skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found this quote interesting: "There are a decent number of people working on more efficient jet engines, but not very many civilians working on replacing the jet engine with something new."

It's not really the problem that there aren't very many people working on replacing jet engines. The issue is that the problem domain is full of physical limits. Ask yourself: why are we still using quicksort now, half a century after it was developed? Well, because theory tells us that any sorting algorithm based on binary comparisons is going to require at least O(n log(n)) such comparisons, and that is going to remain the case no matter how much engineering effort you throw at the problem. All you can really do when it comes to sorting algorithms is improve on the constant factors and take advantage of special cases (radix sort for small integer items, etc).

Software engineers don't usually have to think in terms of theoretical limits. But when I was in engineering school, as an aerospace major, every course began with: these are the theoretical limits in this particular area--all you can do is approach them more closely. A Brayton cycle has a certain efficiency at a given pressure ratio and an airfoil has a certain maximum lift-curve slope and there is nothing you can do about it. Improvements are in "hard engineering"--new materials that can withstand higher temperatures and pressures to eke out slightly more efficiency, etc. You're already seeing this in semiconductor manufacturing. As you run into the limits of lithography with ever-smaller wavelengths of light, semiconductor fabrication plants get exponentially more expensive to build.

These physical limits are what give the traditional engineering fields the shape of their "innovation curve." Much more happened in aerospace engineering from 1930 to 1960 than has (and will) happen from 1960 to 2020. The long-hanging fruit is gone, and all that's left is hard engineering.

And of course, this all plays into the "get rich quick" issue the author brings up. If you had a billion dollars lying around, where would you invest that money? A jet engine that's 0.5% more efficient? If you had $100 billion, would you spend it making an alternative to jet engines entirely (in an industry where people will fly on truly shitty airlines just to save $5 on a ticket)?
I'm curious about how this works in their existing API. Does it get dumped into the list of photos for an account, or is there a separate videos API coming?
After watching a few Instagram-filmed videos on the web, videos on Instagram are much lower quality than those taken with Vine, likely to compensate for the 2.5x-increased length.
Sigh...

Instagram talks a good game, but I find this to be more unimaginative dreck. Look, I get it, you need to clone Vine to stay competitive, but it's not new or a re-imagining of the video paradigm.

Most of these social startups promise unique experiences based on new forms of social interaction, but really only deliver more ways to watch cats dance on the internet.

Bring on the hardcore technology like better Ethernet Switching, Less Apps please.
I like this. Vine is great but never had the same browsing experience as Instagram. I'd much rather scroll through Instagram than Vine. Now I have even more reason to do so.
Profit. It's far easier to cut costs, reduce taxes, and expand existing products/services into new markets than it is to conduct applied research and commercialize new products.
The Greek public broadcaster showdown, and when do people finally snap?
Capitalism tends to monopolies, monopolies tends to sustain its power and its dominance so innovation is a threat to their dominance and developed markets..
Also when a company or group of people innovate the dominant dinosaur buys it and shut it down..

On the other side, those companies put large sums of money to "innovate" on the markets they already dominate, or in research to make them better in what they already do.. (so it doesnt really get into a innovation cicle)
The same people that pay for other essential basic services like roads, firetrucks, police, elementary schools, judges, etc. etc. etc. - i.e. everyone through taxes.
Ask HN: How do you build an audience?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868

Was looking at the passive income thread that got so highly upvoted. How do you build an audience HN? I'm a complete noob and don't know anything marketing.

Any good starting points, communities, references, de facto standards, etc?
Silver may be common in some places, but IIRC it isn't common inside animals or plants. So if you are a bacteria producing an infection, you would not expect to find a lot of silver inside your target. The metabolically paths that have resistance are usually more expensive, so the cheap path is usually selected and the other unused path is lost after some generations lost dew to random mutations.

It's possible that there exist some strange bacteria that feed on sulfur components and live inside mines with high silver concentration that have special mechanism to handle silver, but I think they are not very happy eating meat.
Remind HN: TSA comments deadline Monday
- "Today we want to talk about something a little different..."

- “We’ve worked with the leading video scientists to create something great. We call it Cinema.”

- “We worked hard on all of this.. but we wanted to do more.”

There has to be someone in the Valley that has distilled every Steve Jobs presentation into a style guide that every other firm is now using in their presentations.
The title is completely unsupported by the content of the article, which presents no evidence that Obamacare is prompting the practice of hiring part-time workers. In fact, it clearly states that Walmart supported Obamacare because it fit with their part-time worker strategy, which was already in place. The article also states

"The recovering economy could also help force Walmart, and other like-minded employers, to back off this policy and hire full-time workers with benefits."
So you're back to "Block the Analytics" and everyone is happy!

Or are you saying instead that you should impose your own personal choice on everyone else?
Today we are here to announce our new feature, it's called "Beautiful". Beautiful is the most...crap guys we didn't think through the naming of this feature very well.
Just realized I published this on the same morning that "Video on Instagram" is one of the day's top stories.

Interesting irony. ;)
Actually, there are a lot of companies being forced into this, not just Wal-Mart. Most full-time jon vacancies are being simply deleted or relegated to two part-time employees because of the mandate in this legislation.

There's nothing political about the truth. To not recognize (or admit) the connection between the two is serious head-in-the-sand syndrome.
Well the 'Cinema' feature is something brand new that Vine doesn't have -- stabilizing videos like this is mind boggling to me at least and should be interesting to see how it plays out.
If they were able to achieve better performance than Vine on Android (said another way: if it's usable), then they could make headway in the Android market share. I hope that's the case, because I eventually uninstalled Vine on my Galaxy Nexus because performance was inconsistent... and usually terrible.
I just downloaded the app. Videos don't play automatically. You have to click the 'play' button. Doesn't look like it repeats once you play either.
Would it really be so hard to engineer these "disks" with an outside layer of plastic protection?

I have a mock-up here:
http://i.imgur.com/DbV5ByR.jpg
Gone are the days of "It just works!" because, well, people expect that it will just work. All the major platforms, at their core, all work the same and all just work. The visual appearance is the differentiation now.
Instagram just made Vine irrelevant.
Haha, no one said it would be risk-free :))
Well, I've ridden thoroughbreds since I was 3yo, so I have some experience with being thrown through the air, and the concussive results of that. I've also crashed my bike, with and without the involvement of other vehicles. In my worst crash, I hit a concrete bollard head-on while pedaling at speed. I flipped over the handlebars and landed on my back. My tucked, helmetless head never touched a thing. I destroyed the heavy-duty suspension fork on my hardtail, but other than that I just scraped my elbow and got my office shirt dirty.

Another occasion that really sticks out in my mind is the time I laid the bike down and jumped off to the side to avoid a child who literally jumped out from behind cover into the street directly in my path. If I had been in a car, going the same speed, that episode would have ended very differently.

I don't have a problem with helmets in general. I never snowboard without a helmet. There are many rivers I won't kayak without a helmet. I don't usually wear a helmet when riding horses, but there are exceptions, like polo. I'm sure I'll encounter other circumstances that seem helmet-appropriate as well. The point is, bicycle commuting is not an extreme sport, so enforcing the conventions of extreme sport is an effective way to discourage it.

For every anecdote, there is another anecdote. You only think your helmet saved you, while I know that my lack of helmet did not harm me in the crash I described. (And if we're going to speculate intuitively, it's a good thing I didn't have a solid bulky object on my head to catch on the pavement and impart a jolt of rotational acceleration to my brain!) If you've never considered the phenomenon of risk compensation, you could think more deeply about an issue that is much more complicated than "it's bad to injure your head". Fortunately, there's a place you can go to educate yourself: http://www.cyclehelmets.org/
I'd do it, not sure how many months I'd be able to do it, as I often get rid of crap regularly.
So, expectedly, we will hear a lot of criticism that Instagram is copying Vine. In some ways, it is - but with its own spin and one that I think will emphasize beauty in video, much like it has done with photos and whereas I see Vine personally as one that lets you share moments as they are or some kind of quirky videos. Technologically, the difference is arbitrary (filters vs. no filters) but, as the saying goes: the medium is the message - and Instagram has created a community based on those filters - and that community will invariably transform the new technology into something extraordinary.

What I'm interested in is what will happen to Vine. Vine was meant to be this great sharing solution for moments recorded in video. It had its moment when it first launched, then dipped in popularity, and only recently started getting popular again. Its use has not skyrocketed (I could be wrong). My belief is that it's because taking a good video is hard, harder I think, than taking a good picture.

So, it's likely that Instagram will able to bullishly leverage its existing and talented user base to take full advantage of the video feature. What about the majority? I'm worried that most Instagram users won't use the feature as actively because they are too intimidated. I mean I looked at the cafe latte example and it was practically cinematic. Is the Average Joe expected to take a video like that?

I think this is the right step for Instagram but I'm not sure whether they've solved the essential problem in sharing these video moments.
10 Principles of Good Mobile Library Design
To the point where it's becoming nearly meaningless...
In Space, No One Can Hear Your Takeout Order
this is exactly what i'm trying to accomplish with version 2 of one of my sites - although I still need the cms and all of that, i'm stripping away all the fancy colorful css, photos, etc... only keeping what I need.

minimalistic - let the content speak for the site, not the fancy design
I've never seen a serious study on the subject (at least not in English), only anecdata, so I've never been sure how much veracity to assign to claims of the commonality of CD-R degradation. It wouldn't surprise me if 90s-era discs were higher quality, though -- for my own anecdata, I've had only one batch of CD-Rs ever show evidence of degradation, and it was one of the last I ever bought and seriously used in the early 2000s.

I've never seen a problem with DVD-Rs, but I didn't use nearly as many of those. I haven't written new optical disks for practically anything other than OS installation media since ~2003/2004, and in the last few years I've rarely even done that.

(And I never made the hop to BD-R. From a data storage perspective, I found it pretty much obsolete on arrival.)
> The point is that if anything can be ruled constitutional

The Constituton isn't magic. No matter what it says, courts applying it have always been able to rule anything constitutional (or, conversely, unconstitutional.) Like any set of rules for human behavior, it is not self enforcing.

The Constitution has never, from day one, been a protection against the power of the federal government, it is at most a warning about what the public intends to limit the federal government to, and it has force exactly to the extent that the public is willing to follow up on that warning.
No, we're talking about defense of our nation, not a voluntary war.
answer to vine ?
If the author thinks 'the assumed essential decency of the state and its agents' is the reason people are against conspiracies, he's got no understanding of the issue at all.

Some of us object to conspiracy-mongering because we know people are only human, and have a limited capacity for outrage and action - there's only so much we can do beyond taking care of our families. At the same time, we know that plenty of objectionable things that deserve our attention are happening every day - things that are known and acknowledged to be happening, things that may be perfectly legal and constitutional but are nonetheless repugnant.

When the public's attention is drawn to an entertaining and sexy conspiracy theory, something that might have happened but very very probably didn't, the public's attention is no longer focused on the absolutely-100%-objectionable things taking place every day. That's why conspiracy-mongering is a net loss for society, and why I'll happily crack tinfoil hat jokes at the author's expense - it's not because I think the government's a big group of lovable folks, it's because all that time we're collectively spending writing the script for a future episode of Ancient Aliens could be so much better spent.
Vine ripoff?
Does Google use a person's search history to filter job applications?
If i were to apply to a job to Google, I would definitely use my Gmail ID in the application form and in my resume. All of my Google tools would be linked to this id.

Now I understand that an individual's Google Search data is holy and only a limited few within Google can access the same.

But wouldn't Google be able to build a simplified YES or NO tool using a candidate's search history, that the recruiters within Google can use to shortlist a candidate?
Do they do so?

Jes Asking...
Simple. When the idea was devised, it was thought to be a good way to make employees more dependent on their employers..i.e. makes it more costly to strike/quit/get fired.
User uploaded ones won't autoplay, but the video ads will
Max Kelly, the former CSO at Facebook left to work at the NSA.
If I pull a fire alarm when there's no fire, I get fined. If I speed on the highway or run a tollbooth without paying, I get fined. If I decide not to go to elementary school, I get fined. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truancy#United_States Who decides what health care I have access to, and what health care I'm required to take (vaccines, vitamins, exercise, etc)?
So the behemoth copies features from a small startup. Bastards.
Escaping after the services are all shot to hell?
Antibiotic resistance is definitely not an existential threat. Most people do not catch any bacterial diseases that would be fatal if untreated before their reproductive years.

That doesn't mean it's a good situation, but existential threat is greatly overstating the problem. People would have to have an extra baby, MAYBE.
Given that the "anti-conspiracy" here is predicated on statistics and not an assumpion of beneficence by the state, I really wish the author would have taken his own advice.
Mixable ambient sounds for programming
This is just a clever way to get video ads integrated into the facebook stream.

Relevant: http://adage.com/abstract?article_id=242165
While there are a number of things that must be done especially for accessibility purposes, for the large part the web is trying to evolve towards natural accessibility. The best example I can think of is SEO, as we attempt to make our sites readable by the various search engine crawlers we also make them more readable by software for the blind.
To be honest I think Instagram is good at what it does and this move makes it look cheaper and greedy to invade markets it's not meant to be in.
I don't disagree with your point, but I think it's worth adding that journalist Naomi Klein wrote "The Shock Doctrine"[1], a book which outlines numerous examples in the past 100 years where government officials worldwide have chosen military actions specifically with economic goals in mind.

The book misrepresents capitalism somewhat, but the journalistic research and examples presented provide a compelling case that there are people who have a "sane" or "rational" (from their perspective) view that they (and maybe some others) could gain economically from war.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
Xanga’s shutting down unless it raises $60k by mid-July
> Interestingly enough, a socialized (single payer/universal, etc.) system of basic health care with privatized add on's and extras is basically the way every civilized society on the planet operates except the USA.

I simply don't trust our (the USA's) federal government to handle a socialized system with any amount of efficacy or competency. We would need a fundamental cultural change and a massive restructuring of current spending. Like that will happen any time soon.

Plus, I don't think such a system should even be possible with our form of government because of the powers enumerated by the Constitution. If there were to be a socialized system, it should happen at the state level and perhaps the federal government could help regulate / control interstate issues. Or, I suppose, we could try to pass an amendment.
I agree. The current model stifles entrepeneurship and ties people with chronic illnesses to their jobs (or their spouses/parents/etc with jobs).
It's interesting that you mentioned that concrete in particular is well understood, I just came across an interesting article the other day about some breakthrough in understanding Roman concrete: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2013/06/04/roman-con...

Seems there are still certainly innovations/iterations left to be made in concrete.
The last 7 were far different IMO. Coming out of the bubble, and very little progress in software, not much needed to change. But now, I think the fact that software, not hardware, is changing rapidly, a 7-8 year cycle isn't going to work.

Sure, they can bolt-on new firmware updates and operating systems, but I think the way we use consoles will change quite a bit in the next 3-4 years alone.
It's weird that a few people are challenging short-term thinking, and they're all friends with each other (Thiel, Musk).

Also, it's weird how short-term thinking has infected the government. Nobody's forcing them to meet a quarterly P&L, you'd figure that would give them more freedom.
Millimeter Waves May Be the Future of 5G Phones
We may have finally found the "instagram for video".
There are more shares from Vine on Twitter than Instagram. I'd say its use has skyrocketed.
Thanks for sharing this. I'm not sure why that green tab is showing up there. It really is annoying. I'll see if I can get that out of there in the next few minutes.
This article doesn't mention it, but I've heard the suggestion that far more of the runoff is from over-fertilized suburban lawns than from agriculture.

At least commercial agriculture tends to be a bit more concerned about wasteful inputs, etc. (At least where subsidies haven't distorted it too much.)

But I see some incredibly excessively perfectly green lawns which are such a waste of resources unless you're playing golf or lawn bowling.
I am surprised there aren't more body hackers turning themselves blue on purpose. Nothing says 'alien' like blue grey skin right?
Poll: What chat service are you using for internal communication with your team?
What chat service are you using for internal communication these days? If you're using something that is not an option, leave a comment.
Google Talk/Hangouts
Apple iMessage
Microsoft Lync/Communicator
Lotus Sametime
Clerks often have a lot of access
I don't buy the claim that the Web is 80% inaccessible. Does anyone have a citation for that study?
Another reason why / short term & software / is the currently the sweet spot is because it allows for short feedback cycles. A startup is a company that searches for a viable business model -- a product-market fit. When you create web based applications you can gather data, A/B test and do a lot of stuff that allows you to make measurable progress in the right direction.

When working in hardware or when working on long term software projects like AI you're in a vacuum. And even smart people are not going to do very well if they can't see the consequences of the decisions they make.

So long term projects take more people, more resources, are typically much harder problems and on top of that you won't be able to collect data early on to adjust course if needed. So the risk-adjusted return on an ambitious long-term startup is going to be horrendous compared to the low-hanging fruit most web startups go for. So investors avoid the big and ambitious ideas, and I can't blame them.
> One of my friends is named Montreal,she is fun to play with

I smell a sequel...
"I wrote these words, and you're reading them"... and Google knows you're reading them.

I find it a bit ironical that a manifesto for minimalism still carries Google Analytics code to track people.
It might be a step, but the obvious first step is remove the laws that make employer based insurance so much more attractive. Specifically the huge tax advantage, and group insurance laws. The whole ACA is a really complicated partial fix to the employer - healthcare problem.
There's a farm who started posting pictures of their animals on websites like Pinterest and Reddit. They have a pretty big following now, for a small farm. I also noticed that they are outranking pretty big sites(like Petsmart) since they started.

You just have to have something worth sharing.
It's not widely known or understood, but there are, in my opinion, quite a few ways to make significantly superior jet engine replacements.

Factors of 2 or 3 in specific power and efficiency are possible. Due to the rocket equation, this could yield vastly longer range and more efficient aircraft (1/10 the weight, 10x the range, 10x the efficiency, 2x the speed...).

In particular, you point out the limitations of the Brayton cycle and material limitations. However, there are other cycles that are much closer to Carnot efficiency, or match it in the ideal case. There's a lot you can do when isothermal compression is possible. Additionally, if there is a thermal limitation, you can do isothermal combustion, such that much more heat addition is at the maximum temperature of your materials, and you can even design efficient reheating.

It's not a jet -- you want to pair this with a driven fan system or at least have high bypass, but it's fundamentally more thermodynamically efficient.

For supersonic applications, scramjets remain possible, but challenging. And rocketry + high altitude flight remains extremely exciting and potentially more efficient than standard jetliner transport. Just difficult.

So yes, there are physical limitations. But they are not what most people think they are, and they do not mean what people think they mean.