skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Petrol assisted bikes, where a bike is retrofitted with a small 30cc engine, is hugely popular around Buenos Aires. I saw lots of them when I visited recently and they were fairly cheap apparently.
The Best Press Is Your Own Press
How To Get Started Contributing To Open Source
I have to confess that the more I learn about emacs, the more I am curious about just what is new in the world of editors/ides. I mean, I understand that the thread model in emacs is supposed to be lacking, but it really seems that the only difference between emacs and so many of the "modern" alternatives, is that emacs is written in elisp, the others are not. Am I missing something more fundamental?
I haven't used a Herman Miller chair, so I don't claim to understand why they are popular, but from a purely aesthetic view of the world, that is a very nice looking chair.

Can someone enlighten me as to what the big deal is about Herman Miller chairs?
Popular Unity Game Engine Adds iOS 7 Game Controller Support
What a testimonial to how out of touch people on HN are. "The people love him." Really? Depending on what poll you look at, some large percentage of the public (30-40%) considers him a traitor. Even the people who agree with what he did wouldn't ever vote for him (they care more about issues like abortion, social security, etc).
...the only radio in it is Bluetooth...

I guess I just assumed from the comment in the video about SMS that it would integrate a Qualcomm chip or something. But now that you mention it, that seems a stretch. Such a component would serve no other purpose, and really change the pricing.

...the first line of electric bicycles...

Really suspect that "the" should be "our". I have sympathy for non-native speakers of English, but this is an error that ought to be fixed, since it really undermines their credibility.
Colonels at the Pentagon are a dime a dozen. But a Colonel in the field - away from DC - might be a base commander. When I was a civilian working for the military and participating in/attending meetings, briefings, etc., we didn't even stand for Generals entering the room (which is protocol) unless the General had at least 2 stars. . .and not always then, depending on the level of the brass in the room.
But the iPhone (normally) has a 3G/4G data connection.
Anyone ported this or something like it to phones/tablets, yet?
Ways to make money online, 200 of them
First 5 Hires: How GitHub's Happy Hive Started With A "Badass" Team
Could you clarify this? I'm not overly familiar with California's rates, but I've looked at what seem to be the two most prominent providers (PG&E and SCE), and neither of them have rates higher than 35 cents even at their top tiers. And there is no mention of increased rates during peak hours or days (I'm not even entirely sure what would define a peak day).
Yes gak,

"He wasn't proven innocent" is a rhetorical attack that can be made against virtually anyone who has been tried and not convicted in the US.

Indeed doubly off-topic as this is a civil matter.

But it still should be noted that, given prosecutors in the US have a high (up to 90%+) conviction rate, not being proven guilty is pretty good as far as exoneration goes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate
Unless you're disabled, why do people want an electric bicycle? I figured most people cycle because they love cycling and the exercise of it. Including hills. Is this product meant to attract more automobilist?
Ten essential tips for searching the Web
We're also going to read one sentence of your copy and assume that we know everything about how it works. We're going to draw a quick conclusion despite have never developed anything in that space and assert that your product has fundamental flaws without understanding your research, your market, or your funding model. We're going to compare your product to previous market failures despite fundamental differences that actually go so far as the previous product never having been produced.

But hopefully you'll still be able to get something useful out of this crowd :D
This is spot on. When you hear NetBSD developers arguing about proposals (or commits, ex post facto, like here), there is often mention of "users". But these are mostly fictional.

I think this is true of much open source software. Just for the sake of example, a few years ago the Gnome devs removed some printer config options because they decided the "users" didn't need so many options. It's not that Gnome doesn't have users, but the developers seemed to have some notion of a type of user that didn't really exist.

I think more often than not, fictional users are used as justification for the addition of some nice-to-have feature, but of course I'm just speculating.
Some people (myself included) cycle as a commute. It can be exhausting - I wouldn't mind a little help on those uphills.
This is a really nice :)
Firebase added firebase integration[0] to this, I hope that would be really cool.

I'm not there could be an possible integration with Meteor too.

[0] - https://github.com/firebase/togetherjs
Will Google Punish a Guest Posting Strategy Due to Unnatural Link Patterns?
completely agree- until then, URX's Turnpike Open Source library will have to do!
My understanding is that the health insurance is still better than what is typically available for private sector employees. The pension system is not nearly as good as it used to be, true, but it does exist, which is not true for most private sector employees.

I've worked both sides of the fence, so I'm not flinging arrows.
A Novel Idea: Write a Book with GitHub
Snowden Journalist’s New Venture to Be Bankrolled by eBay Founder
Not unrealistic if you happen to 25 miles away (journey each way) but definitely not your "average commuter". (I used to cycle 20 miles each way, I knew someone that cycled 35 miles, but for different reasons than just commuting).
> Do you categorize vaccination as modern medicine, or as public health?

It depends on what point you're trying to make. E.g. if you're talking about contribution of pharmaceutical drugs to longevity, then it doesn't make sense to include vaccines since they're not drugs. If you're talking about the contributions of modern medicine as a whole, then it make sense to include all the vaccines developed roughly since Dr. Gold popularized the gold standard clinical trials, so sometime in the mid to late 1950s. Or if you're talking about the contributions of the western medical system as a whole since its inception, then it probably makes sense to include all vaccines, etc.
Possibly that the device won't stand up well to the rigors of regular riding? Potholes, curbs, railroad tracks, stairs, etc.? With all those different batteries, if any particular solder connection fails say once a year on average, this would be totally unusable after a few months.
But it has NOT been done before! The Copenhagen Wheel is not available for purchase. And even it had been done before, what's wrong with putting it on Kickstarter? There's no require for strict novelty. Finally, the project member noted some additional differences.
It's awesome to see this work finally hit the tree. Now, I cannot say I agree with all of the motivations. For example, I do not believe that prototyping should be done in kernel mode at all, nor do I believe that using Lua will shield from incorrect operation or crashes. However, there is already proof that device drivers can be written in Lua (https://github.com/SnabbCo/snabbswitch), and it's great to see more push in that direction.

After all, why use C if you have a working alternative? We just need real world experiments to see if Lua is a working alternative for the kernel.
URX's ads are only shown to users who already have a given app installed. If a user uninstalls an app and sees a deeplink ad before our systems refresh, they will be directed to the app store on click.
If you slow the bike from either the front wheel or the back wheel, energy is removed from the whole bike. There's little to no benefit from harvesting from both wheels.
Heh. Some of us might. There's no shortage of cynicism to go around, here and everywhere.

On the other hand, what does the HN crowd say about technologies they really do find uninteresting and unimportant? Absolutely nothing. They drop right off the bottom of "NEW" without a single comment.

Edit: And to be fair, most market-speak is so vapid that we often only get one meaningful line of copy stating the purpose of a thing and a picture showing us its general physical shape to go on. We have to deduce everything else from that. In short, we've gotten used to disappointment.
shameless self-promotion - I wrote a perceptual hasher for PHP : https://github.com/kennethrapp/phasher

FWIW the biggest problem with this is false positives, though admittedly I may just not be clever enough to do it with enough finesse.
ETFB --

Hey man, author here.

I'll admit, starting out (back in 2006) the business was a little shady with regards to can-spam, but for the specific MLS area my business served, it was the norm for realtors to send eblasts to each other. (the MLS sold the email list on the basis of "prior business relationship" because all the realtors were apart of the same area board.)

That said, in 2007 I sent out a double optin request, and nuked my list from ~40K to ~5k to really make sure things were above board.

This crushed my business, so I spent ~$15k in Adwords building a double opt-in list of customers that wanted email updates about luxury properties.

That was the REAL value and how I was able to scale the business past 6 figures and sell it in 2010.

I appreciate your concern even though I despise ad hominem arguments. ;)
Nope, just salary.
But most importantly, there is no patent protection for the Copenhagen wheel.
What I'm not clear here is whether this does regenerative braking, or only charges at home. If it's regenerative, it's awesome and I want it. I've actually wanted to do a DIY regenerative braking project for a bike for a long time (impracticality and net-loss-due-to-added-weight would not really bother me as long as it worked). Somehow, if it's only charged at home, I feel like it's kind of silly, like a way to make biking lazier.

Still, in any case it would be awesome in that it would make biking practical in hilly areas where it is otherwise a horrible mode of transportation.
Li more abundant in the Earth's crust than Cu, Zn, or Ni. I don't think we're going to run out any time soon.
My parents are deeaaaaaaad!
As I recall, an ATT executive, when hearing about the early plans for ARPAnet, said something along the lines of "it can't work, and if it could, we'll be damned if we help create a competitor to ourselves".
Are there any sites which list the deep-linking schemas for popular apps? Or where app developers can share their schema for others to use?
Or.. charges for a subscription and becomes a sustainable "lifestyle business". Which seems to be more typical of the "lean startup" approach.
Reading comprehension is not HN's strong suit.

Or basic arithmetic. 30,000 miles in a year is about 3 x 30 mile trips per day, every day.
Not totally sure either, but my best guess is they're aesthetically pleasing and supposedly ergonomically great, which is I guess appreciated amongst the crowd that spends all day sitting in front of them.

They seem to have a fair amount of research to back up their ergonomics (see this blog post regarding Aeron chair design: http://www.hermanmiller.com/research/solution-essays/the-ben...)
Schedule a software update rather than race automatic rapid deployment
From the Kickstarter page:

"The battery also charges when you’re going above the desired speed, riding downhill or pedaling with the motor off."
What constitutes a charging cycle? Connected to the mains? What about all those micro charges you get along your journey, going downhill or braking?

Presumably the battery capacity will diminish over time, and you have some smart software to counter that as much as possible? Any expectations on how much the range will reduce by? Will the app tell us the range?

Really interesting project, looking forward to it.
Can you give some insights on why to avoid Hazelcast or friends for distributed system?

I can give my sample usages. I mainly used it for organizing the cluster automatically, like managing membership, server joining or leaving, maintaining the master server address list. With a distributed hash scheme like Soda, any member server can accept work from any client. Scaling out is very simple, just boot up a machine from an image. It would use Hazelcast to join the cluster and become available.

I also used it for distributing jobs, nice to able to say - queue these jobs and the distributed workers pick them up automatically.

I avoid using it for shared memory stuff, using it like Memcached. That's what Memcached, Redis, and friends are for.
Cars cost a few thousand a year + large initial investment. Lots of people bike in cities because they can't afford to drive/pay insurance/gas/parking.
How is that 10K date even possible? If the first migration to the americas happened ~16K years ago - then there were populations isolated for at least that long. Aboriginal Australians reached Australia something like 40K years ago. It's not hard for me to imagine that there is at least one Aboriginal Australian who's ancestry is ... what's the right word ... does not contain any Europeans.

This is a case where the objection to the argument presented in the article is so obvious to me I feel like I'm missing something. (wouldn't be the first time!) It almost sounds like they wrote a computer program that was seriously abstracted and when run it spit out "3000 BP" and now "they" are interpreting that result literally.
You would lose going downhill (when you don't need it) and gain going uphill (when you do). Seems sensible to me.
I'm 33 yrs old. I've never not spoken to my parents for more than 14 days ever in my life.

From the link, I gather that you feel under societal pressure to stay in constant touch with your parents, even when you don't wish to.

Is someone physically holding a gun to your head? If not ... you, and only you, are responsible for the conduct of your own life.
They already are for the FlyKly Smart Light! :-p
Did these guys just reinvent the Web?
xx56 at cornell.edu

thanks!
Detailed Street View comes to Mumbai, not from Google
This is superb street view for Mumbai. Every street and nook & corner is covered. Not at all an easy task to achieve in a city like Mumbai. If you have been there you would agree with me.

Google should buy this company for like a billion dollars right away!!

The URL here shows street view of my apartment which was demolished 4 months ago. So I assume that they are collecting this data since a while. This thing is so much better than Google's own street view offering in US. So much contextual information & layering.
Ah, I see what you're saying. The point being that you still have the GC for any non-asm.js code on the same page. And I suppose by the same token, you could "opt out" of GC without asm.js by using various techniques to eliminate allocations.
Obama Demands $1.1 Trillion Ransom or He Will Crash Global Economy
I mentioned that on Twitter. It turns out that those are the limits according to the laws in US (20 mph) and EU (25 km/h), so it's top speed is limited accordingly depending on the country it's in. It's also an amazingly confusing way of putting it.
I believe the season doesn't start until 29 November[1]

The method of calculating scoring is available at [2]. It doesn't make much sense to me though - it appears the second place competitor only gets 0.53 points?

(Now I know way more about cross country skiing than I did this morning)

[1] http://www.fiscrosscountry.com/data/document/media-informati...

[2] http://www.fis-ski.com/data/document/fis-points-rules-2012-2...
Is it doing kinetic energy recovery? My reading was it was 'only' a rechargeable assist motor.

EDIT:

dangooer found the relevant part of the page. It does KER. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6563287
It's not practical for many to arrive at work sweaty from a bike ride. It a commuter vehicle.
I tried Xerneas (new legendary) but it is still in the process of researching. Also, for those who haven't played pokemon in a while, it's much more than just type match-ups, no matter what the anime leads you to think. There is much more strategy involved as it is a somewhat detailed RPG.
Why Is The Video Ad Industry So Slow To Adopt HTML5 As Standard?
The four commandments of starting a tech product company
Must be a scam...
Shameless self promotion: I'm the creator of an Android app for the Hue called LampShade.io that also supports this (and a ton of other features!)
Dash is a free coding course that'll teach you how to make CSS robots
>That doesn't sound like a better world. That sounds like a worse one.

It sounds like a dystopian cyberpunk nightmare. And who better to lead us into the world of High Tech and Low Life than Silicon Valley Zaibatsus? I can never really tell when art and life are imitating each other.
While the article said about "holiday PC lineup", is the upcoming machines confirmed for Windows machines?
I have this on my BionX system. I think regen braking is fairly a no brainer these days.
We'll never have it so good again
That doesn't make sense. GPS is not a transmitter. Will you include an embedded 3G SIM card (like a Kindle)? I'm not sure how you will get the GPS coordinates to the smartphone 10 miles away.
If they did this for League of Legends characters and build calculations, I'd never leave the site.
I use f.lux and think it's great. I recently started taking a small amount (~1.5mg) of melatonin after reading a post[0] by Gwern and the accompanying discussion on HN[1]. I find that taking it ~30 minutes before I want to go to bed makes it much, much easier to "tear myself away" from the computer, book, etc. and go to bed.

0. http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495358
IANAMechanicalEngineer, but do we need to worry about additional stress on the left dropout? The forces to which this component is typically subjected are the weight of the system and the tension of the chain. This device would seem to add an additional torque associated with driving the wheel via the pill-shaped peg that slides into the dropout.

This probably wouldn't be an issue for most bikes, but it seems like it's outside the design specs for any existing bike.
Will this only work with single speed bikes? What about bikes with gears in the front and/or back, they will need to be converted to single speed I presume?
I take my kid to school in mine, and get groceries etc.
Is Microsoft deliberately misleading buyers over Surface 2?
This seems too good to be true. I tried researching it, and apparently there is nothing on the internet at all about this company.

Can anyone confirm that this is legitimate?
Thanks for your explanation, that's fascinating.
EDIT: Watch this video for details! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds77e3aO9nA

Key quotes around 8:30 - 9:00, but the whole thing is excellent. DARPA was funding all sorts of different networking and operating systems, which in those days were all incompatible. But they wanted them to cooperate, hence open source BSD and the Internet.

Silicon Valley doesn't get this kind of cooperation. In stark contrast, a proven business tactic is to undermine cooperation by poisoning open standards (e.g. embrace and extend).
More than a little luck. It'd take quite a bit of luck just to live that long, much less be healthy till 95.
Three Questions for Microsoft’s New Head of Research, Peter Lee
I'm curious why they chose 'Cocaine' as the name of the project. Naming a project after a substance illegal in most of the world is pretty bold. I'm looking forward to how they market this outside of Russia.
when the aeron first came out it was panned as being ugly fwiw.
A level 100 Raichu can kill a level 5 Bulbasaur using one Body Slam.

I wonder what Wolfram has to say about this...
Everyone who submits a "Show HN" should commit this to memory. This is a great place; thanks for the reminder.
Cool! Do you know if they have any issues with it making the wheelchair wider and therefore causing problems with doors/turning? I guess I'd have to give up my 2 degree camber with those wheels but it might be worth it.
Fair enough. If you need to support outdated browsers because of someone else's technology choices, that's a differentiating feature for you and your business, and I respect that (and I hope you're charging a decent amount as compensation for the fact you're supporting their older technology).

But if you're interested in the advance of technology, especially when it's pushing the boundaries, a little bit (or a lot) of idealism is a good thing.

Plenty of people make a (from what I hear) very lucrative living programming in COBOL, and I respect them for it. Lots of people still program in Fortran, which is awesome. But that doesn't mean we should be limited to COBOL and Fortran because someone else is...
Germany has good value but there are a number of issues with hosting overseas. Latency is one - in Australia one of the cheapest hosting companies is based in Perth but the latency is double that of Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane.

The other consideration is the legals. Moving the server to Germany not only puts your data under EU/German jurisdiction in addition to AU, the new privacy laws to take effect next year will mean disclosing to your clients and they to their clients that personal data is stored outside of Australia.
I second that opinion. Were yo expecting the muscle mass to simply grow forth from the shimmering air?
You referred to it as reprehensible. So you are basically saying that their culture is reprehensible (As the striving for wealth is well and truly part of Chinese culture).

That's fine to not like it your self... but to condemn others... That seems more than just intolerant, that is verging on bigoted.
We also do our best to be critical. It makes us look smarter.

"Negative reviewers were perceived as more intelligent, competent, and expert than positive reviewers, even when the content of the positive review was independently judged as being of higher quality and greater forcefulness." — http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=7402
There's a cost to automating any task: the time spent designing and testing the system. So if it doesn't make economic sense to automate a task, then employment will occur instead.

That's true, but the cost of automation is declining. What happens when Watson-like systems are available to the average consumer? What happens when NLP becomes good enough to understand standard English? Eventually the cost of programming a computer will drop below the cost of training a human. What happens then?
I just tried out the f.lux for Philips Hue feature and it is highly impractical because it arbitrarily adjusts the brightness of all Hue lights in your house...

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of LampShade.io, an Android app for the Hue that has a similar feature (and many others too)
Arf! That can't handle people older than the Unix epoch. Unsure whether to consider this a bug in the code or in me.

Never mind, I'll just head for the Carrousel.
I upvoted this in hopes of seeing it get more comments, and hopefully someone who is known on HN will vouch for them, or at least have a discussion about the company behind this.

They have 10,000 servers at this price... so it sounds like a promotion to get eyeballs for a newly launched service.

And that is why I will pass over them, my business depends on stability of the infrastructure, and these promotional details are not where to look for stability.

On the other hand, this sounds great for personal usage.
It's hard to believe anything like "lifetime package". The company's reputation is way too low for that.