skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, it's more of an art project than a science project. Second, it lets you see wifi strength! That's cool! NASA releases false-color images of stuff all the time, where they remap various wavelengths to visible colors. e.g. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/pia00032.html
Ah, the mighty SX processor series. These look like very similar specs, even though I'm sure it wasn't a Toshiba.
Eh, Sal Khan was a 30-something hedge fund analyst when he started Khan Academy. He's intelligent, hard-working, and could find work somewhere else, but he wasn't exactly "set for life" if the Khan Academy thing didn't work out. So don't let that stop you going the non-profit route!
I'm not trying to tell you what you meant, but what you said, because they were different. Best of luck.
I took that to mean the testimony was from people who had studied at the university, not the university itself.
This reminds me of when I was describing to my wife how the NSA was snooping on the internet traffic, and she had a "special" moment:
"But how can they get the data if its floating in space".
Talk about cloud computing!!!
I worked in a government setting where there was an entire unit of about 12 people called "the island of misfit toys".

They basically took inept employees that were too dumb to give real work to do (but not dumb enough to successfully terminate) and put them into a "Security" unit that allowed salaries to funded by some special source. As far as I could tell, their job was to assign password-reset permissions to "key users" in the field and do some sort of audit function. One of my interns automated their jobs in about 2 weeks when they all retired. They spent most of their time filing discrimination complaints about each other.

The Director was brilliant about it, he'd nominate them for awards for exceeding their KPIs or meeting project milestones, or some other nonsense, which allowed him to expand the group and put them in a separate room.

In the Fortune 500 space, I saw a similar behavior, but for a different purpose... the company did stack-ranking with 5-10% annual layoffs, and the Director-level people would scheme and fight to collect the most inept people possible. When it came time for their unit to be culled, these people would basically serve as fodder for the layoff. It was bizarre to watch.
Computers and especially software are really difficult to explain because of the sheer amount of abstraction involved, it doesn't help that software often presents abstractions to users that do not reflect the underlying mechanism.

You will tend to find misconceptions about things very commonly amongst even people who work in IT as their livelihood. If you ask 100 mechanics how a 4 stroke engine works you're likely to get approximately the same answer. Ask 100 IT people or developers what an operating system does and you'll get 100 different ones.
Like with all software... it doesn't until it does. And when it does you wish you had an auto-restart system in place.

It doesn't even have to be nginx's fault. It could be that some other process started fork-bombing the system and OOM-killer decided that killing nginx is the way to resolve it, before trying the actual offender.
I was shocked for a while, since I read it as defendthensa.
> I have a hard time seeing who would be harmed if software patents were categorically invalid.

Let's add business methods and existing genetic sequences (thankfully that one has been partially corrected) to the list.

At the very least, one should have to demonstrate economic damages arising from the violation.

If I'm a glass company that spent time and money developing a revolutionary new compound to strengthen glass and my sales are being impacted by someone who copied the compound, then it seems reasonable that I should have some protection.

But if I developed it and then sat on it, I should have zero ability to claim anything.
What the hell is Cyngn.com, and why is it counting down to August 19th, 2013?
Fresh Analogies Needed to Explain Quantum Mechanics a Little Less Incorrectly
If Samsung ships binaries produced from this code to customers and this code is derivative from GPL code, they _are_ in violation of the GPL.
We were living in a really crusty apartment back during college. The cooking range was super old, and over time we started smelling something which smelt like a gas leak. We called someone to take a look, and apparently the pilot light was burning off some of the grease accumulated under the cover. He immediately turned off the gas and locked it until we fixed the range. I feel very lucky that the windows were busted too, thus keeping the airflow going in the house.
Hack your way to a paid intern position.
Russia Pioneering Quantum Technologies
Not unless something's changed recently: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0312.0/0670.h...
"Valleytronics" – a new type of electronics in diamond
Growth Hacking Tips - Increase your sales funnel
Me and my friends will never stay in your way if you want to fund a firefighter or NSA, or local McDonalds. It's your choice, your property. Even if we don't like your lifestyle or disagree with your ideas. Will you give me the same respect to disagree with you and act upon my beliefs? Since I don't force you to pay for what I think is good, will you please allow me not to participate in things I don't approve of? If yes, then you should be against taxation. If no, will you employ violent action against me if I disagree with you and try to peacefully avoid certain things you like?
Makes sense hn would too vote such a stupid idea. If it didn't exist already something like it would have to be created.
Actually, in some environments bad identifiers could save your job: Job Security through Code Obscurity. It's sad, but more often than not true.
How we moved our phone support to the cloud
Instead of voting to block funding for programs, why not repeal the laws that enable those programs in the first place? I don't understand this logic.
Publish your notebooks
We've gotten to a point where those who read this article will say sweatshop labor is OK because we want our 2-day free shipping.
Then, we say it isn't OK because they make minimum-wage, have to walk 15 miles a day, and work under management that runs the shop by strict metrics. Well, someone has to do it (at least now.. coming soon: robots) - not everyone is destined to goto college or even a voc-tech school to learn how to operate a bulldozer.

It sucks, I agree. But, 40 years ago it was a mining town. Mining by all accounts to me (tech desk jockey) sucks worse than an Amazon warehouse, but yet there was some dignity and pride in being a miner. You were producing coal for power! Power saved the country in war! Power keeps the lights on! Yay! Go miners!
But, making millions of people happy by providing them widgets and sheets and 0.99cent cart-filler-chinese-made-LEDs doesn't make you happy?
The stock market doesn't get hacked? Are you kidding? Did I miss a /sarcasam tag? The stock market is a hack. If the stock market doesn't get technologically "hacked" it's only because it's so easy for the well-connected to hack already. And you want to make our government itself exactly that easy to hack?

The vast majority of Americans don't care about most issues. In fact, I would go so far as to speculate that there is no American who cares deeply about more than a handful of issues. But giving everyone a vote would give everyone the opportunity to sell that vote to the highest bidder, whether literally or figuratively.

You know who will vote on every single solitary proposal? Old people. Old people who think a monitor is a computer and the Internet is a series of tubes that young people use to give each other venereal diseases. As it stands today, we can shine light on corruption, Snowden helped with this. In a HUGE direct democracy, how would we even begin to figure out if someone had usurped control? Would it even be illegal to do so? Instead of writing letters to our representatives we'd all just end up sending daily letters to our grandparents begging them not to blindly do whatever Rupert Murdoch tells them to do.
Correct. Link:

http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0312.0/0670.h...
> The ROM scene has always been a grey (verging on black) area when it comes to IP

Speak for yourself.

There are two scenes: The binary modder scene, where people retro-fit vendor-created and provided firmware-images with their own modifications. Commonly referred to as "Photoshop ROMs". This scene is clearly grey at best.

However, there is another scene: The one based on AOSP source and derivates of it. This scene lives on Github and similar places where open source is shared and reused freely, as intended.

This is driven by serious developers and focus is on doing things cleanly, properly and reliably.

Most successful and widely deployed ROMs (like Cyanogenmod) are based on this scene, and there is nothing grey or remotely shady about it.
Remove the funding and they will get it from elsewhere; that 50 years worth of data just became market research.
I always thought they took a situation and exaggerate it to the absurd. Now I know that they were actually being conservative.

AFAIR, Dilbert creator Scot Adams always made sure to keep Dilbert vague and a bit extreme. But people would write into him recognising some absurd part of a current strip and ask if he was really writing about Company X?
> Are they in some way approved by the countries where they take place?

Yes.
I have no idea how we fix Congress. It is a totally corrupt mess that will viciously defend itself and try to prevent anything being changed that would threaten its self-perpetuation.

Obviously ending the nightmare that is Citizens United would be a start. And enacting other strict rules about campaign financing....
Here's a couple of related answers at the FSF GPL FAQ:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistributio...

Unfortunately, the question isn't really directly answered.

The most relevant passage seems to be, "If the [unwittingly distributed] version in question is unpublished and considered by a company to be its trade secret, then publishing it may be a violation of trade secret law, depending on other circumstances. The GPL does not change that."

So I think a court would rule that the original leak does not qualify as "distribution," and thus the company is not required to distribute the source and everyone distributing the leaked code is under copyright violation.
Taxes are the means of transferring worth to folks like firefighters, police officers, construction works etc... You know, the folks who hold up infrastructure and need to eat food and stuff. And I can count on one hand the number of people I've met who would donate to these institutions in this economy.

I think this is a misstatement. Taxes are not the means of transferring worth to those individual people, taxes are the means of paying for that very infrastructure.
Depend which you want to listen to. If you want to listen to what lawyers think (fsf), then there is a GPL violation( https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NonfreeDriverKerne...).

If you want to listen to kernel hackers, (such as Linus Torvalds), then he doesn't say if it is, or isn't a violation. Rather, he says that developers has a right to write non-free drivers to the kernel using modules (http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules....).

So... what does that mean? Im not a lawyer, but it looks to me as an GPL violation which has been given permission to exist by one of the kernel developers. That it is the project leader that gives permission does lower the risk that any individual kernel developer will suddenly go out and start suing companies for GPL violations, even if they has a legal right to do so under copyright.
Because that would be a concrete step that would actually change something and would be a clear signal as to how each representative stands on the issue of unlimited domestic surveillance.
The dark side of professional skateboarding.
I was an estimator for a company. When we didn't have any jobs to estimate on I had no work to do.

I offered to help out other people (who were very busy) but was given strict instructions by my boss not to do so. I have no idea why.

It meant I had about 9 months of 40 hour weeks where I'd do maybe an hour per week of actual work.
There's some discussion of it in the "Reward Removal" section of this widely-linked Gamasutra article http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/1949..., but their example is again Puzzles and Dragons. Presumably this is the main game that uses this technique aggressively.
Ask them about the 4stroke and you get even more differences.
Everyone knows we need some kind of government.

That depends on either your definition of government or everyone.
This energy bar gets its kick from ... crickets
The laws do NOT enable the programs. The laws had specific clauses stating that they could not be used for this sort of widespread surveillance of innocent citizens. But the administration has an "interpretation" of the laws which apparently is at odds with the plain text of the law. I can't say HOW they came by this interpretation, because the interpretation of the law is secret. (Yeah... really.)

So maybe the power of the purse will still be effective. We can hope.
It's very strange that the facebook comments on the Vice article are more critical of the project than the comments here. What's up hacker news?

Can't you see how juvenile this work is?
Code-breaker Alan Turing to be pardoned (finally)
Well, before GitHub there were things like Google Code or SourceForge, which I think worked pretty much the same (albeit probably not as noob-friendly). Before those it was probably self-hosted servers for the bigger organizations or something like that, although I'm only speculating.
No need to bring in the stock market. The issue at vote is clear:
"Ends authority for the blanket collection of records under the Patriot Act."

This is politics, they now make it explicitly illegal to do this. Clearly NSA and FISA need to alter their procedures IF this vote makes it.
If I had to do that, I'd probably go with a queue on Redis or Postgres. "Cogs bad".

What are the advantadges of ZeroMQ when you're still on one computer?
Saying you have absolutely no oversight in the UK is not true. I recently read David Omand's "Securing the State" which is the most informative book I have found on how to integrate secret intelligence into a democratic society. Most of the analysis in the book focuses on the UK system as he is a longtime member of the UK intelligence community. There is a detailed discussion of how to meet the challenges of keeping a secret intelligence system accountable while maintaining its secrecy. Specifically see your JIC (Joint Intelligence Committee) and its history of post-portem analysis after notable incidents such as the Iraq WMD misread. That was about political influence into the workings of intelligence, scope overreach is of course the issue of the day but presumably they could take a crack at it.

In fact I have come to believe that your system is more well-managed than ours here in the US partially because it is a smaller country and hence easier to keep track of. See the Washington Post's article (before Snowden's revelations) on the mushrooming growth of myriad, largely redundant secret intelligence groups dispersed throughout various US agencies: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articl...
Jimmy Wales did not build Wikipedia. Thousands upon thousands of unpaid volunteers did.

As for Howard Roark, who is supposed to epitomize Ayn Rand's "virtue of selfishness" ideal, I don't remember him being any kind of philanthropist. If anything, he (like Rand) has nothing but contempt for the masses.

Wikipedia would be the antithesis of what Roark would want to build. The Encyclopedia Britannica would be more to his liking, except that even it would require too much cooperation and would be made to help others and instead of himself.

Rand's ideal is the lone visionary designing his brilliant artwork for his own pleasure, and to the gnashing of teeth of the ignorant horde who are jealous of his genius.
In the case of Obama, half of the population was tricked. And lots of us weren't ignorant - only HOPEful that he wasn't a complete and utter liar.
Instantly create beautiful online galleries with Chromatic
"In two meters it should be four times as dark as in one meter"

But our eyes compensate for inverse square laws, and have a logarithmic response to light.
Just a thought:

If people give up, the situation should get worse, and then people will act. It strikes me that we are not at enough of a tipping point yet. Giving up will get us to that tipping point quicker. People seem to tolerate a lot, until it gets excessive, well ,has an effect in their day to day lives. Right now, while what is happening is bad news, it doesn't touch most people's lives in a significant way, or a way they care about. Let the government run rampant, and we'll get to a tipping point quicker, then the majority will demand change.

Also, the government sees some decent, so it will slightly change things to bring the heat down a degree or two, but not fundamentally change anything at all. So it plays a game of whack a mole to keep the over all heat manageable, and this can go on for decades. All the time people are just tinkering at the edges keeping various groups vaguely happy. So no one really pushed for fundamental change.

So, why not just stand back and let the government hang it's self?

Yes, people will suffer, but world history tells us that nothing substantial changes with out some suffering.

Like I said, just a thought.
Quit and do something meaningful/challenging. Life is too short to let it pass you by, personally or professionally.
This made me wonder about the concept of integrating detection for things like carbon monoxide into cellphones. Of course there's a patent on the concept: http://www.google.com/patents/US20080303678

But I don't know if this has ever actually been attempted.
but it is a large enough problem.

Wasting man years is precisely the problem. Our collective knowledge is boundless, but time is finite. See the problem here? Why would we want to waste the effort of future generations with the problems of yesterday?

So that an individual can live more comfortably with exclusive privileges to something that benefits all of mankind? We shouldn't be working towards selfishness and arbitrary contractual law.
> Lots of people have already hacked themselves to gain a "sixth sense" -- the ability to detect electric fields via magnetic vibrations.

What?
There is a limit to how much money one can waste while remaining wealthy.
If you use Wikipedia as source, please verify that the section you are referring has a source. Both now has citation needed tags on them.
The open source subset of Android is not practically usable though. There aren't many (any?) devices that work usefully without a lot of proprietary bits.
RMS reckons so: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/linux-gnu-freedom.html
John Guthrie former Half Life level designer confirms Half Life 3
I would strongly recommend including an auto email form. Maybe not as powerful as a phone calll, but conversions will be much higher
Wacko in the Morning 07/23 by The Wacko Network
I love this part -

"Maybe people get tired of building houses for other people. Maybe people want to build their own houses. They sure as shit have the necessary experience. More houses should be built by people who’ve been through the experience..."

I think that's what a lot of programmers/marketers/entrepreneurial spirits feel. Eventually, we want to build our own thing.
Yeah, the PadFone is quite attractive. If only they'd kept the Transformer-style keyboard dock from the original...
How to transition from client work to products
Morally you might be right. Legally it's a grey area, and practically it's almost certainly a no-go.
Important point:

(This point was made clear in the actual page, but some of the comments suggest that not everyone understood it.)

The title to this posting (and the name of the website) are misleading. This is not a proposal to block funding for the NSA. And that's good, because such a proposal would have NO chance of passing, and would probably be a bad idea anyhow. Instead, this is a proposal to block funding for NSA collecting records on American citizens that are not being investigated. Which is a much more reasonable position.
The great Android interface shootout
With something like that it's easier to know how much you know. I could probably give a reasonable description of it, I might get some specifics wrong or not be able to go into as much detail as someone more knowledgeable but at least it wouldn't be completely insane.

I probably have more misconceptions about computers that I'm not even aware of.
Offtopic, but are you the actual Rational Male, or just using the same screen name?
Apparently, Google 'magnetic implant'. I remember reading about it here:
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087?current...

Doesn't seem all that useful from what i've read though, unless you're an electrical engineer.
I've interacted with Mike a few times via the Tcl newsgroup, and he seems like an alright person in general.

While you may not approve of his actions, you seem to be defending them because he acted like an "alright person" a couple of times in a newsgroup. You're acting like he saw someone drop a $20 on the ground and took it for himself.

I think a lot of people, when presented with an opportunity to go for zillions of dollars would take it.

Well, yes, patent trolls are pretty common nowadays. This doesn't make their actions less terrible.
It would look like light from a lightbulb.

We already see light in the specific frequency peak of the sun.

If we could see wifi, it would be like a lightbulb that dimly appears to pass through walls.
Maybe the issue here is that I know 100% that the effort I put in now will lead me to success in the future.
Some people implant, I believe it's a small neodine, magnet under their skin with the idea that they can feel electrical fields.
There's a reason I described myself as a "true seeker".

"No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker." - Mikhail Bakunin

You're overestimating my risk for memetic infection and underestimating how much prior exposure I may have had to this subject. I often ask people for examples or book recommendations to learn more about them as much as I do to learn about a subject.[0]

Besides, it couldn't possibly be worse than Mussolini's autobiography.

[0]: An example. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6056707

The authors response was worth more to me than the response of other commentators because I find that socialists often like to say that X or Y society wasn't socialist. So as an exercise I asked what they consider a socialist society.

(And I was genuinely interested in what they had to say, so I wasn't lying.)
Flipboard Magazines On The Web
Taking VC means you need to look for an out. In my mind that's the biggest difference. They don't want to invest in a company to take a portion of profit, they want you to sell your company or go public so they can cash out.
Read the website. Despite the name, it is not about defunding the entire nsa, but instead about removing the authorization and funding for blanket data collection
This was a very sad story. Charcoal fires are prodigious producers of CO. That said, I'm sure we've all seen photos of arctic explorers or Himalayan climbers melting snow in their tent with a small stove. I suppose the general answer is that it is always dangerous, but sometimes you can get away with it. Some specific fuels and stove types produce less CO per unit heat.

http://www.backpackinglight.com/ has several scientific reports (some premium$) with specifics.

For me personally, a candle lantern is about as far as I'd go, and even "cooking in the vestibule" I'd want a good breeze.