skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Speculating from the perspective of a Brit in Boston, it may be to do with the fact that police organization in the US is much more fragmented and federated - rolling out compatible radio encryption equipment, handling key management etc. across multiple police forces would be much more complicated, financially, logistically and politically. On the operation in Boston on Friday, you will doubtless have heard of the involvement of the FBI, ATF, Massachusetts state police, city of Boston police department, Watertown police, MIT campus police, transit police... cops from all the surrounding towns were also involved in the lockdown. In the UK this would all have been handled by one constabulary, possibly with support from specialists from the Metropolitan police, and with fundamentally common funding and control structures from the UK Home Office, whereas all those different police organizations in the US are responsible to different funding and governing authorities.
It's sort of an ironic parody of kickstarter.

People "donate" by simply purchasing it on the app store, just like you would with any other app, and thus they get the game (immediately). And they are saying that they will add other features to the game if the revenue exceeds the target.
In India, 'no frills' hospitals offer $800 heart surgery
People scream about paying 0.99 for an app on the App Store yet App.net thinks all of the free-chasers are going to want to pay for yet another social network and one that has no ubiquity? Good luck to them.
I think we have learned from the mistake made all around the world, particularly the ones where government run organizations lose billions of dollars through their shoddy operation of industries.
I realise this is snark about the article going down, but it's actually a good point too. Not much point in optimising the client side if all your dynamic requests take a second for the server to process.
It's just being sold on the App Store. The whole site is a parody / joke around Kickstarter campaigns. At the same time it does show real sales data and have an authentic video.
Aside from the traditional "NSACoin" hypothesis (massive transaction graph waiting to be de-anonymized), here's another one: the private keys for the massive hoard of coins mined in the earliest days of Bitcoin are on a bureaucrat's computer, and will be used to crash the exchange rate - discrediting cryptocurrencies for all time. (Discussion here: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1009)
Making end users pay is a huge barrier to entry for startups. Not all can afford it. And App.net is there to play zookeeper, and could shut them down if they do anything out of bounds. For users this is great but for startups it's hugely dangerous. So app.net has a marketplace problem : to overcome this they need to be huge (think Apple App Store huge) and to be App Store huge they need the startups and users.

Disclaimer : We build hull.io. we think that developers need stay in control of the data and responsible for themselves for this to work.
Because Posthaven has the Posterous branding and endorsement of the Posterous founder.

Brand identity and switching cost is a hard thing for most people to overcome. It's why Blogger still exists. And then there's the chicken-and-egg problem that the former Posterous had already solved.
The order to close businesses was pretty broadly heeded, and with no workplaces, shops, daycares or school programs to go to the voluntary 'shelter in place' situation became pretty mandatory, even for people outside the lockdown but working in the Boston area.
I object to excel for quantitative analysis on the grounds that it is impossible to demonstrate anything that might give one confidence in an analysis. There's no record of the steps taken to transform data. By contrast, in R, you can start all the way at the beginning and trace everything that is done to your data, right up to your final answers. You can explore the data without wondering if you've accidentally performed the Sort of Ulimate Corruption.

It's like algebra class: no credit unless you show your work. And in excel, there really isn't a good way to show your work.
> Always great to see studies looking at the mental implications of non-psychoactive drugs.

... also great to read about the mental implications of priming. I'll be more punitive/forgiving depending on the unrelated thought I had minutes earlier...
I have always lived in cities so have assumed in the past that the glorious smell was something to do with water coming into contact with the concrete/tarmac/stone around me.
In comparison, Amazon EC2 offers GPU clusters for $2.10000/hr [1]. Each cluster contains 2x M2050 Fermi cores [2] which each put out ~80MHash/sec [3].

To get the requisite 64686 GHash/sec, you'd need to spin up
404287 of these things, which costs you $849000/hr. This is of course assuming Amazon has 400000 instances of the GPU compute clusters.

The cheaper alternative is to utilise spot GPU instances, costing only $0.346/hr [4]. At that price, i's $139900/hr or so. I am willing to bet that they do not just have 400000 spare GPU instances laying around unused, however.

All this was purely academic, but it kind of amuses me that for a theoretical $140000/hr, you could hyjack bitcoin as it is currently.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

[2] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

[3] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

[4] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/#spot
I find it odd that the edge length is even.
So long as you also invent alternating current.
You don't think the NSA could free up a few machines and have a couple of Terahash/Sec available in a weekend?
Define "recently". I can't remember not having a skip button and I've been using pandora for a couple years at least.
A video game style electromagnetic gun (from 1934)
UberDNS Service where you manage your zone/records with Git
Perhaps there is something to learn from grove.io (I'm not saying it's a bad idea, only that you should learn more about what didn't work for them -- which you presumably already have)

https://grove.io/blog/grove-shutting-down-october-13
There is probably no business case for such an operation. To benefit from an extreme price crash you either have to short bitcoin or buy a ton of stuff with it. In the latter case it is hard to imagine a merchant honoring such orders if he is not convinced the blockchain is sound.

As for shorting bitcoin... It's certainly not impossible. But shorting a few Million of Dollars of Bitcoin? If this is done in any kind of trading account (without the money being physically in the hand of the attacker), the trading institution would probably be out of business because of the price drop anyway, before paying the profits to the attacker...

For everyone else... You shouldn't have more than 20 BTC on hand anyway. Preferably a lot less, depending on the rest of your portfolio. In these cases any price drop isn't going to wipe you out and the network resumes normal operation.
Not exactly.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that most security cameras are not setup for capture of facial details (or license plates for that matter).

Most security cameras are setup for general overview shots, with around 10-20ppf (pixels per foot), whereas good detail starts at around 80ppf (meaning that you'd need 4x as many cameras in most areas to start to get something approaching an image quality that you could use for reliable facial recognition.

On top of that there is the storage factor. A "common" camera in a new deployment is a 1080p (2.1 Megapixel) camera. If this is set to record good quality images 24/7, it consumes about 60GB of storage per day. Various tricks like "record on motion", etc. can reduce this to maybe 10GB/day, at the risk of potentially missing key evidence or having gaps in the recording.

Lenses are important, but it's not that hard to find a lens with sufficient resolution for these cameras. A good lens rated at 2+ megapixels is around $70-$120 (depending on various factors), and a good outdoor camera (including lens) can be had for $500-$1200. Big price ranges, yes, but not to the point that the lenses are the limiting factor budget-wise.
‘Human computer’ Shakuntala Devi has died
Oh, it's not wrong, just embarrassing as a human being. ;)
Couple this with a medical insurance system and you'll have a copy-paste model for pretty much every development country (and the United States cough)
Good point. I once spent three months developing a highly optimized dynamically loading Google Maps point & line overlay library capable of smoothly scrolling through thousands of elements with hundreds on screen on 10 year old single-core Pentiums.

In the end the server team ended up implementing a home-grown geo-search on an XML document store with an average query time of several seconds.
Much as I like having options, I have come to realize this applies to code as well. On my current project, I keep telling my partner that we need to keep the cognitive load down, because eventually we will have to bring on other people. Being that it's written in C++ (please don't flame me; it's what we have to work with), I'd love to use things like template metaprogamming and multiple inheritance. Since we are already working in a domain that doesn't always follow common sense (RF/E&M), and we are also using some design patterns that take a little getting used to in C++, we've had to eschew a few features of the C++ language. It's probably for the best anyways.
There's a bit of a chicken and egg problem here: If app.net was already well established among users then it'd be great to tap into that userbase, and users would be looking for more apps. Unfortunately, before that happens it's pretty hard to imagine that an app developer would be able or want to introduce their users to both 1) their app, and 2) that they need to pay for a separate service in addition. Sounds like it'd be complicated and confusing to users. Perhaps if alpha.app.net were to take off that would solve the problem, but since they're focusing on a platform and not the app, that doesn't seem as likely.
> I am convinced that within a century coffee, tea, and tobacco will be no longer in vogue.

Tea is a great herbal drink. IMO, its here to stay.
Posthaven came out of the ashes of Posterous, which a lot of people on HN used (including me). Right now I switched to Posthaven from Posterous because the transition was seamless. Add to the fact Garry Tan is obviously well-known in the YC community, so that gets the discussion a little more attention.

App.net started with a certain positioning, not as a similar product to the Posterous or Posthavens of the world, but as a mission in how it would treat its customers (at least that's how Dalton Caldwell framed it in the intro videos). Although app.net has changed over time, I think a lot of people on HN view it with skepticism because of the lofty goal of moving users away from Twitter or Facebook. I think people couldn't bet on the fact that a critical mass of people would move from those sites simply because they make their money off of advertising dollars.
All those comments have in common one thing: they are from people who claim that something can't be done, that others can't do/accomplish something.

Moral of the story: never claim that someone can't do something, no matter how unfeasible it might look. They might actually do it, and you will look silly.
I've been wondering about the same thing.

You can print out {{controller}} in your template to see the name. If it's generated it will say something like "generated controller xyz". If your custom one is picked up it will print that out.

It would be great however to include some debugging tools since sometimes you can even wonder how to name your templates.
I strongly doubt that a single HN post would "influence the markets."
Indeed. I can only advise you to read "The Information Diet" if you haven't yet. The state of the media influences a lot the state of politics as well - and not only that, our whole culture. 24/24 news watching is more than popcorn, rather like only eating bacon burgers.
I was inordinately tickled to discover that Wolfram|Alpha's database includes this question as an easter egg.
If you take opioids for the pain from stubbing your toe, you should re-evaluate what is important to you.
I agree it would take a long time and be unlikely for a single ASIC-purchasing party to reach 50%. Another organization, an ASIC-datacenter-hoster, could do it.

BFL has an "ASIC hosting program" where those purchasing more powerful BFL machines can put their machines in an affiliate datacenter. There is real incentive to have one's ASICs hosted there, especially given that power requirements are 6-7 times originally forecast (one needs commercial space to run these now), and that this new hardware has an unknown failure rate and a real tangible cost to not working. The hosting center provides direct maintenance from BFL personnel, so one's machine shouldn't be down for more than a day or two for any failure. I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of BFL ASIC purchasers opt to host their hardware in this datacenter.

The hosting program could lead to the mining pool (the default option is for your BFL ASIC to join the mining pool) at the datacenter having > 50%, under complete control of the affiliate datacenter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5584783
There are a few, though less than you might think.
Lots of general progress has been made in terms of facial detection algorithms, but there are almost no "general" security camera deployments that are setup to capture sufficient detail to get a good face match.

There are not enough events like this in open places that drive requirements for facial recognition use. Limited cases (airports, casinos, etc.) more frequently have cameras setup to get good straight-on high-res facial shots, but almost no typical outdoor area is covered that way.
I thought that may be the case but reading about synchronous communication through the queue and a desire to keep the architecture simple with a single api was causing me doubt.
It's more like Salesforce.com than it is like Twitter in terms of business model -- that's interesting.

Will it work though?

SFDC started out with a product that had clear enough value to sell seats at $60+ a month and then there was a large market for apps built on top of their platform. And note that if you sell somebody an app in Salesforce, you're adding something to their recurring bill.

App.net sounds like an "all you can eat" service in terms of back-end hardware and software, a bit like cable TV, in fact, it's at the low end of that price range.

It may be very possible to build something interesting on here but so far all I see are a number of instant messaging clients, particularly for the Mac.

Show me a tool that can be used to build a social system that gets people to do something that they otherwise don't do then I'll be impressed!
Because you get a full VPS, maintained by me.

At 10 people, it's already cheaper than other services, which usually charge a few bucks per user.
Correct, and you're talking about cases where you might have literally 500,000+ pixels on a face (close-up shot from an 8MP camera).

The average cctv shot will have around 200-1000 pixels on the entire face, if you're lucky.
Perhaps creating a thin layer of middleware so that your work supports hubot scripts is a good idea, then!
Could you recommend some of the critical reviews?

I've seen some critical reviews that are just nonsense. I don't want to spend time wading through nonsense, but I realise that maybe he's made mistakes, so I'd welcome curated suggestions.
Using PHP Curl to log in to HackerNews
If your product is a mobile app primarily, domain names are far less important. (We don't own bump dot com, and while it's hard to prove the absence of a thing, we don't think it hurts us at all).
In generics they can change the inactive ingredients and obviously they don't always use the same equipment or facilities to produce it. Some people have allergies to inactive ingredients which may explain the different side effects.

But in my mind the generics are just as good as name brand, albeit sometimes different. I guess I'd be just as likely to react poorly to the inactive ingredients in the name brand and might find a generic better in some cases.
If true, the key phrase there is "lawful order".
The brothers didn't leave the area, didn't go into hiding and were able to kill a campus officer and hijack a car, all without police finding them for a week.

It was mostly dumb luck. It's not like they were hiding!

Oh, and http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013/03/27/hanover-police-trying-...
Don't forget the tools that would (help to) extract a 'proper app' from your average corporate Excel sheet.

I'm pretty sure there's a huge opportunity there ...
The problem is that most of these links link directly to MtGox, thus involuntarily helping the DDoS attacks.
So how do you measure $productivity_cost accurately? Do you account for cases like where employee A, B and C come in the shared office with a new kind of idea going to rocket your business revenues to sky level?
Open Street Map – The Free Wiki World Map
In Study 2 there we 236 subjects, which AFAIK is a pretty big sample size for these kinds of experiments. There error bars on the graph are still somewhat large, so there was a lot of variability, but assuming there is no bias in what data the experimenters chose to include, combining both studies, p < .02*.01 = .002. Furthermore, as the article notes, there was a prior study that also showed cognitive effects of Tylenol. While these effects could be spurious due to publication or selection bias or deliberate manipulation, it's not all that plausible that they happened by chance.
“I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years.”

This is my favourite of the lot, for two reasons:

a) Gates said it on COMDEX in 1994, the same year when Amazon.com was founded.

b) I would dare say that he wasn't that much off -- he said little (and not "none"), and one could argue that Internet's commercial potential is still to be fully realized. At the very least, Amazon.com itself reached its first profitable quarter in 2001, making Gates' forecast much more accurate.
Odd that this is Asimov's favorite - it seems so inferior to Nightfall, or The Dead Past, or probably some others that I am forgetting.
Your pricing is what failed it for me. I can get a 512MB VPS from DigitalOcean for $5/month.

I love this idea, though. I just feel that your approach of giving a full VPS is a bad idea. People who want a full VPS will buy a full VPS for much cheaper than the 20GBP you're offering it for.

What you need to do is multi-tenant your hosts, and isolate them from each other. Then you'll get costs savings that you can pass on to your customer; which will put you in line competitively with the likes of HipChat and Campfire.

Great idea, can't wait to see what comes of it!
"To get the requisite 64686 GHash/sec, you'd need to spin up 404287 of these things, which costs you $849000/hr."

Really, I don't think even Amazon has enough of this hardware. And AFAIK these (GPU clusters) are not virtualized.

Makes me wonder what happens if you have a cost advantage in taking the cheapest PC hardware and plugging high-end GPU cards (beyond ASICs)
> Always great to see studies looking at the mental implications of non-psychoactive drugs.

Well, it kind of fits the definition (except psychoactive drugs have their primary effect in the brain)
Also known as the Clarke's first law... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws ;-)
It's not only yours and mine favorite - its also a favorite of Asimov himself. Here is what he written about The Last Question in the 1973 release of "The Best of Isaac Asimov":

‘The Last Question’ is my personal favorite, the one story I made sure would not be omitted from this collection.
Why is it my favorite? For one thing I got the idea all at once and didn’t have to fiddle with it; and I wrote it in white-heat and scarcely had to change a word. This sort of thing endears any story to any writer.
Then, too, it has had the strangest effect on my readers. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can write them the name of a story, which they think I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They don’t remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably ‘The Last Question’. This has reached the point where I recently received a long-distance phone call from a desperate man who began, ‘Dr. Asimov, there’s a story I think you wrote, whose title I can’t remember–’ at which point I interrupted to tell him it was ‘The Last Question’ and when I described the plot it proved to be indeed the story he was after. I left him convinced I could read minds at a distance of a thousand miles.
No other story I have written has anything like this effect on my readers—producing at once an unshakeable memory of the plot and an unshakeable forgettery of the title and even author. I think it may be that the story fills them so frighteningly full, that they can retain none of the side-issues.
Where should one work? Questions to ask and how to decide
As much as I love "The Last Question," My favorite Asimov short story is "Profession" (I read it in the same story anthology as "The Last Question): http://www.abelard.org/asimov.php

Described on that site as "an allegorical description of the manner in which education currently functions in our primitive western societies," I found it (as a child/early teen especially) to be one of his more engaging and relevant works. Check it out if you get a chance, although note that it's somewhat longer than "The Last Question."
Patents for health are probably okay. But the abuse of the patent system really does need to stop.

Companies engaging in illegal, anti-competitive behaviour such as "pay to delay"[1] need to have some realistic punishment applied.

[1] (http://www.npr.org/2013/03/25/175043758/supreme-court-hears-...)
Yeah, that. Excel's CSV behavior is worse-than-useless, which is a shame since CSV is generally treated as the easiest way to get data into Excel.
They don't use the terminology "use your family and friends to make money". They always say they are going out and "helping" other people to make money. They want to make people think that if they don't ask their friends and family that they are actually causing them to miss out on the opportunity of a life time.
Re-read my post. I didn't say the average human being is busy playing Curiosity; I said that the average human is fully satisfied interacting with a Skinner box.
Not to mention it's not news to anyone who deals with bitcoins whilst it is annoying for anyone who doesn't care about them.
Also, our Internet surveillance dragnet failed too.

I guess when you create a panopticon you're relying more on psychology than surveillance.
No lecture videos as of yet, but perhaps eventually. Princeton began a partnership with Coursera last year and the CS department has been relatively active, e.g., our algorithms course is now on the site [1], and I believe that they actually 'flipped' the course over the past semesters, i.e., students were expected to watch the lectures online and typical lecture hours were replaced with professors fielding questions / working through examples.

[1] - https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI
Oh..whoops. I suppose "working memory (machines)" is an analogy to "working memory (humans)", so your use of "working memory" actually directly refers to humans, and isn't an analogy at all :)
Yes.

Medication compliance (people taking meds correctly) is a severe problem. The UK spends about £9bn on medication, and about half of that is wasted by non-compliance.

It's not the severity of the illness; many organ transplants fail because of med non-compliance. It's not the lack of cost of the meds; figures are similar in the US.

Getting patients to take meds correctly is a problem waiting for a solution, and there's money to be made from it.