skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't recall the name of the product but there's this little bluetooth bracelet you can buy that got big on kickstarter. Turns out that its almost identical to one at alibaba.com. The guy running the kickstarter said that they more or less copied the physical design but modified the internals a bit for better BT connectivity and to a newer version of BT.

This could be going on here with the Z3 watch. Instead, we have an out of control witchhunt. I think it makes a lot more financial sense to modify a proven design than to start from scratch. If you're on kick starter, you probably don't have deep pockets and an engineering department to begin with. Not to mention that hardware is kinda a commodity now. Good software is the hard nut to crack. Think CM vs Touchwiz on the same phone.
We didn't really try OpenStack, heard good things about it but we wanted to really keep it as fast as possible without any overhead.

Now we have a simple nodejs daemon which spawns and destroys VMs through libvirt.
Capitalism has already solved the problem using nuclear power. This solution has been back-burnered to get votes in the system we call democracy.
sci-fi? It's more like reminder from the history. Rapid industrialization and increase in living standards seems to follow familiar pattern.

Great Smog of London documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkx-2mT1-q4
>>its command line almost matches a linux setup.

Grumble, the most important feature isn't as good -- apt. Otherwise, I might switch back.
Tech Britain relaunches, now tracking over 7000 entities and 53 organic clusters
What did the cities look like in the US and Europe during parts of the Industrial Revolution?

I cant imagine it was as persistent and thick as some parts of China.
Thanks-now, I'm reading, everything-aaaahhhh,this way
There's a maturity cycle -- risk shift with time.

On day one, buying equipment, labor and software to stand up a computing environment is a risk. You don't truly understand your needs.

After a couple of years of operations, you should have a better idea of your typical run state and growth patterns. At that point the risk may shift. If I can deliver compute with AWS for $X, but can also deliver that compute through some other means for $X-Y, you have a new risk/cost evaluation to do.

The key is continuing to use the cloud thought process.
The holocene interglacial is what we are living in now. It started 12000 years ago, at the end of the last glacial period. This extended period of glaciations and interglacials together is called the quarternary ice age, also known as the current ice age.

Ice ages are the periods in earth's geological history when permanent ice caps and glaciers existed at the poles and in mountain ranges. We think of that situation as normal, but it has only existed for the last 2 to 2.5 million years. The high albedo (reflection of sunlight) of the ice sheets at the poles cools the planet down further, so an ice age reinforces itself. In other words, we are now living in a warmer period inside an ice age.

There have been other ice ages before, but the last one before the current ended about 100 million years before the first dinosaurs evolved.
There are astonishing numbers of protests in China every year.[1][2] I also think the culture for factory workers during the industrial revolution was one of deference to authority, and that it took extreme conditions to spur them to protest their conditions.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protest_and_dissent_in_the_Peop...

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/02/rising-protests-i...
It jumped out at me as well... because I'm under the impression that there are little differences between the two and they both use the same compression algorithm.
> In my view, public acceptance requires stability. There's nothing that I can think of in the theory or history of Bitcoin to suggest that it should, can, or will ever, overcome its volatility.

I think we're missing the data, but I feel fairly certain that bitcoin has, on average, become less and less volatile since it started being traded.

What would be helpful is a chart that plots a price average across exchanges, where the price on each exchange is weighted by the daily volume of the exchange in question. This would show a more accurate picture of volatility, and I bet that this is slowly decreasing, ever since bitcoins became tradable for USD.

We've already seen the market depth increase dramatically over the past few years. One can purchase or sell $1M worth of bitcoins with a slippage of 4.35% and 1.47%, respectively - if you spread it out over exchanges. That's unprecedented, I believe, although I don't have a consolidated historical BTCUSD order book to back it up.
I know but my wild guess would be that the tendency should start to show up in stats given the pollution already started years ago (?)
Education is great. In sufficient volume and with a low enough ranking on the "do I have time/inclination for this?" scale, people decide they've had enough and opt to put up with the consequences of not having it.

Indeed curation works for Apple insofar as it's in their interest. It's in their interest because people, overwhelmed with other things to deal with in a mere 16 hours a day, choose (among other reasons) to function in the "walled garden" where such crap behavior is screened out and they don't have to worry about it. The Android ecosystem isn't, for most people, appreciably different from the iOS ecosystem; a major differentiator is curation, which while having some downsides, on the whole leads to a better experience of getting to useful apps rather than having to wade well-educated thru a swamp of gratuitous permissions abuse.

Sure, one could learn the risks of pre-loaded crapware so prevalent on new Windows computers and learn (it's easy!) how to wipe everything & do a clean OS install to get rid of it ... or get a Mac, which doesn't include any crapware. It's a persuasive option for many people. Likewise Android vs iOS app stores: learn the details of dealing with problems, or just go where you don't have to deal with those problems.
There's a follow-up post[1] where he talks more about the reactions:

"A vision of a future in which civilizations, species and worlds follow life cycles like those of all other natural things didn’t leave them furious or depressed. Their comments instead featured such words as “comforted,” “delighted,” and “awed.” It’s easy, and also common, to mischaracterize such feelings as simple schadenfreude at the failure of humanity’s overinflated ambitions, but there’s something rather more significant going on here. Not one of the readers who made these comments made gloating remarks about the fate of humanity or the Earth. Rather, what comforted, delighted, and awed them was the imagery of Nature’s enduring order and continuity that I wove throughout the narrative, and brought to the tightest focus I could manage in the last two paragraphs. "

[1]: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-sense-of-ho...
Miaow! The analysis is absurd because it treats Bitcoin as the only representative of an asset class (crypto currency), rather than one of possibly hundreds.
Investment idea: Companies that manufacture sulfur dioxide scrubbers for coal plants.
Linux has some of the nicest DEs.

But we are used to the DE being de-coupled from the OS, and being able to change it. For Windows and Mac the DE is a 'selling point', for Linux it isn't because it can be changed any which way you want. I mean, in Ubuntu it's trivial to install 10 different DEs and switch every time you log in...
I feel there's a much higher chance that humanity will drastically change its own fate (for better or worse) in the next hundred years, and any forecasts beyond that have very wide error bars. Artificial intelligence is the big one (it ends the current era of "business as usual" no matter whether it's friendly or not), but there's also nanotech, superviruses coming from desktop bio-hackery, mind uploading, good old nuclear terrorism, etc. For "business as usual" to continue and things like climate change to stay relevant, we need to dodge all of the above, which is difficult.

For a more thoughtful take on the future of humanity, Google for the keywords "existential risk". Bostrom's writeup is a good start: http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html
F*ck apartheid, but for all I know Mandela pretty much deserved to go to jail.

Big disgrace if the CIA actively sponsored this regime, but the allegations in the article are just from one source not directly related to the affairs. All the "Who knows" and "My guess" doesn't make the case any stronger.
Was there much involvement of private capital in the initial development of nuclear power? Or indeed in ongoing attempts to investigate fusion power?
I guess we didn't have to wait until November 2019.

But at least we have "cheap" consumer goods!
Renewable energy storage and electric vehicles. If enough people adopt electric only vehicles that could provide a mechanism to store and send energy to the existing grid.
Failed HN Launch vs. Reddit Paid Advertising: Which Converts Better
I was just about to launch my first app on heroku.. whats wrong with it ?
There are times when all of us are jerks, or morons, or both. We should certainly shun such behavior, but I don't get this knee-jerk reaction to sent the sucker to jail. Which law did he violate, and which government has jurisdiction over it, and in what way are you a victim? Answer all three and yes, you can actually send him to jail.
Someone or the NSA? If I was them I would hijack some poor country ISP and siphon everything through them. At this point assuming it's the NSA should be the default assumption. Remember that Snowden's encrypted data (assuming it's real) includes everything not yet public. So likely we only know a fraction. Thus assuming NSA is probably safe.
> Nobody would risk migrating that table

People migrate tables a lot bigger than 23M rows all the time. On MySQL, even, though it's an offline task there.
You're not really handing over URLs to google saying "here are some urls, please keep them", are you? Bookmarks, yes, and you can easily export them.

> Or even the connections I have on Google+: is it data belonging to me because I entered it?

Yes. Google takeout lets you download your G+ circles, if that helps.
US government is an 'advanced persistent threat': Iran since 1979
Any sane person can figure this, this is no play on words.
If someone can be aggressive against someone, he will be against everyone too.
It's a delusion, He (they) are aggressive for someone else, in fact, he (they) would be for everyone else too.
This rule is not specific to a person or country.
It`s how to on the same page
http://www.ihash.eu/how-to-downgrade-from-ios-7-beta-to-ios-...

Can anyone know if this works on regular update?
Microsoft Surface 2 was a blowout Black Friday winner. Is it for real?
Because bikeshedding.
As already mentioned in the thread the London "pea soupers" were as bad, or worse, than the pictures we see here.

Google image search for ["pea souper"] for images from 1950s London.
A big part of the issue with Bitcoin is that our global economic system is, and for the foreseeable future will continue to be based on fiat currencies issued and controlled by central banks.

I see Bitcoin's role in all this as a way to exploit arbitrage in currency exchange rates for restricted currencies. This is exactly why it's popular in China. It is a currency whose supply is algorithmically limited and theoretically should track global inflation. The world has always had nominal exchange rates and de-facto exchange rates for restricted currencies; but until something like Bitcoin emerged there was no legal way to perform exchanges at the de-facto rates at scale.

My big worry with Bitcoin is that the supply is too limited. Currency is subject to manipulation by many forces; much of the job of a central bank in control of money supply is to counteract any intentional manipulation. With unstable prices and a limited circulation value (the total value of all BTC in circulation is only ~$12 billion) it is very open to manipulation by investment banks and hedge funds. Until BTC reaches economic scale, it's going to be subject to all sorts of shenanigans; and with no central authority to counteract the manipulative influences, I don't know that there will ever be enough trust in it for it to reach that scale.
All-female distributed-team software startup goes big in 1962
If in say 100 years human population growth stopped, would it still be deflationary? Surely the population cannot grow infinitely?
"This is a website expressing my personal views – through a selection of opinionated observations and arguments."

It's Adam Curtis. This is what he does.
NutraClick - The Health/Wellness Company Built on Smart Internet Marketing
Reading the follow-up article he talks more about the 'folk mythology of progress' and speaks of the cycle of nature (intelligent species and civilizations) as a more fundamental truth.
Here's a counter proposition: yes, the processes of nature are supremely powerful and yes, humans are apt to make life difficult for ourselves and yes, progress isn't a given. What we call progress is really just humanity fulfilling our ecological destiny of adapting to new niches, just like every other species. But by destroying our environment, we are creating the very evolutionary pressure necessary to force our own adaptation - which we will continue to rightly term 'progress'.
You're missing the point, because what you'd need to claim is "there are no dumb backers on kickstarter." Even if kickstarter backers are smart on average, the point of the spelling mistakes, etc., is to find only the dumb ones.
> In a predictably deflationary environment, it's always better to spend your money "later".

So if I'm saving up in a deflationary currency, it's better for me to wait upgrading my computer until the day before I die, instead of doing it now?

The thing with saying something is "always better later" is that it logically means that it never gets done, because there's always a "later" (until there isn't (ie. you die)).
Rheti- Android App Development on Your Phone
As far as I know you have to stop the instance to mount a fresh EBS volume, which means as soon as you start up the instance with the new volume you're paying for another full hour again.
There's also a lack of understanding on the effects of this pollution, especially as it becomes more regular. I worked and lived in China for 7 years and just getting parents to close the windows of an obstetric hospital with newborns was difficult enough. There is a belief that "fresh air" is always better than what is in the room. When I asked nurses about the public health impact of this pollution on children, they often stared blankly back.
Objective-C: What does the ".m" extension stand for?
Growth Hacking gone wrong: "Hoover's free flights fiasco recalled" (1992)
Apple's Star Chamber
(1) When it's free, you're probably not the customer - you're the product. Hard lesson for most people. Pay a little and be the customer.

(2) Every single user was asked for permission to access the information, and they all gave their approval. Give your consent to (1b) because of (1a), and (2) isn't an option.
This is pretty much what I often discuss with a friend of mine. Like you he always tells me to use RPM/APT instead of the Python stuff. But my goal is not that the stuff runs as clean as possible on one specific system, but that it runs on as many OS's as possible in relatively clean manner. If virtualenv doesn't tell my Ubuntu's APT that it installed some Python packages in ~/.virtualenv/project_one then an Ubuntu sysadmin will cry and try to kill me, I really don't care. On the other hand with virtualenv I can make sure, that my team leader can run the same command lines as myself and get my Python project running on his Suse box and the QA department can run my code on their Fedora as well. This is why I use Python and this is why I use virtualenv. I'm not happy with how things are in Python, but if I compare the problems between both solution paths currently I still think I'm better off with virtualenv and co.
Any platform needs exclusive apps to draw people to it and only to it. I'm probably never going to get a Windows Phone no matter how good the platform looks because I can't get apps like Tweetbot and Reeder.

Ben Thompson does a better job explaining the why than I do: http://stratechery.com/2013/casual-gaming-is-a-sustainable-b... but the tl;dr is basically that the casual games most people look for on iOS are either already on or easily portable to Android or Windows. If Apple wants people to buy iOS devices to play games (and they should; that's a lot of people!), they need to make sure there are good games on iOS that people can't find anywhere else; otherwise, people will buy cheaper Android/Kindle/nook devices instead.
actually that may be a good use case for it!

it's real seamless and nice just ends up being expensive after a while if you are trying to do enterprise stuff & their add-on services aren't particularly cheap. The customizability of AWS & private stuff means you have to do a bit of server admin but it is generally cheaper & can give better performance.

EDIT: Oh also note that (my biggest gripe) I see big performance swings / queue-ing issues that aren't really correlated with traffic. Plus they introduce some platform/API changes intermittently that make their admin UIs kinda buggy. Or you have to change your workflow to integrate with their services (though the APIs for this are usually ok). I don't know, I feel like they make a lot of money draining people on threads since the performance of RoR overall is kinda questionable, along with the performance of their platform. I'm going to try with Play framework soon & see if there are less of these issues.
That part doesn't seem too unfair to me, considering that China and India's per-capita emissions are still vastly below U.S. levels. It'd be one thing if they were being allowed higher-than-US-level emissions due to being classified as "developing" countries, but they aren't producing anywhere near that.
Amazon Drone: Stunt, Service, or BB gun target?
Yes I know the propeller-head nerds who operate the "technical" Internet would immediately think my proposal is much too harsh. But, ultimately, nerds need to understand that sometimes things are done for "political" rather than "technical" reasons. And the managers who sign the nerds' paychecks are political creatures; they almost invariably aren't nerds.

Nah, but I do think you can go fuck yourself for being so patronizing.
Well, I really don't agree with any of the arguments in the article. I'll use the experience card and just say that I've been using virtualenv/pip for years and it always served me very well. Made development, testing, and deployment easier. Even if it's hackish and that there are more robust solutions, this one strikes a perfect good enough of quality versus time versus complexity.
For historical reference, here are some breathtaking photos of mid-century Pittsburgh:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2155742/Hell-lid-tak...

I wonder if anyone can cite a source for one of the claims made in the article:

"Also lots of people thought that high smoke output was a sign of high productivity and that coal smoke was good for the lungs and helped crops grow."
My bad. I should have realized earlier I was discussing with a child.

Please accept my apologies.
Some examples of books on how to use a Mac:

http://www.amazon.com/Books-Learning-How-Use-Computer/lm/RMA...

http://www.amazon.com/Macs-For-Dummies-Edward-Baig/dp/111851...

http://www.amazon.com/My-iMac-Mountain-Lion-Edition/dp/07897...

http://www.amazon.com/OS-Mountain-Lion-Pocket-Guide/dp/14493...

http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Guide-Mac-Mountain-Edition/dp/1...

Doesn't seem all that different from Windows, after all.
I've also heard plenty of Mac users rant about their computers.
smaller engines for one, maybe even make them production based. Part of that goes back to relevance to road cars. I test drove a Fusion when I was car shopping. needless to say a pushrod V8 was not one of the options.
I think the introduction of bitcoin into the current paradigm would only serve to deepen and strengthen it. A universal currency with no barrier of entry and a slew of other features and benefits can and should be leveraged.
> And is there truly no alternative way to get there that is cheaper in terms of computing power?

If you discover one then please let us know. Right there there is no known alternative to proof-of-work when trying to reach consensus in a distributed system.
You're looking at this wrong. You're thinking of TestingBot as the customer, so you see one customer replacing AWS with dedicated servers and calling it a cloud. That's not the actual scenario, though. TestingBot built a cloud for their customers. They built a way for their customers to offload the risk and costs of scaling their test infrastructures. They built a simple[1], automated way for their customers to easily scale. They built a way to share the same hardware among many customers and thus lower costs and improve utilization. This is a cloud.

I also don't really agree with your claim that the key attribute of "the cloud" is offloading the risk and cost of scaling. From my perspective, "the cloud" is primarily about simplifying and automating scaling, thus reducing the human and time costs. It's not just about dumping the cost of physical machines onto someone else. I see taking less risk on machine purchases as a nice benefit, but not the core purpose.

[1] I haven't actually used TestingBot, so this isn't an endorsement. I have no idea if they actually do a good job or not.
If we don't, get, to fifty thouSAND, in about, thirty days, then, the whole, y'know, project goes, unfunded.
Mandela Coverage: Live Radio Streams From South Africa
Five Preconditions To Adhere To When Developing A Big Data Strategy
Agree with this - switched to dwm and setup some config files and am now unaffected by the changes blowing through gnome, unity, kde etc.
How to grow fresh air
No, thats ridiculous. You are still paying for all the servers in the server farm, even if you have decided to waste another year of Moores law to add a bulky abstraction layer on top.

The whole point of a cloud to a business is that you can adapt to changing needs without having to pay for all the infrastructure all the time.

(You didn't think the suits talk about "the cloud" all the time because they fancy the technology, right?)
[Ask HN] What do you think of indian developers?
nothing's wrong with it (although it's expensive). I think the point was the Heroku is a service built on top of EC2. Switching from Amazon EC2 to Heroku isn't switching your platform at all... it's just paying for convenience. Personally I think Heroku's convenience is worth the difference. The question is more if the base EC2 pricing (which Heroku adds to) is worth it for your needs.
I have left odesk, because of their ridiculously unjust behaviour in a dispute between a client and me. The "support" people there lack basic ethical principles like "in case of a conflict hear both parties involved" and just suspended my account. It's a place, where arbitrariness is an everyday occurrence. I think, it is better to avoid a place, where people with such weak ethics have power over one's business.
Some databases are relatively tolerant of indexes not all fitting in RAM, especially if the access pattern is localised within the index.
I don't know, the color palette seems to be from Quake.
Yes, in fact no Chinese person born with a peanut allergy survived more than a few years.
That's good to hear. My only point about protesting in America was that it's very ingrained in our culture to protest, even for small issues. I didn't really know much about Chinese protesting culture, but it's good to hear they do it in large numbers.