skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is explained simply by setting your mind to something, selective attention, etc. I'm not sure why commenters are looking for exact science when we don't even have a working model of consciousness let alone the subconscious.

When we focus our attention on something, we are applying more brain resources towards that task, sending more energy through our neurons, etc. If sitting in an aircraft simulator makes you more alert due to the excitement of the experience and task, it makes sense that you will invest more energy into it to get a better outcome. Not too mysterious.

I disagree with those commenters who imply that there is nothing scientific about making observations without a theory to attach to it. I actually tink it's a lot more responsible than trying to force a theory that we don't have enough evidence for.
I can't express how much I agree to this - but with a small addition: The "middle" is disappearing in Europe also.

The most worrying thing is that if you put 95% of the people on a ship's back, it's going to sink; together with its front.
"This story appears in the September 2, 2013 issue of Forbes."
> I'm not sure what all the fuss is about.

I think everyone's just trying to make sense of the SF real estate market, tech industry workers included. The average rental unit price in SF is now higher than Manhattan, last time I checked.

Hopefully, talking about the craziness of the SF real estate market will lead to more solutions, e.g. public pressure to make commuting from the East bay more feasible ala Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Awesome! Thank you so much :).

Can you tell me a bit about what your experience setting up the direct connections was like? Frankly, I do this for a living and I'm curious what it's like for others. Dealing with global carriers is hit or miss for me. It's either BOOM DONE or years of waiting in vain.

What was your experience like? I admit, most of my conversations are focused on Europe and Asia so I'd be quite curious about your experiences in Africa or elsewhere.

Thanks!!!

Edit: To clarify, where are you unable to get carrier agreements?
1. You are assuming that everyone understands what "web based" means.

2. You are assuming that everyone understands that email is like a postcard.

I have even met technically competent people who were surprised to discover how easy it is to forge email headers. When even people with years of accumulated knowledge about computers carry bad assumptions around, what can you expect out of people with little-to-no understanding of computers? For a lot of people a computer is a magical box that is beyond their comprehension.
No: the source code being available does not provide freedom to the user if one cannot replace the code being used with a differently-modified copy. To the user, it does not matter in the slightest that the full and complete source code for something is available if they cannot use that source code to affect the binary versions of the code they am working with by changing and recompiling the code. What the various versions of GPL provide is that freedom as it applies to binaries, and thereby when people care too much about source code my contention is that they are a developer, not a user.

When a library is under BSD, for example, and is compiled into a program statically, it does not matter at all whether the developer using it was kind enough to provide the source code to all of their modifications: from the perspective of the user of the binary the freedom to change the software they are using has been lost, even if they are a developer. This is what the LGPL guarantees: not directly that the source code is available (though it does), but that any binary distribution that uses the library also provides the means required to replace the binary of the code with a modified version based on the source.

Moving to the full GPL, what is gained is the "viral" guarantee that this ability to get the source of a binary is maintained as people attempt to use the benefits of the licensed work in a larger binary. The license, philosophically and legally, is not about a property of the source code: it is a property of the binary being distributed; the result is that people who rely on the works of others in their binaries have to make the entire binary open and modifiable to end users. That's what makes GPL so interesting: it is a license about binaries and what the rules are surrounding how people can modify those binaries, and is only tangentially related to source code as the means by which these binaries will be modified.

Of course, as TiVo taught mainstream, there is a loophole: you can comply with GPL2 fully and yet users are able to lose these guaranteed freedoms if the binary software is verified by some kind of hardware lock: Android being open source is academically interesting, but provides no value to the owner of a device with a locked bootloader; GPL2 required the binaries to relate to source code in ways that failed to take into account cryptographic verification by unmodifiable firmware. This is why the GPL3 exists: to provide this freedom of modification to the binaries sitting on my hardware devices, and effectively moves the freedoms being guaranteed from the "binaries" all the way to the product itself.
Whose "problem" is economic equality? It doesn't sound like it should be the responsibility of the companies that happen to reside in/near the Valley. Google's mission statement is to index the Internet, not to bolster the Valley, so they optimize accordingly. The companies and its residents don't owe their cities anything. Living there is merely an implementation detail.

Granted, I think it would be nice if San Francisco wasn't left in the dust so to speak... But I can't think of how keeping the city propped up in a certain way aligns with people's and corporations' natural inclinations.

It doesn't add up any other way, I don't think. What is happening is perfectly logical. Maybe unfortunate. But logical.
I am curious, what different data mining techniques uses Palantir? or is it just that they have access to difficult to find information?
There is the critique that if that energy and money were instead directed toward Muni and BART, everyone would benefit.
Ask HN: Interested in the Hyperloop and digital media? Comment here
This is incredible. Yes, it would be insanely cool to live in 2500s with all that privately affordable faster-than-light travel and everything but still... it's very exciting to see the progress being made by private/commercial space programs. I wish them all luck. It must be an amazing feeling to be a part of all this.

This is actually the only thing that's giving me hope that man could really step a foot on Mars or mine valuable resources on asteroids in a (hopefully) not too distant future.
It amazes me how the examples given in the article as displays of wealth don't resonate with me at all.

In the Middle East, you have Sheiks creating gigantic palaces that rival wonders of the world, all for their display of wealth and power.

In the Balkans, you have rich gypsies throwing money on women at their weddings and carrying more bling on them than you will ever have in your lifetime.

I just left SF for a bit after living in SoMa for a year. People should understand that spending YOUR money on YOUR wedding to make it special is not an exorbitant display of wealth. Neither is having a corporate jet area at an airport or a charter of private buses for that matter.

It could be worse; much worse.
? Maybe I used the wrong lingo, but my intimation was that one use something like Q.
It's back up, mostly.
The water analogy is hard to understand. As I said below:

At a fundamental level, backscatter modulation is little more than a reflector that modulates its radar cross section. You could imagine building massive spinning reflectors to serve the same purpose at very low datarates.

Basically, you're looking for the presence (or absence) of reflections over time. Your "baffle" needs to be able to change it's state to change how much of the wave it's reflecting, and the receiver needs to be able to detect the minute changes in the reflections. On the receiving side, you'd have another "duck" that generates waves to exactly cancel out the incoming "big" (direct) waves through destructive interference (but this new duck's waves don't propagate to the rest of the system). Then, all you're left with at the receiver are the small reflection waves, which you measure changes in over time. [See, it's hard to visualize for water.]

For RF signals, this is done by mixing with a local copy of the carrier, low-pass (or bandpass) filtering the baseband signals, and then running symbol correlators. For ambient backscatter... I presume they have to do carrier recovery for their own LO.
My understanding is the main complaints are that they're massive and block traffic and they also often illegally make use of public transportation's bus stops, which can force blocked public transportation into letting out their psssengers onto the street.
Why don't you just bring your product to the hospital where you work?
It does not make sense to group peoples reaction to choice like this. As a counter example Apple products are very popular in the USA and other Western Countries, and Apple does not give you many choices.
Where does OpenStack go from here?
Video Games Live: Level 3! Game composers of the world unite
I think that the SDK is way ahead of OpenNI. Soon the more enhanced features of the new Kinect will make their way into games too!
Just remember that it is indiegogo and not kickstater. The project still gets funded even if the target is not reached.
Flickr co founder launches new startup Slack to disrupt group communication
"Heck, who here hasn't been reminded by gmail that you said you 'attached' something, but you don't have attachments?"

Is this something that requires Google servers to inspect your mail? Pretty much every email client I have ever used does this even if I have no Internet connection. It is really a matter of matching a regular expression and checking if there are any attachments to a message being composed.
Totally misplaced anger by non-techies - the housing problem in SF is down to the planning restrictions.
Scaling Apache Giraph to a trillion edges
On what principle should "making huge amounts of money because you are top tier" be illegal? And with what filters?
The problem is the SF City gov. They are destroying everything they want to protect about the city by restricting housing developments.
Ben Haggerty is macklemore's name...
Big Data Startup Datadog is a Monitoring-as-a-Service for DevOps
I was responding to this, specifically: "The laws in SF are as renter friendly as you can get in this country. I'm not sure what all the fuss is about."

If those tenant friendly laws are de facto easy to work around - and they are, particularly for poorer tenants - then they are significantly weaker than they seem. That's what the fuss is about. Poorer people get driven out because they don't have the time and money to fight their landlords trying to double their rent, whether legal or not. Richer people like me are able to fight it and win.

I don't think you understand California or San Francisco rental laws. They do not say you get to perpetually live in an apartment even if the owner doesn't want you there. They control how much a landlord can raise rent, and limit some forms of eviction. But they also have many exceptions, and the burden can be on the tenant to prove the landlord is wrong.
I think that dichotomy is not quite right - you're saying that without the buses, the Google and Apple folk would still be in SF, they'd just be polluting more.

The other possibility is that far more people would live close to work, in the South Bay.

I saw the latter happen. The buses enabled an exodus to SF. This puts pressure on housing cost.
Meh. Welcome to the party, a couple of years late. I'll stick with Balanced. Fantastic product, incredible support. Not even a question. Braintree's bread and butter is card processing. Balanced's is marketplaces / payouts.
I've read they often make use of public bus stops, blocking the publicly funded transportation system.
I also recommend Pianomania (2009): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1331115/

There are clips on youtube.
nslookup nytimes.com

Server:	127.0.1.1

Address:	127.0.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:

Name:	nytimes.com

Address: 170.149.168.130

Name:	nytimes.com

Address: 170.149.172.130

going to http://170.149.168.130 works but going to nytimes.com doesnot work. Whats going on here?
I think it's due to expectations. Every single time I read about psychology research there are these glaring gaps in methodology that completely nullify their experiments.
After losing track of how many psych papers have used statistics wrongly, planned their experiment poorly or had seriously questionable methodology I have lost faith in this field. It's too much work going through a paper every time something reaches the news.

I therefore make the very personal and questionable choice to ignore (most of) them and go straight to the neuroscience people - which in general have a way higher understanding and higher scientific standards.
I didn't, by any means, intend to say it is not a good setup or denigrate you. I don't think anyone is wrong for using, even big teams, and I might even use the setup myself for certain projects. Only that it is rare to find really good full-stack developers, and those developers willing to work equally on both ends of the stack. And that a majority of work is thinking about the architecture and product; only hand waving 5% of the time is going to be spent context switching languages. I'd lose most of that time not having a richer language than what JS 1.5 offers, and if backend JS ever gets 1.7+ features, I am certain the browsers are not in the same stride, at which point I lose again.
I have gone through similar feelings and you raise a great point: The buses from Google, Facebook, etc. are far better than those same companies quietly doing nothing as their employees clog the freeways, which is very common among other companies but basically invisible. So they get crap for doing a good thing.

Here's the flipside, although I've never heard anyone actually make the first argument:

-Google the company actively dodges taxes, albeit through tactics common in the corporate world. So while it is pampering its own employees, it is undermining public transit by not paying nearly its fair share into the federal (and likely state) pools that help fund the transit for everyone else. Thus, Google is actively exacerbating inequality.

-Google's buses use public land intended for public transit to provide "stops" for its employees. Google can clearly afford to compensate for this, but, as far as I know, does not do so. This at a time when Muni and other transit agencies could really use the money. Free rent for large corporations is never going to be popular.

-Although there are environmental benefits to the buses, Google, Facebook, etc. are almost certainly not motivated primarily by the environmental benefits but by self interest. In other words, the freeways are full, and getting to South Bay each morning is a nightmare. And yet many desirable engineers etc prefer to live in SF vs South Bay. Hence, the buses, which make it easier for these companies to recruit. This competitive element then puts pressures on other smaller internet companies to run their own buses, even if those buses are not particularly full or if they are driving large distances within SF to pick up only a small number of people or single person at a given stop.
You're making the same argument as the post, it's worth reading. He is saying that telling people they can't use "literally" as an exaggeration is wrong because words mean what you want them to.

He is also explaining that the dictionaries that have updated "literally" to show this usage are not dictating anything, they merely reflect the way the word is being commonly used.
OP here. Great comment, thank you. I'm definitely a proponent of execution > ideas. I hope I made that clear in the post by saying:

"I don't mind that their app does exactly the same thing as mine. Or that I could lose business over it. It's that they've slavishly copied the minor details that I'm so proud of."

The minor details I think are a result of execution, not the ideation. However I think you'd disagree - would love to hear more on 'executing at a high level'.
Ask HN: History project
I have a friend who is a history teacher who is toying with the idea of having his students make a map of history, like this:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/08/12/the_1931_histomap_the_entire_history_of_the_world_distilled_into_a_single.html

If you were in his place, what software would you use to make a professional-looking map?
There have been many variations of these basic ideas for a while.

Hyperloop is different in that it does not require a full vacuum, but just a low-pressure atmosphere, which make the tubes much cheaper to build an maintain. It also does not require magnetic levitation along the full length of the tube (like the Chinese proposal uses), as it uses an air cushion provided by that a compressor that sucks in that low-pressure atmosphere, further reducing the cost of building the tube. It merely uses occasional magnetic linear motors spaced out along the route to accelerate and decelerate the pod, spending most of its time coasting on its air cushion.

So, while it does share design features with many previously proposed systems, it is not exactly the same as what has been proposed before. There's a good reason why people have been talking about evacuated tube transport for centuries but no one has actually achieved it on a practical scale; the hope is that the low-pressure design will be much cheaper than the evacuated tube design.

Now, I am somewhat skeptical of the incredibly low numbers that Elon Musk quotes, especially relative to the much more well understood high-speed rail he's comparing it to. But you shouldn't dismiss it just because there are some superficial similarities to previously proposed systems; as far as I know (and I haven't done much research, so I could be wrong), this is the first such system that proposes using low pressure, a compressor on the front of the pod to deal with the problem of the air mass not being able to flow around it, and an air cushion to support the pod taking advantage of the air taken in by the compressor.
We rewrote tesla.im in AngularJS.
The submitted link has a section on technical benefits to FreeBSD for making this switch which directly links to clang's website for what this submitted link's accepted answer considers the "most notable" technical benefit.
list of projects http://raspberry.io/projects/
Hopefully the folks at Twilio are following this thread.

For all the awesome things about Twilio, its pricing at serious volume is very shitty. I was recently talking to a start-up that makes apps for call centers. He blamed the super high price relative to their competitor on Twilio's pricing. The start-up's competitor uses Plivo.

May be Twilio believes they can survive without taking part in price wars. We'll see.
To continue your thought experiment, another researcher designs a new, double-blind trial of gourds, and discovers that while gourds per se have no effect, the placebo effect is statistically significant.

There is no explanation for WHY expectations would effect outcomes. In fact, any explanation at this stage would be provisional and highly suspect. And yet, there it is. What are we to do, ignore this phenomenon as if it didn't exist? Question the statistical ability of the researcher, and all other researchers who document a placebo effect?

And lo, the messenger. Ready, aim, fire.
Fourth Amendment: renting a home is sufficient probable cause for a search
Not to mention he linked to several "bullshit" articles, thus perpetuating more of the same.
Apparently HTML5 apps can use your microphone without your consent
I feel dumb for not knowing this, but I also know that I wouldn't pursue suing the cloners. Would prefer to learn a little from them, then out-compete.
Yes, but on the other hand if all these private companies used their capital to contribute building a decent public transportation system instead of building parallel ones, that would be far better for everybody.

In any other developed country in the world, it would take less than 30 minutes to go from SF to Palo Alto with a modern train.
If you're implying anyone can have eidetic memory by "removing their limits"

What I said is that most people don't try to memorize things because they think that they can't.

Most people memorize things by simple repetition

Sure, and most people don't try to memorize things because (again) they think that they can't no matter what technique they use.

I don't buy it

I'm not selling anything. I'm merely passing on my own experiences and those of my friends. If you choose to continue to believe you can't memorize things because of some innate lack of ability, it doesn't affect me at all.
You're right, history hasn't been kind. The F-4 going into service with only missiles an no internal cannon is a pretty good example. After all, the new missiles would overcome and air combat maneuvering was a thing of the past.
Not as impressive? Come on. Like we were all doing things like this on our backyards in 1995.

Given historical context this is as much as impressive as what SpaceX are doing right now.
I'm not really sure what you guys are arguing about... obviously observations and descriptions are an important first step toward developing scientific theories. Lutusp seems to be complaining about people who feel descriptions are sufficient and make no effort to discern the underlying mechanism. Is there really disagreement on this point?

If there is, then maybe this is just a debate about Instrumentalism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism
Google: Gmail users "have no reasonable expectation of privacy"
> You're making the same argument as the post, it's worth reading.

Yes, I know, I read it. My objection was only to the article's misleading title.
What makes the DC-X so freaking amazing to me is compare the sensors and computers you had available in 1995 to ones you have available today.

It is a great illustration of the 'ecosystem effect' where adjacent technology advances move the entire frontier of a technology forward.
>This would be just like the Nazi mistake of always ending messages in "Heil Hitler".

Got any source for that? Closest I can find is a Polish cryptologist facetiously adding "Heil Hitler!" to ENIGMA encrypted messages he sent to Britain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo
I don't mean to stir controversy but I am curious how many countries are thinking 'I want one of these for my military'.

Hear me out, wouldn't this technology allow for more advanced ballistic flight across Earth and perhaps even become more efficient than anti-ballistic missiles, evading any 'danger'?.
GoSquared Redesign
Not quite up there with building the atomic bomb but with about the same amoral structure.

Sorry but I cannot admire that.
I don't like these maps -- not giving a clear picture. For example, 26 weeks paid maternal leave in the Congo.
Really cool. What's the technology behind this?
Good

Not to mention it doesn't take almost a full year to get like the H1B

Getting B1 level in German should be not so complicated and attainable in, let's say, 18 months.
Here is a story from using the Plivo APIs, that convinced me that these guys are for enterprises and serious businesses.

We were looking at different telephony APIs to build a highly concurrent calling system. With Twilio, we could only send one phone number in a single http call. That was a bummer. With Plivo, we could send as many phone numbers as a http POST can handle, and let their APIs handle the high number of calls per second. We were pleasantly surprised that they do so much of the heavy lifting.
SoundFocus (YC S13) Launches With an App for ‘20/20 Hearing’