skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Does such a system have a single practical benefit to a teacher doing their job, that they couldn't / wouldn't do better offline by simply talking to the kid at school after the lesson?

I think so, as long as the scope is clearly defined. You are right in your later implications that it could easily be subverted to a tool making more work for teachers, and I was erroneously drifting down that path.

> What would you expect from a teacher buy-in there

Listing homework for the night

Listing upcoming longer term assignment dates

Noting any information that students/parents should be aware of

Sending important announcements to students/parents

Addendums to lesson plans that they forgot to cover or came to light later ("Joey brought to light that I might have been unclear or misspoke when I was referring to the Spanish inquisition. What I should have said is that 'No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!' That should help you complete your History of Monty Python unit tonight.")

An official way to send a message to a teacher outside of class

I receive emails from one daughter's teacher on a regular basis, at least twice a week, because she hates the school website software (I hate it as well, it's horrendously bad). The other daughter's teacher has emailed maybe once, to confirm the address. I assume all her updates are going to the website, I haven't seen them. The teachers are all very responsive to email though.

> The original post sort of implied that it would be the place where you'd want kids to move their communication between themselves, no?

No, just that it is a place they could communicate between themselves, with some other benefits and a heaping level of oversight. My daughters would use it because 1) They aren't on any social networks, 2) they don't have any email addresses I know of (I'm not discounting that they don't have any, but I doubt it at this point, ask again in a year), and 3) we don't have a land line, just cell phones, so she doesn't have a lot of easy ways to contact some of her friends.

> In any case, teachers pretty much everywhere tend to be overworked and underpaid

Agreed. I'm all about using technology to make life better and reduce work, not create more work. When I'm referring to teacher moderation, my original thought was more along the lines of the teacher being able to research and see message history of a student when actively searching. If someone complains they are being bullied or targeted, that shouldn't be any more acceptable in the online system as in the classroom. I think kids need a safe place to learn this.

As a replacement for a class website, I think it would have quite a bit of potential.
Bezos worked in finance (hedge fund) before starting Amazon. He was not a VC.
Is no one going to point out the fact that the data came from Google themselves? I mean, I'm excited about autonomous cars too, but what happened to taking everything with a pinch of salt?
That seems roughly right for large-ish oak trees, the sort of forest I spent my childhood running around in. Of course there are hundreds of different sorts of forests.
Scientist: Tiny robots can find and kill diseases
Facebook’s spring animation library for Android UIs
You can still use Dropbox!
Hmm, what if both are right?

It could be a floating prison, filled with a giant data-center! The NSA+Google tie could mean that they both needed an interrogation free zone, one for torture, the other for stealing data. Both would benefit form letting prisoners generate the energy. They could even argue, that it's good for health to breath sea air and do regular "workout". Then they could offer the unused crunching power as an OSaaS – Overseas Sofware as a Service that is similar to AWS and Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Aside from that, isn't it illegal to systematically heat the water of the ocean with hot waste water?? Can't something be done against that?

Why are such prison ships even allowed to be built from tax-money, isn't it illegal?
Redditor claims silkroad bust was an elaborate scam, other users seem to agree
If this stayed on the frontpage we would be swimming in gold. Oh well, time to read them all and lose some faith in humanity
I'm looking for a tech person to be part of my human rights startup. We are building a mobile application to manage the physical security of human rights defenders, activists amd journalists. If anyone is interested, drop a mail to secfirstmd@gmail.com
I think it's possible to build a platform, like an oil drilling platform, survivable in the middle of the ocean (against storms and rogue waves) and hook fiber into it by dropping fiber in extremely high-strength conduit (like oil drilling pipe) to the ocean floor and then across the ocean to continents.

I don't think the cost/benefit is acceptable considering more serviceable locations that already have fiber, like Hawaii in the Pacific. Operational costs for a floating platform are much higher, and fixing anything major would take days instead of hours.

What about DDoS attacks (N/A if these are private network links) or real pirate attacks?
An online personal organizer for the price of a real one
Agreed, most devs that choose GPL3 don't know the first thing about licenses, and just pick it because they will do whatever Stallman tells them to do.

I can't think of any good use case for GPL3. Nobody should use it.
This is a good point. They compared the braking and acceleration of the vehicles vs. a human driver. A human driver supplied by Google. Nevertheless it's clear this technology has immense near-term promise.
I am not sure the government can/should make laws that are retroactive. It just _feels_ wrong. The teleco immunity being the largest in recent memory.
This was a basic requirement of the Urban Grand Challenge... in 2007.
I suspect the name may just be to confuse anyone trying to look into it. "By and Large" returns over 250 million results in Google. Anyone looking to find permits, job postings, or random government filings would need to dig through tons of unrelated cruft.

This is done pretty often for shell companies, they will have names like "Twisting River" or just "Investment Vehicle VII, LLC"
How can wirelessly-powered lighting be cheaply produced a la Nikola Tesla?
I don't doubt for one second someone in the US government doesn't already have plans to backdoor, take over and turn an autonomous vehicle infrastructure against people if they deem it necessary for "the greater good." Imagine one day your car decides you need to drive out into a facility out in the desert for "questioning..." or suddenly a group of them get commandeered as an ad-hoc roadblock, or any number of ridiculous but maybe too-tempting to resist possibilities, which people couldn't escape should these things become a dominant form of transportation.
The picture of what we're guessing is the data center is BAL0010 which is listed as a Passenger vessel above.
It's an interesting problem that exposes the fundamental difference between humans and algorithms:

While some humans may be able to adopt to driving in Sicily or Thailand after the U.S., algorithms will never be able to do that. Unless, of course, specifically designed for driving in the U.S., Sicily and Thailand. (Or Russia for that matter, where driving is barely subject to any formalization.)

Humans can learn and adapt, it's in our nature, but an algorithm is just a reflection of some narrow aspect of what we, humans, have learned. Change a few external variables and your algorithm fails miserably.

I'm sorry, but somehow I don't believe in the future of self-driving cars, just like I don't believe in algorithms that would do image or voice recognition as well as we do.
Landscaping can help the area become a forest by limiting the species that thrive under full sunlight (weeds, mostly) until larger species form a canopy (trees, mostly).

EDIT: pmorici explains it better than I
>
Why the big difference? For one thing, Salesforce.com's operating expenses rose 40% year over year to $656.3 million, with big increases in head count as well as research and development, sales and marketing, and general administrative expenses.
>

They want to be the market leader so they keep expanding as long as they have money.

They can always reduce the headcounts and becomes profitable.
You don't ever seem to find startup ideas. Startup ideas seem to find you. That's why it's important to always be listening - if you listen often enough then problems will "appear out of nowhere" and you'll be in a good place to understand their potential.
From the vessel listings above, I'd guess it will be BAL0011.
It took me a minute to figure out what a "Que. boy" was.
Does this mean that digitizing of books through reCAPTCHAs will be done at a much slower rate or not at all?
I was in Palermo not all that long ago (2009) and I did wonder how self-drivers could ever navigate the cluster there. In my trips to Seoul, I could see them doing okay on the main roads, but once you get off of those things get really tight and irregular very quick.

Heck if a self driving car can get through some of the old parts of Boston and Philly I think they'd have a chance. Hell, if they can navigate D.C. with all the crazy turns that change depending on the hour of the day they definitely have a chance.
He's just letting the author know that the library is unusable with this license. So either people won't use it, or they will use it and violate the license.

Would you seriously consider using (or even trying) a new library that has not even proved to be better than others yet, if you had to comply with GPLv3? I wouldn't.
Short car insurance companies then? (Assuming their profit is some % of the total)
Frankly, it is a rather ugly product. The headline made me salivate but I ended up disappointed! Don't get me wrong, the cause is a noble one and I say kudos for that.
Malcolm Gladwell on Jimmy Kimmel Live PART 1
Exactly- that can be seen as CFO qualifications, a background that I think primed him for Amazon well. Amazon is a CFO-type idea- small margins, obscene volume, financially micromanage the infrastructure.

To call Amazon a bookseller is missing their entire raison d'etre. Bezos wanted to be King of Volume, and how much of their current revenue is books? Can you imagine Barnes and Noble starting BNWS?

As a hedge funder he'd be looking for secure, smaller returns through diversification. Sound anything like Amazon's business plan?
seems a little rude for you to keep visiting then..
There's some more info on the Detroit LocalWiki here - http://detroitwiki.org/Hantz_Farms. When I asked my friend about it, he responded with "long story."
Hey, Silicon Valley: D.C. Needs Your Help With More Than Just Healthcare.gov
I wouldn't be surprised if it was a GoogleX project of some sort.
It's hard to DDOS private networks that aren't accessible from the internet.
Isn't that how it starts though? It is no longer possible to disrupt Facebook on its terms. You have to offer something completely different at first then slowly add Facebooks key features to provide a smooth transition.
It would be ok (imho) to share the name of that company here.
U.N., fearing a polio epidemic in Syria
Uncle Bob is spot on. I see software people ship half complete "minimum viable" things for the sake of shipping something even if it is terrible and incomplete.

If we all made our art, our craft, with more care, the world would be better off.
The flame war underneath that article is very entertaining
In addition to the links below, Raytheon has deployed many 'Electronic Modular Enclosures' which house power/cooling/servers enclosed in a TEU'ish container. They've been in use since 2005'ish in the DoD and brought up in the recent 'Navy ship uses Linux' story from last week.

A previous employer used a TEU contained power/cooling/servers for mobile disaster recovery circa 2003. More recently some have used fuel cells in place of diesel generators.
Steps to Developing a Usable Algorithm
I guess you are talking about succession.
LinkedIn loses corporate mind, asks you to do something incredibly stupid on iOS
Do not forget Julius Edgar Lilienfeld who invented and patented the much more relevant field effect transistor more than 20 years earlier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Lilienfeld
Okay. Thanks.

>Refusal of the EU bloc to cooperate...

Sharing of banking and passenger data is not something I know a lot about. Why do countries share this data now, and why would they stop because their prime minister is being spied upon? How the spying affect the pros and cons of sharing the data?

> Refusal of large South American nations to do trade deals...

Can you explain why a South American nation would not make a trade deal that made sense economically because of foreign espionage? How do the economics change as a result of the espionage?

> A move away from American dominance of the internet...

Who would avoid using servers based in the US as a result of espionage of 35 specific foreign officials? We're not talking about normal EU citizens in this particular article.

>The decline of the American empire...

Again, what decisions will countries make differently? Are countries going to make decisions that are not in their best interests in order to spite the US? Or are they already making decisions that are not in their best interests in order to be nice to the US, but won't anymore? Neither of these seems likely.
"Whiskey on the rocks event horizon" is the best part of the post.
That's not unlike what Tony Hseih is trying to do with the Downtown Project in Las Vegas.

http://downtownproject.com/
Given a few years, softwoods (pines - fast growing) will grow, then hardwoods (oak/hickory - slow growing) will begin to appear in abundance. Hardwoods are more valuable, but softwoods grow quickly and have less market value.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_forest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest

I think the term you were looking for was a "climax community."
just to slightly build on the other comments, I believe this barge is designed to be out from shore quite a way, if it was right up against the shore I could see this being an issue.
Couldn't find it. Can you give me a link?
A better title would be "Data show..." Data are plural.
To be fair though, there's nothing particularly difficult or slow about a ~20km commute with a good public-transport infrastructure.

Until recently I lived about 20km away from my work, and my commute took about 25-30min: 10min walking and 15min on the train. I found this a very nice and relaxing commute; being on public-transport means you can read / browse the web / zone out, and indeed it's a valuable unwind time for me (the walking time is also hugely beneficial in this respect). [The same trip by car takes about 30min with no traffic, or an indeterminate amount of time in typical rush-hour traffic...]
No, this does not appear at all. It appears they want to save on real estate and cooling costs by having floating data centers.

Google has owns so much real estate and immovable property in the US it is silly to suppose they are thinking of leaving the country just because they built a couple of barges.
FBI seizes over $27 million in bitcoins, likely from Silk Road suspect
This isn't a forest. It's a for-profit business that happens to be a farm in the middle of a major city.

That said, I'm really excited about this. The project is removing blight and contributing much needed tax dollars to the city.
Tried Car Woo for the first time a few weeks ago when we were ready to buy a new car and was quite disappointed. I thought it'd be a revolutionary way to not deal with scummy dealerships and I ended up getting 1 shitty offer (total).

That was it. No communication from CarWoo, no tips on how to get more offers. Just a scummy offer from yet another typical car sales guy.

Having now gone through the new car buying process, I can confidently say that it is "ripe for disruption" and somebody needs to level the playing field.
Nikolaus Otto and Rudolf Diesel who invented the four stroke internal combustion engine and the diesel engine.
May i suggest you go off white. Not a lot just enough to unbrigthen the screen.

#FBFBFB for instance.
Self-driving cars could save more than 21,700 lives, $450B a year
I'll buy a self driving car if they let me sleep in the backseat.
Are they even digitizing books anymore? I seem to always get a house number. The house numbers make it really easy to know I don't actually have to type that part
This Guy's Eaten Nothing but Raw Meat for Five Years
But without any impact on the western world.
Bingo.

I see Google says the idea has fallen out of favor, though even when I was taught it I was taught that the oak trees will still fall, creating clearings, which then march back through the same progression, so even then it was only notionally "climax".
I was immediately struck by the scary thing of putting the password in the URL:

remote = 'https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@USERNAME.cloudant.com/DATABASE'

I know HTTPS URLs are encrypted, but it still strikes me as unsafe. What does HN think?
I'd guess that if both cars are automated, there will likely be some type of vehicle to vehicle negotiation process between them to determine who has the right of way.
I think these will probably get floated somewhere within the bay, and they will probably ruin the bay views of some people. They have probably found a way to build them without going to public hearings and want to finish the job before the locals get wind of this and try to pass new laws to prevent their installation.
I don't, but Comcast does.
I think the way to do that--and the way I've seen it done in other contexts--is to detect what features can't be saved in the original format and warn the user about about it (with an "I don't care about this" checkbox). I think Word does that when you make a bunch of changes to a document in an older format and are saving it back.

I know users don't read, etc, but the trade you're making is that the simple process of editing a file and saving it is now much more annoying. I just want to make changes to my PNG, not deal with the One True anything.
Money quote:

The No. 1 reason Comcast's offer shouldn't signal the start to an HBO-loving cord-cutter's dream: Time Warner brass isn't interested in them as customers, even though there's definite demand. The JP Morgan study found that a stand-alone premium content service like HBO Go or Showtime Anytime could sway 62 percent of that group to drop their existing cable service.
Report: Germany Wants Its Own Internet After Spying Revelations
Hey everyone, I posted this in the related thread, but I'm really curious about it:

Has anyone in the U.S. had any success signing up for and using the HBO Go standalone service "HBO Nordic AB" through a VPN? It's only $12 a month in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark.

Is the content automatically subbed or dubbed, or is English the default?
I agree but it might work if a vast majority of cars are automated ones.
I can imagine a transition with "smartcars" : you drive with help and advice from your car.
I have the same workflow, and I like http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/ on mobile (and sometimes desktop).
I find it difficult to believe the captcha served over the last year or so were actually scanned from books: they were so completely illegible and nonsensical. I usually had to click refresh about half a dozen times before I could even find a sample that I could read correctly.
Understanding Entity Relationship Mapping, Part 1: The basic concepts
I thought that was zombo.com.
I've burned enough midnight oil trying to add content in Wikipedia just to discover it frequently gets deleted next day. The worst part is that even if it doesn't, it always feels like that it's a question of when rather than if it would get deleted. And I'm not talking about silly content. For instance I tried to add content on properties of different grades of gortex material and someone deemed it not useful on the page about gortex!

Lot of restrictions, if you think about it, are silly. Why can't I create a wikipedia page about my mom or my high school teacher? Why can't I add interesting details on techniques to solve high school math problem or even add exercises like textbooks? However "non-useful" it is, it's still information and it's all electronic. Why wikipedia should restrict itself to articles of types that only traditional paper-based encyclopedia would potentially allow (well, mostly)?

Would it be so hard to design it so we can add ~infinite amount of information on any given topic while allowing users to dive in from 10ft to 100,000 ft level? My dream would be to have wikipedia or an active website like that which catalogs almost every imaginable information available to any human at any point in time. May be they can add "draft" mode for content that is not fully baked yet. Or pages that are only visible if you opt-in. There has to be better way than enforcing silly bureaucracy.
Mentioning the speed-of-light delays sort of implies that you'd have a straight shot fiber run to both exchanges (no circuitous routes, at least no more circuitous than other exchange participants - can't be behind the rest of the market, right?).

I'm not sure that this is possible without working directly with someone like Hibernia Atlantic or FLAG to get a fiber splice in the middle of the ocean.... which puts this beyond the reach of the average startup and into Goldman-or-JP-morgan territory, pricewise.

For those who want to play at home - where would you drop your offshore arbitrage platform, given the cable spread on this map: http://submarine-cable-map-2013.telegeography.com/
?
This is demo code. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612482

But it can work with cookie authentication with just a little more lines of code.
Soberly exercised fiduciary duty is probably around #15 on the reason why things get closed down. Other things that I expect are higher include a couple of key people leaving; a manager not liking another manager; an executive not really understanding the product, the audience, the market, or the potential; idiocy; somebody wanting their budget; somebody being envious of their success; somebody hating the guy who ok'd the acquisition; the departure of the guy who ok'd the acquisition; more idiocy; somebody suddenly needing to be seen as a bold and decisive leader; the need for a distraction; or it not being mauve [1].

There is no particular reason to think high-level executives at a company have a better understanding of one of their minor products than do the people who post here on Hacker News. Indeed, the people posting here demonstrably have a surplus of time, nosiness, and interest in the industry. High-level executives are generally insanely busy and very focused on their jobs. Which includes understanding their industry, but only as a relatively small fraction of their time.

[1] http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-17/

Updated to add: I have no idea what goes on inside Salesforce; this view comes mainly from 25 years of reading the business press.
There's a patent for one specific, detailed design for a floating datacenter. Not for the mere idea of a floating datacenter.
That's interesting. If that's their only verification, you could probably pretty easily get one of those rechargeable or "gift card" credit cards, and plug in any address you want.
I don't understand, what law of nature do you think there is that prevents algorithms from being able to emulate human intelligence? What magic sauce is there in the human brain that means it is in principle not replicable by computers? What do you think an algorithm is?
Exactly. This sort of thing is what embedded programming is all about. "Real Time Computing" is the relevant keyword.

Just like a frontend dev learns HTML/CSS/JSframeworks and a backend dev learns JSframeworks/Node/(no)SQL, embedded developers learn about creating real-time, fault tolerant, highly recoverable systems.

Tell an embedded engineer that he should consult with Boeing and he'll give you the same strained smile that you would give a family member who suggested consulting with Amazon/Ebay/YouTube because "they are good at making websites."