skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder whether this has an open-source* baseband/firmware, and open-source graphics drivers. If not, it's not better than, say, a Nexus 4, which you can unlock and put custom software on it (e.g. Ubuntu Phone, I'm sure you could port Meego/Maemo/whatever it's called nowadays). The Nexus of course has vastly superior hardware.

If I buy such a tinkerphone as this, I want to be able to play with it at all levels. For example: Imagine the mobile connection doesn't work, but it still displays the GSM network's name? So it still transmits some data.... I want to be able to see where it hangs. E.g. do my packets reach the other station? Do I get garbled responses, or no responses at all? ... I want to be able to access the audio stream programmatically, which is not possible on 99% of android phones. And so on.

Mobile technology is such a black box, due to closed firmware. I wonder what amazing things will be possible if people can hack their phones' radios.

(* With focus on "I can compile and modify everything myself", don't care too much about license politics.)
Since the article only quotes total amounts owed (US diplomats owing 7.2 million out of a total of 67 million), it probably just says the US sends more diplomats to the UK than most other countries.
These Blue or Purple states are not doing one: New Hampshire, New Mexico for the moment for individuals, Utah permanently for individuals, Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, Illinois.

Plus my Purple home state of Missouri isn't doing one based on a citizen initiative in 2012, where 62% of us voted to outlaw the creation of a state exchange unless authorized by the people or the legislature (http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Missouri_Health_Care_E... ).

I also find it highly questionable to score elections like you have. Not only are you ignoring Scott Brown and 2010, but the one in 2012 was between Mr. Obamacare and Mr. Romneycare, the eGOP handed voters the single worst possible candidate to have a referendum on Obamacare about.

More generally, you should acknowledge this is the first ever major entitlement program that didn't pass on a widely popular bipartisan basis, from FDR's Social Security to Bush's Medicare Part D prescription one. It would be remarkable if that didn't have consequences we've never seen before.

Or more specifically, how did not building an exchange "sabotage" Healthcare.gov? Sounds like you're trying to magic a perceived by you sin of omission into a sin of commission.

Can't be a volume problem, seeing as how the site failed in integration testing a week before launch before achieving 200 simultaneous logins, and so much has to go through it for every exchange (remember when Verizon's goof shut them all down) and perhaps one day if they get around to it insurer (it's the only allowed source of subsidy calculations, which does make some sense).
> Who has the money to go to Stanford to get a degree that offers very limited career opportunities at pay levels that will never recoup your college costs?

A LOT of people. How many applications do they turn down? They can just keep jacking up the prices and people will still keep going. The name is worth far more than the job prospects available. I'm just not sure that they only want to be a club for the super rich (or maybe they do and just admit enough poor people to try to appear otherwise.)

Similarly, I can't see employment being a problem for someone graduating from Stanford. They'll get paid.
"Free-Mail" is a possibility. It rolls off the tongue like "email", is not so politically charged like "Freedom-Mail", and can entice people with the word "Free" while you can educate them (not an easy problem to solve though) with the "Free as in Freedom, not as in Beer".
That is correct. After the Great Depression, several "blue sky laws" were created which were designed to protect those without significant wealth from fraud. During the Great Depression, many people invested in securities which turned out to be Ponzi schemes. In other words, they were investing in "blue sky".

I am generally not for regulation to "protect people from themselves", but I generally agree with the creation of those laws. The crash in 2008 proves we do need regulation of securities to protect ourselves from destroying the global economy. Having said that, I am glad the JOBS act makes it possible for regular people to invest in private companies. I have always thought it was wrong that only rich people and founders can benefit so greatly from a startup's acquisition or IPO.
So what you're saying is... asking people not to spend money to support Orson Scott Card is on the same scale as giving money to institutions and people to 1) lobby against sexual minority rights and 2) encourage foreign countries to have laws to criminalize queer behavior, resulting in more violence and attacks on queer people. Cool.
So it's a trick? I'd rather see a thermal device that makes contact with a larger surface of one or more of my body's high-blood-flow areas and actually cool or heat it.

I've found it efficient to cool or heat myself by letting cold or warm water run over my hands.
I'm not sure if there's something I'm missing about soylent, but it seems to me like the most remarkable thing in the soylent story is that the company is a product of the tech startup culture.

The product itself fits (in my mind) in the nutritional supplements / meal replacements category and wouldn't have ordinarily gotten the attention of HN and startup investors.*

I wonder if this is an anomaly or first blood. Maybe startup culture is spreading to other areas. Startups haven't themselves been necessarily creators of technology (tricky to define). Many are just something that is enabled by mass adoption of some new technology or the cultural shifts that came with it (eg cloud based enterprise software). The whole world seems to be changing fairly rapidly now. That means there might be room for startup-culture to infiltrate even more areas. Tech savy, risk tolerant, big vision, funded, etc.

*I've got nothing to say about the product itself really. I like eating, personally.
Forbes calls Putin the world's most powerful person. Don't be deluded.
Thanks for the heads up. I work with @phawk so will see if we can get a fix out for this.
Coming in 10 hours late, but from the little I know of computer architecture...

Intel won that fight on being at least a generation ahead in semiconductor technology. Intel have efficiency problems compared to the ARM processors now, because they can't just throw many more transistors at their design when the metric is amount of processing/watt.
Sparrow still comes on top as the best email client for me. Its UI/performance is still superior compare to other client IMO.
>This is just a move by Cisco to prevent the adoption of free codecs.

Perhaps in part, but in addition to motives mentioned by others, Cisco obviously also benefits from increased use of bandwidth. When more people use video, it drives network equipment sales.
Now I am badly rooting for Mozilla - both its browser and OS for mobiles, for now a VPN and virtualbox or incognito combo will have to suffice.
Bringing attention to errors and attempting to recover from errors aren't mutually exclusive. I would much prefer that poorly formed pages cause the address bar to change in some visually distinctive way, similar to how modern browsers make part of the address bar green for pages retrieved over HTTPS. Another option would be to display an error page with a button that says something to the effect of "try and guess what the lazy developer wanted".

An inability to guarantee valid output hints that inputs aren't being properly analyzed and sanitized, with terrible security consequences. Both developers and users of pages should be made aware when these errors occur.

If the error messages are too intrusive, adoption of browsers displaying them would of course suffer greatly.
Low-tech Magazine did a good article on these sorts of transportation systems a couple of years ago: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/01/aerial-ropeways-autom...
I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers - but a four pack of Ensure Complete can be had for ~$9 or less. It's not the cheapest thing in the world, but I can comfortably drink three for breakfast, lunch, and midday snack and have a regular, home cooked dinner and still keep daily food intake cost below $15.
Wearable Computing: Remembrance Agent and Privacy (1996)
Leadership and Communication
We at Mozilla understand things like divide-and-conquer to achieve a uniformly public good just fine, thanks. Do you really insist on all or nothing at a given instant? That is not how Firefox took on IE and took back the web, restarting competition and standardization.

Sorry, we aren't able to take on the patent system in full.

Note that US "health care" cartels practice legal price discrimination, they are exempt from Robinson-Patman. Still, piecewise reform can make a net public good.

On RF for some or all profiles, see my point about desktop rents. Time passes. Just because something did not work in the past does not mean it won't in changed future circumstances.
My Selfie, Myself
Movember, NovemBEARD, Grow your facial hair for Men's Cancer Awareness
Who was Mr. Romenycare, and prior to the election was notorious for being willing to say anything to get elected?

Coming from the "extreme right wing" side of the political spectrum, I assure you that few of us considered any "severely conservative" promise from Hairpiece Q. Motherf----- credible. The eGOP managed to hand us the single worst possible candidate in every way to run against Obamacare.
Speaking as an Australian, I'm surprised that the average American spends as little as $7 per day on food. Do you know who compiled this statistic, and what a 'typical' $7 day's diet might look like?
True. It's just kind of an idiosyncrasy I've noticed among these "easy, magic" frameworks. Those things do usually get ironed out, but they are a barrier and probably something that could be easily thrown into an install script.
> In fact, being good at things is a good way to get other kids to like you.

Maybe in highschool. In elementary school, having any perceived deviation from "average" is a great way to get ridiculed by the majority of kids.
Presumably he's talking about a Bandcamp-like platform.
I fully intend on watching it.

Paying for it is another matter.
Startup Founders Should Not Be Paid More Than This
When you change the style of an element, like a paragraph, it works like CSS and applies the change to all elements of that type. To add specificity, you have to give an element a class.

Really appreciate the feedback.
I'm not a crypto expert at all but I do have one question:

If there is a concept of "quantum-safe" (which I did not know until reading this article), why hasn't the broader internet (HTTPS) adopted them? Is there any plans for there adoption in the future?
Can't wait for the FDA trials.
Aha, very good find. Okay then I am pleased.
Ask HN: What are the hardest developer interview questions you've been asked?
Ok I get it: The government and the politicians are not at fault here; it is the private for-profit companies fault. Sorry, but I just don’t agree with your point of view. Like I said: there’s plenty of blame to go around but I don’t see how anyone can justify spending that much money for something that doesn’t work.
... I think the movie that came out of Watchmen is pretty much proof of the conjecture that it was unfilmable. The director tried very hard to be faithful to the original - the changes were minor (some added ultra-violent fight scenes, and changing the nature of the SQUID) but the film that came out just wasn't very good. Some of the cast chewed the scenery a bit harder than was strictly necessary, but no film is going to have perfect acting. And yet somehow it just was such a mess. A shame, since I loved Moore's book.

Watchmen is a book that's designed to be read over and over and your own pace, with more to notice each time through. I think everybody skims the Black Freighter stuff the first time. Comics are so short that a good re-reading experience is prettymuch intrinsic to separating a decent comic from an excellent one. That doesn't really translate to film, since all the details and layers of the story just make the movie feel too dense.
Neither is more or less RESTful than the other. The media type and link relations express to the client what resource is being returned, not the URL itself.
Whilst I agree with your point, I think an important question to ask is "harder compared to what exactly?"

Cracking SSL?
Weaking crypto standards?
Tapping undersea fiber?
MITM attacks?

Given all those are used, I find it hard to believe the update vector isn't exploited. Sure you'd need to compromise the signing key first, but that's a single target allowing you the ability to subvert many more without the need for any breaking & entering or social engineering alerting intending targets/victims.

I'll take my tinfoil hat off now.
But does it really work? The links were all a journalism pieces about what it Could do. The one hospital study concluded the children had more fun; of course they did! They were wearing a robot suit! They didn't study if it helped them move their arms or legs, or if their walking improved, or anything.

Sounds interesting but probably just a gimmick so far.
It's amazing for hackathons. I wrote http://battlehack.meteor.com in 24 hours by myself after having done meteor as a hobbyist for 2 months.
Like drinking a coffee every day.
> Are those real margins, or are those the costs of sensible operation in a safety critical regulated marketplace?

For late stage cancer patients it sure might be the case that the margins are deserved. But for healthy adults this might not be the case.

It really isn't that hard to measure basic powders and mix them together, nor is it that expensive to QA one's methods. Cost per day should approach cost of production per day in competitive commodity markets. The fact that this is not the case is due to some kind of market distortion, whether that is unserviced market need, human diet biases, oligopoly dynamics or regulatory barriers.

> how do you work out that price of $14 per day?

People need 2,000 kcal per day. Ensure nutritionally complete powder's serving size is 250 calories. Hence you need 8 servings per day to hit 2,000 kcal. A 7 serving can costs $13.71 on Amazon, which is $1.958 per serving, or $15.66 for a full day's needs. If you buy in bulk with a 6 can pack, cost per can is $10.83, giving $1.547 per serving, or $12.377 per day.

Sources:

1 can; http://www.amazon.com/Ensure-Nutrition-Powder-Vanilla-Flavor...

6 can pack: http://www.amazon.com/Ensure-Complete-Balanced-Nutrition-Van...
I don't think UoW would make a good movie. It's a fantastic book, but it would have to be extremely long to capture everything needed for a movie, and I still don't think it would work well. For one thing, how could you capture the confusion that leads to the final twist in film?

I think Consider Phlebas would be the one to go for. It has just about everything you could want for a fun action movie, but it's also smart. I recall Banks saying that he saw Star Wars and decided he could do better, and that's where CP came from, so it's a pretty natural fit. It's also quite a bit less serious than UoW and as a result I think it could stand being shaved down to movie length.
Normal food at 5$ a day? Not sure which part of the world you live in, but if it's in North America/Europe I call b.s without evidence.

You can't run on Ensure/Fortsip/Sustagen's only without having consequences.
Anyone else who tested it with "correct horse battery staple"? :D
You'd think the success of the Harry Potter franchise would've gotten that project fast-tracked. Kids love the story of a poor downbeaten kid turning out to be The Chosen One.
Wow. How true. I started reading this book in college one night right before bed (~8 or 9). I finished it at 4am.

I had no idea this book had a similar effect on others.
Show HN: Surfly - surf the web together (HTML5 based, no plugins, just works)
God damn, N900 was the best smartphone ever.
I'm glad I'm not alone thinking like this. And boy I'm glad there are people who actually do things.
Docker 0.6.5 released
But my point is specifically not about legality.
Asking people not to contribute money to bigots is dangerous? What?
Yes, obviously. But Google got it from somewhere too. It clearly started with the ADM3A keyboard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Terminal_ADM3A.svg) and spread through use of HJKL in vi, and in a number of games from shortly thereafter (rogue, as mentioned, but also robots) which is actually where I first encountered it, playing games on my parents' unix systems long before I learned vi. It's just fun to note the various plausible memetic vectors.
The fact that he admits is a big step up form most polticians.
Thinking Little (An approach to achieving something big)
Interesting article - awfull title

Unfortunately it's the modern media's job to give things catchy titles so they do well on the social media rounds. A lot of excellent stuff fails to do well on HN because it hasn't got the right title (I'm an HN firehose dweller so I get to enjoy a lot of the hidden gems :-)).

Indeed, I'm pretty sure there's room for an "off HN" type site that solely focuses on the best HN submissions that didn't make it for whatever reason.
Interesting if you haven't seen it before, but that blog post is kind of terrible. (Calling them "WWW" domains? In 1985?)

Wikipedia has the list too, along with the corresponding domains in .org, .net, etc.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_r...
Why would their be FDA trials for this?
404 submissions (password not found)

Damn, this is becoming addictive.
It looks thick. I don't know why, but it makes me not at all interested. Also, what was so special about the N900 and is that relevant in the market today? I'm genuinely curious, I don't know much about the N900.
Python: self keyword
Have you ever been in a class where you are graded on a curve? If you're the best and you ace and exam, meaning everyone else gets a C or F instead of a B, the other kids don't like you.
I agree with the python one.
Some more things I find annoying in Python:

- Hardcoded recursion limit + no tail call optimization. I understand Guido's reasons for this but I find myself writing ugly code instead of beatiful code. (But maybe changing this would make Python's internals ugly.)

Mainly Python but other languages too.
- Length of the collection: len(foo). String representation: str(foo). Why not foo.len() or foo.str().
Or even better: foo.len or foo.str.
As a Python user, I'm not a fan of getters. I think we should use the "attribute syntax" to get data about and of the object/type/thing, regardless if it involves any computations or not.
(but would probably generate more problems than solve little nitpicks)
BBN has an entire /8 for itself at 4.0.0.0. I'm sure whoever made that decision saw there were maybe a dozen addresses and figured, "whats the point? people can reach us at 4.3.2.1."
Because his client in this case doesn't really have money at stakes.

Also "I expect you to break the rule" is a saying that cannot be taken without any scope, it still doesn't mean punching the professor until he give you A is okay.
I don't agree with your premise. The composition as much art, often more so, than the performance. For most of the music I listen to, including the classical music, I want the performance to be a faithful reproduction of the intention of the composition. For sheet music, you need the performer to interpret, but if he or she interprets outside of well established norms, the piece will sound off.

For electronic compositions rendered directly to a sufficiently precise format (which MIDI is not), you need no separate performance - the act of composing it and performing it is the same.

Since I reject your premise, your conclusion is irrelevant to me, and I don't think there's any chance we will get any further.

I see from other comments that you imbue the touch of a human performer some special quality beyond the qualities purely physical sound generated, and to me that is pure superstition with no basis in reality. You might as well try to convince me fairies are real.
Meta's Spaceglasses promise mobile augmented reality | Cutting Edge - CNET News
Still, he is one of the target customers :) And you might noticed in the excerpt you have pasted, it says that

`Torvalds wanted a distributed system that he could use like BitKeeper, but none of the available free systems met his needs`
Congratulations. Your customer base today = (customer base yesterday) - (hacker news readership).
Looks like it's someone pretty excited to have it: http://symbolics.com/about-symbolics/
New $5 device easily unlocks car doors for thieves in Winnipeg
I did not mean to make any such claim (hence the phrase, "in theory"). I was responding to the statement that "large cloud systems are fundamentally incapable of protecting data" by pointing out that, in theory, they are.
You wrote "MPEGLA was terrified of WebRTC and HTML5 standardising under a truly royalty free ...". Note the conjunction, also the past tense ("was"). When I called you on being wrong (HTML was never going to standardize on VP8/WebM), you changed your argument. Are you implying that WebRTC making VP9 (not 8) MTI would in the future affect HTML? If so, dream on. If not, you shifted your argument, and plonk.

BTW I answered your Daala vs. hardware question. Read more carefully. Getting into hardware as second codec is hard for any codec, even with a big sugar daddy (Google). Leapfrog via the GPU is the better way.
NSA Hacking Google and Yahoo
That's unfortunate. We were required to take so many senior humanities courses that I'm 2/3rds of the way to an economics or philosophy degree...
I perceive it as one of the worst Sci-Fi books that I have ever read. It's not a very popular opinion though, with the book being widely regarded as classic.
One sense in which a manual gearbox might make sense for beginners is that it arguably leaves you more in tune with what's actually going on inside the car. Much like knowing assembly can guide your C.

This does not mean, however, that it actually helps with safety, and that concern should probably dominate.
Fine then, my budget for the failing website is now $500 million. Savings be damned!

Oh crap, sorry, inflation. Price tag's now $750 million.
Wow, thanks very much!
Google, the NSA, and the need for locking down datacenter traffic
cf. also http://bash.org/?4281
Interesting to compare this list to the current Fortune 500 list to get a list of companies that were first on the net and also managed to stay very profitable over the last couple of decades.

Just from a glance, looks like IBM and AT&T made both lists. I'm sure there are others.
Yes. If you are driving, you should not be doing anything but driving. There are far too many deaths on the road.
This reminds me of a book published, back in the early 90's that contained a list of every public email address on the internet. It was smaller than the average phone book.

I imagine an updated edition would be a little larger. Or have really tiny type...
As someone who was being born when those domains were being registered, can anyone shed some light onto what the internet was like back then? (my understanding is that there wasn't a www back then)
Almost comflicted .. still going to wait for Jolla Sailfish .. I never owned an N900 (though I did covet one).
jQuery does exactly that, with polyfills for browsers without the native implementation. jQuery 2.x does away with many of the polyfills since older IE versions aren't supported.

If you want an even smaller jQuery, you can build your own[0] without the modules you don't need.

[0] https://github.com/jquery/jquery#how-to-build-your-own-jquer...
I reckon you'd be dreaming about food in the Homer Simpson style for a while, until you get utterly accustomed to the new diet. I call that the brainwashing of the stomach. (because stomach-washing sound weird)
Moto X easter egg: "Windy Day" Immersive short