skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Musk said it himself on an earnings call: "I think I kind of shot myself by ever mentioning the hyper loop ... [I] obviously have to focus on core business and SpaceX business and that's more than enough."[0]

He had to build Tesla to prove it would work. He had to build SpaceX to prove it would work. I think Musk knew, the moment he first mentioned it, that it would be nothing but endless pedantic discussions about trivialities.

[0] http://www.earningsimpact.com/Transcript/82715/TSLA/Q2-2013-...
I agree with kayoone; it doesn't really seem like this could consistently be true or else it would just be bad business.

In general, though, the best way to combat the depreciation of a car's value is to take out a long-term 0% interest loan, provided of course that you can get it. This works because (1) inflation reduces your effective net expenditure on the car; (2) you can take the cash you would have spent on the car and invest it instead; if you even conservatively get 3% returns a year, you've still come out far ahead.

Regarding (2), if you can't afford the car in cash, then you can't afford the car. That's always been my motto. Financing is a choice; it should never be something you are forced to do, unless this is your first car straight out of school and you just have no money yet.
plus, they sold SketchUp
"Maintaining a distro is not a small thing though, so I'd like to see how serious you are in that aspects. What are your upstreams? What are your release policies and schedules? Update schedules?"

And will we find a note on the Web site one day saying 'Luna is closed now, we are working on Selene (or whatever)'?

Jupiter worked well on my Netbook. Luna works OKish (bit heavy). The UI is refreshing, and I appreciate the work going into this. But as acqq says, a roadmap might be important for wider adoption.
That is the FBI and the CIA.
Leads To, a word association chainer, for fun.
Couldn't agree with this more. So many developers I know let sunk costs influence their actions and it stifles their ability to innovate.
Generally around 5 minutes off peak, and 10 minutes at peak flying times. Then again, I don't fly to the USA much and so don't have to deal with the TSA. Security in the rest of the world is not much of a problem.
Sadly, the result of this news is likely to be a new multi-billion dollar War on Furniture.
Looks like a nice tool.

The value of such of tool though points to one of the reasons why web technologies will ultimately prevail over native for most applications -- ease of use.
And everyone who is interested can signup for a launch at: www.journalium.com
As usual, advertisers rely on assumptions about what they think users will or will not do. When users deviate from the assumed patterns, tracking fails.

Three ways to easily defeat this "cookieless tracking" come to mind:

1. Turn off automatic image loading.

2. Use your HOSTS file to block/redirect the domain name to which the tracking info is sent.

3. On devices that hide the HOSTS file, use your own localhost DNS server to block/redirect the domain name to which tracking info is sent.

The common theme here is the user takes more control over what connections her computer may initiate.

Under current usage patterns a user types a domain name in an address bar of a browser (usually a browser written by some entity that pays its developers through revenues from the sale of advertising) or she types something into a search bar/box and then selects a search result. The user thereby initiates a connection to some other computer addressed by a. the domain name she types (assuming she types the name correctly; otherwise she may end up at a page of sponsored search results) or b. the result she selects.

This level of navigation is within the user's control. She intends to connect to a computer addressed by a domain name that she can type or select. Does she also intend to connect to other unspecified computers at the same time?

Due to the way these browsers are configured, many more connections to other unspecified computers may be initiated without any input from the user. Increasingly, these are computers that serve the user no useful content. They are devoted to tracking. Go figure.

Does the user want her computer to connect to other unspecified computers whose sole purpose is to track her? Under current assumptions, this is to be decided outside of the user's control (and awareness).

By exercising more control over what browsers do and over domain name lookups, the user can retain more power to specifically choose the other computers to which her computer connects.
I'd be curious to see a graph of transmission efficiency vs. distance. The technology here is almost certainly acoustic beamforming, and that large square under wraps in the image is an array of small ultrasonic piezo speakers. Beamforming will give you better than 1/R^2 relationship between power and distance, but probably nowhere close to linear.

I'd be hard pressed to imagine this working over distances larger than the 3 feet demonstrated, which suggests constraints on the use case, like charging your laptop while its on a desk, for which there would seem to be easier methods of wireless charging (inductive coupling, conductive pads, etc).

Very interesting in concept, I'd like to see numbers before I believe anything.
>How do we inspire even a few kids in each generation to take up programming, if the only computer they've ever used is un-programmable.

I think for most users, the experiences of using a programmable v.s. non-programmable device are about even in terms of inspiration. An iPad is just as likely to spawn an interest in games as a regular PC (perhaps more, as it's more approachable). The biggest problem is that locked down devices are poor programming platforms, but getting a basic platform to program is pretty cheap and easy, so I don't see that as a big problem.
If you want to build a “content script”-type extension that does nothing but interact with the page and run normal JS, think about building the extension on the GreaseMonkey platform. GreaseMonkey (http://www.greasespot.net/) is an extension that lets you write a content script as a single JavaScript file, with metadata such as the name and version written in specially-formatted comments at the top of the file. That makes scripts easy to develop and install. GreaseMonkey also provides a few functions that allow you to do some things that browser security doesn’t normally let you do – http://wiki.greasespot.net/Greasemonkey_Manual:API.

“GreaseMonkey” is only a Firefox add-on. But there are GreaseMonkey-compatible extensions for other browsers, such as Tampermonkey for Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tampermonkey/dhdgf...) and GreaseKit for Safari (https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/20718/greasekit). Thus, GreaseMonkey scripts are automatically cross-browser. Chrome even supports installing GreaseMonkey scripts natively, but only through a convoluted process, for security reasons. The reason people made clones for other browsers is the huge library of existing GreaseMonkey extensions at https://userscripts.org/.

The downside of GreaseMonkey is that the user needs to have a GreaseMonkey-compatible extension installed to run your script. So your extension depends on another extension. It’s also harder to use a build system while writing a GreaseMonkey script, if you want to write it in CoffeeScript or something.
I'd offer that $1M would qualify Non-technical as an accredited investor. I'm more interested in the person who can offer up, say $100k, give or take, to support the development and launch of a MVP.
You stripped the context of ", in order to design a rail network" from that quote.

He has to design the thing to then write a paper on the design. You are saying that he took time out to do that as though it is not what I am saying, however it is in complete agreement with what I stated in the first instance.

All I ever said was that he took time out to design the thing, and the paper on the design is obviously the public part of designing the thing.

You keep coming up with this build nonsense, which I never implied at any point and which you know is a non-point as anyone who has been following this in the slightest, obviously knows that it hasn't been built yet.

And he has invested in the thing, he has invested the time it took to design the thing to the level required to then write the published paper.
Colour, social beings, and undecidability
I Will Not Learn Rails (2012)
How to write to NTFS on Mac OS (free)
I'll join in...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fgc-live-streams/f...

Totally unrelated to hacking :) It's for finding twitch streams for Fighting games (Street Fighter, etc).
I know it's sometimes easy to forget, but technology is not now and has not ever been destiny. Certainly a better people mover will get built, because it's a problem that isn't anywhere near a local maximum. Maybe something like the Hyperloop will be the solution to some small subset of the people moving problem. Maybe the Chinese will take this baton and run with it.

But I doubt it. And in any event, the idea that we should build a toy project because it offers some improvements to some parts of a current problem for some small number of people is a perfectly defensible one -- on Hacker News. As an actual spending cash sort of idea, it's fairy tale nonsense. You can see how seriously Musk takes it by how serious the proposal actually is w/r/t nuts and bolts -- not at all.
>I don't think you should be so sure that all solutions to cancer have been tried.

He never said that.

>There is no money in natural cures, so most researchers don't bother.

Even if this is true, it doesn't mean the natural cures actually exist in a usable way currently.
They use it like OSX and iOS which rightly have OS in their name: both are the new and original operating systems. Debian, Ubuntu rightly don't have OS in their own names. Elementary shouldn't too.
You don't have to smoke it. You can eat it or vaporize it. So keeping it illegal because one form of consumption, may, be harmful is okay? I think you're missing the point and focusing on one quite minuscule detail.

I have yet to read a paper that actually shows smoking marijuana has or does not have adverse effects long term.

So I say it's trivial at best.
CIA first built drones in 1965
Nextbigfuture
Just read a really interesting article about a type 3 civilisation with a dyson sphere around a Super Massive Black Hole
So your mom didn't lap up Nancy Reagan's "Just say no."?

"Just say no" was a propaganda campaign and you rightly describe it as widely influencing the population. Somebody told your mom that "pot causes young men to give up on life and not get jobs or girlfriends and just play video games all day", she didn't dream that up all by herself.
I am not a Muslim if this is what you were hinting at and I don't see how being one matters in this case. Also, I don't see how ad hominem attacks are a good way of carrying out a discussion.

I regularly post articles related to such stuff -- a quick glance at my history should suffice. "Terrorism is a threat to the world" is what we all think but this is approaching this from a logical, statistical point of view, which is how it should be. If you are the kind that subscribes to Fox News and refuses to open your mind (my ad hominem attack to you), then you can just ignore this article and we can all happily move on.
Here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/01/09/1215678110.abst...

And, as a bonus, here is a debunking of a similar, and similarly widely touted study that made it into the Lancet. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19560900

The point is: The whole purpose of these heavily funded studies is to penetrate mainstream journals. They were hyped in the mainstream press with the full weight of government behind the press blitz.
I think he meant scanning all ports, UDP+TCP+ICMP etc etc
Why Hyperloop’s awesome and still the wrong idea
I don't know why you are being sarcastic. I don't make one mention of Khalil's grammar. I understand that everyone's first language isn't english, but Khalil isn't even making an effort to be clear or accurately communicate what the problem is.

In the comments of the blog post, Khalil admits that it isn't that he has a poor understanding of the english language, it is just that he doesn't care.

> whatever , i dont care for miss spelling , just the idea , i never correct an underline red word ;)

So we have a guy that doesn't give a crap about communicating correctly, who then complains when he is not understood.
I don't see many television commercials for, say, the USDA's Rural Development programs. The absence of such television ads isn't them saying that those programs suck either. Being quite about it is the default position, spending many millions on primetime television ad spots to push it is exceptional.
India’s lost 220 languages in past 50 years
One side effect of this might possibly be an increased cost for traditional form factors as demand for laptops and desktops from home users declines.
So I think this is actually not true. The average American isn't really frightened of terrorism. They don't pay attention and just want decisions made by someone else. They are comfortable when those decisions are framed in simplistic Manichaean terms because it demands little thought.
I think one advantage of the hyperloop is that it would probably be quieter (they claim the compressor uses <150 HP) so that would make putting it on a pylon simpler and would reduce the need for noise barriers. Also the separation between tubes could be much lower than the separation between tracks. I'm not sure how much this would affect the feasibility of putting a more normal HSR train on small, lightweight pylons, but it wouldn't help.
I hope to see the day that given the right development attention one can make a web app that feels fast like a native app. It might already be possible for some kinds of apps.

There are apps popping up that are really an ember or angular one pager wrapped in a native shell.

HTML/CSS on Webkit gives you an amazing layout engine for free. Building UI for native apps feels like "web coding like it's 1999" with a lot of absolute positioning and use of sprited images. I wonder if things improved in iOS7.
This is true only if the source image is smaller than the destination image. In the article, the source image is shown as the same size as the destination, and includes a large white border that can be clipped without the inner image being affected.

In the event that the destination buffer is much larger than the source, that additional computation is trivial (it's the same calculation that's already being done for each and every pixel). As it only needs to be additionally done on the corners, not per-pixel, the additional time spent should be quite minimal.

The shearing method in the article is genuinely clever and totally cool, but I just can't shake the feeling that even on 1980s hardware, this method would be better. On modern hardware, there's no question, it's still used to this day. Nowhere near as cool, though.
Congratulations on your work.

We do quite a bit of CNC work. Our main product is CC BY-SA. I think you'd be surprised how much customers appreciate that, and how much they are willing to work with us.

So I agree with phreeza. Licensing the brand name as a stamp of approval for OpenDesk looks like a better way to build an ecosystem around your quality design work.

Other options might be to do like the your Richard Stallman did with free software. He delivered the free source code with the (software) product. Essentially you would sell physical furniture including CNC files without commercial limitations.

Or maybe you could, with minimal disruption to your current business model, make the commercial license CC too? Sell a CC BY-SA licensed design. Distribute a CC BY-SA-NC version for free like you do.

Just my .02€.
Girl who never ages could hold key to 'biological immortality,' researcher says
actually Chrome already has native support for GreaseMonkey scripts since a while ago [1]. You can just install scripts directly from http://userscripts.org.

[1] http://blog.chromium.org/2010/02/40000-more-extensions.html
Reminds me of my own project I'm working on (https://logicpull.com/demo/editor/2)
Another added benefit is being able to keep up with the bleeding edge PostGIS and keep some scope of what's changing. If PostGIS was internal to Postgres I'd be a lot less comfortable swapping the configuration so often.
> Warren Buffet explains why you can't beat the market

The article's title is misleading. Buffett's memo explains that you can't beat the market averages, but not why. I have no doubt that Buffett is right -- that a conservative, buy and hold position in an index fund is the most effective way to make money in equities -- but his memo doesn't go into detail about why this is true.

The why is easy to state -- if a method existed that reliably improved on market average returns, either:

A. It wouldn't remain secret for long, then everyone would practice it, and that would become the new market average performance, available to everyone.

B. It would remain secret in perpetuity, the lucky secret-holders would drain the market of its capital and its attractiveness to average investors, and businesses, smelling a rat, would refuse to raise capital using equities. The market would collapse.

Therefore there are no "secrets of the winners", those much-touted investment books are worthless, and the most boring, geriatric kind of investment, like an index fund, is the most efficient way to grow your money.
Strangeloop was a great demo.

What's the next big leap for speech to text programming? A language designed specifically to be speakable, ie, all keywords and no symbols?

I mean, I'd like speech recognition to get more natural error correction, drawing more from the way we use inflection to give feedback about which syllables to correct. (I love how Google on mobile now gives visual indication of which syllables it heard clearly, and which it didn't. I just wish it would understand when I shout "No, X not Y" to replace just that one misheard word.)

It'd be interesting to hear about where voice is heading from someone who uses the technology far more.
When you have too many movies in your collection. You need something like this.
Sorts movie folders by renaming them with a zero padded inverse IMDB rating. Makes it easier to decide what to watch when you have tens / hundreds / thousands of movies in a collection.
The ability to create a directional soundwave powerful enough to move specific objects from across the room would be a highly useful invention of its own, quite aside from remote power charging.
The Kindly Brontosaurus: The posture that will get you whatever you want
>but getting a basic platform to program is pretty cheap and easy, so I don't see that as a big problem.

A basic platform to program with is pretty cheap, but it'll _probably_ only run programs on a general purpose computer. I'm pretty sure you can't build iOS apps on a RPi.

I guess my big problem is that you can't build an iOS app on an iOS device. I see this as a problem given the prevalence of locked down devices now on the market.
I was discounting Cameron as he hasn't won an election and isn't very good at getting people to believe in stuff.
By your link, we're also 8 times more likely to get killed by a government employee than by a terrorist.
I mean his tunnel/tube is more expensive than a noise barrier. It has all the same properties but has to withstand far higher pressure differences and be built to insane tolerances.
Looks interesting. Is this anything more than an internal research project?

From the second slide: "The following is intended to provide some insight into a line of research in Oracle Labs."
What was the motivation behind forking the distro rather than building packages and an apt repo for Debian or Ubuntu? This is certainly a neat desktop environment, but it always makes me sad to see things done in a manner that makes it difficult to use with other distros.
hahahah anther one
Sadly, the result of this news is likely to be a new multi-billion dollar War on Furniture.

Natsu probably meant that the litigious implications of this finding will be adverse and widespread, but largely monetary, none of which will really address the real problem.

Unless, of course, this sort of thing could bring about the equivalent of "1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act" which was largely due to the activism and efforts of Ralph Nader.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#Automobile_safety_a...

(Don't be so quick to downvote.)
Show HN: Lurk for Reddit [promo codes]
> why web technologies will ultimately prevail over native for most applications

All your users care about is UX and features. Native sdks provide more features than web apis, are more powerfull and your users feel the difference. Native sdks are not going away anytime soon.
Nobody would disagree with you that the disclosure message was poorly written.

Though the Facebook engineer conceivably could have offered to give the guy's email to a native speaker or tried to get more detail from him, I don't blame the initial Facebook engineer for dismissing it on the spot given that he probably had a few dozen other messages like that on the same day to review and deal with.

But it's all about perception here. The end result of this is a big PR loss for Facebook if they want to protect their users and get people to submit bug reports without having to fear that they'll lose out on money.

The next time an inexperienced foreigner discovers an exploit they'll research this topic and see that Facebook answered this guy with a "thanks for working for us for free" message. So what will happen is that when some spammer comes around with a few thousand dollars in cash vs the uncertainty of dealing with Facebook, odds are the exploit will go to him rather than Facebook. They won't read about the hundreds of times that Facebook did pay up, but the couple of times they didn't.

So this is just a big loss for the internet because Facebook made it that much more likely that people will sell their exploits to all kinds of nefarious people.
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You are correct, I completely missed that. However, he again fails to provide any sort of explanation of what he did to perform the attack. Even if he had reverted back to his native language, he never even attempts to explain what he did to perform the attack.
That's meaningless. That's like claiming you didn't really visit a country until you looked under every trash can.
I was concerned too, but even with general purpose computing devices readily available, for the last decade most people have been using them like oversized tablets, barely knowing anything about how they work or how to fix them when they break. The curious among us will always have the avenue of creation open to us (after all, who otherwise would create the newest apps and websites?) and it's not like all the literature is being burned and destroyed.

Perhaps its our duty to make even better tools and resources available to those who want create and produce in the age of tablets, and to create alternate platforms that don't include walled gardens and locked-down app stores.
Doesn't sound very nice.
"their stuff is shit, and your shit is stuff".
LOL.