skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lightning is elegant precisely because it is not backwards compatible. This connector is. You can plug a usb 2.0 micro cable in it and it will work properly.

If we are willing to throw everything out, you could make something brand new and shiny like lightning too.
That's true. The draw is quite a bit higher than for a simple electric motor, but as devices use less and less power in the future, it should at least be available for some.

Something like a Moto Fone shouldn't need cables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_FONE
So then diet and exercise are a proven effective way for you to control your weight. Except for the fact that you wish you could eat more. But why do you want to eat more? You can't be feeling "like crap" as anonymous suggested or you wouldn't even be able to train. Maybe you just enjoy food and feel it would be nice to enjoy it more often.

I think that's really where most people are at. With varying degrees of consumption capacity. So the question is, do we want to "fix" ourselves so that we can consume more just because we like to eat? I don't really feel like that's a direction we should be trying to go.
According to Eric Ries, "a startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty". "Institution" is broad enough to include nonprofits, which are explicitly mentioned in the Lean Startup book. After all, they do face similar challenges to those that companies face, as they also try to discover new sources of value and to grow... Looking forward to seeing the future YC nonprofits!
Interesting how silent we are. Obama is way worse than Bush ever was.
"For what it's worth, this is about the point where I get
off the Snowden train. It's true that some of these
disclosures are of clear public interest. In particular,
I'm thinking about the details of NSA efforts to
infiltrate and corrupt the standards setting groups that
produce commercial crypto schemes."

If anything this new information should put more people on the Snowden train. In the 90s, legislation was proposed which would have put backdoors everywhere via the Clipper Chip. Back then, we voted against that bill and all was good. This new information is shocking because we've already told the government that backdooring things was unacceptable behavior, yet they've done so anyways. We should all be outraged by this because it clearly doesn't represent the interest of the people.
That's a matter of device choice. My phone charges wirelessly.
I don't think he's saying it would be good for anyone for the NSA to continue snooping as they do. I think your first point is wrong, your last point is right, and the two are unrelated.

The issue isn't the fact that the NSA snoops. That's their job and it has value when their power to do so is used judiciously. The problem is that its not being used judiciously. Rather than singling out as few people as possible to root out the bad guys their just collecting everything they can. They don't need to do this and doing so opens up the possibility for huge abuses of power. That's the issue.

I think the article is right that the crypto revelations aren't pertinent to this discussion. I would even consider the crypto revelations a red herring. Is it important how the NSA spies on everyone? No, its only important to know that they do it at all when speaking in the context of how the Snowden leaks are important to creating a national debate and, hopefully, by some miracle, create reforms.

I think its reasonable that as a US citizen you're okay with the NSA being able to break crypto. You just want to be able to trust that they're using it against the bad guys and not you. Even now that we know they're probably using it against innocent civilians its more harmful to the NSA's ability to go after the "bad guys" when they legitimately do (and they still do serve that purpose) and isn't really helping the debate over whether their over collection of data is okay and how to reform that system.
I'm assuming a full hypervisor, like Xen, which is basically a full-blown kernel that does its own resource pooling and abstraction. A "disk" for Xen is just like a "disk" for Linux--something that presents a disk-like interface in its driver and nothing more.

Let me rephrase my previous idea. You have two kernels. One is an exokernel/library kernel, responsible only for managing the hardware[1]. It only does things when it's called into. The other is a "userspace" kernel, that does the virtual memory, process/thread management, etc. It's the one that registers interrupt vectors.

You could do this to Linux, today. Rip all the stuff that starts the machine and initializes the devices and abstracts them out, away from all the stuff that touches userspace, and put an known ABI between them. Then, take advantage of modern processors' specific support for hypervisors to make this ABI more performant.

The important idea is not that "somebody else" deals with the "drivers and stuff", leaving you free to write "just" an OS. Both the driver part and the process part can be considered part of one OS, and you can't have just one or the other, and likely the same vendor will be worrying about both. No, the important part is that each is a layer, which should be able to treat the other layer as a black box with a known interface. In exactly the same way that TCP doesn't care whether it's being carried by IP or NetBEUI, while IP doesn't care whether it's carrying TCP or UDP, moving the driver part of a kernel out into a hypervisor means that the process-management part doesn't have to care what hardware-management part it's talking to, and vice versa. An "OS stack", to match your "network stack."

Really, we already have "OS stacks" in a sense -- that's when we run a full-blown Linux kernel, running an (optionally paravirtualized) IA32/64 emulator, running another full-blown Linux kernel, running your software. This just eliminates everything redundant about that configuration, while keeping all the advantages.

---

[1] Notably, this also means that the outer kernel is responsible for permissions to the hardware. This means that each "inner kernel" running on this hardware only gets a single effective permission-set; if the one process on the inner kernel has access to a resource (a disk, say), then every process on the inner kernel has access to that resource, because the inner kernel doesn't deal with the hypercall--it goes directly to the hypervisor.

This would have been a terribly big deal 10 years ago. Now? Who runs things as more than one mutually-untrustworthy user within the same virtual machine any more? Today, if you want separate security contexts, you use containerization. Which is to say, you get the hypervisor, not the OS, to enforce resource permissions.
I think we (on HN) underestimate just how OK a large part of the US is about all of this stuff. "The terrorists" in many ways have already won: people are scared. My take on it is that a large part of the US populace (and also in other parts of the first world) believe that giving up what we on HN consider essential liberty is a fine trade-off for some extra security (real or imagined).

Yes, the Snowden disclosures have tipped many people (who were on the fence) toward an active dislike of what US intelligence agencies are doing, but I think there is still a very large percentage of people -- perhaps even still a majority -- who truly think all this makes them safer, and that the cost is worth it. I won't pretend to understand that point of view, but... there it is.
ohh yeahh, just like 'girls who code' means boys will never code. shut up.
I have read a book on this subject: http://www.amazon.fr/The-How-Happiness-Approach-Getting/dp/0.... The author wrote that happiness was defined at 50% by our genes, 10% by circumstances and 40% by intentional activities. I guess that's a non-negligible proportion we could act on.
LOL - actually, OT but lot of recent articles are showing that "young people know all about computers" is a complete falsehood.
Eh, that's the catch with building on platforms. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
> although that could entirely be due to placebo effect

If the drugs had no effect, then why are people (ab)using drugs like Adderall to improve cognition, etc?

A big problem with trying to make a science out of the brain, is that it can be very unique to the person. For example, in people that are blind since birth, the pathways in the brain that are normally used for visual processing can get re-purposed over a lifetime to be used for other things.

I'd almost say that the brain is sort of like an evolutionary algorithm. Given similar parameters, the results largely resemble each other, but alter things enough and the results can be way off.
With the iPhone in particular, the problem isn't the cable, which is fine, but with the lack of a decent dock. Lightning connectors aren't much easier to hook up in a dark room than any other connector.
Hackers can make huge money in psychology/psychiatry (both prescientific fields). Life logging and it's analysis - quantified self. Positive psychology would be the better angle to play it, unregulated, big money in the self-help culture. Mobile apps are the right medium for it. There was recent doc on it 'Monitor Me' by bbc horizon.

edit: to replyers, it didn't want to post links for everything, so

google 'monitor me bbc horizon youtube', 'quantified self', 'self help industry', 'positive psychology'
Power mat I presume? Doesn't that still require a device specific base/connector?
> I don't see why a phone shouldn't either

Any Nexus 4 can charge inductively. The problem is that the 'standard' charging docks are actually incompatible (my $80 Nokia one doesn't work), and they take about twice as long to charge.

> Plus a phone should be able to transfer data wirelessly at reasonable speed

Like, say, 802.11ac speed?
I'm not sure anyone cares about being able to plug a USB 2.0 Micro cable into a USB 3.0 device. Perhaps they should have asked somebody.
I'm a current senior Design & Development option at Penn State. The degree is basically worthless in terms of teaching you real software development. I did learn a lot about the social aspects of working for clients and working in teams, but I did not learn the proper structure to actually work on software. I literally spend all of my free time studying software development and computer science, because I know going to school will only yield me a piece of paper that will get me taken more seriously.

Here's a list of what I've done:

- Learn more languages. Penn State only teaches Java. I've worked professionally with Python, have open source projects in Go, and have read books on Erlang, Haskell, Scala, Clojure. The more languages you know the more abstract concepts you'll know that you can apply in any language.

- Watch online lectures in your free time. MIT Open Courseware, UC Berekely, Coursera, YouTube, InfoQ are all really good resources.

- Start a reading collection. I have tons of books and white papers downloaded that I read.

- Get an interest. I like distributed systems. I honestly don't know much about them, but I think the problems are interesting and I've read some of the important white papers that establish the field. Establishing an interest will help guide you down the rabbit hole.

- Get out there and do stuff. Find a project on GitHub or make one with a circle of friends. Pick something outside your comfort zone. Even if the project never sees the light of production use, you'll learn from the experience. Having your name in open source projects AUTHORS/CONTRIBUTORS files is also very nice.

I'm getting closer to graduating, so I've been reading up on algorithms and data structures again because I know I need brushing up on it. I'm close to getting a compsci minor and was recently debating just getting a masters in it instead. If you want someone to vent your experiences at PSU, feel free to drop me an email.
Does Google losing users help advertisers make sales?
The point was more along the lines of "intelligent people are generated by being born, so it's a matter of time before we face an intelligent adversary" rather than "young people are intelligent."
I never said that linkedin or google were spamming. All I was saying is that they are slightly evil and annoying. I'm also not sure I agree with your assessment of the techcrunch reviews.
Yet another bitcoin gambling site, interesting concept though
Presumably, Amazon gets enormous volume discounts for the disk drives that would be a main cost of running S3, and they run their business with notoriously tiny margins. It would seem nearly impossible to undercut them for the same product at the same level of service.
John Gilmore: NSA obstructed development of IPSEC Crypto in Linux Kernel
>If the drugs had no effect, then why are people (ab)using drugs like Adderall to improve cognition, etc?

Placebo effect is certainly an effect. But the claim is not that the drugs don't have an effect (though it's true, some work no more effective than a placebo), but that we have no sound explanation for their effects.
The molecule looks somewhat obscene.
I'm trying to understand what you're saying, but honestly I have no idea what you just said. Would you clarify your meaning?

edit to reply to your edit: no, you'll have to do much better than that if you want to actually communicate with people and not be ignored or dismissed as crazy. Would you please spend at least 10 minutes typing an explanation of (a) what are you talking about, and (b) why is it valuable?

Maybe I should point out that your edit seems to assume that most people understood part of your original comment. Actually, I think nobody understood any of it. So you'll have to rewrite what you originally said. (One strategy would be to make your comment longer and more thorough, and don't assume that anyone understands what you're saying unless you've explained it thoroughly, even if it seems obvious to you.)
Could you elaborate a bit? You lost me after life logging.
I can't any record of a Congressional vote on the subject, only that its adoption was the subject of a proposed FIPS #185. I don't think your statement above is founded in fact.

I refer you to Michael Froomkin's lengthy but readable analysis from 1996: http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/planet_clipper...
It does seem as though Apple should implement a separate optimized path for the very common case of ISO-8601 date formats.

Although I'm not sure how many people on iOS need millions of dates parsed.
I think its reasonable that as a US citizen you're okay with the NSA being able to break crypto. You just want to be able to trust that they're using it against the bad guys and not you.

This is very interesting and got me thinking. I think that yes, in principle I agree, but there are limits.

I draw a distinction between types of "breaking encryption". There's the standard kinda that "anyone" can do: social engineering, secret mathematical hacks, 0day exploits, brute force attacks, etc.

Then there's the special stuff that only organizations in the position of the NSA can do: putting backdoors in cryptosystems (and pressuring commercial vendors to do so), influencing development of new cryptosystems to make them weaker, etc.

I'm ok with the first set of methods, but not the latter. When you weaken a cryptosystem, you weaken it for everyone, not just the people you want to be able to spy on. Even if the NSA's activities were completely above-board and their power was used appropriately, weaker crypto that everyone uses means that no one can trust their crypto, whether it's to secure corporate communications, keep discussion of an unpopular idea secret, or just trust that when you access your bank's website, a random attacker can't use an NSA backdoor to steal your banking info.
This being said, the backwards compatibility of the next generation will look fearsome.
It's also the case in the UK. What makes you think I was thinking of US libel law? I'm not American
Being directional makes it sort of suck. I'm all for backwards comparability but this is one of the original design flaws of USB. I hope they fix it at the cost of losing backwards compatability some day.
I have approx. 500 links since I started using my own developed "Pins" app (couple of months ago). Check it out: http://hmpgr.com/apps/pins, Invite Code: HN
The font on this page looks bad in Chrome 29, Windows 8. No antialising. Looks ok in Firefox though.
There's a lot of 47" 3D-capable sets in the $500 range available now and you can throw on a cheap Android box for $50 and have the same thing. A built-in version like this one from Vizio (http://www.walmart.com/ip/VIZIO-47-Class-Theater-3D-LCD-HDTV...) is $598 so I'm not getting why it's making waves?
There are many examples already in use. At least Palm Touchstone (charging lots of late palm phones and the touchpad) and Qi (Nexus 4, Galaxy S3, some htc phones) are out there and usable.
Article 12. (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
Interesting, and thanks for the response. If I may probe a little further, I have a couple of follow-up questions.

1) Server groups of at least 3 mirrored servers, with a max of 5TB.

This seems like an interesting design choice. What do you mean by "at least"? Does this mean you'll have some data with more replicas? Are these server pools filled up and then powered down until they are needed? How do you choose which server pool to send the data to? And since you have a mirrored set of servers, when do you send a response back to the client?

Is the 5TB number something that is a limit for the storage server (ie 15TB total for a cluster of 3)? That seems rather low. It also doesn't divide evenly into common drive sizes available from HDD vendors today. So what kind of density are you getting in your storage servers? How many drives per CPU, and how many TB per rack? Since you're advertising on low price, I'd think very high density would be pretty important.

2) You say you split data into smaller chunks if it crosses some threshold. Let's suppose you split it into 1MB objects, once the data is bigger than 5MB. And each 1MB chunk is then written to some server pool which has replicated storage (via the mirroring). How do you tie the chunks back to the logical object? Do you have a centralized metadata layer that stores placement information? If so, how do you deal with the scaling issue there? If not, another option would be to store a manifest object that contains the set of chunks. But in either case, you've got a potentially very high number of servers that are required to be available at the time of a read request in order to serve the data.

Just as an example (and using some very conservative examples), suppose I have a 100MB file I want to store and you chunk at 10MB. So that means there are now 10 chunks replicated in your system, for a total of 30 unique drives. Now when I read the data, your system needs to find which 10 servers pools have my chunks and then establish a connection with one of the servers in each server group. This seems like a lot of extra networking overhead for read requests. What benefits does it provide that offset the network connection overhead?

And what happens when one of the chunks is unavailable? Can you rebuild it from the remaining pieces (which would essentially be some sort of erasure encoding)?

Overall, the chunking and mirroring design choices seem to me like they would introduce a lot of extra complexity into the system. I'd love to hear more about how you arrived at these choices, and what you see as their advantages.

In order to not make my long post even longer, I'll not pursue more questions around listings, failures, or hot content.
All the latest revelations show is that corporate and consumer encryption is just corporate and consumer encryption. It's never going to phase a state sponsored intelligence organ. What they can't decrypt, they buy, what the cannot buy they subvert or cripple or backdoor.

In fairness, it would be grossly unprofessional if they did not. The three letter agencies take pride in their craft and part of their job is staying in front of any wide spread encryption technology.
There should be one standard for wireless charging, but I'm afraid we'll end up with just one more if that's the case. Obligatory http://xkcd.com/927

802.11ac Will do nicely. It's supposed to be gigabit capable (allegedly). Considering we've been transferring files between PCs at that speed for a while, it's about time this came to wireless.
Advice & The Recency Effect
Try reading it again, this time without reducing a persons life into a bullet-point list of what he did and didn't do. As other replies are pointing out — it's the whole situation from day one that creates a situation like that if Chris'. If you think you can solve that by saying its because of laziness, you really ought to read up on how people have been made to change throughout history: by being given a fair chance to succeed. How many times have you risen from the ashes, yourself?
I'm doing the Algorithms course on Coursera. It's fantastic. Interesting and practical, and taught by Princeton's Sedgewick. I have a BSc in AI and 20 years professional experience yet I'm still learning a lot from this course each week.
>>What does a 12 on a scale of 1 to 10 even mean?

Integer overflow!
I'm on the cusp of buying it - the $59 for the package is probably a bit much, the $29 is alright, but definitely not an impulse buy.

I guess you've done your pricing research - but the consensus, at least on HN, seems to be that $20 is a price most people would just go for, but as you get higher, people really want to know what justifies the higher price. It is a free-market economy, I know, but if you can somehow justify the higher price, then you'll have a lot more sales, and a lot more happy people willing to spread the word.

The fact that most O'Reilly/Pragmatic Programmer/Manning books - which are generally very good quality, well-proofed and technical - are priced around the $20-$30 mark doesn't help things.
Nobody except everyone with existing chargers, cables, etc. Have you never gone out with a phone and realised you're low on charge and need to plug in? Backwards compatibility is a major win here.
Hi, please consider making your text less giant. E.g. compare the typography of http://screencast.com/t/lvyIZqbUExW

vs

http://screencast.com/t/7RcJcMPNff
Indeed, there was "Designing Web Applications" by Nathan Barry for instance. See discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4909784 . Very similar discussion on pricing by the way...
What about the millions who want to use the car phone charger they brought for their last phone?
I suppose if you had one RNG that's 0wned by the NSA, and another that's 0wned by the Chinese MSS, and another by the Russian FSB... and you assume they never ever work together or crack each others' systems, you could XOR their results together.
Huh? There's a whole section about how the average person can go an entire month without eating at all because eating is not even entirely necessary. One guy went over a year with only water and vitamins and lost over 200lbs. And if I recall correctly from previous reading that guy actually kept the weight off for years. Nothing about a life of continuous starvation and suffering.
If you can find the depression of the home button on an iOS device, you know where the Lightning or 30-pin dock connector goes into.

I believe this has been the case with every iOS device (but not necessarily every iPod device, some of which had the connector shifted to one side or the other) since the beginning.

Hand a blindfolded person an iOS device and Lightning cable end, and they'd likely be able to put the two together fairly quickly if they've ever touched any other iOS device before.

It does suck for docks though, as it's not wide enough to balance on like the 30-pin connector was.