skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have very limited 2nd-hand knowledge, but that's the impression I've gotten from the people I knew who grew up in East Germany. They wanted reform of the system, but are unhappy with the reform they ended up getting. Some people wanted only a modest reform from authoritarian communism to a more democratic communism (as you mention), but even among those who wanted to abolish communism entirely and "join the West", many people thought what that meant would be adopting a democratic-socialist model along the lines of 1980s Scandinavia.

Many people didn't even really believe that the West Germans had ideals much different from theirs: they thought the idea that Wessis were really "capitalists" was Soviet propaganda trying to scare them away from reunification, and assumed West Germany was probably, in reality, just full of sensible social democrats. So it was a rude shock when they found out that Frankfurt bankers were more like American bankers than like Swedish social democrats.

The end result can be seen pretty clearly in the map of Left Party election figures: http://welections.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/germany-2009-d...
I've seen those. But having even a mediocre version of the same available as software for each smartphone will only improve what the casual user or even first-aider is capable of.

I wonder whether it would make sense to give people first aid instructions via an app? I guess when actually panicking, people would work better talking to an experience person over the phone. At least for the time being.
Well, like pg said above, I wish the OP dove into the forces at hand. However, that doesn't mean that we can't.

I don't know why cdixon wrote the article. But I suspect that it's only not an exciting claim to you because you're already at a certain place in your understanding of innovation. I think there are plenty of people that believe innovation happens when an inventor hides away in a basement and tinkers with stuff, and one day, he has a big reveal and the world says how awesome it is. That story's reinforced when you tell the story of successes looking backwards.

In reality, early innovation doesn't look like that. It looks like people doing weird things you don't understand, or seems like they're wasting their time, doing things that seem to have nothing to do with the real world. The only thing in common is that they seem to be doing it for shits and giggles, while having lots of fun.
Regular 'ol state school grad here:

I observed that cheating, especially in the first year or two was pretty common among certain groups of students. But it was treated especially harshly. Most of the students who were caught cheating were given a scare and a second chance, but by and large the systemic cheaters were kicked out or changed to an easier major by the 3rd year.

By the 4th year, the average class size was around 10% of the average 1st year.

My school was so strongly into fighting cheating, that they invested heavily into licensing cheat detection software when it was available and spending quite a bit of money researching and selling/licensing anti-cheat tools to other schools.

It turns out to be an interesting CS problem that cut across most majors and definitely made an impact on killing off endemic cheating in the school.

Academics were taken very seriously at my school.
I think you should look into the noscript addon + a Kasperssky TDSS scan. This looks more like a browser hijack than a Stack Overflow ad.

Furthermore, normal Stack Overflow ads have a upvote/downvote mechanism if you mouseover with js enabled.
Things You Can Upgrade with a Little Electronics Hacking
Lightning is an Intel feature that Apple is trying to support right? I mean I can't tell if they firmly support this or if since Intel is there only chip supplier they are kind of bound to supporting this.
How to Enable Administrator Account on Windows 7 with Windows 7 OS Boot DVD.
An artist with a decidedly analytical and systems-thinking bent: http://worrydream.com

This one is more established: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci
Everyone pictured on the website is guaranteed funding.

https://watsi.org/faq#how-do-the-donation-logistics-work
sometimes, ideas might need a little tweaking. Perhaps MUDs inspired MMORPGs? It seems likely.

I'm not sure what the equivalent for ham radio would be, if at all.
i have the same problem
You're thinking about Thunderbolt?
Bitcoin itself may have any number of problems - it is though, the first algorithm that allows truly distributed ownership of objects in a network.

I think that changes the game totally. I don't yet know what application of it will go mainstream first.

Agreed about NoSQL. Its vision is too narrow (scaling within one organisation, rather than truly distributed, syncing, forkable data)
Using ImageMagick to reveal existence of hidden steganographic messages
It still makes dollars for its compensated staff and founder/managers (unless the founders are working on a strictly volunteer basis). (PG will not make direct dollars off it, though.)
"amazon is a business that sells things for a profit."

Their financial reports sure don't support that theory. Apart from making very little profit as a company [1], they sell many products at a loss [2].

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/29/amazon-calendar-q4-2012-e...

[2] http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/technology/2012/10/amazon-...
Steelcase creates a new chair for new postures
this may be interesting, but the closing line they say "when you feel it, you'll get it".

I feel that if they didn't create an ad that was pure buzzword bingo, and actually took the time to talk naturally about their creation, we wouldn't have to see it to get it.

When will we see the end of these sorts of horrible advertisements?
How Making This Redesign Of Facebook Changed One Designer's Life
How do these services monitor abusive customers if they don't even log user sessions?
Designer & developer plagiarise portfolio website, use it as their own, profit.
Thanks for the insider insight!
PBS short documentary about 3D printing
The other candidates could have asked as well.

When on the job, there's no such thing as cheating [1], so I'd like to see any prospective employy act as pro-active as that. (And if I really need comparability, I'd thank the candidate for their good idea, but explain why we are going with the whiteboard instead.)

[1] Modulo conforming to laws and ethics.
On Programming Archaeology
I actually was able to write a macro in C that, along with a certain paradigm for defining collections, allows foreach loops that are just as nice as Python.
The problem is that it is fluffy, and self-congratulatory: it just pats us on the back and says, what we do in our spare time is the future. We are the future! Our hobbies are tomorrow's serious endeavors! This is boring pseudo-intellectualism, and what techie forums always risk decaying into. The part you identify as having been left out is the entirety of what would be interesting in the analysis: any kind of specificity beyond flattering the greatness and prescience of our very-smart techie hobbies.
How does Watsi prevent fraud on the part of Medical Partners (misdiagnosis, not providing treatment, etc), and how can donors feel confident that Watsi's controls are effective?
To start, I'm thinking of tests for things that aren't cultural trends, like the fist bump:

I think some differentiators between the two types of work under the umbrella term 'hobbies' is:

It's something where people are asking the question, "What can I do with this now, that I couldn't do before?" Hobbies like stamp collecting, or star wars trivia seem to fail this test.

It's something where other people can build upon the hobby to do other things. Hobbies like being a foodie and MUDs seem to fail this test.

As far as I can gather, it's people taking advantage of a new piece of knowledge or technology to try to figure out what new things it enables them to do.
> If they can't even do 1080p lossless right now, they are in much deeper trouble for the future.

Unencoded video is about the most bandwidth intensive thing I can imagine coming out of or going into a phone, and will remain so for a long time.

1080p30 @ 24bit is roughly 1.5 Gbit/sec before you talk about transport level ecoding (8b/10b) or audio.
Did you read the post? Here's just one example:

Through packet level filtering at the firewall it’s possible to
apply rules to an entire shared server, blocking the abuse
immediately. For example, let’s say someone decides to use
TorGuard to unlawfully promote their Ugg boots business (spam).
In order for us to block this one individual, we simply implement
new firewall rules, effectively blocking the abused protocol for
everyone on that VPN server. Since there are no user logs to go
by, we handle abuse per server, not per user.

Seems like a silly way to handle it since eventually none of their servers will be able to access the internet.
Any plans to support EBT, to avoid exorbitant credit card fees?
The key words are 'happily' and 'dismissively'. If an algorithm is saying something then check its tone. If it's using text to make a statement have it add some smilies. Smiles are great for non-native speakers.
Yes of course. From context, we are restricting our attention to renewables.
Intel's original business plan (1968)
Blood pressure would be pretty hard, I believe. But pulse is easy.
Saying something dumb that defies social norms but 'some people actually think that way'...

Sounds like a joke to me. In bad taste, sure, but that doesn't category-shift it.

Or another way of saying it: unacceptable jokes are still in fact jokes
Having tied sales is pretty bad.

Having tied sales that drops the ball for an essential component ('B') of service 'A' because they can't sell you component 'C' is terrible.

At a minimum Tesla should know where SolarCity has installers or SolarCity should pass you on to a competitor that does serve your area.
The last MOOC I took was MIT's introduction to solid state chemistry (great course, BTW). Before an actual MIT student can take that course on campus, the go through a pre-screening process that ensures:

1. The student has the necessary background knowledge that the course assumes,

2. The student has the necessary skill required for the course,

3. The student has the necessary motivation to do the work,

4. The student has the time to devote to the course.

There's also a pre-screening process for people who wish to take the online course through edx.org. This pre-screen process ensures:

1. The student can successfully create an edx.org account and click a sign up button for the course.

Given this huge difference in screening of students, and the fact that the online course is for the most part not "dumbed down" compared to the on campus course[1] , I would absolutely gobsmacked if the MOOC version of the course came within an order of magnitude of the completion rate of the on campus course.

[1] Online students were given 72 hours on the exams, to allow for computer and network outages, and to give more flexibility in accommodating their lives outside of the course. On campus students were given 3 hours for the exams. I think they said the content of the exams was the same.
I don't think he needs to worry about that, he's concerned with nuts, bolts and engineering not with science fiction.
But then there's 4K, if we're talking about future proofing.

Well, say right now it cannot transmit 1080p60 raw. Could it with new hardware in device and adapter?
Or put another way — does number of pins limit bandwidth in any way?
Yknow, to hell with "making stuff". Do you really want do dance with dead crap?
Heat isn't equal to heat. Server farms produce relatively low temperature heat, which is almost useless.

Look up entropy and thermodynamics for more background.
And HDMI does it effortlessly. That's exactly what these interfaces were designed to do: raw massive data with low latency over short distances, suitable for processing in dedicated circuits, not SOCs.
Codejudge: A lightweight online judge
I might be really confused but why is Apple going to be in deeper trouble ?

Surely the future will be H.265 content which will have better quality for the same bandwidth. And it's unlikely that people are going to be demanding a higher output resolution than 1080p from their mobile device for anytime soon.
You did not actually expect a 911 to be comfortable, did you? Also, I'll happily take it :)
If the idea is just that some things that now seem serious didn't seem serious in the past, sure, I buy that. But does anybody not buy that? I feel like that's the plotline of a dozen Discovery Channel shows. And it's also the justification behind many of the "why pure math/science should actually be funded" arguments, to take it in a different direction.
fantastic use of classical music:
Beethoven's﻿ Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat, Op. 73 ("Emperor"), 2nd movement
Seems like it would just muddy the waters further if they recommended someone else.
Do you mean the future where we're streaming 4k video? If HEVC (aka H.265) lives up to its promise, 4k video will come in around a mere 50% more than 1080p does now.

Meanwhile, lossless 1080p would require 20000% more space (no I didn't add too many zeros, that's 200 times more).
I believe there is much more wind and solar energy each than humanity's power demands. It's not a question of total energy, it's a question of cost.
You cannot look at any statement from him without realizing he's been kept in extremely hostile conditions, just this side of torture, WITHOUT TRIAL for over 1000 days (nearly three years!) being told he's facing execution or life imprisonment.

Any of us would say ANYTHING facing that. Anything.

They are roasting him alive now, government has over 140 "witnesses" to put on the stand.

They are going to make an example out of him, it's going to be horrible.
link to the previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5300255
Previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5300255
So, you're saying bandwidth increase while maintaining backwards compatibility won't be possible through the Lightning interface? Surely, USB 1.0 to USB 2.0 demonstrated a counter-example to your statement.
Seems like you could easily diversify away most of the wind risk by building wind turbines in many locations and just moving the power (with loss). Also, whatever the cost of solving the storage issue for solar also solves the wind issue, unless storage is only possible over some intermediate time scale. My understanding is that most of the plausible storage mechanisms (pressure, gravitational potential) can store essentially indefinitely, although maybe total capacity is an issue.

Without more info, I really don't think it's clear cut.
A mere fifty per cent more than something that Lightning already can't handle...
Basic security is dirt cheap, and it is not at all appropriate to risk user data because you want them to pay.
I.e. you advocate the following?: make road funding as local an affair as possible. Even interstate highways should never go above the level of a few states collaborating.

Can you believe that in Germany you even get a tax rebate for living further away from work?
The word "smartest" in the title misses the mark slightly in a way that exposes the idea to too-easy dismissal. The way people commonly use "smart" (high IQ, basically) isn't super-correlated with what Chris is talking about. Many high-IQ people are too locked-in to Achievement to bother with disinterested play. You can redefine "smartest" to mean "those who turn out to have been most ahead of their time", but that's circular and doesn't help identify the quality.

The body of the post uses the word "hobby", though, and that's much better. Your hobby is the thing you do because you want to, whether or not anything comes of it and whether or not anyone thinks it's valuable. Hobbies are marginal, not one's main or proper thing (Woz was an engineer at HP). And they're often wild or eccentric. The main reason we wouldn't normally use the word "hobby" for important creative activity—that it seems too trivial—is actually a point in its favour. Incidentally, there's an earlier usage of the word "hobby" that was closer to what we now call "obsession" or "fixation". People would apologize for introducing their hobbies into polite conversation.

One must also insist on the fact that very often nothing does come of this quality. To imagine otherwise is to allow no room for randomness.
The Innovator's Dilemma doesn't say you have to start at a "low end" and work up. That's just how it was for the computer storage industry (the example in the book) in the second half of the twentieth century.

It says that you have to start with a new market - i.e a set of people who want to buy your product who are different fundamentally from the existing market.

Plenty of innovations are rolled out starting at the high end. An obvious example is the iPhone (which changed the smartphone market from business/hobbiest to consumer, and which began doing that with rich consumers).

Another way of looking at it... New things can be relatively expensive within their new market - the first PCs were very expensive, they just happened to be cheap compared to Minicomputers. From a product side, they looked like cheap, crap computers. From the market side, they had a totally different market (e.g. individual finance professionals, rather than large corporations).

It's natural as a geek to look just at products. You have to look at both products and markets - they are not just both important, they are the same thing (http://www.flourish.org/blog/?p=371).

Tesla's product is electric cars. It's market is people who want:
a) To not have to recharge every day on their commute.
b) To have more accessible storage space.
c) To have cheap power when gas finally gets more expensive than electricity/batteries

Short term they have been bootstrapping that using a market of people who have longer term motivations (concern about climate change or an energy crisis) which will later go mainstream in the form of c).

It's very very smart.
The whole "best in the world" schtick just seems like such pablum, and most people espousing it aren't best in the world at anything. The arrogance required to think you can be/are (literally) the best in the world at something is astounding. I mean if it is intended solely as an aspirational/inspirational idea you have in your own mind that is fine, but actually, legitimately, thinking that just seems to border on delusional, or seriously myopic.

I heard a great quote today that is almost the opposite of this: "There are no great men, just great challenges which ordinary men, out of necessity, are forced by circumstances to meet" - William Halsey

That seems like a much greater view than "you'll only succeed if you are the best in the world", which pretty much translates to "why bother" for just about everyone, because almost no one is objectively "the best in the world"
Less of a bug and more of an underestimation on how out of control method overloading is in Java :)

Thanks for the great tools!
Ask HN: How do you think the current economic climate will affect US startups?
I'm currently employed in the DC area, which will arguably be one of the hardest hit by the sequester. The local defense contracting industry is going to take a hit, likely increasing competition for local software positions. This is probably great for those looking to hire some decent talent, but will increase competition for open positions.

How does the current economic climate impact the US startup scene? Is this going to boost the industry due to the new labor entering the market? Will the economic uncertainty cause investors to tighten their purse strings?

I'm eager to hear some outside input, since the Beltway definitely has a feedback loop.

TLDR - Sequester: opportunity, or setback?
SSL is easy to do if you

1. force it on your servers

2. only include content from your servers

It becomes almost impossible to mix insecure content at this point.
It's fluffy because it's brief.

>And we on HN could do better than merely dismiss it.

What, embrace it? I'll take self-deprecation over rejection of self-deprecation.

>We could try to dig into the underlying forces ourselves. E.g. not all hobbies consist of making the Apple I. So which do, and why? Are the things called hobbies merely two different types of work that are conflated by clueless observers simply because they're not the worker's day job? Or is there some amount of crossover between inventing the future and merely playing around?

Maybe if the article did that it wouldn't be so fluffy. It's fluffy because its terminology is closer to "Rock Star" than "Guitar Lesson."

If you are still inclined to view
jacques_chester's post as fluff, consider at least that _submission quality affects comment quality._

I know you're not likely to respond to my comment. I'm partially just wondering why you're wading into the field personally to address a meta point.
As I said elsewhere, I believe there is much more wind and solar energy each than humanity's power demands. It's not a question of total energy, it's a question of cost. And my intuition says that wind would be cheaper because it is of higher density. And in fact wind is significantly cheaper in the current situation where renewable sector is so small that variability and storage isn't an issue.
Ask HN: Should a comment be worth an upvote?
It seems like if something is getting a lot of comments and generating discussion, whether a post or another comment, it should be rewarded. Would also make sure that people "don't feed the trolls". I see way too many <= 0 comments that have a big discussion associated with them which often speaks to the value of the comment itself.
See indiewebcamp.com and https://indieauth.com for a useful, working version of domain-as-login.
I just can't believe that in 10 years, everybody is going to be coding 6502 and Apple ][+ emulators in Go.

Oh, wait...
> Well, say right now it cannot transmit 1080p60 raw. Could it with new hardware in device and adapter? Or put another way — does number of pins limit bandwidth in any way?

Based on what has come out about lightning it appears to have 2 differential data channels (same as USB2). There will be some upper limit on frequency but its impossible to know without detailed specs. Its also not clear if one is locked as send and one as receive, or if they are configurable, there is an ancillary control channel so anything seems possible.

For comparison, HDMI has 3 data channels, each with raw bit rate of up to 3.4Gbit/sec (~2.7Gbit/sec data).
You have a point there.

It's interesting to see the contrast btwn the Soviet transition and the Chinese transitions away from core communism -forgetting that the SU had numerous other things to contend with (viz the delayed collapse of their late colonialist empire --the 'republics').

While the Chinese have moved away from the state as a direct employer and divested their enterprises and have moved away from providing pensions and benefits, the economic growth caused by their policies made those things a non-issue. That is, while the state retreated (and thus provided the same nothing to people) The SEZs and then then state-turned private and new private enterprise filled the void granting people hope and a vision of a future. People felt (and still feel, altho it might be on the descent) that if not they, their heirs have a chance at the future which they did not. On the other hand China is relatively natural resource poor and Russia is NR rich.

It would seem the transition was handled better by China than their fraternal twin, the SU. The unhurried transition probably helped, as well as culture (a Chinese family is willing to sacrifice a generation, if it has a promise of hope for the next -long view).