skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Backscatter is (indeed) phenomenally interesting. We used it to build "cyborg" dragonflies [1] and to build battery-free tags capable of transmitting video and audio [2]. We've demonstrated fully-passive tags (at 915MHz UHF) capable of 100Mbps communications. Using ambient signals as the carrier is a pretty cool extension.

[1] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/06/dragonfly-backpack...

[2] http://www.travisdeyle.com/publications/pdf/2013_rfid_rich_m...
Culture and principles at Bridgewater
Opportunities for Businesses through Mobile Advertising (Infographic)
This is such a perfect comment. You completely sum up their business in 11 words.

In the future, I hope they partner with hospitals/medicare to provide fitbits for free. There's immense savings in preventative medicine.

A lot of people don't see the potential for movement trackers beyond counting steps. By looking at the data, you can identify when a person is beginning to get sick or weak before they even feel symptoms.

One such startup working on the data problem: http://ginger.io/
Github owns gaug.es and it would make a lot of sense if they integrated it into github.com. One of the removed metrics is also clone counts.
Have you used ML?
People are wondering why they'd need to raise so much at this point, so I'll throw in my guess:

The consumer health wearables market is one that exploded recently, but is now at a standstill. We have several companies (Jawbone, Nike, Fitbit) who have been selling well-designed slightly-advanced pedometers for the last few years, and others (eg Basis) that are scheduled to ship similar products very soon. There's been little innovation in this space, but the market is still enormous, and there's a ton of money to be made.

Now considering that the current products are more or less equal, the company that will win in the end is the one that can 1) first get to market with a new innovative product, 2) brand it effectively to appeal to a wider audience, and 3) develop an ecosystem around the product that leads to customer lock-in.

With these points in mind, it may make the $43 million funding round more sensible. Although one could argue that Nike has the R&D resources to out-innovate its competitors, giving them point 1, Fitbit has also been in this game for a long time. Where FitBit is currently winning is their market and ecosystem. They're marketing to a large segment of the population who just wants to develop healthy and happy living, so they push features like calorie logging and sleep tracking -- features that Nike's products lack. Nike's Fuelband, on the other hand, is geared towards a smaller more athletic market. As for ecosystem, Fibit also offers the Aria scale, which can keep track of an entire family's weights, and a whole line of Fitbit trackers geared towards various lifestyles. And for Jawbone, well, they may have the R&D strength to innovate (I don't know), but they haven't been in this game long enough to get a foothold on a segment of the market, or to develop any sort of ecosystem around their product. At this point, there is no other company that's marketing to a wider audience and that offers both the variety in product as well as complementary offerings than Fitbit.

My guess is that investors see that Fitbit is best-positioned to win this race and needed the cash injection to break the stalemate it's currently in with its competitors.
I don't think so. He based his service on the premise that he didn't have the keys o the encryption, and I can imagine he was able to respond to the requests "this is what I have." Specifically, as the service customers paid for, he was able to give, for example, the name and the credit cards of the specific investigated customers if he billed them directly. But it is OK, there were narrow court orders, everybody is expected to get and respond to such. What happened now must be different. Otherwise, why would he decide to do what he did now?

BTW it's a really nice article, gives a nice personal side to the whole story.
Lol.

As Bill Gates puts it "Saudi Arabia [is] an example of why [he] believes limiting the rights women can hinder economic growth"

"Education is bad in the middle east" so there's an opening, hmmm same in many parts of the western world yet the real silicon valley has yet to crack this one.

Most of his examples are copies of western ideas localised.

To me there real point here is there's a opening in localising software, once silicon valley cracks this idea it'll really take off.

I'm also not sure he ever even mentions 'Saudi Arabia'
How Innovation Accounting and Customer Support Go Hand in Hand
They could have handed over encrypted files, is there something to suggest they handed over plaintext messages?
I have lived in poor neighborhoods. For a period of a few weeks I was unemployed, Because I had been a student I was ineligible for unemployment benefits and living in the woods in a tent. I went out and got a job washing dishes and got on my feet. Moved on to a bus boy gig. Then got a job doing tech support and paid my own way through school that was almost 10 years ago now.

So please don't come to me and tell me I have no idea what it's like to work my way up from rock bottom.
GNU C Library (glibc) 2.18 Release
The Internet, day one.
When 1% of the nation has similar levels of access as these two, I don't know that it's reasonable to exclude the sneakernet vuln.
Does _every_ C or C++ developer know the ISA they're targeting? Also, source maps.
I'm all for gang leaders being strung up, especially when it's in accordance with the law as would've been the case with Nixon. If the democrats were similarly guilty of felonies, they should've been brought to justice as well. Remind me again, what felonies did the democrats commit?
> a bigger scandal than Watergate.

Depends on how you qualify its big-ness. Go out and talk to regular, non-techie folks about NSA spying. In the unlikely event that you even find someone who knows what you are talking about, they won't care. They will look at you like you're crazy and they'll say, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about."

If it's just a small, quickly forgotten blurb on Fox news between TERRORISM and Honey Boo-Boo then does it even qualify as scandal?
The OS is Windows, and Jenkins handles everything else just fine. It's just the Node projects that ever have issues. Of course, it's easier to blame the OS.
It is more likely, he modified the site to give the targeted individuals a different front-end that would capture the keys. OSPF
"you can absolutely choose your gender"

I've been reading the intro of the book you recommended. Frankly, that gender discussion seems extremely weird and trite. Why don't you just behave the way you like to, rather than get lost in philosophical mazes about gender? As you say, if you can choose your gender, why don't you just do so and be done with it?

So what exactly makes your friends be the victim of being approached? Are they men who want to become women? What attracts the men, boobs, or their clothing?
I fully understand that it can be annoying to be approached all the time. However, it is the flip side of being attractive, which brings lots of advantages. Curiously, few industries cater to making people less attractive, a lot cater to making them more attractive. So perhaps your friends who want to be left alone are not very typical.

Yes, it is unfair that women are more attractive than men (as I elaborated in another comment, they have a much higher biological value than men, hence they are being sought out). But it has upsides and downsides (as has being a man). I am pretty sure you can also exert at least some control over the amount of street hassling you get by the way you present yourself.

I can assure you that not every man who wants to sleep with a woman approaches that woman. And not every dude approaches every woman in a bar.

Objectification is just a nonsense concept, sorry. That's pure ideology. What is it even supposed to mean? Attraction isn't real unless you recite poems together?

We had the pay discussion already, don't know enough about your friend to comment.

As for your divorce laws, that document is rather long, I couldn't read it all yet. If what you say is true I suspect you have found an outlier state. Also perhaps men who seek custody are the ones whose lawyers already said they have a chance because of the way their case is structured, it doesn't say anything about the real proportion of men who get custody.

As for rape, I have no idea if it is better to fight back or not - I'd recommend asking experts about that. I know that we don't live in a rape culture, though - as I've also explained in another comment already.
DA Buddha Vaporizer - 4 months without turn off best vaporizer on the market
As a disenchanted California resident, I'm of the opinion that there is no way that Hyperloop could be built within the current California regulatory climate for anything close to the cost he suggests, if at all. But short of trying it, this is hard to prove or even debate.

So instead I'd like to ask: regardless of whether California is possible, where would the _best_ place be to implement a a project of this sort? Australia? China? India? Canada has a number of cities a reasonable distance apart that could be served by a single coast to coast line and existing right-of-ways. Could this 'fly' there?
With Hover at least you get a free forward-only email address with your domain, and with Gmail, you can send email "from" any address you have control over, without needing an apps account. So, with Gmail, and with the various first-party Gmail apps, it's a cinch to use your own domain for email without switching providers.

You can do this with Gmail over IMAP as well, though I just use the first-party apps on my devices for the most part. But for the record, if you set up a "Gmail" account on an iOS device this doesn't work; you have to set it up as IMAP and monkey with the settings a bit.
I don't know political leanings of this writer, but he makes lots of valid points for both the left and the right. I found this article to be very insightful and very important.
>My counter-argument to voice-driven coding has been primarily around the input bandwidth and the fact that you must work from home with that kind of setup.

I wonder how long it will take for reliable subvocal speech reading a-la [1] to become available in consumer products. It could potentially solve not only this problem but a lot of problems related to the use of cell phones in public spaces.

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2004/mar/HQ_04093_subvocal_s...
Userland has become a lot more stable over the past year or two as projects have matured. A lot of popular projects (like express) went through rewrites with breaking changes.
As a human this fascinates and excites me because of the possibilities for innovation.

As a hacker this fascinates and excites me because of the potential for abuse and, well, hacking.

This is really cool stuff. I can't wait to see what is built with this technology and how it will get broken.
Run CasperJS scripts in your browser
SpaceX was running an entire rocket development program for the price of one Shuttle launch. When they kept hitting their performance/schedule targets, the Shuttle lost all credibility within NASA. It's hard to predict a past that did not happen, but the Shuttle would probably have been kept going for longer if there has been no alternative waiting in the wings.
Lavabit was hosted webmail, and therefore inherently dependent on the host not being evil. It is not possible to construct a hosted webmail service that is safe against a malicious/compromised host.

The phrase "user information" is vague; it could include timestamps of all requests from a particular IP, for example. Given that he was willing to shut down his sole source of income on principle, I'm willing to believe that he had reasonable crypto in place to protect user data at rest.

Cryptography was just a side show, just like with
Hushmail, because Lavabit could get the plaintexts
whenever someone working there wanted (or whenever they
were compelled to do so by a government, criminal
organization, etc.).

Assuming good faith and a reasonable storage implementation, it is possible that Lavabit is not capable of providing plaintext messages on demand. I heard somewhere that messages were stored with a key derived from the user's password; if true, then a warrant for johndoe@lavabit.com might not be fulfillable until after the next successful login from johndoe@.
The original poster is a developer. A developer for Apple platforms. Chances are this affected him and if not, it did affected his peers. Yet he never mentions the massively embarrassing outage...
No, that isn't the case. Lavabit's emails were encrypted on the server for paying users, and only if enabled by them. In a case where one of those users (whose numbers were less than 2000) had their data subpoenaed, Lavabit would be unable to do so without MITMing themselves in a way that grabbed the plaintext password in transit. Since that didn't happen (why would he close the site when he was asked to do it again?) we can surmise that the only data that was given over was free users and only when compelled by the government.
I never said that. But the prosecution (and the judge) have to take into account the effect the trial might be having on the victim, and reduce the defendant's ability to cause more damage. Prosecutorial discretion is all about minimizing the damage done in the course of the defense itself.
Putting hints in source is unhelpful in mobile. Is there a jquery plugin to provide an alternate mechanism for puzzle writers?
Show HN: Voice + Video Chat on any website with the ‘Barc’ Chrome Extension
What makes you think they're just theoretical? Are you insinuating that I'm just here to argue arbitrary crap for the hell of it?

Also, gitignore does not work in SVN (*omg he uses SVN! the shame!), and the node_modules do actually have to be included in the source since the runtime is disconnected from the internet (intranet app).
I will now have to find the time to watch these "quality" shows to see if in fact they are quality programming. It would be great to be able to tell TV networks that they should focus on creating quality programming, instead of just getting the best advertizement deal and that this would boost their ratings/revenue. While I cannot think of any great TV shows, there have definitely been exceptions, like The West Wing, which I didn't watch live, but I'm now watching on NetFlix and can certainly say that the show is of very high quality. The West Wing has set the bar for what I qualify as quality programming, so if AMC's programming is there, no wonder they are doing so well.
I like the simplicity of it.
Hey HN!

With our extension, every page you visit becomes a place where you can find and connect with other people in real-time.

Get Barc from the Google ‘Web Store’ here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/barc/lkledilgabpel...

Current Features:

* Share pictures/video/music all within the chat

* Chat completely anonymously or login with your Twitter, Facebook or Barc account

* Create private group chats which can be permanently deleted

* Connect with other users using your microphone/camera (using WebRTC)

* Chat with people in different languages using real-time language translation

* Make rich interactive polls inside the chat

Features being worked on:

* Screen sharing

* File Transferring

* Customizable Interface

Barc can also be embedded inside your website as a comment/community tool. We’ve had a lot of adoption with radio station/band websites. Example: freedomizerradio.com
We’ve open sourced some of the tools we’ve made too, check out our stuff at http://barc.github.com

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Tim Armstrong Apologizes for Publicly Firing Patch Employee
I'd love a device like this, but until it understands that cycling is not driving mode, it's pointless for me.

(I think I heard about someone tying it to his shoe when cycling; I'd be interested to know if that kind of thing actually works.)
I certainly appreciate Ryan Dahl's opinion and absolutely agree with the conclusion (which has done incredibly well for me in my career), but these things are not mutually exclusive. One can put user experience above all and still hone their tools and habits while working towards that goal.
This is an interesting proposal, and I'd be keen to read a constructive (and less 'emotional') breakdown of the possible things that Musk might have to gain from the HSR project being ditched.

However, I think it's worth pointing out that the science appears to be fairly good in the Hyperloop paper. Certainly from my brief read through, it appears plausible, and on top of that I have yet to see an attack on the actual mechanism, with most criticisms focussing on the 'politics' surrounding the idea.

So I'd like to raise a few points to think about on the politics and funding side of things.

1. Elon Musk seems to have a fairly good track record of massively optimising processes and re-inventing manufacturing methods. Tesla factories seem to be very well engineered themselves, but more importantly is SpaceX which has managed to reduce the cost of space travel by very significant amounts, I think it's down to about 25% of what it used to be to re-supply the ISS, and much of this saving comes from improved manufacturing and testing processes for the rockets.

2. Musk also appears to have a good track record of negotiations and dealings with councils, local authorities (or whatever they are called in the US) which would help him a lot with getting building permission. From what I can tell Tesla's network of superchargers will have been mostly a logistics and negotiation problem, rather than a technological one.

I'm not sure if just anyone could do this for $6bn, but if the science is shown to be sound, I'd bet that Musk could have a good attempt for under $10bn, which is still a massive reduction on the $60bn for the HSR project.
Your theory is wrong. Here is the warrant Lavabit complied with:

http://ia600908.us.archive.org/9/items/gov.uscourts.mdd.2362...

Take a quick look at attachment B and you'll see that Lavabit was asked to provide the plaintext message bodies and attachments of emails sent by the user. This was not a demand for metadata, it was a demand for messages, and it was a demand that Lavabit complied with.
so... way better? :)
As the post said, there are plenty of libs that add additional functionality in place of callbacks. Let everyone choose the way that works best for them.
>defendant ‘systematically re-victimized’ the victim, and that was what Swartz was doing by dragging MIT through hearings and a trial.

Just surreal. Like Swartz was a sadist and MIT was a traumatized victim of violence, not like a young prodigy whose life were being crushed for the modern "Prometheus" action and a bunch of PC-sensitive executive bureaucrats augmented by a lawyer department.
‘from a human one-on-one level to an institutional level.’

I fail to see how government vs a single individual can be construed as "a human one-on-one level."
"For instance, using name matching alone, you can clearly identify the full name of a student at University of Central Oklahoma, what state she’s from, where she went to undergrad, and where she shops for gas."

You mean without using Facebook and/or LinkedIn?
No, the main selling point is that it's an event-loop based paradigm where all the APIs are async by default. As opposed to python twisted or ruby eventmachine where you have to look for async versions of the libraries you want to use and people writing modules usually aren't even aware that you want to be event-based.

So yes, grandparent is correct.
Perhaps not exactly what you're looking for but you can get some database dumps that you can browse offline at your leisure. I know Wikipedia offers a file you can download so does Stack Exchange.
...how is that different from Hushmail?
> Prosecutors eventually offered Swartz a deal to avoid trial in which he’d have to plead guilty to all 13 charges and spend six months behind bars. Two days later, on Jan. 11, 2013, Swartz hung himself.

Somehow I missed it before that they had come all the way down to 6 months in prison, and just 2 days before he killed himself. I thought he died still thinking he was facing 35 years in prison... not 6 months.
Wow. Not any old committee either, but the Senate Committee on Homeland Security.

We live in days of high weirdness.
Someone posted this on reddit, thought I would repost here as its timely:

From a jail interview with Hermann Göring during the Nuremberg Trials:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Product onboarding should be part of product design
Tried it out on Firefox and it pegged one of my CPU cores to 100%. I hope this is not the future of the Internet.
This sounds more like carelessness if anything.

I've head the Fitbit Classic for about 2 years now and it's still going strong. I shower and swim with my Flex and it's still working too.
Poll: What OS do you currently use?
Please only select one OS, your main one
BSD family
Thanks for the comment. I agree that as she gets older she needs to be more self sufficient. Even now she plays by herself in small spurts. The intent of my post wasn't to insinuate that she must always actively feel she's the most important thing in the world, just that if it's a time when we should be actively engaging, say at the dinner table, we should do that, and I, nor she when she gets older, should be preoccupied by trivial "screen time."
I really enjoy the callback paradigm. I love how powerful the abstraction of async code is. In procedural paradigm, there are some things that you want to accomplish that you simply cannot create an abstraction for, because the operation you want to do is time based. With the power of callbacks, you can abstract away complex things with a single function.
Not to sidetrack the conversation too much, but I fully agree, and I'm sure those in the agencies do as well. It's a gap they're closing, with two-man rules etc.
Nope. If it were inductive or capacitive transmission, this would be the case, but for far-field radiation, it's generally not.
What we've got here is... failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it. I don't like it any more than you men.
Show HN: CityStrides - Track your running, city by city.
My attitude comes from the experience of living in a tent in the woods with no money then finding a job washing dishes and working my way up.
Everyone mentions Nike, but no one says Garmin. Perhaps it's just my background, but I see the influx of phone and phone-connected solutions as eating Garmin's lunch. Their solutions (including wearables) still probably have the edge in precision and battery life ... but Fitbit and the upward growth of pedometers is disruption for them.
Startups should have exec off-sites
It's more Shannon-Hartley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem (I think).