skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Funny how efficient electric service is now in Texas. There is one outfit that installs and maintains the lines, and dozens of competing service companies that just handle billing (and oddly enough all use the same third party billing software). Compare that with the ISP situation where each town has a cable company and a phone company and that's it. Except where an older phone company had a presence years ago where those lucky folks can also get FIOS as an option. My town, the 50th largest city in the US, has TWC and AT&T and no FIOS. So I have an option of Dumb or Dumber.

The laws in this country to allow monopolies are a joke, but both political parties could care less.
She was back from the era when most computer programmers were female. Until late 1940s, the word "computer" meant a clerk who used did long clculations by hand or adding machine. These were mainly mathematical tables or military operations. Some of these women transitioned into programing jobs when the first programmable digital computers began in the late 1940s. Programming was either switchboard rewiring or punch cards/tape then.
Great way of looking at it. I wonder what percent of the money supply gold is at.
This is going to make my life so much easier for the next few years as these situations come up more and more.
I think they need to work on their .gitignore file a little, for example: https://github.com/guardian/frontend/blob/master/nginx/front... And also, there's cache fragments in the repository.
why is hover detection slow? i know browser devs are way behind the times... but three things:

* the browser can implement this optimisation

* spatial partitioning maybe is a much better general solution. the 2d aabb case is extrememly fast and can handle checks against 10000s of boxes per ms with good memory layout

* stagger checks across frames if more optimisation is needed when there are say, 100000s boxes to test (maybe? i'm skeptical even that would be especially slow)
Thanks. I hope so too. Let me know if you know of any good ways to get visibility. I have been posting on HN and reddit.
The passive spectator stance is part of what causes this, not really a sane reaction to it. It's not a show, it's the result of our (in)actions.
So, then journalists should be mercilessly and ruthlessly critical of all they are covering? ARPA-E judges are pretty smart folks, if they were fooled by this thing what makes you think a journalist on some tech news site is going to be able to vet this technology and determine if it's the going to be the next big thing or not?

The point I really want to discuss is the negativity of your comment. We like to come down hard on people dismissing new projects for being incomplete, unpromising, and so on when it comes to social sharing apps. Why not also be kind to failures in the cleantech area? The area where it's actually really tough to innovate, the area where improvements would definitively make this earth better than how it's currently heading.

ARPA-E's own stated mission is to fund ideas that are so far out that most institutions wouldn't fund them, "too early for private-sector investment" (their words). ARPA-E itself only expects 10% of the projects it funds to be successful. So then what good reason is there to cry about some specific project failing? It doesn't spell the end of ARPA-E, this is just the nature of the game. This is not some tragedy of news journals failing, nothing is wrong here, just move on. More will fail yet still, but one just might be that breakthrough that we're looking forward to.
Any chance that you can add all exchanges with significant volume? (hint: China has more than one exchange)
Really we need a way to join forces. You can't do it alone. I was able to crank out a barely working software project on the side when I was 23 but now I don't have as much free time. I would love for us to post "Join Me HN:<description of project> " on here and maybe some of us 9-5 ers can get it on the action.
The drip-feeding has been great! We get to see officials grudgingly acknowledge the latest revelation, and flatly deny we're doing whatever will be released next. Over and over.
Thanks for that, enough to say i didn't receive the "email" they sent to their US customers, it may have got lost on the "interwebs".
I honestly think the best advancements aren't going to be battery technologies for mass transit(at least for the next hundred years or so). Which lead me to read about a group working on creating Biodiesel from algae[1]. Turns out they can have our waste (sewage) fed into vats with algae and providing the algae with nutrients to grow. They then dry/squeeze out the algae and due to the high amount of lipids produce oil and in turn it into oil (although low quality).

The amazing part about this process is algae converts carbon to oxygen more efficiently than plants, and can only introduce as much carbon as it removes from the atmosphere. Therefore process would actually produce the same amount of carbon emissions as it reduces.

Battery power is slow growing and will take many years (perhaps hundreds) based on the current rate to reach the efficiency of oil... So this seems like a better alternative to me.

[1] http://algae.illinois.edu/Projects/BiodieselProduction.html
Woah, you can't compare those numbers directly. If you could then Tesla cars would be travelling just 10s of miles per charge. Obviously, there are many other factors: weight and bulk of the power train, power train efficiency, regenerative breaking, driving conditions, etc.
LampNote initially started life as a hackday project using data provided by Manchester City Council. The data available for the hackday included planning notices which, in the UK, are still publicised by sticking pieces of paper onto lampposts.

Maybe it's an easier correlation to someone in the UK?
Manning largely revealed information about what the US was doing to foreigners (to a foreigner, in Assange), and Snowden largely revealed what the US was doing to US citizens.

The vocal majority in the US are racist, xenophobic nationalists, and are disgusted by the idea that any conceivable US initiatives would be even slightly compromised for the sake of any number of foreigners, anywhere. The gender-change was a nail in the coffin - because to a lot of the public, that others him into a foreigner too.

Snowden is very middle-class professional, dates a (female) model, races to Moscow through Hong Kong like a movie spy, and the President of Bolivia was pulled out of a plane just to find him (unsuccessfully.)

(American) people generally understand their world in terms of shallow stereotypes and movie narratives; they hate both subtitles and protagonists that aren't white middle-class heterosexuals.

Manning is a lot more of an underdog than Snowden.
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Heh, I would describe myself as Lewis Hamilton "fan", and even I had to down vote that nonsense. I mean, its not even like Lewis had a decent season. By his own estimation, he performed poorly and has to do better for Merc next season.

If we want to get all F1 about it, look no further than Adrian Newey.
Right. We want doing responsible journalism to lead to more money.
Facebook opens new AI research lab and hires Yann LeCun
Poking around, on the Lithium-air battery wiki page, they have this quote:

> The energy density of gasoline is approximately 13 kW·h/kg, which corresponds to 1.7 kW·h/kg of energy provided to the wheels after losses.

Any clue what the energy provided to the wheels is for electric cars like a Tesla? I'm wonder what the energy loss is for electric cars from stored form to actual power at the wheel.
Experimentation Can Make You and Your Startup Better
Ask HN: Does your startup use Captchas? I want to talk to you.
I'm working on a captcha alternative. I think it could help with some of the pain-points (hard to use, etc). Let me know if you'd be down to chat!
Not necessarily. Gibson has weathered it well, IMHO.
Snowden docs had NYTimes exec fearing for his life
Amazon by the Numbers: $3.3B in Shipping Losses
Global Bitcoin Computing Power Now 256 Times Faster Than Top 500 Supercomputers
I think we're both right. :)

I believe the official system requirement was a Pentium 75, though in reality you could run it on a 486DX pretty well if you had a VESA local bus video card, etc.

(I think I remember running it pretty horribly on a 486SX, like 3fps...)

Oh, the memories!
Strange how centralized governments everywhere are expanding their power under what are, universally, "small government" neoliberal regimes.
There was a huge campaign to free Mandela in the 1980s, including the memorable song "Free Nelson Mandela" by The Special AKA:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/09/jerry-dammers-f...
Rcarmo/imapbackup
Treat the competition differently depending on your stage of startup evolution
>Come to that, I don't know anyone who watches the show, even.

Then you should know that your experience isn't very representative, because the ratings for the show can be objectively confirmed.
Eh, I don't find it terribly hard to imagine that America is the Kingdom of Azeroth and Al Qaeda are the Forsaken. Just map place names and unit compositions and you have a fairly large vocabulary already. Wouldn't even make it hard to just swap out different races for the current code key.
I believe you can do it with Martini https://github.com/codegangsta/martini.
[LLVMdev] Update on OpenMP support in clang / llvm
> When you look at the rumored Snapchat valuations of over 3 billion dollars, it’s difficult to understand how an investor can think that Snapchat is worth that much. Because the truth is, it’s not.

How much is your house worth? Might be it cost you $100K, but if someone is willing to give you $1M for it because they want to build a supermarket there, then your house is worth $1M.

So if Snapchat is being offered $3B from Facebook because they think it would give them at least that much value, then Snapchat is worth $3B.
Swiss journalists keep intelligence chief under surveillance
Indeed, but, the profit motive prevented the timely release of the documents they have in they possesion. Are they still sitting on any docs?
It seems remiss to talk about how the Great Northern didn't need any government help when it bought all its land from the federal government after the federal government had acquired control of it by slaughtering most of the land's previous residents.
I really like his point on market cap. When you have preferences if things go South, the valuation isn't as simple as total shares multiplied by most recent equity valuation. Not all shares are equal.

The # of IPOs is also consistent with my intuition. It feels like 1998 excitement, as opposed to 1999 or 2000 mania.
Remote Code Execution exploit in WordPress 3.5.1
English (Google Translator): http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=ht...
Manning is much more of an underdog, but watching an underdog succeed (or come close) is what's interesting about underdogs. Watching an underdog get trounced? Boring.
A single coin can be divided up to 8 decimal places though.
This guy thinks news outlets aren't using data to make editorial decisions as often as they could. Maybe there's a reason his colleagues at the Times don't defer to his data. If the new york times made every editorial decision based on its effect on metrics like pageviews and social shares, you'd have the Huffington Post. The online equivalent of a tabloid. Newspapers have a responsibility to the public that transcends profits and popularity.

That said, we data could improve news consumption if used properly, especially in terms of testing user interfaces. Data should be used to design how people consume news. It shouldn't be used to chose what news to report.
The Guardian also open-sourced a test SSL cert
I could not agree more for this specific case. Really wish Internet was just another utility that we paid for and not worry about the monopoly these ISPs have specially in some remote areas.
CIA's anti-terrorism effort called 'colossal flop'
DIY SEO:Learn Your Link Building Basics
I heard they wanted to use WebP, but I don't see any?
Actually, I'd take that one step further:

Share prices DO NOT denote actual value. Hence things like the P/E (Price to Earnings) ratio. Share prices denote estimated worth, which is often never the case (some companies trade at 30x their actual earnings, and never live up to the promise of those expected earnings). The same concept applies to public/private acquisitions.

What is actually going on with these valuations? Well, it is kind of a way of conning public markets into buying this stuff. Even in the case of "private" acquisitions, these acquisitions are largely or entirely funded with publicly-traded money used by the publicly-traded acquiring company.

This is not always devious but I suspect there are at least a few cases of corruption. Sometimes companies are innocently acquired with the true belief that they will add value. Often times, companies are acquired to simply be "flipped" - i.e. destroyed within 3 years after the shares vest. The valley floor is littered with the skeletons of acquired companies. :)

[Edit: on reading further down, the author hints at this a bit).
I think the HN crowd honestly believes that the only reason the next browser hasn't been written in a GC language is momentum and time. That the next one will very obviously be written in Ruby or Python. I've seen discussions here to that effect.

I find it hard to read HN discussions about C. One faction is totally amazed by the C equivalent of being able to tie their shoes. The other faction believes shoelaces are obsolete and everyone should wear velcro.

This "my generation has missed out" thing is really odd... If you are honestly interested in it, go learn how it works! The commenter you're replying to should quit making excuses.
yeh you right its both "traditions" As one of my Scottish colleagues said the thing that saddened him him about Scotland was the "nasty element of anti englishnes" and sectarianism that was common. And he was very knowledgeable about scotish politics and his facility with "engineering" language makes malcom tucker look like a middle class mommys boy.

There are parts of Scotland where I would feel uncomfortable coming from a mixed (RC/PROD) background.

I could see a post Independence Scotland pandering to right wing anti emigration lobby and or religious or anti gay presure - the same thing happened in Northern Ireland John Major had his feet held to the fire by the hardline unionists -

I think thats on the far end but in the context of a future sf dysutopia not that much of a stretch after all coutrys like Holland had far right politicians making ground.
Could this comment be more Hacker News?

There are not 7 billion people that this will impact. How many of those have no access to a computer of any sort, including a mobile phone? How many are under the age of ten? That cuts out a huge chunk from that figure.

Then subtract all those too old to care about Bitcoin or internet anything.

Then remove from that those that have little faith in anything they can't touch and hold, physical currency, precious metals, or simply commodity items. Considering how reluctant some groups are to even use credit cards for online purchases, regardless of the enormous level of consumer protection provided by that service, this is an insurmountable hurdle for some.

There's at most a billion people in this market and for it to get that pervasive it will take an enormous upswing in popularity. At this point Bitcoin isn't even as popular as Cuban Pesos.
Every compiler tries to schedule instructions the best it can, it's just that for a lot of code you can't do a very good job due to uncertainty about memory delays. The Mill has a very interesting but relatively simple way of dealing with load delay uncertainty, which they cover in an earlier lecture.

And really, there are plenty of problems where static scheduling works just fine. Matrix multiplication, signal processing, stuff where the execution flow is regular enough that you can predict memory delays actually runs just as well (and in some cases faster!) on in order machines where the compiler schedules everything out ahead of time. That's why your cell phone has an in order VLIW DSP or two along with the ARM cores that run the application code and the GPU. This tends to correlate with floating point code, which is why Intel left the floating point unit on Silvermont in order while upgrading the inter and memory units to be OoO.

I certainly understand skepticism, and want to see this on production silicon before assuming that it'll work as well as they seem to think. But there's a lot of very interesting innovation there and I hope they license their patents to DSP makers even if their processor is a dud for application code.
Yes, all of the Conj talks will be available soon, they are currently being edited.
I'm sure they'd appreciate a pull request.
Classic VW Bus Productions Ends
The Tesla Roadster was 88% efficient. I don't remember the exact value for the Model S, but it's in the same general range. This huge difference is the main thing that makes electric cars viable.
Manning is a hero, and its okay to down-vote this post.
Lossy wouldn't look bad, it's just not a direct comparison :) Here are 3 files: a lossless WebP and two lossy ones with max and min quality settings https://www.dropbox.com/sh/q1jqoru5ljtq9on/P2ELh8NkA6?lst The lossless one is slightly bigger than the GIF which I did not expect. The high-quality lossy one is obviously overkill and is huge! The low-quality lossy one is smaller but looks like crap.

GIF: 81 kB
WebP: 82 kB
-q 0: 59 kB
-q 100: 259 kB
They have reputedly released roughly 1% of what they received. I think that simply dumping the docs would have had less impact than the steady stream of new revelations, but certainly I could be mistaken...
Scala and Clojure are built for two different purposes

The point of this talk is to make light of the fact that Scala is now being used for purposes to which it was not originally intended. These new uses are much more in line with Clojure's intended uses. This makes it appropriate to compare them.
The first paragraph is essentially this:

http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

I also suffer from this condition ;)
The Mac desktop is a much less controlled environment. It doesn't help Apple to block a desktop app from their app store because if they do, the developer could release it outside of the dev store. Less apps in the app store means less apps Apple can say it has in the app store.

On the other hand, realistically, the app store is the only way to get apps onto an iPhone for the general public. They can easily control things there because it's the app store or bust.
Well, that's just a weird way to use HN.
American airlines and US Airways merger closes
Yes real question is will Bob ever get that cat5 cabling project finished
Lessons from a Maker
DHL testing delivery by Paketkopter drone
False Memory Fundamental
"Price is What You Pay, Value is What You Get". [1]

I could hypothetically buy an apple or an investment for $100 billion (if someone gave me the money). There could be any number of reasons for doing so, but those reasons don't change the fact that it's highly unlikely I will derive $100 billion or more in pleasure or return from that money.

On the other hand, if I can buy something cheap and I find it to be more enjoyable, or an investment returns more money, than expected, then the item was more valuable than what I had paid for it.

[1]: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett
I agree with jonahx. It's a bit unsettling when you see it. It's not the fact that there's a form in there, but that it looks like a menu dropdown.
In addition to the predictable obsolescence you cite, a problem with making deals with USA telcos is that they seldom stick to the terms of those deals. Even if some stick-in-the-mud with an excess of conscience won't play ball at the local or state level, they can always overrule that with the commissioners they've bought at the next higher level.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/billions-in-cus...
This morning I spoke to someone who had installed it; it had SMSd everyone in her contacts, and she was understandably not too happy. It's not just an assumption that they're misusing permissions.

You are asking the author to assume that apps that ask for broad permissions are trustworthy. There have been far too many counterexamples for that position to be tenable.
Been done "niccolo machiavelli" wrote the book a while back now.
Doing a startup in your spare time is a good way to get fired. It is also a good way to ruin your good idea.

Part time startups work only if you are trying to start a "home business" that is very different from you day job.

You work at Best Buy, and want to start a new search engine. Great. That is better than quitting you job to start a new search engine.

You work at Google and want to start a social network. You are going to get fired. There is a good chance Google will own your code, and you won't have enough time to get your social network off the ground, so now you are doubly screwed.

You work at Google and want to start a business selling Clay ovens on the weekend. Congrats you have a startup that won't break Google's moonlighting rules.
Scientists Develop Silicon Supercapacitor, Could Lead to On-chip Power Storage
> So if bitcoin will one day become "THE" currency...

That's the big question isn't it? Will bitcoin take over, or will another digital cryptocurrency conjured out of the ether take over? (bitcoin 2.0)

> So there is 0.003 bitcoin per person.

There's some bitcoin amounts that are likely lost forever, perhaps miners that lost their private keys or whatever, or forgot about their bitcoin wallet from the early days, which will skew the calculations and make the effective total less than 21 million. Also, as others have noted, you are likely to see inequality with bitcoin wealth, just like regular assets and currencies.
How UK air traffic control system was caught asleep on the job
It's latex notation and should render like http://arachnoid.com/latex/?equ=p%5E%5Cmu%20%3D%20m%20u%5E%5... . It's a bit obtuse to be using it on a non-physics/maths forum.

mu is being used as an index (mu=0,1,2,3) on the components of the vectors p and u, m is a scalar representing rest mass.
This article didn't contain any mention of the US government.
We have a lot of competing ISPs here in Lithuania. Just for comparison, I pay <15$ for 100mbps connection and in the 10 years I had maybe one or two outages that were fixed within few hours.
The nation does not have money to support public health care but has enough to support public spying.
Maybe. Maybe not. The proof is in the pudding. It's immeasautably better than before and is a lot cheaper to run. Until otherwise I am of the opinion that they are making the right decisions.
I would upvote if it wasn't spread across 8 pages.
Obviously, this is a subjective question with many answers. However one clear marker is expert sales ability. Anyone involved in business for a while will know that there is a clear demarcation between average sales ability and superstar sales ability. The best sales people are not just a little bit better than the average, but multiple times better. Someone with this skill level can sell anything to anyone, including of course a piece of their company to the VC. The most delicious part is that at that level, this fancy decision tree is irrelevant; it's the sales expert who is selecting the VC, not the other way around.
Sorry can someone explain a bit more about the Small Win Scenario and how you still get all your money back? Say Snapchat IPO's for $1B and you invested $100M at a $3B valuation, wouldn't you only get $33M of your money back? Or is that the caveat in "assuming I’m the most senior investor"?. Everyone investing at these valuation can't all be the most senior investor right?