skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Older networks were designed around the fairly reasonable assumption that a cell phone would only ever be able to talk to adjacent cells, because anything farther away would be over the horizon

That can't possibly be true. Spectrum re-use in distant sites could in theory have some effect on the call but differences in signal strength would make significant effects unlikely.

Also, that story about the pilot must also be apocryphal. A handover is a handover, and there is only one "winning" decision. Not to mention that CDRs don't work that way.

Lots of civil aviation pilots use mobile devices in the air without problems for the user or network.
Negative Array Index in JavaScript
The book actually explained why she knew what she was doing.

The movie seemed more interested in product placement for SGI and Apple.
Do you think it likely that an entire field that evolved over a period of thousands of years, has thousands of people doing the job all over the world daily, and is so common and important that there is scientific research performed on it pretty much not-stop, just missed this idea?
I think everyone can benefit from learning how to reason in principle. Unfortunately it's habit forming and can causes tension with the uninitiated.
It's interesting to see two similar projects come out around the same time. Is there some new technology that only makes this possible now?
I've been using GrandPerspective for quite a long time. Pretty happy with it, lots of ways to drill down deeper / filter / etc to get at what you're looking for.

http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

edit: oh, hah, they're almost identical. interesting.
It sounds like you'll have to launch the app to change which three cards are stored on the Echo. This is actually too low of a number for me, so it would end up being more of a hassle to launch the app all the time than it would be to just carry 5 cards everywhere.
Yo Zuckerbro
What if it consolidates four reliable cards down to one mostly-reliable one?
>Comments on their FAQ like "Should last"

They quite clearly state the usage pattern for the 2 year figure. From said FAQ site (https://onlycoin.com/support/faq/)

Q. How do you figure that a Coin will last 2 years? What constitutes
normal usage?

A. Here’s how we modeled typical usage. On a daily basis, we assume
you’ll toggle which card you want to use and swipe your Coin 10-20 times
a day. In addition, you may adjust which cards you want to store on your
Coin a few times a week. Initially when you’re getting to know your Coin
you will likely be syncing often. Over time we find that most people
sync much less frequently once his or her cards are on a Coin. If you
swipe and sync more frequently on a consistent basis, your Coin’s
battery will drain more quickly.
Treemaps have been around for ages. why not just run one on your local dropbox folder?
Rest assured, Amazon has nothing to do with the AmazonBasics brand.
This one was announced in August 2012. Several others have tried the same thing over the past few years.
Automate Your Garden
I would estimate that Google and Microsoft each operate more servers than IBM and they are definitely in the analytics business. (I consider Watson more analytics than HPC.)
RocksDB – A persistent key-value store for fast storage environments
I'm curious what you need four credit cards for though. I can see maybe a personal one and a business one, but what are the others for?
Montreal teens face child porn charges for sharing saved Snapchat nudes
"Q: When will Echo be available?

A: A year ago, we estimated a 2013 availability. We’re still working on perfecting the technology. We haven’t released a revised availability date."

I'm all for several kinds of these things, just as we have different kinds of watches and phones. It's a matter of taste more than anything once the basics are established, as they clearly are. And, of course, of getting it to market. Hopefully the Coin I preordered today isn't still in preproduction a year from now.
If only. I strongly recommend this documentary: http://www.thebusinessofbeingborn.com/
- As of now, 0.5 Billi with a potential of around 7 Billi.
Anybody else feeling uneasy about committing to spending serious cash immediately for a scheduled delivery 7-10 months away for something that could have many legal ramifications (with the associated delays)?

At $50/card, with anywhere from 5 to 15 cards, it quickly adds up...
Yes.

[edit] Part of it is that the patriarchal doctor wants to be "in charge" of the situation and treat childbirth like some kind of medical operation.

(This is not to say that modern medicine saves many children's and mother's lives. A modern, optimal, approach is to have a traditional birth with ready access to a hospital for a c-section, etc if necessary.)
"In the United States, the PROTECT Act of 2003 made significant changes to the law regarding virtual child pornography. Any realistic appearing computer generated depiction that is indistinguishable from a depiction of an actual minor in sexual situations or engaging in sexual acts is illegal under 18 U.S.C. § 2252A."

That's the part I'm talking about.
Most typical usage of Hadoop I've seen (so far) is people dumping many terabytes of data into HDFS and then analyzing it. But maybe you're more focused on distributed computing than the "big data" side of it.
I carry two government-issued ids; one driver's license; two medical ids; three credit cards, two debit cards and two coordinate cards (two-factor auth) related to three bank accounts; my mother's two debit cards and one medical id (she's elderly and I take care af all her needs); and one medical emergency info card. That's 16. Membership and discount cards are the non-essential ones.

I do have all of those cards scanned and stored in dropbox with 1password, but I don't have good 3g coverage so I carry them just in case.

I carry my fat wallet in a fanny pack. Not very elegant, but incredibly practical.
> Am I being affected by a noisy neighbor? Can't tell; contact Amazon support.

Sure, you can. Spin up multiple RDS's and benchmark them.

> Can I look at top to see if the load is high on the box, and potentially why?

If you ar using top to monitor your box, you are already screwed. There is lots of support for remote monitoring.

> Can I look at the disk iops to see if there's any kind of problem there?

Disk iops are part of the built in monitoring and metrics provided with RDS.

> Can I look at the slow log? Kind of. They'll push the slow log data into the database for you to query, but then you can't use tools to do aggregate tracking.

If only there was a tool that could extract records from a database and compute aggregates...

> So, after many hours swapping emails with Amazon support, we've determined that we're actually spending a lot of time waiting on malloc mutexes. The internet says that using a non-default version of malloc will help with that - can I do that?
>Nope. You're stuck.

MySQL sucks. RDS provides no means to make it any better. Fortunately they do now provide PostgreSQL.

> Offsite backups that are in any form but MySQL dumps.

You can do that by replicating to an external MySQL server and doing whatever the heck you want with it.

> * Take advantage of new index types and compression support from TokuDB.

Yup. Until today it was also really hard to take advantage of different engines found in PostgreSQL. ;-) This is a totally different product.

In general, all of the stuff you are describing are features, not things that cause maintenance complexity. In fact, manipulating those things causes maintenance complexity.

> Databases just aren't that hard to set up. Install packages, install config files, start the DB, restore from a backup file, restart the DB, and you're golden.

I had no idea PCI compliance could be that simple. ;-)

> This is particularly simple when you use an orchestration tool; I recommend Ansible personally.

Yes, orchestration tools, if set up properly are exactly how you'd want to do this kind of thing. If you already have all that setup to manage your database, RDS is likely not going to help.
That something can make law enforcement's job harder, even though it's otherwise completely innocuous* , is a terrible reason for outlawing. Especially considering that whole first amendment thing.

* In this scenario it's something creepy but harmless. In another it might be fake guns or fake drugs﻿ * *

* * Consider the implications of outlawing bags of sugar.
"Coin launches Arduino Bluetooth module" (Oct 5)
> "for offline processing"

Agree, SUPER clever idea. I'm wondering how this would work to make purchases _online_. I know, I know. I'd use my real card. But it strikes me as ironic that the big idea for this digital card is that I don't have to carry my 'analog' cards around. Unless I want to make a digital purchase. Then I need my analog card.
customer relations and PR specialist at an insurance company and software engineering freshman
> However I would imagine (and correct me if I am wrong) it is a lot easier to approve and go through the standard approval if there is already an implementation out there to look at.

I think you are correct. But that implementation does not need to be shipping on by default in a major browser like Chrome.

If Google would promote Dart mainly through dart2js, but not ship the Dart VM in Chrome, then I have no problem with that, and even the opposite - that would be quite cool, new languages are always nice to have. Then, if Dart catches on with developers in the industry, I think it would be very appropriate to discuss standardizing it. The momentum among developers, plus an existing VM that runs it even better, could be a compelling combination, and browser vendors could discuss that in a fair and open way.

But to ship the VM in Chrome far before any of that is a violation of the basic principles of the standards process. It sends the message that Google intends to use Chrome's huge and growing market share to force the market to do what it wants, instead of following the standards process. Perhaps that is not what Google intends, but that is how it can appear.

For that reason, I think that shipping the VM in Chrome is counterproductive if Google wants to standardize it, since it antagonizes all the rest of the industry.

> But it is also not vaporware.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I never said anything to the contrary? Not sure what you are responding to here - the quote you refer to is about "Effort", where I talked about the effort for other browser vendors to adopt the Dart VM, not for Google. Clearly Google has a working VM today.
I think you're going to have a very hard time cloning them. Security researchers have worked on this for years, while the card manufacturers have learnt from their mistakes and adapted.
Locally (in some stores around here), cashiers were required to swipe cards for Visa (because they also have to check your signature, etc.).

Nowadays in Canada though, no one uses swipe cards anymore, it's all chip-and-PIN. The only time anyone swipes my card is when I go down to Seattle, and it's really unnerving when they do so.
The increase in complexity isn't on the user's side, though. Look at Square - in a way, it adds complexity, since it sits on top of the "crusty" infrastructure, and it requires a smartphone/tablet and dongle, a touchscreen app, etc. That's definitely an increase in complexity, but also an increase in usability.
These two sentences follow: 'This system functioned efficiently until his death; it has since been dismantled due to lack of support and interest on the part of the younger obstetricians who replaced him. While it existed, this system was an excellent example of Graham's "partnership paradigm" or what Brigitte Jordan has called "mutual accommodation" between biomedical and indigenous systems.'

i.e. The traditional methods are occasionally acknowledged but rarely adopted.
Look on page 13:

>> Transactions cannot be deposited until goods or services have been shipped.
Western medicine treats pregnancy and childbirth like a disease. So, yes; I do think they probably get delivery wrong.
'Realistic' virtual porn producers should just be asked about source for generated scene, just like producers of real porn are asked for actors age verification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_film_industry_regulation...). There is no reason to ban it just on this assumption. I think the real reason is different.
Author and other metadata are actually part of the parsing spec used (and promoted) by Readability.

This would be useful.
Seems like a slippery slope that ends in people getting arrested for murder because they play GTA.
More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6732078
The connection has always been primarily in the contractors. Two agencies (NASA, DOD) sharing the same contractor (Martin Marietta, for example). It is a classic dual use scenario where both uses give value to the country (space exploration and space domination :-) which lead my neighbor (who worked at Lockheed in Sunnyvale to remark "win-win means we can sell it to both civilians and the military."
Square, which is a point-of-sale system? Two other things, which the billions of people who use credit cards every day have never heard of?

What would constitute "killing" the credit card, anyway? Less than 5% of the population using it? I don't see that happening for a good 15 or 20 years at a bare minimum.
We keep a styleguide (which is actually public: https://github.com/styleguide) that we loosely use across many products and apps. Beyond that, we have two libraries (one CSS, one JavaScript) that we pull into projects that help us maintain a general feeling of consistency.

Beyond that, designers get passed around the company a lot. Typically they can implement the frontend quicker than the backend can be finished. This has an interesting and unintended side effect of getting designers working all across the company. I think this plays a large role in getting a lot of the consistent feel across different projects: there's a lot of transfer of taste across the company.
Debit card, credit card, starbucks card, transit pass, home depot gift card, health card, two private health insurance cards, costco card, driver's license, and a rewards card from a local restaurant.

Both my debit card and credit card are chip-and-PIN cards, so I can't replace this with card, and none of the rest have magnetic stripes that anyone actually uses (the few cards that do have stripes, like my Costco card and driver's license, also have my picture on them and I can't replace them with a generic card).

This will be super useful for some people, but not for most people.
I've had the same issue in the past which can be frustrating (though now I always travel with enough cash).

I actually called Visa about it and they told me that any vendor accepting Visa transactions is required by their contract with Visa to accept swipe transactions. She said it was there because the US was still rolling out chip and pin cards.
Low Tech, Ultra Low Tech and No Tech survival & solutions:

Low tech hacks
http://amzn.to/HPp7Ar

Water drilling
http://amzn.to/1aH6gOH

Rooftop farming
http://amzn.to/1bytafM

Architecture
http://amzn.to/I1Z6Od
As a person who reads PhD applications and works with graduate students, bullshit.

I care a little about your GRE scores, it is a filter, you need some kind of standardized comparable. Congrats on getting in the 99th percentile (that's expected). I don't care much about your GPA. I might look at what classes you took. I will probably look at your reference letters briefly. They might be from professors, they might not. I don't care. I love the fact that you have some startup or industry experience, you are slightly more likely to actually know how to get things done.

The very first thing I read is your cover letter, then straight to your research statement which I will read in great detail. The only thing I care about is do you have a passion for research, are you likely to be successful at it.

At most research institutions in most areas of science, we have to pay our graduate students stipend and tuition, either right away or after a year. This is a damn good incentive to get students in who are going to do great research.

All I care about is getting great researchers in the door and (eventually, hopefully) into my lab. So, my advice: focus on your research statement. Tailor it to the department your are applying to, talk about the research they are doing there. But, have your own agenda. At least know what research areas you are passionate about.
No, I am not kidding.

Based on the conversations I have had, it seems to be typical that a committee selects the applicants, not the professors. That is what all the professors tell me.

That being said, I would be stunned if this were the truth. There is no frickin way that this happens. Here's how I imagine it:

'Admissions committee is in session'
'So, which of these bozos we gonna pick?'
'I want Joe, Schmo, and Dingus'
'Sweet, I want Harry, and Fiona'
'Ok, we all cool?'
'Yep'
'Aite, lets get beers'
a bit cluttered on a smartphone screen
So far I can recommend a wallet from SaddleBack leather. solid construction and it does get soft after half a year of use.

Though because of the size I keep mine in my front pocket, also handy as I believe it lessens the chance of having it pick-pocketed.
KitKat Factory Images for All Nexus Devices
Why did this not receive more upvotes?

What a great API to build off of.
Hating to pile on, but doing so anyways, one of the overlooked things I'd argue is that postgresql tries much harder to let you do neat things with your data without much hassle. Needing to write a custom function to process data? Not only does PostgreSQL have support for PL/PgSQL, but it's made in a way that has let people write plugins to python, perl, v8, tcl, etc, so you can do that data transformation on the database instead of shipping it back and forth to another server with the latency that brings. The recent version also brings read/write support to redis, so you have have your updates trigger redis to store new values, etc. Plus, being that it's not controlled by Oracle, there's much less a feeling of the community being held back; MySQL feels very much like Oracle's tying one hand back, so that when you get to the size to need a "real" database, Oracle will gladly step in, at their standard consulting fees, of course.
Combine this with something like BoA's ShopSafe "disposable" credit card numbers and POS credit card fraud could be practically eliminated. Consumer privacy would also be increased because it will become much more difficult to cross-reference purchases across different merchants. (You'll still have to worry about Visa selling your purchase records, but one step at a time.)

https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/accounts-cards/shopsaf...

http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abu/y205/m02/abu0137/s02
Pandora side stepping cookies in advertising
$0

I hadn't heard of SnapChat until this acquisition story broke. I guess I'm out of touch or something?

Anyway, no revenue and no real hope of revenue = $0. VC can blow smoke up your ass until they collapse, blue in the face, but it's not a winning proposition.
Thanks for the note, we'll have to take a look at that sort of configuration.

Your consumer problems sounds similar to one we had. Root cause was that the number of consumers exceeded the number of active partitions. The tricky part was that the topic was only distributed across part of the cluster (because of the issue described in my parent post), so we had fewer partitions than we thought.
Isn't this going to stop the baby from breathing?
While you may think this is a step in the wrong direction, that's just an opinion. While NFC / Bluetooth LE would be preferred so I can pay with my phone, that would mean every merchant would need to have a reader that supported that technology. Today only some merchants support paying with QR codes. At the very least, COIN is a killer stop-gap solution, a convenient & technical solution that would work with every merchant out there.

I personally had no issue giving them $55, the same concept behind kickstarter, for the money to produce my goods. Consider me an investor of 1 unit.
> The law is very cognizant of intent and willfulness.

Not in strict liability offenses, such as statutory rape. Which isn't entirely relevant to playing a game, until the legislature makes 'possession of child pornography' strict liability and includes drawings as being child pornography.
Is making it easier to carry around and use multiple credit cards really a good thing?
Answered elsewhere but the Coin is not a good idea for reasons also answered elsewhere (merchants wouldn't take it, your account could be flagged, etc).
"Q: Will Echo facilitate card skimming?

A: No. Echo users can only mimic payment cards (debit and credit) registered under their name. Sorry skimmers!"

I'd like to hear more about how this card is designed not to allow skimmers to use it. My suspicion is that the app will, in fact, be easy enough for skimmers to hack so that they can put anyone's card they want on it, turning it into a pocket skimmer for waiters or anyone who can get their hands on a customer's card for a few seconds.

"Q: What happens if I lose Echo? Is it secure?

A: Yes, Echo is secure. You can set Echo Card to lock down when out of range of your mobile app. "

Again, more information would be nice. Is card data stored in encrypted form and decrypted only at the moment of use via a key provided by the app? If so, are keys securely broadcast to the card? Is card info uploaded to the echo card securely for that matter? This is important to ask, since you might wind up transmitting card data on a public channel repeatedly.

There are some pretty big cryptographic concerns here that are completely glossed over. I absolutely would not use this card without knowing more.
This is an excellent point. You could make a series of purchases with your Coin set to your credit card, use an obviously fake signature, then dispute them all. The merchant can't claim that they checked the signature because they obviously don't match, so any merchant that lets you use your card has little recourse in the case of chargebacks.
>cashiers have never so much as glanced at my cards

Depends on where you shop. Some stores (particularly big box stores -- Best Buy comes to mind) always ask to see the card and ID. If they do, it's a showstopper for it to not be real. There's NO WAY a store with that policy would let you buy something with an anonymous black "card".

Not only does this scream "FRAUD!", it almost certainly WILL be used for fraud, almost immediately on release. Think of how easy it would be to allow a server at a restaurant to "steal" someone's card -- photo and a swipe, and POOF, you can use their card the next time you go somewhere that doesn't look at the card. How long will it be before stores that DIDN'T ask to see it before start asking, and specifically disallowing the use of these fraud-enabling devices?

Regardless, there's no way I'd risk getting to the point of purchase somewhere and finding out at that point they won't accept my card. And I AM part of their target market: I probably have 8 cards in my wallet, maybe 10. It's complicated, but they all have a unique need that makes me carry them.

I'd love to have something like this that "just worked," but I doubt this would be it without orders of magnitude more education and many layers of security protection to prevent fraud -- probably enough layers to be an impediment to people actually signing up to use it (receiving physical mail being required to register a new card comes to mind).
Mushrooms can eat radiation - and protect those who eat them
TSA Screening Barely Working Better Than Chance
I know the OnlyCoin guys, so maybe I am biased, but for me this is about reducing the risk that I don't have a card, or that I leave a card behind.

Combine this with the "you can't sniff my card through my pocket" capabilities and I am very excited.

This is just a troll post by someone who either doesn't understand, or has sour grapes.
Udacity launching paid course enrollment
I can now forgive him for The Expendables.