skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By definition? That requires some justification.

The justice system still sets the parameters and manages the procedures by which sentences are handed down. If a court determines you're going to prison for 10 years, you're going -- the private company manages your environment for that time.

And given that private parties also manage your medical care, hospital stays, air travel, car manufacture, work environments, home building, and thousands of other mechanisms and environments that determine your safety and quality of living, I struggle with finding a moral difference when it comes to prisons.

You could argue that these other things are voluntary and prison isn't, but it's involuntary even if run by government; most inmates would opt out either way.

And I think it's highly naive, this distinction between private companies as greedy, interested parties and government agencies and functionaries as objective arbiters of truth and goodwill. Either way you have ridiculous salaries, internal power struggles, marketing/perception, budget committees, and cynical people inured to the hard realities of the lives they affect.
> . The “problem”? Apple was too successful, too quickly. Because the iPhone was such a good business

"too quickly"? Apple? Are we talking the same Apple that was founded in 1976?
Hey Franco,

Nice list. Thanks for mentioning Everhour :)

Cheers,
Mike
I know it sounds absurd, but it really is like this. Typical car ECUs have about 40-50 MHz processors and there are about 70 ECUs in a modern car. Imagine switching them all to 1GHz ARM cores - how much more expensive it will be and how much more space you will need. You will also most probably need bigger PCBs and cooling and there comes the additional weight.

Also the CAN protocol may be crappy for development, but allows for more simple hardware design (connectors, wires etc), which again saves weight. The cables in a modern car weigh about 50 kg so imagine doubling that in order to use a better protocol - this would be like always driving with one more passenger.

Such things may look small, but they quickly add up...
I highly recommend the following TED talk on bike physics by Arend Schwab from Delft University of Technology:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y4mbT3ozcA

It focuses on the question why bikes do not fall, even without a rider on them (spoiler: coriolis is insignificant).
Pluralsight Acquires TrainSignal
1. Just because he is rich and famous doesn't mean he is an oracle with a time machine. He puts on his pants one leg at a time; makes predictions just like the rest of us, gets them wrong too.

2. After thinking hard about it, I have decided to pay for the NYT. I still can break through the pay wall. However their content is amazing. Saving stuff, using their rudimentary recommendation system and occasionally getting the print version is nice.
> Bitcoin is an incredibly efficient protocol for moving money with low fees. However, it does have a “miner fee" ($0.05 - $0.01 at current exchange rates) if you want your transaction to be sent and confirmed quickly.

Should that be $0.01 - $0.05, or $0.005 - $0.01?
http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/bicycle_mechani...
Everyone has the right to be offended.

Everyone has the right to not care about those people being offended.

And everyone has the right to consider those people assholes.
If that's the one thing people want to do with a hacked Chromecast, then they don't need to hack it.
I always wonder why people go out of their way to dig up old quotes which contradict current behavior. People change their minds. Or come up with new ideas. Or have a breakthrough of some kind.

I highly doubt Bezos would have spent $250m (even if that is small time money to him) if he still believed what he said last year.

Or maybe he still believes that, and he feels he can still do something with a major news paper that sits within those lines.

Either way I am unsure why this is making it as an HN post.
Linux Command-line Client for Evernote
That would be... people, e.g. the Good Guy Greg and Good Girl Gina memes, you could I suppose do a RL version, GGG t-shirts with individual QR codes for up voting people.
>Don't take things people say prima facie.

This deal was just announced, and we don't know enough to say that we shouldn't take Bezos's words at face value. His plans for the Post may be taking it digital, turning it into a boutique printed offering, or a combination of both. From the article:

>There is one thing I’m certain about: there won’t be printed newspapers in twenty years. Maybe as luxury items in some hotels that want to offer them as an extravagant service.

He can take it digital or upscale print and remain entirely consistent with his quoted stances." Heck, -he could even keep the current model exactly as is as long as he turns a profit and be one of the "last men standing"

>Printed papers won’t be normal in twenty years.”

Really, all he was saying it that we're trending away from print. In the same sentence that he said there would be no print in twenty, he implied there will be some print in twenty...
Start-up Defense.Net debuts with anti-DDoS service
I remember reading a story about how he turned Amazon into a platform to make it more nimble and faced a lot of resistance, and it gave me a good impression of his leadership abilities. This purchase is probably a good thing.
It starts to become a problem when judges and district attorneys own shares of the companies that run the prisons. This creates a clear conflict of interest (the more people they can convict, the more money they will make) which so far doesn't seem to be noticed as you read about such circumstances at times.
> I honestly can't think of a better way of informing people of urgent events (natural disasters, mainly)

I know that recently, at least in my area (Flint, MI), they started pushing tornado warnings (tornado touchdown confirmed) to smartphones in a way similar to the Amber Alert OP discusses. It was actually pretty cool the night in June, when we had 5 tornadoes touch down in the area, since I don't have TV and was too busy to notice the weather outside to check the weather online.
I think its getting so bad that in addition to the 'sell the shovels' there are lots of 'how to sell the shovels' or 'how we can help you sell the shovels' posts going around.

Don't dig for gold, sell shovels!
Want to learn how to sell shovels? Subscribe to our newsletter where we teach you 3-4 things and then end up with us trying to sell you on stuff that will help you selling shovels.

Next thing you know, you are paying for 50 different services so you can "focus on selling shovels"
ActiveMe’s Depth Map Analyzer - 3D sensing camera technology
It would be great if there was a tool to push/pull projects from Google Code to Github that handled not just moving the code but migrating issues and wiki content all the other details that aren't straightforward but could be automated like creating a gh-pages site for the project, migrating downloads, notifying/adding project admins, emailing issue watchers, etc. Even better if Google and Github collaborated so that it could handle redirecting traffic.
> 6. There's a five percent chance I live in a "future" computer simulation as I write this. False - to run simulate sentient beings with so much suffering would be cruel.

This, along with most arguments based on morality just doesn't hold water, it assumes both that the Simulators (those running the simulation) hold the same moral values as us and that our suffering is deemed unnecessary.

The first also assumes that every member of a Simulator level race is perfectly moral on top of assuming they share the 'suffering = cruel' moral bullet point because at some point all member of a society would likely have the ability to create and run UniverseSimulator.exe.

Today we do tons of cruel things for science or to learn who's to say that the Simulator runners wouldn't make a similar valuation or draw a distinction between their real existence and our simulated existence?
nerdook was able to churn out very popular, very similar Flash games for ages.

He did this primarily by a form of marketing, possibly unintentional, in which he was constantly accessible to and friendly with his fans.

E: Removed a dumb statement.
I'm not sure it's altogether bad news for Artsy. On the one hand, it makes negotiating deals with galleries more difficult, but this move validates Artsy's central premise to its investors – that there's money to be made helping people find art.
Mixpanel vs. Goliath
The only thing I discovered after browsing through that site is that I am too poor to own art.
It lost me at "362" which patio11 has described below as "(very) figurative"
For ham radio HF propagation above 20 meters? Well, not really. Enjoy 10M while you can... I hope the next cycle in about a decade has better flux numbers. Es on 6M is fun, but I want some months long round-the-world F2 propagation modes.

(Seriously its interesting the article didn't mention how unusually weak the latest cycle has been. Usually the peak is much higher leading to happier ham radio operators. So the "news" or "journalism" is the unusual weakness of this cycle, but instead we get human interest story...)

Aside from the stereotypical "this individual cycle is weak" most recent solar coverage has contemplated Maunder Minimum effect and stuff like that. The wiki article is pretty good, summary is every time a cycle is wimpy everyone temporarily jumps on the bandwagon that its a semi-permanent long term decline etc etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum

In these ways, its a somewhat atypical solar news story. Which is cool.
Card Pirates: how wind speed and weather are represented
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. I can't provide health insurance to my partner and we pay quite a bit more in taxes than a married couple.

I would like to not pay more because of whom I choose to marry.
He said the same thing in all the paragraphs as in the headline - Bezos is playing a smart game that the rest of us don't get. So what exactly is that game?
Wow! Thanks for the livereload link, I'm definitely going to implement this. I know people have been complaining about HN lately but it's contributors like you who continue to enlighten me with new tools that I love about this community.
Not really. Opportunity cost and all that.
The rich are getting richer... and going shopping
> Converting large amounts of atmospheric movement to heat will itself result in "manmade global warming" type issues.

The main problem is that even if you do nothing, after a while the air in the wind stop dew to the friction and all the kinetic energy is transformed into thermal energy. So using a windmill and connecting it to heater is global warming neutral, but stupid. Connecting the windmill to an engine is much more useful, and after a while all the movement will get transformed into heat, but the process is still is global warming neutral. If you connect the windmill to a laser, and point it to the space it's possible to remove some energy from the Earth and make it cooler, but the effect would be still totally absolutely completely negligible.
Google's Sergey Brin explains why he paid $330,000 for lab burger
Well, we know enough to know how to increase stability - primarily by increasing trail and rake. Decreasing rake angle is the primary way of making a motorcycle turn faster, with the known risk that it makes it more likely to head shake or even tank-slap.

It's fairly clear that common two-wheelers are stabilized by the rake and trail inducing a counter-steering effect when pushed horizontally - try to shove over a bicycle and the front of the front wheel will turn in the direction of the push because the point of contact of the tyre with the ground is behind its axis of rotation (the amount of which is the trail). And if the bicycle is moving forwards, this turn of the wheel will cause a torquing effect to roll the bike in the opposite direction of the shove. So long as the correction is somewhat less than the overall shove, the system should be self-damping.

But if the dynamics were fully understood, we'd be less likely to get motorcycles with issues like the well-known Pan Weave[1] and other high speed stability issues. At the limit, things like aerodynamics, chassis rigidity etc. start coming into the equation.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_ST1300#Pan_weave
I for one do not see this worth upvoting. Even if it has some good (even admirable) ideas, they are buried in a lot of noise. After reading the whole thing I find it resembling more to a writing exercise than to an article that wants to say something.
I think he bought "WaPo" for the same reason he bought "Goodreads:" the users of both are readers and he sells books. Specifically, the Book Review section.

Even if the print edition operates at a slight loss, controlling a popular (perhaps the second most popular) newspaper Book Review section would be of immense value to Amazon.

At one point in time, daytime TV existed simply to sell detergent (hence, "Soap Opera.") I could definitely see a time where newspapers exist to sell stuff on-line.
Nor do we know how airplanes work. Or whips.
Or buying the customer base, if they think the customers can be moved to their platform.
Yeah! Because you become determine and will to whatever you can to get something. Get me?
Birds and people who haven't adopted GPS will be screwed... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA_54559main_comparison1...
Skills you need to succeed as a blogger
Tips for Finding and Keeping Mentors
Perhaps that's why they ask you to turn them off before the show and not just silence them
How I Built a Career in Business Development
this needs to be higher up.. that's awesome to know! ... we might actually be able to emulate the Ps3 on the computer! hah
You would eat less, drink less, travel less. Americans that get cleaned out could easily end up without anything to eat, or drink, or (hah) travel. According to feedamerica.org, 16.1% of Americans (as of 2011) already live in food-insecure households. 15% live in poverty. If you're impoverished and being helped by the state - i.e., Social Security - your aid checks are going to be direct-deposited into that swindled / frozen-while-we're-fixing-things account. When you're living on a pittance, you know how rough it is to not have that pittance for a month or three?

You're talking about eating less. You're talking about still being able to travel. I'm talking about a country where roughly one-sixth of its population would literally starve if this happened to them.
I would say that their attention span is too short, then. And that they're more of a dilettante than a student.
I would like to see organizations with narrower goals. The ACLU is great, but they have so much on their plate.
If a company is big enough and should have documented their network for liability insurance, either A. I know places who didn't have it, or B. I know places that hid it, or C. it isn't always required. Weird.
Don't make the mistake I did a few years back, of buying the latest/greatest Android device (A Galaxy SII at the time), do all your testing on it, then find your app performs miserably on the far more common lower powered handsets. (Some of the early jQuery Mobile betas were glacial on a typical "low end ~$50 on a plan" handset…)
Etsy has more choices and much cheaper
If you're using a tablet you should face away from the sun and turn the screen facing away from you. You can then use a mirror to see the screen.
Richard Stallman on proprietary software, SaaS and open source
Scientists Are Scary Close To Controlling Our Memories And Brains With Computers
> Whatever you might say is moot, if the cops are willing to play that card.

Not really, if things go poorly it makes your lawyer's job a lot easier to get the case thrown out.
Now I read this, and the article, and now I am confused, because I was a staunch believer it was gyroscopic effect fault, now the thing can work without a gyroscope and what the hell?

Now /I/ want to know why the bike do not fall.
What parts we don't know about these?
Mine:

In fifty years ecology will seem as ridicule as we see the middle age crusades now.

The only allowed porn will be animal documentaries.

Economy will be replaced by something that actually works, the same way alchemy has been replaced with chemistry.

High buildings will be considered as dangerous paper castles and cities will be flat.

Having to sit on a desk at work will be considered as belonging to the lowest end of the social scale.

We will run on highways with special shoes and cars will make us laugh at their utter discomfort.
Je lever en galblaas natuurlijk en gezond ontgiften | Gezond Detoxen
WeWi’s $300-ish SOL Laptop is powered by the sun, Ubuntu, and Intel Atom
total tangent, but in defense of graphs: it's worth noting that graphs are actually a lot more expressive than they might appear at first glance. it's possible to interpret linear orders, algebraic groups, or any other theory written in finite language with graph theory (according to Marker's book on model theory, which references Hodges' for details on the proof)
Just when that all the aaron swatz stories started to fade nsa/snowden popup

it would be nice if HN was at least divided into tech & political-tech
What ever civilization that runs our simulation could have drawn a distinction culturally/legally between their real sentience and sentience in their simulation. Linking and granting rights to a simulated sentience isn't a guaranteed step after all.
> This extra level of indirection on every container is very costly in V8 and Ion.

It is very costly only if JIT is particularly bad at eliminating redundancies. Crankshaft is not and (I hope) neither is IonMonkey.

If you try removing it yourself from JavaScript version and replace every new OrderedCollection() with [], .add with .push, and so on then you will discover to your amazement that resulting code became 7-10% slower on V8 [try it, I am not joking :-)]

Now if you replace [] with new Array() then you get code that overall is 3-5% faster on V8. That is about how "costly" this indirection is.

Overall it seems that this is irrelevant in the large picture of things: Dart VM is around 195% of V8, dart2js is somewhere around 100%.

I do agree however that this OrderedCollection looks completely out of place and it is not clear to me why it appeared in the original JavaScript benchmark code at the first place. It is not idiomatic.
For a deep look at Omega (Chaitin's constant) I'd recommend Chaitin's book Meta Math: The Quest for Omega [1]. A fascinating book.

Chaitin has also uploaded the full text (pdf) of the book to Arxiv.org [2].

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Meta-Maths-Gregory-J-Chaitin/dp/1843...

[2] http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0404335
The Cloud Sucks
You'd think that for $78,500 they could waive the $50 shipping fee.
You could probably describe most economic activity that way, we have relatively simple core wants and needs (we want sex not SaaS). We spend our lives trying to acquire things that help us satisfy those by increasingly indirect means.
That is an outright horrifying idea. What Friedman is suggesting in this article is basically applying the model of inter-state diplomacy to criminal law. That is an inherently unfair and inequality-promoting system.

Happen to be a poor man who opposed the death penalty? Too bad. The rich guys' law corp. is pressuring your law corp. to accept it in cases of inter-corporation conflicts, and - while your firm is very much against it - they represent lower-class people and simply can't afford to purchase the anti-tank weapons they'd need to survive a war with the other corp.

(Did I mention the other guys have tanks? Of course they do; they have the liquid funds and it's a sound investment.)

And what about this idea that inter-corporation conflicts are to be resolved by arbitration or ad-hoc negotiations? That spits in the face of the very basic concept of law where you're supposed to know if something you're doing is illegal or not. Would you really want to live in a world where anything you do can get you thrown in jail at any time because the corporation representing you decided it's cheaper to settle? I sure wouldn't.
>There are real conspiracy theorists out there who are batsh_t crazy,

Yeah, but that doesn't mean they all are.

> it is quite difficult to tell which ones are actually reasonable.

Isn't that the truth. I used to work with a fellow who was absolutely paranoid about gov't surveillance. Some people might think he was a lunatic off his medication if you got him started talking about it. He was an Air Force avionics tech in the 1970's. Everything he ever told me about gov't surveillance has turned out to be true.

> The illogical fallacious arguments are spewed from both sides of the debate.

That happens at the extents of every political faction. Look at the debate surrounding Abortion/Gay Marriage/Drugs/Welfare

>Also, its possible to be a statist who is disgusted with the government's behavior;

I never considered that. I should have though. I can see no reason why someone who would identify as a Statist would be any different than a person from any other political faction. We're all people.

> its not black and white as the libertarians would try to convince everyone is the case (the NSA is spying us...and we have to pay taxes!). Ya, some of us are pragmatic.

I'd be a Libertarian if I thought it could work. And be fair, there are a lot of different folks in that particular faction too. IMO, those Johnny-come-lately post Koch Bros. Libertarians don't really count.

>So without a better alternative, we are free to shake our finger at the gov without advocating violent revolution or even deep systematic change. The devil you know...

I'm not sure what you're getting at.

>Of course, living in China gives me quite a different perspective on it all.

It does give one a different perspective. I lived there in '08 & '09 (though not full time).

>The US could definitely do much worse, and it is important to stop going in that direction.

I have a feeling it could be a _lot_ worse in the US, but that's no reason to accept the status quo. IMO acceptance of the status quo practically guarantees a pretty terrible outcome.
You're too poor to own art whose primary defining characteristic as art is that it's too expensive for poor people to own.
Growth is all that typically matters in the stock market. Investors really want to see this kind of steady increase in stock price, despite the difficult economic environment.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AMZN+Interactive#symbol=A...

Unless you have some blue chip giving out dividends, no one cares much about profit.
New Vietnam law criticized by Internet companies and rights groups
From my experience most of the H1B candidates who might join a company with lower wage at first, can and will negotiate for higher pay when they change company.
I think the days of hiring H1B candidates at lower wages and thinking of _retaining_ them are gone and the companies do realize that.
Andy Ruina is a great guy to listen to about stuff like this. There's an annual conference for scientists in all fields (robotics, biology, cognitive science, etc.) that study walking locomotion called Dynamic Walking; our lab hosted it in Pensacola last summer and Andy gave a "Greybeard" talk about the mechanics of sailboats and sailing down wind faster than the wind that was really entertaining.

I'm not sure where his fascination with esoteric mechanics comes from, but he has a pretty clever and engaging manner of discussing the stuff.

Edit: Didn't realize that Ruina was a co-author on the paper referenced in the article. Even better. It all goes full-circle.
Is Islam a peaceful religion? [Oxford Union]
Although that would make for an interesting sunrise. "Here comes the su- POOF"
I think that part is super useful. Sometimes I need to pull up a saved password for some common internal site, and this way I can do that comfortably even with friends or colleagues hanging over my shoulder!