skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ubuntu would fix that? I doubt it. Ubuntu has not even fixed its desktop fully yet. It's breaking, and breaking even more with every new release. In 12.10, I can't safely write to my NTFS partitions, can't say if my Desktop Manager won't crash, can't say if the startup screen (plymouth) won't freeze....

Ubuntu is not going to fix anything anytime soon IMHO.
> The article this discussion started about finds that if you just use data from the last decade and project that forward you get an average projection of increasing 1.55C in a period that previous models had said would increase 1-3C

No, for some definitions of "the last decade" the trend line is cooling and for others it really is flat.

If you define "the last decade" as the ten year period ending this month, the temperature trend looks like this (slight cooling):

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/last:120/plot/wti/last:...

(The "woodfortrees index" shown is built from an average of several standard temperature series - if you like HADCRU or GISS or some other specific one you can select it from the popup menu and hit the "plot" button to see that instead.)

The 15-year trend is rising, but just barely so: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/last:180/plot/wti/last:...

The 20-year trend is still positive, but the recent flattening is real and it has already been flat enough long enough that it's starting to pose a serious problem for the model predictions, hence articles like this one.

> But the median prediction of the new range - the most likely outcome - is 1.55 which is (assuming that the original range was a 95% confidence interval) is inside of 1 standard deviation of the prediction.

Er, no. You're assuming the probability distribution is a normal distribution with the median in the middle - it isn't. IIRC, some of the newer attribution-based papers that have been forcing them to shift the window to the left have a positive skew - the median peak is way on the left side and then there's a "long tail" on the right. So depending on which papers they use it's actually possible the new median could be outside the 95% confidence interval of the old range.
Yes, the concept of a distributed unforgeable public ledger is brand new in human history. The monetary use is interesting in that it obviously made bootstrapping possible, but the long term impact is probably bigger than just trading bitcoins.
My favorite coding atmosphere is like 70% N2, 20% O2 and 1% Ar.

Big desk, two large monitors, Aeron chair (I miss it :/), Logitech illuminated keyboard, G500 mouse, 21°C temp, 11 PM, nobody, no noise, just the keyboard clicks rythming the night.
A friend just moved to a house number 1 on the street. Left of him is the typical number 3. To the right, someone added duplex, which provides two units: 1A and 1B.
They lost such a good chance to say "Es el fin del Camino!" (which means "Is the end of the Road!" in Spanish)
B5 had a much more cohesive story. BSG was better in other respects (acting, SFX) but the story was mostly improvised from season to season and it's much less satisfying.
Data centers are supposed to have backup generators and systems in place to fuel them up should the need arise. Can't do the same for every house in a city.

However I agree, building something that depends on the grid is not crazy. For example: TVs, computers, light bulbs, fridges, ...
I don't feel sorry for the guy in Club Fed that tattled on the CIA. If you want some real prison stories read "Papillon":

http://www.amazon.com/Papillon-P-S-Henri-Charriere/dp/006112...
This is probably true for Finland aswell, i was a student in Helsinki (I have lived in the helsinki metropolitan area for the most part of my life) from 2006-2012, and as any kid in his early 20s i wanted to have my own appartment.

So my rent was 650 euros/month, and adding other costs the monthly cost for living was probably over 1200 euros/month.

So school was free, and we also get a student benefit from the government for 9 months each year, the benefit is for everyone studying and its about 450 euros/month.

So as you see i also had to work at the same time, which was fine. I had a job for the entire time i studied, and got a decent salary.

Now, heres the catch. By some idiotic law i cannot make more than 9000 euros per year. If o make more i have to pay back the student benefit.

Why? I pay taxes, i get the points in school? So the government is telling me: DONT WORK!

This law resuts in people dont working, or working just a little bit and ending up taking student loans, and when they are finished studying many have loads for 1000s of euros.

As a student work experience is as valuable as the knowledge from school, i would not hire anyone without work experience, and this is where the finnish government fails.
Unfortunately it had the most annoying bug in that it did not reload CSS files. Back in the day, I developed with a text editor on mac PowerBook and after changing one CSS statement, I had to close the browser and restart it.
Google and Apple are different. They have different cultures, but also quite different businesses. If someone else takes the Google Glass as it is now and makes a more attractive product out of it, Google still wins, as they make their money from usage, not hardware sales. Therefore it often makes sense for Google to throw half-baked products out there and get help from others to gain traction, Android being the shining example.
Sure, I was just responding to the subthread about the feability of long-distance precise/safety-critical tunnel-construction in seismically active areas.

Nobody knows what hyperloop is anyway (and it's not even clear that Musk actually has a real plan), so it's hard to say much about the details! :]
Get a free copy of "Tizen For Dummies"
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Perth has a really active web scene, I feel like one of the most talkative in the country sometimes..

We are remote yes, but we have so many events going on here that it makes up for it.

They have support from the banks and also the Australian Government so would love to hear how that all went, if/when I meet them I'll ask them to blog about it then post on HN.
It would allow you to establish prior art for ideas that you didn't want to go to the expense of patenting.
It worked fine on Safari on my iPhone 4S on 3G...
> and IE Mac did not suffer from the "box model" bug that affected IE on Windows.

Nope. Just the box model bug that affected all the CSS 2 compliant browsers. ;)

It was indeed a pretty good browser for its time, though.
I think it would make much more sense if the web application / browser / operating system can adjust the colours to fit a colour-blind person, rather than applying the same logic for everyone. In addition, different types of colour-blindness (deuteranopia, protanopia, tritanopia) make it hard to come up with one scheme that fits all.

There are a couple of browser plugins and scriptlets for this purpose - e.g. http://daltonize.appspot.com/

At kenHub (working with John Cupitt, the creator of ruby-vips), we've also created an implementation of the daltonize algorithm for ruby/rails that does this server-side. see https://github.com/kenhub/shikimo

(we are hoping to use this soon on our anatomy atlas, so colour-blind people can more easily distinguish between highlights and colour-coded structures)
> JPEG encoding, for instance, utilizes an O(n*log(n)) frequency analysis algorithm called a Discrete Cosine Transform.

Scuse me?

JPEG's frequency transform is a set of fixed linear transforms and is always 8x8, so this step is just O(n) of the area of the image. Also, it's not really "a DCT", just any approximation that will look good when run through the approximation of the opposite transform at the other side.

See http://multimedia.cx/eggs/dct-pr/.

The compression steps after are the most difficult, since they have poor ILP and can involve division. But JPEG is really simple, it's not a burden these days.

One interesting part of it is minimizing the memory use of your application, by using the smallest possible ring buffer for pixels rather than keeping the whole image in memory at once.
this is stellar, sterling and capital, all at the same time. I was days away from signing up with eWay.
Maintain the modern API and take good care of your customers, I'll refer you to everyone I know and your customers will ensure you'll remain in business for a long while. Welcome!
I'm having the same issue. It seems the page is full of non-working snippets like this.
Which actually effectively requires you to have an ABN to charge anyone in Australia. Without it, anyone you were selling to would be required with withhold 48.5%. How does an individual do that?
The people who originated the concept of the launch loop wanted to solve problems of launching spacecraft, thus the name. Elon Musk wants to commute faster between LA and SF, because he does that 400 mile commute 4 times a week. (Obviously Elon also very much wants to launch spacecraft, but maybe has reasons to ignore the launch loop for that purpose.)

With that in mind, is there any reason a launch loop needs to be vertically oriented? Why can't it go, you know, SF, LA, San Diego, Las Vegas, Reno? And if so, why can't parts of it be "underground or above-ground"?
They're in Perth? I didn't know that.

In addition to the tyranny of distance, what's working against startups here is the high cost of living.
I wonder what the chances of them getting this to us in NZ are...
I knew I shouldn't have used that term. :) It wasn't meant pejoratively.
And 100% less human being?

We haven't hit the scaling limits of computation and are unlikely to for some time. But the scaling limit of a human is fixed at sixty minutes per hour.
Sorry, but problem not in Go. Code of external libraries shouldn't be edited (or should be forked before changing).
Still the go-to browser for the diehards on NS/OS, I hear. I remember figuring out how to plumb in SSL and JS support just so I could access a butchered Dropbox...
Did you try blindness? For cataracts, you would expect the question to ask "The more you have them, the less you see. What are they?". I mean if you happened to ask someone if they have cataracts, it'd sound a little odd if they said "yeah I have it".
Bug #2

Proprietary software and adverts in Ubuntu
Apparently our financial regulations are an obtuse, onerous nightmare to deal with. I imagine even just getting setup here is a big head start. Google Merchant have been expanding for years but are still ignoring Australia, so thank you Pin
> do other nations with stable democracies use solitary confinement in a similar way

Other countries with stable democracies have universal health care, don't incarcerate almost 1% of the population, have never landed people on the moon, don't spend 5% of their GDP on the military, aren't the home of Apple, Microsoft, and IBM, and so on. America has always been (and will probably always be) an edge case.
Perhaps Mr. Shipley?
I'm getting errors in Firefox 23.0a2 http://pastebin.com/NNYTsetj
Some people like to run their browser without sending REFERER headers. I know chrome and firefox can both be configured to do so. That would mean these users would not be able to use your site/app. Better to stick with the tried and true method of a random-ish variable that goes into both the form and the cookie with their values being checked against each other on submission.
That brings up an interesting thought. Is the energy (cost) being expended actually going somewhere? I think perhaps, the fact that people put some sort of value onto teach of the transaction, no matter how minimal, accurately (though maybe not precisely) models the "stake". You wouldn't think much on using RSA keys as a public ledger, but as soon as you are tracking something that has some nominal, perceived value, people treat it with more respect and accountability. (Now, is this inherently true? I don't know.)
Except there's a growing number of miners are ignoring small transactions aka "dust"
CD Projekt has figured it out in nineties. Everybody pirated games in Poland (the prices weren't adjusted for purchasing power, nobody did localizations [except pirates - Russian CDs with illegal bothed Polish-Russian localization of English games was on every street market for 20-30 PLN, when same game was 150-200 PLN and had no localization]). That was before CD recorders were available cheaply, so pirates were earning big money on that.

CD Projekt somehow persuaded Bioware to let them do proper localization of Baldurs Gate, hired the best Polish actors for voiceovers (think Morgan Freeman hired by small publisher in USA when everybody knows nobody buys games), did all the coding by themselves, and priced the product reasonably. And it was (maybe still is) the single biggest hit on Polish gaming market. By order of magnitude.

I'm glad they continue with that attitude towards customers.
I'm a co-founder of Pin Payments. Not shy, just on HN-sabbatical :)

There's a story to tell! Building something like this in Perth is hard, but that's part of what makes it such an opportunity.

We're by no means the only tech startup here too - given the population and isolation, Perth is well represented in Australian startup crowd.
Back of the envelope math:

Assume that the notary public needs a 70watt light bulb to function (ignoring food costs, paper, etc). 8 hour day, so about a half kwh. That electricity with a new asic miner would get you about a half bitcoin, which would let you send 1000 messages of up to 1kb each, given the transaction fees.

I'm ignoring some things, but at the moment it seems to be quite the net-win.
I can't give you an ETA, but the chances are high.
I really find this great news and I'm very tempted. The - in my opinion - crappy UI that comes with Samsung's Galaxy smartphones made me switch to HTC but even with the HTC One X I had a couple of things that bugged me. Most importantly the fact that it doesn't run the latest available Android version and never will.

I wonder, though, if offering the HTC One and later the Galaxy S4 with stock Android is just a move by the smartphone vendors to get those nagging nerds - myself included - of their backs. Especially since they tend to be very vocal. I'm sure the average smartphone customer doesn't know or care about software versions as long as everything works as it should.
Great stuff! Good to see this coming out of Perth and hopefully they can get a good foothold on the market from support of businesses here before the bigger US/EU competitors (finally) arrive.
"Average end users" will always be put in the positions of choosing between either: (A) stability/"security" or (B) open access to everything - give them root and the ability to install everything and an "all open" app store and you'll only have viruses and buggy everything. And a lower quality bar for everything - people are cheap and they don't recognize good quality software when it heats them in the head, so any well crafted program will always have to compete with crap-freeware (and no, "average users" don't know or care about the difference between open-source or freeware even!), so "walled gardens" like Apple's also increase quality and, more important imho, the revenue people get for making quality software. "Average end users" can't have the cake and eat it too! Now, I don't say this is right, and I don't like app stores like Apple's, but they definitely bring real value to the end user, that's why users pay for it when they can afford!

(and I've put "security" in quotes because I know this is not "real security" what you get when you trade "full openness" for it, but it's generally a "good enough substitute for security" for the "average end users", as "real security" is only possible if you are either willing and skillful enough to be responsible for it yourself or pay top dollars to get it tailored for your needs, so it's not an option for 99.9%)
The title itself says "extreme rates of warming 'not as likely'. That is, the error bars have shifted down.

The second paragraph says there has been an 'unexplained standstill' since 1998.

Further down Dr. Otto from Oxford is quoted as saying that the "hottest of the models in the medium-term, they are actually looking less likely or inconsistent with the data from the last decade alone".

Certainly sounds to me as if there is something going on that wasn't anticipated in earlier models, especially the 'hottest models' -- the ones that are most worrying.
Perth is rolling in money - that's where the mining industry has boomed, dragging the Australian dollar up with it. It's remote, but that doesn't mean it's poor.
We're very happy using Scala. I have a mild interest in Go, but Scala def. first choice.
I'm not sure why, but this doesn't always work. Stuff that worked just fine for me back in win7 won't always come up for me in start search on win8.
"The conversion is completed at a retail foreign exchange rate of 4% on top of the wholesale interbank rate at the time of the transaction".

So the actual pricing is more like $9/mo + .30 + 7% for any non AUD business.

We use Stripe, a Bank of America USD account and OANDA to move our USD -> AUD with an FX commission ~ 0.1%.
It's certainly considered psychological torture when lasting more than a few weeks. There are a lot of good studies to back this up.

Here's a great article to get your started:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_...
Mine says before the end of June - so you have a full month try it out and decide.
I still think a case could be made, since the purchaser of a computer has not entered any sort of contract with Microsoft, but is forced to navigate a Microsoft-controlled maze.
Independent-in-theory though, yeah? I mean, if Broken Age is running over budget (as they've acknowledged is the case), money has to come from somewhere. I don't think it's super unfair to wonder if that's what this is in part about--whether they hope to use these funds while Broken Age is in development and recoup it to fund Massive Chalice when Broken Age ships.
>maybe has reasons to ignore the launch loop for that purpose

True. I think you would probably agree that they're more technical than anti-competitive. Musk has called space elevators a long-term optimization, but points out that you still need rockets anyway. Engineering-wise, a small loop is a lot easier than an orbit-capable loop.

>is there any reason a launch loop needs to be vertically oriented?

In the canonical implementation, the loop is actually fired horizontally from the base stations. The curve ofhe Earth makes the angle for the vertical component.

You're quite right, of course, that the optimized design for launching is different from the optimized design for transport. I picture in my head a >20° departure angle, but I haven't run the math so I really don't know.

I don't quite understand your question. Could you clarify?
From memory, the cutoff is essentially $50k for "seriously, you should register this properly as a business". The tax office doesn't want to chase businesses below this as a ton of them are hobby businesses and things get complex fast. Bigger fish to fry and all that.
I'll just assume it works like a catalytic converter in a car, and needs to be brought up to a certain temperature before the reaction can occur. The secret ingredients could be the same metals used in automotive converters, the actual fuel could be anything that would be combusted in that process.

The energy density claims are based on the assumption that the spent fuel leaves the center cylinder, which is probably untrue. The weight change could simply be due to leakage.

Of course that's all just speculation. At least I didn't suggest transmutation of elements like the article did.
Also of interest, the worlds most authoritative subject on Launch Loops is Keith Lofstrom [1]. He maintains a wiki on the subject with amazing information on the concept. [2]

He also maintains a wiki on one of his other projects, Server Sky, a push to get a cloud of micro-satellites in orbit for public access. A literal cloud of servers. [3]

What caught my eye is that Keith Lofstrom spoke at the International Space Development Conference (ISDC) this year and he has a ton of patents under his belt. He's not a kook and seems to really have done his homework on the subject. That makes me think that it's a plausible technology.

[1] http://www.keithl.com/
[2] http://launchloop.com/
[3] http://server-sky.com/
Fantastic. http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/2013/2-firsteve...

Not sure how they "feel" the interactions without disturbing them but that's why they are the physicists.
Successfully isolating from earth movements would be my biggest worry about a project like that. The system is going to need a good bit of flexibility built in.
One of the more subtle changes with this is, as people use the blockchain more, people's sense of authority shifts from traditional, centralized structures (institutions, governments) and more into a peer-to-peer accountability.

I've been on the sidelines watching a group of people try to hash out trust networks. Those really have not taken off. And I think they have not because the tokens used for trading trust don't have purchasing power for material goods the way Bitcoins does. I'm guessing that, while we may be tempted to just use the blockchain without the monetary use, the monetary use also makes each transaction like this matter a lot more. It might be possible that the very inefficiency is what allows the public ledger system to work at all.

In any case, I see much farther down the road where ... the big issue is not whether a nation-state actor's ability to issue currency is undermined by bitcoin, or even its ability to regulate it, but more that many other functions of government could eventually be expressed with Bitcoin or its technological successor.

Patents are interesting. What about real estate? Closing and transferring real estate takes a lot of paperwork, with mortgages enforced by powers of eviction and repossession.

I talked with a lawyer buddy of mine's about this subject a while ago. He tells me, the court system will be the last to convert over electronically. Legal papers have a gravitas associated with authority and control that is difficult to convert into electronic form.

Ultimately (and maybe not in this generation), wide-spread use of the public ledger will undermine deep-seated social conventions, emotional attachments, and notions we have about 'authority' and 'institutions.' Or maybe it'll be like the Millennials. All the folk who grew up in a time before wide-spread public ledgers die off; notions of central authorities becoming a quaint chapter in human history.
Here is a video of the Lofstrom Loop that I found on YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCwVjUZV92Q
CMD-Arrow (left,right,up,down) will move you to the beginning of the line, end of line, start of document,end of document respectively. I really miss these keys when I am on windows as I find it much less of a hand movement to do.
Wow. Was not aware of that and their web site definitely seems misleading.

Will definitely be giving Pin a go then.
> and will probably always be

I seriously doubt that. What goes around comes around.
I remember one of the founders of GOG being a part of the ZX Spectrum scene in Poland back in the eighties. He was sort of a major hub in the sneakernet where cassette tapes where the packets, snail mail was the backbone and walking around was the local network. Piracy wasn't even a word, everybody was "obtaining" games. No wonder GOG "get" gamers - their experience with the market goes 30 years back :)
In a world where bitcoin are so scarce that further division becomes necessary, that "dust" would be worth enough to have them not ignore it.
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross-Site_Request_Forgery_%...
A User's Guide to the Digital Revolution
Meet Mr. Money Mustache, the middle-class man who retired at 30
That doesn't sound very "immune to weather" to me.