skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, you could start (for example) with these lists of unsolved problems in physics[1] and math[2]. I'm sure similar lists exist for every science.

Of course, private industry is interested in funding research in to next to none of them (at least not nearly to the extent that it is in problems that have immediate profitable applications).

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_mathemati...
Huh? RSS couldn't be used to spread celebrity gossip, or news about a violent revolution?
Because you are still contributing. The DMCA is the only thing that provides the safe harbor to prevent this claim. It's the only good part of the law.
The US performed its anti-satellite tests against targets in low Earth orbit, so that the orbits of the debris decayed quickly. That was not the case for the Chinese test, which was in a relatively high orbit and generated a huge amount of long-lived debris.

More so, the idea of "secret" anti-satellite tests is a bit rich, satellites are tracked by RADAR from multiple countries, you can't hide a satellite blowing up.
I tend to accept what is guy is saying when it comes to audio:

http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/index.html

See if you agree with him or not, especially the first 3 demos.
"The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation"

Wrong title. It's "I, James Temple, have a different political philosophy than these guys".
According to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5351887, the flatness is temporary.
"If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions without constraint to how they are accpomplished. So let's see $50 Billion to anybody who can take us to a repeatable $10/kilo to low earth orbit. Or $10 Billion for the first 3D printer able to print an electric car."

Arguably that's what government grants do or should do. Taking 50 billion dollars in tax money and stoking the fire in an area we are interested in WITHOUT THE EXPECTATION OF A MONETARY RETURN is the kind of thing the government can and does do. Of course, some of that 50 billion gets eaten by graft, and that's where the problem a lot of people have with government programs. Although private companies don't seem to have any better levels of control (usually much worse control) over corruption, a lot of people seem to think only 100% success demonstrates "working" government.
Independent of the potential truth of your comments, they're entirely off-topic, which is why there's downvoting. And complaining like that won't help you, I' afraid. Being wrong doesn't necessarily get downvotes. contentless or off-topic posts generally do! But then I'm fairly new here, so I stand correctable. My advice: Start a WTC thread with a good link if you think it's really important!
This is a good idea. It seems like everyone working on this problem so far has been trying to start from scratch (Diaspora, Tent, etc), but building on existing popular platforms would give a system a huge advantage.

I don't know exactly what it would look like, but I think it's worth exploring.
Many of these products may change the lives of a large number of people -- but not by much (though some may have a larger effect than others). So while they might be innovations, I wouldn't call them big. In fact, I think it might be a lot easier to change the lives of many by only a little, than to greatly impact the lives of even a few.

I used to feel very strongly about this issue of aiming for truly big stuff, and I agree that increased government involvement (and increased trust of government) is necessary, but I think that doing something really big is just... hard, and very few people can do that. Even large government projects require those rare visionaries. But SV and the startup ecosystem have put the power to make a small change in the hands of many people, and that's quite an achievement. Now we only have to come up with a way to find the few out of those that are truly capable of doing the big things, and help them along.
Maybe if government wasn't so massively wasteful, there'd be a few dollars to throw at blue-sky R&D funding these days, but there isn't.
What? Over 99,000 signatures? There isn't even 1,000 signatures! I'm sorry but I didn't even read the post after this blatant lack of fact checking.
Can people stop taking one data point and using that to extrapolate to a large group? This is pretty bad journalism. Sure, OK story telling but it's not exactly the truth.
I think including the "1998" made the satire more effective.
Yes I did: http://imgur.com/6G8GCLo
I don't even have words for how cool this is, it really shows how far these web technologies have come from their humble beginnings.
Yeah, I understand how it is currently. I was saying it should (in a perfect world) be a much harder battle to prove you were acting in good faith if you are provided clear evidence that your request is completely wrong and you fail to redress the claim. The time period for a take down can cause a lot of harm to sites in exactly the same way that leaving up infringing stuff can.
H.264 is obsolete. MPEG-LA is moving on to H.265, the new hotness. It is telling that MPEG-LA's sub-licensing for VP8 only covers one subsequent revision of the codec. If VPx+ is augmented with H.265'ish technology in order to stay competitive, we'll see a new round of fighting.
> However the static is soon forgotten as Whole Lotta Love rumbles out of the speakers and fills the room. Clear and all encompassing, it's as if the audio spectrum has opened up to me and now I'm swimming in the sound, rather than just watching the waves from the beach. Not that I'm trying to sound like I found God or anything, but this has to be the musical version of that revelation. "In MP3s it's all wedged up into one space, everything is compromised," explains my sonic Sherpa, Phil. "Whereas on a record like this on a decent system, you can isolate everything. Just listen to the voice, and now to the drums. Normally, you miss things, like bass players!" The music is like a big, warm melodic bear hug.

Ok, thanks, sonic douchebag Phil. The important part is "on a decent system". It's almost as though having this big set of expensive speakers all around you might make a song sound more "all encompassing" than listening through a pair of $10 earbuds.

I have some vinyl because I like old things, and I agree that it's an experience worth trying, but have you ever listened to an album like The Wall or The Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl? It's great as a chance to listen the way people did when it first came out, but on the other hand, these albums are meant to be listened straight through, with the "songs" flowing one into another, and it really messes up that flow when you have to flip and re-start 4 different times to finish The Wall.
The thing I miss most about vinyl is the creative canvas that was the album cover. There's no way to hear _Dark Side of the Moon_ or _Sticky Fingers_ without also seeing the album in your mind.
Vinod Khosla is talking at sxsw on how rigorously they evaluate and monitor the CEOs they invest in. Evidently that doesn't apply to his grandson.
You completely ignored the question I asked, by raising an irrelevant point :)

I'll point out that despite your claim that H.264 is "obsolete", nobody still has gotten the kind of licensing google just did, despite people trying.
They don't look bad but do why remove the labels? Truth be told, they aren't really that instinctive to know which one is which. They all look like clocks with a minor icon removed/added (with the exception of the lock icon).
Next headline: Former EA Employee looking for a job.
Bradley Manning is nominated for a 2013 Nobel Peace Prize
That's cool stuff :) (believe me, I know http://codeflow.org/)
Either way it's Site5's fault. They need to be aware of social engineering attacks.
"Oh boy. We've got political commentary trying to pose as analysis. Okay, let's get this straight: capitalism drives efficiencies in markets. Efficiencies drive innovation. If you look at this only in terms of money, you're missing the point."

Did you read anything else before you went into Political Strike Mode, or did you just skim it? From the previous section:

"most of Silicon Valley doesn't concern itself with aiming 'almost ridiculously high.' It concerns itself primarily with getting people to click on ads or buy slightly better gadgets than the ones they got last year....that's fine, that's capitalism - and these incremental improvements lead to slow productivity gains that at least quicken the pulse of economists. But maybe let's drop the pretense that we're curing cancer unless, you know, we're curing cancer."

The commentator has no problem with efficiency gains or capitalism. He's just saying that it's hypocritical to spend your life developing sheep-throwing software, while also complaining about how nobody aims for the stars anymore.

"If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions without constraint to how they are accpomplished."

Right, like what the NIH and NSF do? Handing out money for research with no immediate commercial intent? Last I checked, that money (along with military spending) built the Valley. Government spending led to innovation.

You're looking for a political fight where none exists. Other than mentioning that Thiel tends to place the blame on the government (which he does), most of the essay is about the need for funding long-term research, not politics.
Sorry to hear about your sudden disability. I hope it yields to treatment, and that you'll bring us up to date when you've learned more. I have poor eyesight and have thought a lot about blindness since childhood, but have never had to deal with such a fast and drastic change. Best of luck.
I'm saying that one of the things that may be keeping women from going into CS is that (compared to veterinary science) programmers come across as unprofessional immature dickheads far more than vets do (and, in my experience, ARE unprofessional immature dickheads far more frequently than vets). Men seem to be more willing to put up with this (and indeed, in some cases seem to embrace it).

Vets had a much easier ride in making their profession appear to be a sensible choice for the young lady deciding on a career.
SimCity Update 2
Was that the real cause, I wonder what the upgrade untails (hw or sw)
I have access to quite a different formats in our house. Our materials go all the way back to our edisongraph, with the cylinder box-eulas.

The best format I've heard is 24 bit depth, 96KHz full stereo audio files. That is assuming the microphones were tuned appropriately for their response. MP3's clip higher frequencies, as well as 'round the tops'. Other lossy encoders do other hard-but-easy to hear.

Of course, one also has to deal with the Monster crowd and other golden ear audiophiles. I've only seen one true audiophile: I attended an amateur radio club (fellow ham here). A guy named Stephen, who has been blind since birth, brought his 1 watt Argonaut with a crappy little omnidirectional antenna. We were in the basement of the red cross building (in the Midwest). After 10 or so minutes, he starts hearing something.... And initiates a QSO (contact)... With Hawaii! He talks for perhaps 11 minutes before signing off.

Nobody else could hear the chirps of morse code through that layer of static. He could, even in the basement of a steel and concrete building.
A big heads up for anyone thinking of switching. Bootstrap 3 "Drops IE7/FF3x support entirely."

ref: http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2012/12/10/bootstrap-3-plans/
Will be nice to have a "border-less" class for tables...
definitely not. can you name one feature that has been added that isn't useful to a dynamically typed language?

The only one i can think of is object type hinting which alone isn't that big of a deal.
Best-Selling Drug in U.S. is now an Anti-psychotic
Many good points, but I disagree on a few:

in view of other countries not having the same screening procedure for airline passengers - the procedure is essentially similar anywhere I've flown (not all of the world, but US, Europe and some Far East). Of course this is to some extent a necessary outcome of U.S. regulations (as any flight which has people and luggage transferring to U.S. bound flights needs to take care of this to comply) but it is impacting far more people and geographical area than just U.S. And more global standards do make sense here.

co-religionists of some of those terrorists consider it extremely degrading to be bare-footed in certain situations deemed to be "holy" situations - I think you have got this backwards. It is actually a custom for Muslims to take off shoes in holy places and when praying. Likewise, when you go to a mosque, or the home of a Muslim, take off your shoes or at least offer to do so.

Finally, I'd say it's not going to be possible to "destroy" reactionary movements like the Taliban. You can kill some people, and some killing may be necessary, but a total victory in that kind of war would only be possible through such a force on ground for such a long time that it isn't feasible. It's only feasible to convert them to believing that more tolerance of different religions gives them a better and more honorable life.
I think I did not make myself clear. Fair enough. What I am saying that TSA is not capable of doing the job it is expected to do (due to bad hires or whatever other sloppy execution) because there is not much need for that. This is known by their designers and originators (this is the point I am trying to make), and it is just functioning at the very basic level and most of the time in an irritating way (patting down toddlers, etc.). What happened on 9/11 is known by those circles that is why TSA is not taken seriously.

ps. I do not care about down votes. I care about people giving serious thought about what others might have to say. Down voting for me is kind of censorship act. I believe up voting weeds out (pushes bottom) bad comments anyway.
Looks nice but runs at awfully slow 4-5 fps on my Ubuntu 64bit system. Is Radeon HD 4200 to weak for WebGL or is there something you need to configure?
Email Privacy at Harvard
Reducing their effectiveness if bad enough. Causing superresistant strains of pathogens in industrial animal farming settings destroys our power against disease and causes death and suffering. How is that not evil?
The alternative, for artists, is not to sign with a major label. A lot of bands go it alone these days, although odds are they aren't the ones you hear on the radio (see "independent radio promotion"). They can still find an audience thanks to the internet. Yes, their music gets pirated heavily but, as Neil Young so aptly put it, "piracy is the new radio". The more their albums are pirated, the more likely at least some people will check out their live shows, buy T-shirts or, heck, even albums from their website or at concerts.

As a fan of good music, I try to maximize the impact of every last dollar I can afford to spend on music. My goal in doing this is to pay as little as possible to Apple, amazon, or major record labels and as much as possible directly to artists. That means almost every album I buy is through band websites or at concerts. I make use of the "new radio" and don't feel the least bit bad about it because I make a point of supporting the bands I like in a way that sees far more of my money reach artists than comes from any "honest" iTunes user. In my view, this is the most ethical route.

The record labels' "war on piracy" is really just a war on competition, and is a great example of how the letter of the law can be subverted by a greedy few to defeat the spirit of the law. Even the term "piracy" is very deliberately chosen to squash this valid new promotion channel. I really wish people would take a cue from Neil Young and call it the "new radio" because that's a far more accurate term.
thoughts on living with less and owning physical vs. digital stuff
I can empathize with you. In comparison to others, I own very few material items. However, digitally I am not sparse in the least. Digital materialism is something I have yet to see be brought up; it would be interesting to see what views people have regarding it.
It's important to remember, it's easy to create jobs. Let's dig an enormous trench from Omaha, Nebraska to the Duluth, Minnesota using spoons. It'll take thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people; many of them will be women. So we'll have this gender equality that we're worried...

When we start worrying about these kinds of things, the creation of jobs per se, we give - we have costs that are often hidden and hard to notice. When you talk about digging a trench with spoons, it's obvious. As we talk about these other things, buying American, doing things in expensive ways - we're going to impoverish ourselves, not make ourselves better off.

Econ professor Dr. Russell Roberts on NPR: http://m.npr.org/story/99015346
This notion that people can't pick winners is, in my opinion quite inaccurate. The need for light weight electronics for aerospace systems, and the view that semiconductors were 'the answer' to this problem led to a massive amount of government funding (50% of all R&D funding) and support (the government was far and away the largest customer for semiconductor devices) almost directly led to the creation of the Silicon Valley we are all so proud of [1].

Second, the notion that prizes can solve this problem is simply unreasonable. If a major goal (ie a cure for cancer) takes 20 years to develop, no organization can pursue the goal without intermediate funding. In order to provide intermediate funding with some semblance of accountability, you essentially create the existing R&D structure that exists in America today.

The other advantage to government funding is that with proper open access protocols, innovative ideas aren't trapped in the organizations that created them. There's no doubt that companies like SpaceX could have achieved what they have without the backbone of research done by NASA and published in NASA's amazing technical report series.

1. A nice article on the history of government support for the transistor industry. http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~business/bhcweb/publications...
> Mr. Woo said a Grindr survey of its users found that two-thirds of them were using the application to find new friends, to network or to kill time, as well as to hook up.

I keep hearing this from friends, and I honestly don't get it. The couple of times I've gone on Grindr, all I saw were things like: http://www.douchebagsofgrindr.com/ and http://www.reddit.com/r/lolgrindr . Those certainly represent the worst-of-the-worst, but it's clear what the 'Grindr community' is looking for when they log in to the app.

On the other hand, a friend of mine just told me last week about an in-depth political debate he got into with a guy on Grindr. While I can think of of a few ways to segue from 'check out this dick shot' to 'what do you think of Mitch McConnell', it still leaves me a bit baffled to hear that this actually happens.

My perspective may be a bit skewed because of my work with more, um "traditional" online dating (a phrase which makes me chuckle to type), but I have a hard time understanding how such meaningful conversations arise from a platform where people are quite clearly on the hunt.

Sidenote: It also amuses me how many of Grindr's ads are clearly hetero-oriented ('sexy [female] strippers nearby', etc.). I know they try to keep up the pretense that it's a 'social networking app for men', not just a hookup app for gay men, but.... still!
I'm sure other services have similar downtimes and issues, but they just don't give you visibility into their operation. Most companies won't let you know there is a problem unless you figure it out.
I think hiring CEOs based on years of experience doing the same job is fundamentally flawed, as it creates a paradox. As I said before, I wish that CEOs like Marissa Mayer and David Marcus was more common.
How is the touch support now? I was trying to use bootstrap "radio buttons" the other day, flailed about for several hours (touchend handlers worked for regular buttons, but not the radio buttons), and they still aren't working on an iPad.
>Whether we use a new technology for good or evil reflects our character as individuals and as a society

You'd agree fossil fuel powered engines have been a good thing for humanity in the past 100 years? It would be hard not to agree. Fast travel, ability go grow huge amount of food for the population, just about every modern convenience is based on what they have allowed.

That said, they have also enabled two world wars, mass lead poisoning of societies, smog and other pollution types, global warming, and possible catastrophic collapse of the global population if it stops flowing.

What defines individual selfishness when the effect is close to insignificant per person, but the long term accumulated effects can be disastrous.

which snowflake caused the avalanche?

Emergent behavior can be hard to predict. If you march across a bridge its fine. If a 300 person marching team does it collapses. Where is the volition in the collapse? At what number does something meaningless (or possible good) become harmful? Trying to measure such things as binary, black or white, good or evil when it is the improper unit to measure them will lead to failure.
Surprising I got 0.1fps on a Dell Mini 9 with Ubuntu. I'm used to these things either not detecting WebGL or just crashing the tab.
Improve Linux Gaming Performance With FSGamer
Thanks.

I like his analysis, but particularly liked this interesting bit:

'Consider a 2011 survey by a British insurance company in which 11 percent of respondents claimed to have seen an incident but chose not to report it, worried that higher crime statistics for their neighborhood would significantly reduce the value of their properties. In this case, the quality of future data is intricately dependent on how much of the current data is disclosed; unconditional “openness” is the wrong move here—precisely because of feedback loops.'
Many OSC based applications for the monome[1] were ported to work with the copy-paste-avalanche of grid controllers (Launchpad, APC). 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.

Your counterpoints are correct, but MIDI is a better choice over OSC only due it's widespread compatibility. However, it's pointless to stick to USB-MIDI in the long run. It couldn't support the more complex DIY controller requirements as far as 6 years ago, so I can only imagine the chasm increasing.

A new inter-operable standard that surpasses MIDI and OSC was envisioned back on 2009 called ioFlow[3], but unfortunately it hasn't taken off yet.

P.s.: The website the story refers to is returning a 403, so my comment is here only to support the claim, that starting out with MIDI in 2013 is not the best idea.

Edit: Now that the site is online, I can respond to the product itself. It's probably a good fit for keyboard musicians, but I'd recommend the true hacker to pick up this indy marvel: Madrona SoundPlane-A[4], which has been in development for approximately 4 years. The concept is very, very similar. But it's not bound to the linear piano scale like the Roli. You can play it like guitar frets or better yet, explore 2 dimensional note layouts, such as the ones invented by Euler[5], popularized by Kaosscilator and now Ableton Push. Also, it runs on OSC, so you can enjoy the low latency, and build your own paradigms by transforming the signals in Cycling 74 Max or other OSC capable programming environments.

[1] http://monome.org/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

[3] http://ioflow.berlios.de/

[4] http://madronalabs.com/hardware

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonnetz