skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This could be part of Google's Project Loon. Instead of building a data center in Africa why not ship one over.
As long as the ground looks very similar to Google Earth images and is heterogeneous. Unlike when it is snowing, when they don't work well at all.
How about, it's just wrong?
Tommy Flowers should go right beside Alan Turing in my opinion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers
Talking with Frithjof Bergmann
I have to say, you are probably 100% wrong on all counts. It's all opinion of course but once these are on the road and they work they will spread quickly costs will come down, and culture will adapt. The value prop is just too high, it's like any other computerization: sure, there are some charming aspects to past practices but the machines always win.
I figured out a while ago that you only ever need to type the nonsensical string.

I think its pretty clear the reading books bit was abandoned long ago. I never get non-test words that are in any way a struggle for a competent OCR system. And on the occasion that I do, its impossible for me to read either. If they provided context it would be much more helpful.

As an aside, if you've ever had to solve one of these through TOR and you happen to be running through some eastern european countries... good god those are the most frustrating captchas I've ever seen. Long strings of "mnnmrnrmnm" with contrasting colors and jpeg artifacts... a few attempts at solving those makes me want to kill someone. I feel bad for people trying to do anything on the internet from those countries. I wonder what the rationale is for making captchas nearly impossible to solve in specific regions.
The question is really "Where have all the famous geniuses gone?" The answer is that you can no longer get famous just by being intelligent. It's just not a sexy story people want to read. People just want to shop and read about fabricated drama.
The single biggest problem for autonomous cars is that they have to cope with rules and systems designed for idiot humans. If you exclude that driving is simply a problem of finding a reasonably continuous plane in roughly the direction you want to go.
Live editing of an iOS game using an Android tablet (@Droidcon)
We are all hackers now.
Probably the work of CGI Group! :) Not that I really want to bash my follow Canadian developers, but can we please get some experienced developers working on these sites?
I hope the company is interested in harvesting the hardwoods, which will allow for more biodiversity, less ecological disruption, and a more aesthetically pleasing environment. Hiking through a constantly harvested pine tree forest is not very enjoyable. In any case, letting nature do its thing, somewhat, is better than having delapidated houses strewn all over the place.
great insight from someone who knows an F'd Company when he sees one. ;)
I wonder if Google has considered this possibility at all.
If this was all a conspiracy, how did they get the government agencies to press charges? Or was that faked too?
For this functionality such systems work okay - but they won't work for kids-to-kids communication due to the same chicken and egg problem.

Your daughters wouldn't (couldn't) use it the way you imagine, because, face it, the 'critical mass' of other kids who'd they want to talk to simply wouldn't be on such a system online/active/quickly responding as they are on facebook/snapchat/whatever.

And I'm not sure if any classmate communication forum with a heaping level of oversight is realistic - the nature of teens and pre-teens is such that any must-be-part-of social activities would happen elsewhere; and if all the good stuff is elsewhere, then they don't need/want to use the monitored forum.
Did update today, and it's certainly much snappier, it rarely hits the disk now.
SoftBank counterexample - CEO wrote down a business idea every day for a year and then worked on his best one.
What is in it for me if I fail?
You would need to travel to Asia. And of course, there are huge markets for smartphones in Asia. I haven't seen any of these yet either, but I have seen a lot of fakes, knockoffs, and a bunch of other generally weird stuff.

Edit: Actually, we probably won't see them for a while simply because they are largely just getting started. My point in mentioning Asia is that a lot of weird phones and electronics come out of China and spread to the surrounding regions.
Quite possibly, and for a very important and underrated reason: the fights over water are already starting and are going to get bigger and nastier over the next few decades, but the cities on the shores of the largest freshwater supply in the world will be sitting pretty. Detroit may have to spend its forty years in the wilderness (rather more literally than that phrase is usually used), but there's really no question about it coming back eventually. Not with all that fresh water close at hand.
Reddit was selling T-Shirts years ago.

http://blog.reddit.com/2006/04/more-shirts-new-shirts-and-ev...
Walk away. Make sure they hear you laughing as you go.
A Call for Scholarly Markdown
I've had academic licensing offices balk at the GPL. I've had my fights with people over this, and lost. There are some specific clauses that they didn't like (this was GPL2). However, they rarely have problems with MIT/BSD licenses, so in general, that's what I try to use.

My stance is that since they did the work, the authors of the library can license it however they'd like. But, if they wanted to get more people using their library, I think that they should rethink their approach. LGPL is more appropriate for a library, where you can still have your copyleft approach for the code you wrote, while still promoting wider use.

Here's an extreme edge case... as they said, if they get tired of supporting the email to get a free-as-in-beer license, they will just open it up with an MIT/BSD style license and be done with it. That's great. But what if someone gets hit by a bus? Or someone leaves the project and moves to Antarctica? There would be no practical way to release an unencumbered version.

Really though, they can do what they want - it's their code. But licensing is one of those areas that you really shouldn't try to be clever.
Brazil: highest growth rate in Bitcoin clients
Ding ding ding. Visited the website for National Student Loans Services Centre and forgot my password. Email reset? Here's your password!

No! Why?
What, they didn't use WordPress?
I'll +1 this if I can add the stipulation that it's a US-focused b2c play, mostly because I don't know the international space well.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1JZg_2laiQo/UWjEB7NNODI/AAAAAAAAAL... shows him using a Nokia E61 (or E62), actually.

http://www.backbonemag.com/files/Images/novtek5.JPG
Insurance companies won't care if you're driving yourself or using a self-driving car.

They price their premiums so that they always make a profit, regardless of the risk.

That's why drivers that have accidents pay more than drivers with no accidents and young drivers (that are statistically more risky) pay more than not-young drivers.

Insurance companies will simply adjust the cost of insurance for self-driving cars to account for risk based on past data. If those cars will turn out to be involved in less accidents, the insurance will cost less. More accidents => cost more.
There is no genius, just various levels of domain expertise. We call geniuses those who concentrate most of their time and passion into one niche, and that niche has to be one that's popularly thought of as requiring smarts to fill. I approach genius levels of juggling a tennis ball with my feet, but I don't think there are Nobel prizes for that.

If there truly is a fall in the rate of "geniuses", I would venture to guess that it's because it's so easy to take an interest in so many different areas these days.
Why wouldn't they be on the same roads? Everyone will gain from having autonomous cars on the roads, both people riding them and people driving their own cars.

I like driving too, sometimes. Sometimes it's awfully boring and I wish I could do something else while on the road.
5 crazy things you never knew you could do on Android
Yes but going through a city in Southern Italy how often is it going to say something other than STOP! If you don't assume that other drivers are going to change course and avoid you won't make much progress.

The skill and alertness of the drivers in Sciliy were much greater than in the UK and the US but they had to be as those were relied on more than rules and systems.

I also wonder about what human driven cars, motorbikes and bikes might start to do once they know and can identify that there are nearly uncrashable and will reliably take avoiding action - will they learn that they can just pull out and let the computers avoid them?
As others have said, no, never pay. BUT, if I were you, I'd clarify with them that they are asking you to pay for a meeting. I've heard of people charging for pitch-events, but never for a meeting.

I know of one angel group that charges a menial fee to start-ups to pitch and that money literally goes to the cost of renting the hosting facility, coffee, muffins, that kind of thing. I know that seems super strange, but that is how they do it. I think it's like $30/pitching company, and you have to get invited. I think they do 7 or 8 companies a month.

At the same time, other events will charge $300+ to pitch VCs, and that is just somebody trying to make a profit.

So I'd take the extra two minutes to clarify what you're paying for and why. Who knows what they'll come back with.
Hadi Esmaeilzadeh on Dark Silicon
I think someone posted this[1] here yesterday, but from the description:

>Electrical current is run through aluminum in an acid bath, causing oxygen molecules to bond to aluminum producing a thin, uniform layer of aluminum oxide (basically: aluminum rust). Because this surface layer is porous, dye can be used to add nearly any color to the aluminum part before the surface is sealed.

While they may talk about Jony Ive taking part in the design in order to convey additional prestige to the product, it could be more involved than just painting a regular Mac Pro. Isn't this how they color the iPod nano? Anyway, it is conceivable that they did at least oversee the addition of color, and that there was a small potential for needing someone with special expertise.

[1] http://atomicdelights.com/blog/how-apple-makes-the-mac-pro
Vinod Khosla wins key Martins Beach battle
Why putting SSH on another port than 22 is bad idea
I have a feeling this won't last very long now that they've publicized the fact that they profile a users interaction with the system. Things like rate of hitting captchas, mouse movements, characters typed before pressing send, etc are all easy to mimic and control if you know they're analyzing that info.
I don't understand why it's sound. The order still has to go all the way to the exchange. Why is it better to spend 50 ms to get the market data, 1 ms to do the decision, then 50 ms to send the order (middle of ocean to exchange), when you could spend 100 ms to get the market data, 1 ms to do the decision, then 0 ms to send the order (colocated hosting at exchange)?
The Strawberry Tree: Student-designed free solar mobile charging station
Psst: Human drivers also have a lot of trouble in the snow.
If it can handle the same formulas, then I could imagine a market for a tool that takes an existing spreadsheet and does what you say - allows to set a probability distribution for any number, recalculates everything, and shows the distribution for resultcells on, say, mouseover.

Convenience matters in such things, and simply reading a 20x20 data table into any programming language already takes more time than just writing the formulas next to this table in excel.
No law of nature prevents algorithms from being able to learn like we do, except (1) I don't think Google's (or BMW's or Volvo's - whatever) algorithms are even trying to do that, and (2) algorithms that learn like humans haven't been created yet.
Automated Social Engineering Recon Using Rapportive
Anonymity Network Tor Needs a Tune-up to Protect Users from Surveillance
I'd say you're right if the OP moved to something like Haskell (which is an excellent language, by the way).

Scala enjoys all the benefits of JVM ecosystem, which is arguably more familiar, predictable and popular than C#/.NET. That and the incredibly rich selection of OSS libraries.
Err, yes, but I don't think anything you've said actually disproves his argument...

Black powder guns - I assuming you're referring to the muzzle-loaded antique-looking ones you'd normally see in museums?

Not exactly the sort of thing you'd use for sport shooting, or for self-defense.

And saying that there are illegal sales doesn't mean that the "UK hasn't banned all handgun sales to civilians".

That's like saying smoking in a hospital is illegal - but I heard from a friend of a friend that this guy in the next county did it once and didn't get caught - so they haven't really banned smoking, have they gasp?

Look, I have my own thoughts on guy laws, and I'm not saying the UK handgun ban is bad - but to claim is isn't really a ban (with tiny exceptions) is a bit disingenuous.
Would each new app not be covered by "solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog."?
I just switched to Time Warner Cable and they offered me basically the same plan, with 50/5 bandwidth. I forgot the price, as I don't care to pay anything extra for TV.
No one is taking this seriously on /r/bitcoin or /r/silkroad.
Thank you very much for uploading this article. About two minutes into reading this I felt rather queasy, then vomited in the waste paper bin.
Rechargeable Lithium Battery Makes Your Jammer Be Portable Again
For all Tony Hsieh's good intensions, Las Vegas does not have a water supply to justify the size of that city.
Seattle's public transportation is definitely in better shape especially since the expansion of the light rail and the constant flow of buses between downtown and the east side (Bellevue). Another big reason is just how convenient it is to ride to the airport from downtown. For $2.75 you can go from any station in downtown right to the airport. Compare that to the ridiculousness of getting to the airport from SF first to Milbrae then pay for a transfer to the airport on another line.
You are missing the key points of my
argument: (1) Your "primitive man"
I argued is nonsense because the evidence
is very strong that the genes are very
much the same (right, I left the argument
as an exercise but will give you the solution
if you wish -- hint, it's a kind of triangle
inequality). (2) You missed my argument about
why the women are not happy and not reproducing:
Current life, married or not, does not fit with
the genes of women. There's just no fit. To
see some of this, look again at my scenario
in a tribe or village beside a river in
Europe or East Asia. Likely could throw in
the US before 1492. Hint: Read some D.
Tannen -- women are designed to get a huge
fraction of their happiness, i.e., emotional
security from, essentially, gossip, that is,
a lot of conversation with other women. For
today, think of cell phones, PInterest, Facebook,
Twitter, etc. Well, the gossip situation
was much better in that village 10,000 years
ago. Indeed, for essentially every aspect
of her life, she was surrounded by women
of all ages with lessons on child care
(done essentially by the village), preparing
food, and making clothes. Now, in strong
contrast, she is highly isolated and gets,
what, Oprah? Bummer. For the birth rate,
it doesn't work. Your point about the
marriage rate is next to irrelevant.

I got my 1.5 in Finland from Wikipedia. The
claim was that on average each woman in
Finland has just 1.5 children. Rates across
nearly all of Europe and Russia are significantly
below 2.1 needed, in our modern society, for a
stable population.

That things were better in early agricultural
societies is nice but a bit irrelevant to
my argument: I'm comparing a village 10,000
years ago to, say, the last 60 or so years
of people of Western European descent and
East Asian descent. Beginning to see where
the triangle inequality comes from? Hint,
the common ancestors were 10,000+ years ago.
Soooooo, presto, where women of those two
areas are close, they both have to be even
closer to their common ancestors 10,000+
years ago. Right: Those women would have
loved PInterest and cell phones, right away!

> which suggests that its low birthrate isn't a result of women being unable to find partners

Okay, but "partners" is not nearly enough to please
Mother Nature. The situation is creating weak,
sick, or dead limbs on the tree. One of the reasons
is that a woman of 35 just is not, to her husband,
someone easy to build a good family with. Why?
She's too darned old so that he just doesn't feel
about her like Mother Nature intended.

For women who wait until age 35 to start a family,
Darwin will have the last word.
I love socat one-liners. Here's a quick one that I've been using to image new machines (data volumes only; I prefer puppet/chef/ansible for installing my OS and configuring programs):

On the receiver, let's listen on an SSL socket and output the stream of data we receive to dd for writing to a partition:

socat openssl-listen:9999 | dd of=/dev/sdc1

Now on the sender, all we have to do is

dd if=/dev/sdb1 | socat - openssl:receivinghost:9999

And bam, /dev/sdb1 on the sender is imaged to /dev/sdc1 on the receiving host. Note that dd only knows to read what socat feeds it, so make sure nothing else is connecting to that socket or you'll get a weird image that fsck probably won't be able to save.
How would you write and explore, say, a cash flow forecast of a not-yet-existing product line with a cli script? I could imagine doing that in emacs, maybe, because you can probably do everything there; or on plain paper if you're quick+accurate with doing math in your head.. but in a cli script ?
Will Android Be the One Operating System to Rule them All?
Aluminum oxide isn't really like rust, it is actually quite hard. This property is one of the things that makes aluminum so useful, as the surface oxidizes, it gains a very good protective coating. Rubies and Sapphires are essentially aluminum oxide.

I know I'm being pedantic, but rust carries a strong connotation of degradation.
The guy's crazy. Or at least "Reaganomics inflation" is such a myth this is the first I can remember hearing of it (in part because it was the #1 overall economic topic of the '70s, but not at all so for the '80s). Per http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-in... which used the BLS CPI:

1970 5.7
71 4.4 - Nixon's wage and price controls in August
72 3.2
73 6.2
74 11.0 - Ford becomes president
75 9.1
76 5.8
77 6.5 - Carter becomes president
78 7.6
79 11.3
80 13.5
81 10.3 - Reagan becomes president
82 6.2
83 3.2
84 4.3
85 3.6
86 1.9
87 3.6
88 4.1
89 4.8 - G. H. W. Bush becomes president
90 5.4

So, yeah, that devil Reagan caused Carter's inflation before he was elected. And it steadily dropped after he was in office, especially after he had a chance to really change things (in the first year a president is still tied down by the fiscal year budget which started in the previous October, etc.).

Why do people, who like I lived through these periods, believe the opposite of the truth? Not even sure if this is this guy's revolutionary truth (didn't bother to read much of his essay) vs. the boring bourgeois I fancy myself living in.
While you make a good point about resources being finite, and people that can access those resources when said resource is scarce fair better than those who do not (especially water), you're point is actually a non point.

With such speculation, I could have a premonition of an alternative future where the initial settlers near all freshwater die, as the more aggressive and desperate peoples fight for the area, and this potentiality has as much merit as yours.

Also, why even say Detroit will come back if the original inhabitants are all but gone, and the area has been resettled by others? If Detroit's coming back in 2045, then [insert any maritime city/town/village/location/space] is too!
Predictably many people are skeptical. But just stop and think about how many times you've caused an accident or near miss, ignored a road sign, got stuck while merging, etc and ask yourself if the computer would have done a better job. The new buzzword is "zero fatalities" and it's a far too important goal to just dismiss with typical I'm-a-better-driver-than-any-dumb-machine attitude.
How One 21-Year-Old Raised $2.6M
Thanks for mentioning it too, as it's an insightful comment IMO.
"NSA site down due to alleged DDoS attack" - http://rt.com/usa/nsa-site-ddos-attack-754/
Or be like "Fuckers!" and then enjoy the next 19 real SnapChat messages/videos, etc.. and then be like "Fuckers!" ...
As a former Londoner and current Vancouver resident and transit user who occasionally visits SF for meetings I can attest that SF public transit is really bad.
Exactly. The internet, and hence the (more) rapid liberation of information, makes available innumerable opportunities for curious minds to dabble. I've never been particularly interested in knowing everything about something. Rather, I'm much more interested in knowing a little about everything.

There's great value to be reaped from going extremely deep on a subject, but it's just so easy to become distracted these days. I'm reminded of Munroe's Nerd Sniping: http://xkcd.com/356/
> Court heard the boy used three different computer attacks, one which resulted in a denial of service to those trying to access the websites and flooded servers, making them ineffective.

> In another method he would alter information and make it appear as the homepage.

> His third tactic involved exploiting security holes in order to access database servers.

> "And he told others how to do it," a police expert testified in Montreal on Thursday.

And now so has the Toronto Sun, because frankly, that's all the info a script kiddie will need, if they couldn't work it out themselves.
As someone who's live in both SF and Philly, I'd have to say that while they're both awful in terms of public transit, SF is definitely worse.
Well, since all this information has to be collected client-side, I'm sure people working on captcha solvers would have figured it out anyway.

Plus, there's a huge difference between them publishing what information they're collecting and actually knowing how they're using that data, IMO.
I wish Calgary had better public transport. As a Calgarian, my commute is 20 minutes by car, 58 minutes by bike, or 75 minutes by public transit.
Pinterest founders are a counterexample of this as well
Does ramen, McDonalds, and frozen cardboard pizza count as real food?

I think actual food may already be borderline too expensive for the average person to eat. At least Soylent promises to make it somewhat healthier.
I've heard non-elderly, non-infirm people consuming the major brand product as a convenient replacement for meals.

Furthermore, all the existing makers have to do is launch another brand and Soylent is more/less boxed into an all but hipster lifestyle business. They would have to fight an uphill battle all the way as there is no real element of defensibly about it in a market where the existing players already dominate the key element: distribution.

As an example of branding nutritional beverages: as a kid, I like carnation instant breakfast because what kid doesn't like any excuse to have chocolate milk for breakfast? It's not quite the same as a complete nutrition product, but it's close enough to illustrate the point of branding. Most people dislike Ensure because it's associated with the infirm and the elderly. If one were to build a complete nutrition brand, it has to be associated with Olympians, military specops and so on.