skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Business idea!

Put together a baseball with an accelerometer, a small digital display and maybe bluetooth as well.

Sell it to schools and individual athletes as a training device. You pitch and it tells you what the speed of the last pitch was. Connect it up to a computer and it will give you a graph of the velocity over time, allow you to track improvements in pitching and track users.

Or does such a thing already exist?
Suggestion: Maybe make the thumbnails link to their site as well.
So, I won't repeat what Ed said - the tl;dr is that pyrax should support Python 2.6, and your point about dedicated servers only supporting CentOS6 is something we need to consider.

As for the rest - yes. The communications and deprecation of python-cloudfiles was poorly handled. The crux of what happened is that python-cloudfiles was a part time project and ultimately superseded by the python-swiftclient work in OpenStack.

We have requirements that for an SDK / tool to be officially supported, we have dedicated full time headcount to support and maintain the package(s) - the decision was made to proceed with Pyrax which leverages python-swiftclient and other openstack tools under the covers as the official Python SDK for Rackspace.

This was not made clear to the users, or the community by any parties involved, and for that I apologize. We're continually working on better upstream communication/collaboration and this series of events (you're not the first to give us this feedback) has made us take a very hard look internally on how this is all managed and communicated.

The good news is that Ed - our current Pyrax SDK maintainer is full time and dedicated to working with you and others on pyrax - this means the Python 2.6 support will be taken care of.

Tangentially: Yes - python-novaclient and python-swiftclient from OpenStack will work on Rackspace Cloud - you can actually look at the Pyrax source to see that it uses these under the covers. Rackspace runs OpenStack with as few differences as possible so OpenStack tools should work great on Rackspace.

So, in short: I apologize. The communications and management of this to upstream (the community) were poor, and we are renewing all of our efforts to focus on upstream first.

Jesse
I agree that easy, broadly-accessible secure communication is an important problem to solve, but it does not address the (arguably larger) problem of eroded social trust. A low-trust society just doesn't work very well, and no amount of technical mitigation is going to compensate for that.
Black Swan economics (A response to Nassim Taleb's critque of econometrics)
Michael Hayden was NSA director from 1999 to 2005. Michael Hayden literally was being paid a big salary to stop 9/11 from happening. How'd that go for him? Not so good.

Look at ALL THE TOOLS we now know the NSA Director really had at his disposal to prevent a foreign terrorist from hitting the US on 9/11. Micheal Hayden name's should down in along side infamous names like the Admiral who commanded the Pacific Fleet the day of Pearl Harbor.

Michael Hayden is the textbook definition of "the man who can't find his ass with two hands and an assmap." Hayden's picture should appear next to it in Famous Quotation books.
So Obama is replacing this Putin meeting with a trip to Sweden. Is he just trolling the Internet at this point?
Mea culpa. I was just trying to make a joke.
"from roughly 150 feet away down to just one or two inches."

Are these kind of sensors/receivers available in such commercially available versions that they can be easily incorporated into robotic projects? It seems like this could be used for a robot "homing in" to a position -- such as a charging station.
I actually just started a challenge to do 100 commits in 100 days, and I'm up to almost 70 (w/ a streak of 31). This seems so much easier :P
Ask HN: How did Snapchat gain initial traction?
How did an app like Snapchat gain initial traction? I understand the viral loops, great UI/UX, and overall appeal to the app. However, they must have done something to generate that initial buzz of kids using it.

Did they hit up every high school and get some kids using it? Did they pay for mobile ads?
NYC Grows as Hub for Small Digital, Entertainment Businesses
Sure, but the number of people who would take it is greater than the number of people who will actively take it from your pocket, or from your locked house. A lot of people are honest does not exclude the fact that people can be opportunistic.
Nope, that's not true. Anyway, I'm done with this discussion. Google fanboys can keep using Chrome and trying to defend this bullshit, I don't care. Personally I'm done with Chrome until they fix this.
AR is any augmentation of senses, so a wristwatch is AR for your sense of time for instance. Google glass doesn't do predator-vision, but it can augment stuff like memory or positional awareness.
I remember reading his .plan files in the 90s; the amount of work he would do in a single day was utterly insane.
It's Time to Move Beyond the RSS Reader
The very expensive items are just establishing the legitimacy of this 'fine art' section. Amazon doesn't need those items to sell. Having them listed alone makes the art section feel like it is fine, and makes people more comfortable purchasing a thousand dollar item.
> "who the hell do you vote for?"

Primary challengers who uphold the other values you personally share, but also share our values on the subject of privacy, the 4th amendment, reigning in the expanding police/surveillance state, etc.
Obama cancels Moscow meeting with Putin over Snowden
I would have my doubts about 3D revolutionising TV, as TV makers and content creators don't seem to be getting the reaction they'd hoped for from consumers. A lot of 3D movies are gimmicky, and some heavyweight directors like Christopher Nolan and Michael Scorsese have said it doesn't add anything to the storytelling nature of movies (unlike say IMAX).

Gaming, on the other hand, will be simply amazing on the Rift, especially first person shooters. That's one of the reasons it's so exciting to see Carmack working on the project.
http://www.amazon.com/Speed-Sensor-Baseball-MPH-Markwort/dp/...
9" Speed Sensor Baseball (MPH) from Markwort
Hourly billing is huge for us.

Our service is mostly CPU bound, embarrassingly parallel, and so far, 90% of usage is centered on a time slot that's about 8 hours per week long.

We will save a ton of money by scaling down during the off hours, which means only Amazon, Rackspace, and a few others make any sense at all.
[G+] Hangout with Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson
None taken, but can my experience only add value if I critique the shortcomings? I did relate the troubles I had and how they were overcome. To someone else thinking about buying a Leaf, it could be valuable to know more about how environmental aspects and road conditions affect the range of the car, and how you have to plan for more than just distance.

I was intent on buying a Leaf, and I wasn't going to let this initial ordeal sour my opinion of the car because it had more to do with the dealership. I knew going into it that getting the car back to Madison was going to be a stretch, and then events conspired to make it a bit more difficult. I think the fact that I made it back in spite of that was actually a point in the Leaf's favor.
5 Steps to Comparing Multiple Roofing Installation Estimates
Been around for years. I remember playing with one as a kid. The ones I've used haven't been too accurate or consistent, however. Amazon reviews indicate that not much has changed.
Digital Data Clean-Up
What are considered stupid extra steps by some, others may consider to be deciding factors for using a product or not. The user experience in this case requires a fix regardless of what you may consider a penny solution value. Ownership of the UE often means choosing penny solutions along the way.
Really fantastic job :)
That's true, but I doubt that the OP would be posting on "Hacker News" if he wanted to start a restaurant, fashion label, or virtually any business not related to technology.
Yes, Its also known as "Bicycle Thieves" I loved it :D
> The value of somebody else's commentary on political issues is pretty much directly proportional to their understanding of the political system and their command of objective facts.

Politics isn't about objective facts. Politics deals with ought, not is. There are certainly objective, measurable facts relevant to any particular question, but political debate rarely focuses on those; it's usually a contest among people pursuing different ends, not arguing over which means best effect ends that everyone agrees on. Even what appears superficially to be an argument over facts is usually just rhetorical cover for contesting underlying values and intentions.
I did not - it was pretty much something I picked up entirely at Google.
> # make a change to file.rb

You don't need to change the file to create a commit. Just run this with appropriate range of committer dates:

> GIT_COMMITTER_DATE=? git commit --allow-empty;
OK, that's not good. The system they are introducing here, NL-Alert (which still has some problems), is purely opt-in. And only for things that would make the air sirens go off.

I wonder what kind of alert a Presidential alert could be.
For the iOS crowd: here is a similar game my friends and I built at a Hackathon last week with Node and Socket.io that you can play from mobile Safari: http://phonesma.sh/

Visit it on your browser to get started, then on your iPhone to play (App is not tuned for Android accelerometer data yet).
Apple, Amazon, and the weaponization of profit
A long look at how ARM licenses chips
It's not a very good phrase, since "greatest" means whatever the speaker wants it to mean. You could plausibly say that about almost any country - everyone has something they're "the greatest" at.

To be fair, though, I reckon that there was a period in time in which the USA did seem to be holding the generally accepted global flag for "the country that's doing things right". Not perfect, but the USA had a much better reputation than it does now for generally having its shit together and moving in the right direction.

Cracks started to appear in the 1970s, I'd say, and the edifice had completely crumbled by the mid 90s.
Staring at the Sun: Dalvik vs. Asm.js vs. Native
Pope Gregory's revenge on programmers
Here's a direct link to the funding request (on Bountysource): https://www.bountysource.com/fundraisers/411-gcloud
Once they get on this "corporations are evil, government is evil, everything is evil!" tangent, there's no talking to them.
AOL unleashes its inner startup, buys Adap.tv for $405M
Scratch your own itch – and never stop?
not sure if i should upvote the alice's reference. I love it place but those roads are crowded enough around there. too many cagers to enjoy the twisting roads already :(
Show HN: MongoSync for Backbone/Node
Now we know J. Edgar Hoover was tracking homosexuals to get phone numbers for cute boys.
Everyone who perpetuates the lies of the official narrative of 911 is co-builder of the police state.

When you help build the prison, don't be surprised when you find yourself in it.
Back then, Republicans supported the programs overwhelmingly. Now, it's Democrats. I think distancing the objections from partisan-ly charged individuals might be the better tack, in terms of actually rallying support, even if it is "unfair."
You need to look at your data, you need to look at the sensitivity of that data and check it against current laws at the least and company policy at the best. You then need to ensure that the technology complies with privacy, PCI and any other regulating bodies that may have guidelines or regulations on technology. Then you have to decide whether Node can provide the level of data protection you need. They have a crypto set so a lot of it can be dealt with with crypto but I don't know that there are any PCI modules built so if you have PCI requirements you may have to roll your own token exchange to be compliant should you have PCI concerns. There is not enough information to go on in your post to know if using Node is a good or bad idea.
>...I've never seen a bug in production that could have been prevented with static analysis

That's because they're hidden by the lack of static analysis. They're just waiting for the wrong code path to be taken, then BAM. The whole system crashes.

You need static analysis to find bugs that can be prevented with static analysis. What a strange concept!
Exactly, and that's the reason it's a significant step.
Apple to buy back counterfeit iPhone chargers in genius PR move
Justin, I don' t understand why you have to think only from a hacker' s point of view. Now this thing has got so much publicity that one of my colleagues in the office can simply come to my desk whilst I' m away to grab a coffee and steal my Facebook password? How simple is that and what are the implications?
Or the "is greater than" (>) is a crocodile's mouth, and "is less than" (<) is a bird's beak. The bird eats smaller food than an crocodile eats, and the crocodile eats bigger food than the bird eats.
I remember working on a similar, though slightly less destructive, app. I had a first or second generation iPod touch and it's back was curved so that you could spin it on a flat surface. I collected lots of accelerometer data and wrote the algorithm to figure out how long and fast the device had been spinning. Unfortunately, the next generation of devices came out with a flat back so I shelved the idea.
If I picking a flaw with the line I might have gone for 'When' but you make a pretty fine point there.

However, I'm fairly certain they can already do that by tracking cellphone activity in terms of ping back to the network and asking the telcos to turn it over. This would just give them it in a more targeted capacity.
Can I ask how you discovered the URL the app was making requests to?
AngularJS: $watch, $digest and $apply
I'd like to hear your argument for this change. Seems apt to me.
You haven't lost the plot.

Sooner or later in any programmers life you're going to reach a point where it seems / feels easier to start with less. You start reaching for tools that feel more like the unix way - they do one thing very well, and allow you greater compose-ability and flexibility.

On the other hand, I have to fight this urge: because much like Python - the language that comes with community included, you sort of don't want to be the one person using something, or understanding what you did.

Your best bet is to find something that provides the simplicity you find yourself looking for, but that still has the greater community support you and others can lean on, and existing domain knowledge.

For example - let's say you want to go with a micro framework: look at bottle, web.py and my favorite: Flask. The nice thing with Flask for example is it stays out of my way, still has a ton of plugins (so, for example, I don't have to write my own damned Oauth system) and a vibrant community.

That ache in your gut is looking for things that get rid of boilerplate and get out of your way to just write awesome stuff. If you don't feel like the bigger frameworks like django (which I love for larger projects) get out of your way enough: don't drop down to raw WSGI, go spend some time with something smaller!
Nope, not a response to Talebs critique.
And not just at the national level. A lot of the organization of both parties involves state-level politicians.
There's really no way to answer that question without making a gross generalization. There are some programmers at Google with outsize egos (although to be fair, they often have outsize accomplishments as well). For the most part, though, the culture rejects the chest-thumping brogrammer type. Your performance reviews are done by your peers, and so if you continually make your peers feel stupid, it will be hard to get promoted. Also, virtually everything is done in teams, and you're judged by what your team accomplishes, and so it's to your advantage to raise the level of the people around you.
How about an app which awards points based on g-force while driving a car? You could get bonuses for complete flips, 'hard stops' etc.
I remember playing with those in the early 80s. We'd try to get the highest number by smashing them off of brick walls.
Substantial discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6168241
I'm guessing Wire Shark.
Which is why there's an off switch for the feature. Of course we don't know if the offswitch is an offswitch or a 'hide this from the user' switch but then we have to start mistrusting all the technology around us.
Sure. But that isn't really a significant development in AR technology. The Oculus Rift certainly won't be worn all the time.
I agree, but I think the trust that is required is trust in transactions, whether electronic, commercial, or otherwise, not particularly trust in people or institutions.

To take the current NSA issue, if I take the time to vote for a Congress guy, in return I'm expecting somebody to represent my area in Washington. He doesn't have to agree with me, just represent me. If, in fact, he doesn't know what's going on, or is so captured by the political system that he's unable to make independent decisions, I've lost faith in that transaction.

I never may have liked the guy, or ever agreed with him, or trusted him farther than I could throw him, but we had a deal as a society where I did something and he was supposed to do something. If those societal transactions are not to be trusted, the wheels come off the wagon.

Same kind of discussion applies for electronic transactions, say using SMTP to move email around.
I will probably never get to 500 because the only way I can "downvote" is to post a challenging, dismissive, or otherwise negative comment. Which people don't really like. Since I don't care at all about karma, I also cannot be bothered to carefully craft intelligent-seeming pedagogery, to humble-brag, to spam, or any other form of whoring, subtle or blatant.
Oh well.
Don't know why you expected anything else from an "ideas guy"
If you’re with Ecotricity in the UK (who peg their electricity prices to match the big 6) then you get free access to their network of chargers: http://www.ecotricity.co.uk/for-the-road
I've reached out to the Cloud Servers team and will post what I find out.
The Re-sale value of an iPhone
Yeah, sorry. I've learned a bit since I wrote that, my new tutorial is coming out and it explains installing PyGame and Python on both Mac and Windows.
man, you've tried it with tablet! How big your tablet is? I think they should appropriately rescale scores for the weight and aerodynamics of the object being thrown.
Constitutions were not the solution to the problem. An educated and engaged electorate was the solution. The Constitution was a framework for that electorate to use as a tool, but several of the founders were very clear that the essential requirement of effective government was the engaged and educated electorate.

James Madison:

* The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the
only guardian of true liberty.
* Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people
who mean to be their own governors, must arm
themselves with the power knowledge gives.
* Learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with
every free people. They throw that light over the
public mind which is the best security against crafty
and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.

Thomas Jefferson:

* Every government degenerates when trusted to the
rulers of the people alone. The people themselves,
therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to
render them safe, their minds must be improved to a
certain degree.
* Above all things I hope the education of the common
people will be attended to ; convinced that on their
good sense we may rely with the most security for the
preservation of a due degree of liberty.
* I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of
the society, but the people themselves: and if we
think them not enlightened enough to exercise their
controul with a wholsome discretion, the remedy is,
not to take it from them, but to inform their
discretion by education. this is the true corrective
of abuses of constitutional power.
This is really neat. One question: How are these folks able to keep such low prices?

For example, I run several servers on rackspace. Their least expensive option (512MB RAM, 1 core, 20GB disk) is $16.00 per month.

DigitalOcean's is $5.00 per month. On the face of it, they are identical offerings but triple the price.

Rackspace does offer other features (load balancing, cloudfiles, and other useful things which integrate nicely with their servers.) Is that the value proposition of AWS/Rackspace over these other companies, which only give you vanilla servers?
A Founders Mistruths
NLP package for Meteor
Identity De-duplication The Wrong Way
Sentiment analyzer for Meteor
Yup. Though Hayden is engaged in politicking. Salon is engaged in politicking while reporting on Hayden's politicking.

When I'm feeling extra rational, I really dislike this, even when I agree with views like Salon's. It's bad if we fight dumb politicking with more dumb politicking from the other direction.
You might enjoy this JavaScript turtle graphics renderer I built. It has a few sample fractals and everything renders incrementally. http://obadger.com/turtle/
Counters to your counters:

>1) Does a homosexual couple with no knowledge of US marriage law not have a valid opinion on whether they should be allowed to marry?

No, that couple doesn't have a valid opinion. How could they? They don't understand that marriage is in the United States. That conceptualization of "togetherness" as a couple doesn't exist in their minds. The threshold at which they can form a valid opinion is, therefore, at the entry-level of understanding United States marriage laws.

>2)Did poorly educated blacks or women need training in the subtleties of constitutional law before they could have a valid opinion on universal suffrage?

Depends on what you mean by "training" - they need to understand what suffrage is, so in that sense, yes, they do need training. This is the threshold for having a valid opinion.

Here are concrete counter-examples to your counter-examples:

1) If a gay couple were asked if they wanted the right to be married without first being told the sociological context and culture of marriage in the United States, and without understanding the legal ramifications of being married, their opinion would be null and void - just noise. They don't know what they're agreeing/disagreeing with.

2) If you asked women if they'd like the ability to vote, and they said yes, but couldn't answer you when you asked them what a democratic republic is, or how representation works in the United States, their opinions would be meaningless. It would be equivalent to pathos-driven desire to be able to do something - ultimately, a useless opinion.

Understand - I'm not being pedantic. Your examples may show a somewhat low threshold for meaningful opinions, but the parent is correct in that you need some threshold for every opinion.
I would argue that it is. I have AR apps on my phone which I never use because the startup requirements (pull phone out, turn on, unlock, start app, wait for GPS and fiddle about a bit with inaccurate accelerometer) are too high.

Reducing that requirement by having it on your face is a fantastic first step. We have no idea whether the next Glass iteration will be stereoscopic, or cover your field of vision or what. It's that market preparation I am excited to see.
I respect your opinions, but we really think students should get acquainted with these technologies. If you do, and love, Python, you know what I am talking about.

And, we are not trying to make the students in-demand. We cannot do that in a workshop. But yes, we can at least start a spark. The response we have been getting in colleges we have been has been tremendous. The students are so excited to learn. That's a good sign, isn't it?
As far as I'm used too, you have to enter a password still for a PW manager.