skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Typing in the Air - Fleksy + Leap
To be showcased at SXSW, see a video of Fleksy keyboard working with the Leap Motion Sensor.

Typing in the air, Minority Report style...
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/apps-script/aL... Use google forms to create a fool proof interface for adding them, and do the same to search?
Squatting is an accurate description for rent-seeking behavior that levies a cost on the internet community at large. Unlike land -- a physical, real resource -- domain names exist at the discretion of ICANN, the bodies responsible running the root name servers, the infrastructure providers that default to those root name servers, and ultimately, the internet community.

In that regard, they're even more of a manufactured monopoly than any other form of 'intellectual property'; they require no investment in of themselves, and exist at the mercy of the voluntary participation of the network at large.

In this regard, they're most similar to IP address allocations, which are now subject to considerable constraint and no longer freely available for abuse, as providing unrestricted IP allocations is damaging to internet health.

Likewise, supporting rent-seeking domain squatter behavior is damaging to those that would make beneficial use of the domain name space.
Ask HN: Can you suggest a Bay Area Financial Planner familiar with options?
I'm sure there must be many qualified Financial Planners in the Bay Area. I'm looking for a firm that can guide me through the decision making process, primarily with respect to exercising stock options, and ultimately selling the associated stock.
There are many reasons. That is just one of them.

Please see parent and other posts in the thread, comments on the linked article, and discussions in the forums for others.
I laughed at the I'm a women checkbox.
Ask HN: Legality of hosting encrypted files?
Lately I've been thinking about the legal ramifications of hosting encrypted copyrighted data.

If person X encrypts a copyrighted file with some algorithm/key, posts this encrypted file on hosting site A, and then shares the algorithm/key what would be the legal ramifications to hosting site A?

The hosting site could claim ignorance and saying that they are not hosting copyrighted data. In response the owner of the copyrighted data could show that through a series of transformations the data is the copyrighted data. That being said, can't any data be "transformed" to be that same copyrighted file?

Thanks for reading and looking forward to some feedback!
Credit repayment plans are designed to extract as much interest from you as possible before the debt is paid off. To escape debt, you generally have to apply additional payments to the principle above and beyond the minimum required.
Does anybody know what grievance is being aired here?
Thiel [...] believes the US has moved from an optimistic-deterministic viewpoint to an optimistic-stochastic viewpoint.

The optimistic-deterministic viewpoint is the opposite of the "lean startup" movement and the MVP approach, which is an almost completely pure expression of the optimistic-stochastic viewpoint, i.e.:

We're *optimistic* that innovation is possible,
but we also believe we can't know in advance, so
we'll use (controlled) chance to find out what
works (A/B testing, random trials, etc.).

IMO, the culture shift to an optimistic-stochastic viewpoint is also why people hate Apple -- not because Apple is unsuccessful, but precisely because Apple is successful – wildly successful – but Apple is using the wrong paradigm to achieve that success. In Thiel's terminology, Apple works from an optimistic-deterministic viewpoint, and to the culture today, that's just wrong somehow. Hence, the hate.

If you think about it, "minimum viable product" is practically the anti-thesis of innovation: let's create the least innovative thing we possibly can in the hopes that it might, someday, be successful after a lot of A/B testing to hack the buying and growth process and find a niche market. MVP is not about shooting for the stars, but it is about microscopic, incremental, improvement -- and a dramatic reduction in risk. That's the optimistic-stochastic viewpoint in action.
I know many here don't like/trust Florian Mueller but he is claiming that Nokia (not part of MPEG-LA patent pools for either VP8 or AVC) is currently suing HTC for patent infringement regarding VP8 in Germany. Google is acting as an intervenor. Assuming this is correct (and I have no reason to doubt it) VP8 is not in the clear just yet and Nokia did not participate in the standardisation so is not committed to FRAND licensing.

It is obviously possible that the court could rule the patent is either invalid or not infringed but I think it would be wise to avoid counting chickens just yet (unless anyone has good alternative and contradictory sources on this).

http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/patent-clouds-remain-over...
Silicon Valley used to be a place with cheap land where people went because the cost of living was low, and they could tinker with cool ideas whereas, in the expensive East Coast cities, they'd have to work themselves to death just to tread water. California was this place where you could come and do cool stuff and build on land the East Coast elite didn't want.

It's no longer cheap to live there. Tinkering with new ideas on some modest amount of savings and "odd jobs" or consulting is no longer possible. Expensive real estate leads to calcification and risk-aversion and cultural death. It's why urban ecosystems (including VC-istan, which is not a city per se) turn into hellholes shortly after their peak of greatness.

Enter VC, which connects people with the resources (funding) to try out their ideas and, better yet, enough resources that they have a "rocket fuel" advantage over any competitors. Over time, the VCs and "tech press" became king-makers. Then, the well-connected became a new, informal, executive suite who care more about protecting each other than genuine competition.

Hence, VC-istan. It's the first postmodern corporation, cleverly designed to look like a free market. Reputable investors are the executive suite. People with the authority to write welfare-checks-I-mean-acqhires at big companies are The Compensation Board because they decide on bonuses. "Tech press" are another part of the HR department that writes performance reviews. So-called startup "CEOs" are semi-independent PMs. Software engineers are peons who work long hours because they haven't figured out yet that they work at a big company and aren't actually going to getting investor contact and made founders in 7.35 months-- that was a degenerate empty promise.

VC-istan has clever marketing. It doesn't look like a stodgy corporate behemoth, but it is. That is why it has ceased to innovate.
Iran blocks use of tool to get around Internet filter
Really? I think you shouldn't come up in here telling people that cashing out at 25 doesn't make a 'real' difference. There are people who prefer life experience, over work and research experience.

There are people who rather invest in other people taking that risk, than taking the risk themselves. Everybody's different.

The millionaires are the ones paying for your research work. So when someone like you spends 30 years chasing their dreams after acquiring a PhD and fail-- they have more-or-less acquired a different way of thinking about things. Right? They gain a different self, a different sense of awareness. They gain a specialization of some niche topic. I get it. Researchers change the world theoretically.

The thing is doing research and influencing others to think differently is the same thing as influencing people with products or services. They all have the same goal, to change the way people think about a topic or way of doing things. It isn't tied down to one route.

Because interestingly, MOST millionaire's become philanthropists. And they are not interested in retiring either.

And like how the top comment said, it's not one big disruption that changes things, it's the succession of little bits of implementations or modrnizations of products, services, and ideals. All in harmony. One branch isn't worth worshiping more than the other branch.

I know you were targeting the people who retire and enjoy life, without investing or donating back but there's a world out there to see and not everybody gets bored with it at the same rate as you do.

Edit: Some people like to manage and become overseers, they get the thrill of life from that, you can't tell them they're doing it wrong, that they should quit and enjoy life. That will bring anarchy and chaos. The same thing with a whole bunch of people sitting in a laboratory. I remember reading a book that went over this topic, about people being programmed to work in the laboratory. There were different levels, and Level B's worked in the lab. The book isn't coming back to me..It was where one level were giving audios while they sleep to acknowledge their inferiority. What a book, if I find out what it was I have to re-read it.
MIT releases software that reveals invisible motion and detail in video
There are also videos and slides of the same class being taught by the chair of the machine learning department at CMU.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Etom/10701_sp11/

Direct link to the videos is here:

http://cc-web.isri.cmu.edu/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx#...

The viewer is sadly Windows-only, but you can use the RSS feed option (in the top-right) with something like gPodder to download .mp4 files directly:

http://cc-web.isri.cmu.edu/Panopto/Podcast/Podcast.ashx?cour...
Another indication of Mr. Bilton's self-centeredness and entitlement is that he posts tons of articles from his own NY Times blog (and nothing else) to HN, assuming that we all want to read it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nickbilton

Other than those posts, his total contribution to HN was one comment made over a year ago. It's a bit ironic that someone who can't even be bothered to listen to his father's voicemails would assume that a community that he apparently doesn't consider himself a part of will want to read everything he has to say.
People that don't understand the DNS hierarchy (and history) are doomed to call things failures that were not, and doomed to find new ways to break DNS in the future.
I don't know if you would notice it. A typical lightweight carry-on piece of luggage is 3-5 kilos empty.
An iPad 2 battery contains about 90 kilojoules of energy. This is equivalent to about 20g of TNT, which is only 1/3 of the TNT used in a WWII-era "pineapple" hand grenade.

However, the real reason one can bring a laptop battery on a plane is because no terrorist has tried to use it yet. They would probably need multiple batteries: after the "shoe bomber" attack, the government determined that as little as 50g of PETN could bring down a plane, which is equivalent to 80+g of TNT, which is four iPad 2 batteries.

Even then, it would be necessary to deliver that energy in a very small amount of time, which may not be possible rapidly enough with lithium-ion; they can burn, but can they explode quickly enough, with all of their energy? The TSA aays they have studied the issue, and the answer is no [1], they "cannot be used as an explosive and are not a security threat in personal carry-on quantities."

[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2010-...
Some sort of WP (or other software) plugins for a messaging/activity stream, and a distributed pubsub messaging system between sites? (using probably json over http/spdy/websockets, not something separate like AMPQ)

It would require certain capabilities from the participating blogs/pages/webservers, and it would be fragile in the case of url changes, but it might be workable.
LinkedIn Job Seeker Premium, Worth It?
Have you used the Job Seeker linkedIn membership? Would you recommend it? Are there better ways for self-taught developers to find jobs?
Not to mention that the free internet broadcast license of h264 expires in 2015. After that I am fairly sure that Google will be looking at hefty fees for YouTube if they do not convert over to VP8.
Denmark’s Kiloo Pioneers New Ways of Producing Mobile Games
And while this doesn't dispute your opinion as a general rule, there is always an amusing exception: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBCouCYjYUA

(death doesn't have to be a morbid depressing thing, despite the tendency in the west to view it as such)
Even better, given that the issues raised by (iirc) Mircosoft and Apple against webp becoming the HTML5 standard video codec (and thus mandatory to support for HTML5 compliance) was that of 'patent uncertainty', with this agreement we can finally get a really great royalty free standard codec which can be used with any browser which is HTML5 compliant.

Same goes for WebRTC, which should now be on the fasttrack to be accepted as the standard for RTC (currently supported by Chrome, Mozilla and Opera).

I think having open and royalty free standards for such integral parts of what is likely to be the 'future of the web' is extremely important to foster innovation, thanks to VP8/VP9 and Opus we now have technically competitive offerings which anyone can implement free of charge across all platforms and for whatever interesting solutions they can come up with.
"You don't have a Facebook without an internet..."

The Internet wasn't created as a result of anyone "driving efficiency in the market". Get real.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History

Also: do you think that perhaps it is wasteful for society's businesses to spend hundreds of billions on marketing and advertising differentiating products like soda, fast food and alcohol? Is that a good use of resources?
Japan quake 'heard at edge of space'
Now that vinyl is the exclusive domain of hipster audiophiles, the quality of the vinyl experience has increased a hundredfold. Households like the one I grew up in, with our scratched-up records and the player we picked up at Caldor, have no reason to miss it.
How would a TPM do anything against malicious hardware? The hardware manufacturer could just as easily include a malicious TPM.
I quit my software engineer job to attend Hacker School (Fall 2012). Undoubtedly the best decision I have made in the last 3 + years.

I am now once again working as a software engineer, and would not trade those 3 months at HS for anything.
Ah, I see now that my parent's sources list it as "largest debris-generating event" (celestrak) and "The test is the largest recorded creation of space debris in history with at least 2,317 pieces of trackable size (golf ball size and larger) and an estimated 150,000 debris particles." (wikipedia).

That tracks with what I saw, so take this as just a minor tweak to GP's phrasing.

Don't skip that post because of the oversight. The celestrak link offers an incredible HD video simulating the debris cloud and the path of the ISS... it's like an action movie. Great find, so I upvoted.
"When I tried to think of a project suitable for learning JavaScript, a terrain flyover demo came to mind."

Me too! But then I re-establish contact with the reality of my actual abilities and create a button which, when pressed, prints "Hello, world!" to an alert window.
Fantastic demo, best thing I've ever seen in webgl in my browser!

Motocross suggestion seconded :)
Nitpick but surely you can still try to send too much data over USB-MIDI and have similar issues. And given the nature of USB it might even be harder to estimate where that limit lies.
That's... just beautiful. Congrats, great job; saving it for my reading list.
Far from unnecessary.

If your mobile platform is defined in terms of HTML5, it's easy to mix up the layer of mobile platform with the layer of browser user experience.

The think that probably couldn't technically happen is to install chrome and run firefox OS apps on top of the chrome engine, but that's a completely different issue.

(I wrote "probably" because, well, we've seen all kind of hacks and many impossible things will be made)
> The USB-MIDI data rate limitations are clearly visible when trying to change the state of 64 keypads at once. 64 individual signals with 8ms latency completely break the flow[2], compared to a single optimized OSC message.

Can't agree enough. I picked up a Launchpad since it was cheap and looked fun to hack on. I wrote a Python module to talk to it and then watched it chugging along while writing a sequencer on it; the bandwidth just isn't there to do intelligent updating of the pads. It is a fun little device, though, and I can't wait to get my Push to continue the work (the protocol seems to be more sane, given what Ableton is doing with it)
Don't you think we need "Gamification" QA site on stackexchange?
Research the way Me.ga is getting around the liability issue. I think it may be something similar to what you proposed.

http://mashable.com/category/kim-dotcom/
"domain squatter behavior is damaging to those that would make beneficial use of the domain name space."

How would you propose to determine beneficial use of a domain name?

For example let's say the domain "pifflesnort.com" was taken by someone in 2003 who decided to use it periodically to post a list of movies they had watched on TV. Now you come along (in 2013) and you want it to do something more than that (say do some serious writing). But it's taken already. Let's go further and say that it wasn't taken so you grabbed it. Now someone else comes along and wants it for the name of their new foundation.

Where exactly do you draw the line and what constitutes "beneficial" use of the domain? Do you plan to have a body of people deciding that?

(just checked by the way and pifflesnort.com is "parked". Of course that doesn't mean it wasn't used last year and that doesn't mean it isn't used for email (or an ftp server etc.) and that doesn't mean that the owner isn't hard at work on a website but hasn't launched yet either.)
"It’s a bold move for this nameless employee to write something like this, but so bold he might not be nameless for long"

It doesn't really matter in the end. I'm sure this is how everyone who worked on Simcity probably feels right now.
"Put most simply, there's little respect shown for candidates' time or situation."

And the same companies that treat job seekers rudely will probably complain about how hard it is to find qualified employees these days.

"To me, that seems to be a serious failing - I appreciate the mindset that says you should treat employees with the same mindset that guides your interactions with customers..."

A lot of big tech companies aren't known for their wonderful customer service either.
There are blind go players, so I assume blind chess players also exist.
I will just point out that the first example I was given was a chess CAPTCHA which had two checkmates, so it is not a case of "the only destination square that will checkmate" -- there may be two moves.
Let's be fair here -- the grants originally were sponsored by Etsy (http://www.etsy.com/blog/news/2012/etsy-hacker-grants-suppor...), so your angst should be directed at Etsy's policies, not at Hacker School.

Let me also say that Nick and Dave (and I assume the others) are awesome people.
RaspberryPi free colocation in Austria
This whole discussion boils down to whether the 'big' ideas can be considered to come from software or not. If they only come from hardware, e.g. infrastructure/energy/poverty-changing, then sure they take longer to create, and have higher risk. But we are making progress on them.

On the software side there is of course big innovation, admittedly hard to quantify. The internet has changed the human experience in more profound ways than many physical innovations ever did.
That's an US centered view. No regular person spends anywhere near $100/month on cellphone service where I live, nor could many afford it. For $80/month, you can get a cellphone plan with unlimited sms and calls, 100mbps home internet, 100 TV channels, and a POTS-over-IP line. And yet, many still can't afford cable TV or home Internet.

And this is the problem is pricing global product and/or services; what's reasonable in a market like the US is prohibitively expensive in many others.
Its a perfect show, on could say. In its core, its like "hey, Americans are scared because of some idiot put a bomb in his shoe [1], lets take advantage and use their tax-dollar money to make them _feel_ safer. They won't refuse because they are scared and when you scare, most seem to submit. But its just a show. Twice on occasion I have seen TSA agents coming back from lunch and passing security just by flashing badge even if the scanner went off. Well, we have internal affair departments in cia, fbi, police for a good reason. If there is remotely a chance (there is) one of those good TSA guys turn bad, then we are all screwed.

[1] Let's not speculate whether he was CIA operative or at least drugged idiot who submitted.
As do many other airports in European countries, but it all started after 2001. The same is true for the new EU passports with biometric data.
Iran cuts off 'illegal' VPN workaround to Internet filters
"Negligible" is an adjective meaning "such a small amount that it has no significance", and a "triviality" is something of no serious concern.

Is English not your first language, or do you have the reading skills of an eight year old?
> Okay, let's get this straight: capitalism drives efficiencies in markets. Efficiencies drive innovation.

[citation needed] - please stop trying to argue from your own polemics you'd have us believe are axioms.
Why is it only now that people start complaining about always-online DRM?

Whether there is some trouble due to a server being down or not, for me there is no difference. DRM that requires you to be always online for a single player game is already broken without the server being down imho.
I'll be honest: I'm not clear on what the question at the end is. Are you saying: it's not easy to turn academic research concepts into commercial products? Well this is precisely what Silicon Valley has learned to do better than anywhere else.

If you're asking how we can make the process better, doesn't it boil down to having investors who see the value of these ideas? You need to frame the business case to them in their lingo.

If they don't want to invest in you because they think the can make more money on BS web investments, then we're all losing. But ultimately there will be a shakeout in web investments...and then there will be a shift back.
China Calls For End To 'Cyber War'
> You can change the operation of instructions after the hardware is made, make custom sequences of instructions, or even fix microcode bugs (while uncommon, there have been cases in the past).

I am reminded of the famous Intel Pentium FDIV bug (1994). Seems they had implemented a new and improved floating point division algorithm. It needed only half the cycles of the previous algorithm.

The new algorithm used a 1066-cell lookup table to find partial quotients used in the calculation. Unfortunately, due to a screwup, five of the cells were left blank when the ROM was loaded. This led to obscure errors in the results, which went unnoticed until many thousands of chips were in customers' hands. At that point, Intel had a massively embarrassing recall on their hands.

http://engineeringfailures.org/?p=466

http://www.trnicely.net/pentbug/pentbug.html
The Current State of Ownership - On The Media
Haha thanks :) I've done these things in the past many times, only on different platforms. The real kudos go to the browser guys (especially at Mozilla and Google) for all the superb work they've done on WebGL and JavaScript in general. Learning JavaScript and some of the intricacies of developing for the web has never been more fun! :)
Tl;dr if your code takes user input and interprets it as code, you have an inherently insecure program. Dynamic languages with lots of introspection made their work easier here, but the whole reason it was possible is because the program was intentionally insecure. The "restricted environment" was a few small hacks on top of eval, it wasn't a serious attempt to make it secure.
Will Apple's iTV Actually Be Samsung's SmartTV?