skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tested have an interview/hands-on where they discuss why Oculus have used an optical approach with the external camera to track head movements. They note that it was superior to various other methods they tried. Wonder if eventually it could work with typical laptop web cams?

http://www.tested.com/tech/459692-ces-2014-hands-oculus-vrs-...

Also worth watching that video to hear about the switch to an OLED screen and the latency advantage there. Employees at that company must have so much fun trying all the alternatives to build the best product.

(My dev kit in Australia is for sale if anyone is interested. Email in profile. It's amazing, but I'm curious more than I am a software developer so it might be more useful to someone else.)
Author Here: Got gmail back when people were begging for invites and over the years found using their services out of "convenience". Lots of the recent changes have made me start looking for alternatives. I'm not technical, so I may have missed some self-hosted solutions, but I'm open to suggestions on anything I may have missed.
What, did desktop GUI application development suddenly disappear? There's many classes of software, especially line of business ones, where desktop is pretty dominant.
No self-hosted/FOSS alternatives. This is a bit disappointing.
It was interesting, and the biggest point that sticks out is "we have little automated tests" and that is where the main problem is. From working in tested and untested environments I can attest that a tested environment can rip technologies out and put new ones in easily and quickly. Sure it may take some time, but you always know you didn't break the world.
The part where you opt-in.
Why stop at court side? You could be I the middle of the court!
>You're essentially arguing against all free trade.

it is a stretch. Free trade just isn't always the best approach to every situation.

>A world that relies on trade is a world at peace.

again, big stretch. Just for example:

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21578978-world-...

"Rather, the world of 1913 was quite like that of 2013: modern, substantially urbanised and, even as Woodrow Wilson set about slashing import tariffs, thriving on global trade. "
I mean, I don't use Gmail, or G+, but isn't innovation in messaging a good thing? Mail needs a good rethink, and yeah, maybe I'd prefer it to be by someone other than Google, but I have a hard time seeing malicious intent here.
No, you can't necessarily say that about other companies. Apple, for instance, doesn't have an ad-sponsored business model. Its offerings have to be attractive to end-users, or its products won't command their premium.
Embedding participatory democracy in representative democracy -- People Power
The whole Google+ integration is pathetic! I don't want to be able to "chat" to anyone following me from "Hangouts". The whole concept is a pile of dung!
Yeah, but work meant ascholia in Greek, which is the opposite of schole, and at an Apprenticeship you are possibly lectured at your leisure, but you are also working, so the term scholar fails in this regard.
Google promised to not be evil.
I'd done that for quite a while, but found it broke far too many navigation elements.

You can accomplish that, though, either through your browser preferences, by using a userContent.css override stylesheet, or with site-specific stylesheet overrides (I use Stylebot for this, Stylish is another option).

But, absolute agreement on the crappy design decisions many sites make.
Agree. It'll be big in porn and any off color field just because it'll keep the credit card bill clean.
Hello Pyramid
"At least with these options, you’re diversifying the companies you give your data to."

Why is this better than giving it to one company? Won't I just get more ads?
A company I work with are looking into using TrueVault's document store to keep PHI off of our servers, however TrueVault still does not fulfil the requirements of our application. More specifically multiple document get & document search.

Other than that, the team over at TrueVault is extremely friendly, reasonable and nice to work with.
Let's conduct a simple thought experiment.

I'm attending Hacker School. A friend I haven't seen in a few months comes up and asks, "So, what are you doing these days?" I respond with something like

Oh, I'm an X at Hacker School
Oh, I'm Y-ing at Hacker School

So, it's not a matter of "need" — X and Y are going to be filled with something even if Hacker School has no opinion on the matter. What's more, no student is ever[1] going to say "I'm a customer at Hacker School"[2] or "I'm a participant in Hacker School," and if we insist on referring to students as "customers" or "participants," we're just asking for students to invent their own, contradictory vocabulary.

They might say "I'm attending Hacker School," but that immediately implies that one is a student, i.e., you'd expect their friend to respond, "Oh, cool! What's it like being a student there?" Or if said friend were to ask, "Ah, so you're a student there?" I'd of course reply affirmatively. If they seemed open to it I might elaborate on how being a student at Hacker School isn't like being a student as they think of it.

Perhaps one way to think of it is this: by giving the students at Hacker School a way to refer to themselves, Hacker School is helping them tell a more compelling story to both themselves and those people who care about them.

[1]: You might disagree, I suppose, but I'm not going to argue the point. :)

[2]: Also, the students at Hacker School are not their customers. Hacker School is free for all students and they (presumably) make money through job referrals. This means those companies are their customers, not the students.
You can only DM someone who follows you. As described, people don't have to be in your circles, it's open to the world.
Plus, One actually has much more control over my inbox than one does over Google+ Notifications.
Doesn't this require you to follow them first before they can message you? Also how is this different from someone reaching out to you on twitter that you don't follow?
Because government activity is generally mandated (both in the sense that they can compel people to change their behavior or that people can't refuse to contribute money towards government endeavours), while private sector activity is generally optional.
It's absolutely true, you aren't rich if you spend more than you make, unless of course you're getting pedantic about "earn" but I include wealth and holdings in earnings as well. I didn't mean "earn" in the wage sense, just in the amount of money you make/inherit/whatever regardless of how.
No mention of flying cars, interesting.
It's a little different, though not in practice. It's more a difference of semantics.

On Facebook / Twitter you are receiving a notification through their service, and then their service is emailing you about said notification (likely with the contents of the message).

With this it maps your email address to your public Google+ name, and auto-fills your name for anyone who wishes to contact you through Gmail, which appears as a regular email client. You receive the email as a normal email (as far as I'm aware, may be not the case).

I suspect a lot of the anger stems from this subtle distinction. With Facebook and Twitter, when you sign up for the account you also sign up for the relevant notifications. With this Gmail feature, many people did not sign up for their public G+ name to be mapped to their email address, your name auto-completing in other peoples' "To:" fields.

That said, I don't really have an issue with this feature because I don't have a G+ account, and if I did have a G+ account I'd probably find it pretty useful.
OP here. After reading through the reactions to this post, I think the biggest thing I missed is explaining why we need a word at all.

The primary reason to have a word is that we can have something to refer to ourselves (where "we" are members of the Hacker School community). I think most communities come up with words to refer to their members. It certainly happened in ours: there are a handful of words that people at Hacker School use to refer to themselves and new ones come up regularly.[^1]

The things to consider when figuring out what to call someone who does Hacker School is not what the outside world will think, but whether people who do Hacker School will feel comfortable wanting to use the word to describe themselves and whether we would be alienating anyone who would otherwise enjoy coming to Hacker School.

[^1]. The question of how much we as facilitators should try to influence that process is probably out of scope for this discussion. Let's just assume we've decided that we want to have some input. I can't resist footnotes, even in comments. Yeesh.
Please, if Corporations truly are people, then they're psychopaths. Corporations will do whatever it takes to make a buck. Expecting them to have a moral center is like expecting a shark to do calculus.
Mining Pool Centralization At Crisis Levels
I've had git hooks do this for me for years. I have my hook check for pushes to a branch called "production", export the code (git archive | tar), run some unit tests, and then do whatever it takes to get the code to its destination and restart what needs to be restarted.
..and not one of these is even close to being feature complete. I could get bare IMAP 20 years ago.

There's a very damn good reason that Google's services are so popular.
Indeed, it is. Strange but true.

The way to convince yourself your eyeball isn't moving is to touch your actual eyeball with your fingertip -- like press lightly against the left corner side of your left eyeball with your left index finger -- and then switch your gaze back and forth between the two letters. As long as your viewing distance is correct, you won't feel any movement. (You may have to back your head away from the screen. I'm viewing from a distance of arm's length.)

On the other hand, if you look back and forth between adjacent words, then you can feel physical eye movement.
Calling the whole thing an apprenticeship is humbling, as there are obviously journeymen/fellows and masters involved which would be given titles according to merit as you said.
In my view, even if the driver must remain alert and vigilant and gains no leisure time, as long as these systems dramatically reduce road casualties, there can be no talk of "waste". Saving tens of thousands of purple a year from injury would be a massive public good.
Apparently the porn industry doesn't like Bitcoin because it doesn't support rebilling.
The point of my comment is that it's perfectly fine without opt-in.
I didn't read this thread all day for that reason. Now I'm at home with my tablet and can swipe to collapse that giant swath of gibber-jabber.
Haha, touche.
Good lord these Facebook / Google hate posts are getting out of control and are becoming comical in their faux rage IMO. Do we have a name for a new meme where if a company makes more than X billions of dollars we automatically hate them no matter what they do?

My email address has never been opt-in, ever since I started using email back in 1994.

Don't want people to email / communicate with you, maybe you shouldn't sign up for a social network? Google is linking your GoogleMail inbox to your Google+ account to facilitate communication. Don't like it? Opt out and calm down.
You're welcome. And you'll note that PortableApps.com accepts Bitcoin and Litecoin for donations: http://portableapps.com/donate

A handful of users asked for it, so I implemented it. It's only netted us $4 and I don't really expect it to go anywhere. But I do fire up the Bitcoin and Litecoin beta clients every few days and see where they're at. They're pretty resource hungry while syncing a few days backlog, so I only bring up em when I'm heading away from the PC.

And, for what it's worth, these are not strawman arguments. These are legitimate concerns I have as a businessman and as a consumer. Scan through my comment threads. My issues can be summed up as:

1. Chargebacks. Chargebacks are a biggy, I've had to use them in the last 2 months, and are a big reason why bitcoin (raw, sans a 3rd party allowing you to get your money back) are bad idea for consumers with respect to small businesses. Bitcoin advocates keep claiming that it can be the salvation of small businesses, but, as a consumer, it's these small businesses that are the MOST likely to not fulfill on the product I paid for. Not having any recourse would make me less likely to purchase.

2. Volatility/Risk. Risk of volatility is a big one, and why Overstock.com isn't taking it on themselves (they've pushed that risk to Coinbase). I'd never agree to sell a physical good at a given bitcoin price as it could be 50% of the value within hours on any day. And, yes, it is a risk that Coinbase could go out of business suddenly. The regularity with which bitcoin players get hacked and go under as a percentage of the players in the space has been a bit frightening the last year. True, it is due to poor security on their own systems, but this is a new space and folks haven't had to worry about money being stolen directly from an internet-connected server before. I'd wager a couple players will get it sorted.

3. Perceived Value. I understand the math behind bitcoin, but the value appears to be based on pure speculation and a dash of wishful thinking. Lots of bitcoin players say they have faith in the numbers, but then why does bitcoin have more value than litecoin, dogecoin, or the 100 other cryptocurrencies that have popped up, since those are based on the same or similar numbers. So, it's obviously not just faith in the numbers, it's something else. For some, it seems to be a bit of libertarian gung ho we can do it. For others, it seems to be a bit of technology can solve everything. For others, it seems to be about not having faith in governments. But none of those are really something to base a system of currency around. It needs to be numbers plus something else for me, and it's just not there. At least right now.
I've lived most of my life in Norway, and also spent a year living in Japan (and visited London, Berlin as well as the east and west coast of the US, and Toronto).

Cost of living in Norway is high, but we also are among the people that spend the least amount of our pay (percentage wise) on food. Effective minimum wage (there is no minimum wage) is around 200k NOK a year, the prime minister makes approximately 800k -- and a reasonable pay is 400k NOK/year (65k USD) -- this is also close to the median wage[1].

All our best universities and colleges are public (and free) -- and there's a government sponsored student loan/stipend (for living expenses) that while too low (and worse than eg: Denmark) -- are good enough that it is possible to live on it (almost no-one does, as you can't both live on it and go out drinking two days a week...).

When I went to Japan in 1997 (just before the crash) -- cost of living in Japan "felt" similar to in Norway. Better quality food (or cheaper depending on your point of view) -- more expensive housing and utilities. As I was in high-school at the time I don't know how salaries relate, AFAIK if you get a "real" job in Japan you will make a decent living, but many young people are stuck in part-time jobs.

Also worth mentioning is the heavy taxation on cars, the recent change in VAT for food (half of the regular 25%) -- and that we still don't pay VAT on books.

I'm not sure if this comment really adds much, but I (along with a few other responders, I suspect) was really thrown by the insinuation that education is not only not free in Norway, but expensive.

[1] http://www.ssb.no/a/aarbok/tab/tab-190.html (note these numbers are after tax, my numbers (which are from memory-ish, are before tax)
Some people are really touchy about receiving mail from anyone they don't already know. Based on this thread, quite a few people.
Personally, I don't care. I can imagine scenarios though where someone has a huge following on social media but wants to keep their email private to a relatively small circle. This may be an edge case but nonetheless it probably exists.
I do know Jake! "Fellows" and "fellowship" are really good choices for Insight, though, to be honest, I hadn't spent any time considering the choice until you brought it up. I almost certainly should have. I think your analysis of that decision is totally on point.

Thank you for taking the time to make such a thoughtful and considerate comment. You have gotten to the nut of what I was thinking when I wrote the post and said it more eloquently than I did.
I like it when Marco quotes Gruber or Gruber quotes Marco. It's like a cyclone of fucknozzlery whipping itself into the perfect pointless storm of impotent mactard rage.

Regarding the feature it seems pretty good. It will definitely help normal people find each other and communicate more and maybe will cut down on people mailing me because they make mistyped or guessed someone else's address.
> Generally, we hold to the offered rate even in the case that the card mix changes and becomes more expensive. In the case that the card mix becomes less expensive, we'll decrease the rate as our costs have changed and we can offer a better price. Our pricing is always based on the costs of the transactions, rather than volume alone.

This poses an interesting optimization problem. Given that model, a customer should email you at the beginning of every month asking you to (re)evaluate their rate given whatever period (trailing month? trailing 3 months?) you use to determine the card mix.

If the card mix has changed such that Stripe's cost has decreased, the customer would get a lower rate. If the card mix has not changed or has changed such that Stripe's cost has increased, the customer would maintain the same rate.

The above process could further be improved if the customer keeps track of their own card mix and only emails when favorable to do so. This could even be automated.

> There are downsides to focusing rates and adjusting them on volume alone. With the Balanced pricing matrix, if a merchant has a mediocre Q3 in volume, their pricing could increase for the highest volume quarter (Q4), even if Balanced's effective cost per transaction hasn't changed at all.

Yes. It's certainly not perfect. We used to have a tiered model where in each month the first $x was charged at some rate, the next $y would be charged at another rate, etc. It became difficult for customers to calculate their effective rate and project into the future. We'll continue try to improve based on the feedback we get from customers on our current model. Regardless, we'll publish any improvements in our pricing model and make it available to everyone.

I don't want to make this conversation about Balanced vs. Stripe. I asked my question because I was genuinely interested and wanted to see if there was something we could learn from each other. If you do have an internal formula, I encourage you to publish it. If the model is better than the one Balanced uses, it will allow us to learn and for everyone to improve. That is the nature of openness and what we're trying to accomplish.
I've been following the Oculus CES coverage somewhat and by far the most in-depth interview/coverage has been by the Tested folks. Here's their video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpNQHNkJY1g

The most in-depth discussions probably happen on the Oculus Developer Forums and the Oculus Subreddit. RoadtoVR is good for general coverage on HMDs and peripherals.
This is really interesting.

Google seems deadset on catching up to facebook, but facebook is already trying to catchup to snapchat & the next wave of "social" - which seems decidedly more private.

It's almost as if by trying to catchup to FB - google is only falling further behind.
I'm not sure there will be bad effects from this. If you know my first name you can find my GMail and Google Apps email addresses (and all my social media profiles, Amazon pages, etc.) Spam is still minimal.
It’s a classic result in psychology that people who suffer from what can be attributed to human error feel better after whomever they deem the culprit apologises in a was they deem sincere. More practical examples include studies noticing that patients tend to sue less after surgeons (personally) apologised for negative outcome of surgery.

Expressing sympathy (which is generally considered distinct) also has an impact, although that can be less surprising.

Explanations generally consider the preference for a consistent world-view — think “We now all agree it was Brad’s fault, let’s now move on” above scape-goating.

In this case, an apology would mean: users were not wrong to trust a well-known app with their personal information, security professionals who warned the company about the breach were not wrong to follow white-hat protocol; the company should have acted on it. It's not clear in this case that ‘sorry’ is an apology, as much as a show of sympathy. As I wrote in a previous comment, I haven’t seen a single user complain about negative effect (or read much on teenager-oriented platforms) so I doubt the sympathy actually is towards typical users; on the other hand, the head-wrangling on Hackers News, and late apology, seem to point at a real concern among security professionals who see standard lowered. I would assume the largest issue is to have the indifferent callousness of Snapchat management contaminate the tech industry, and its perception by the main public; I would actually relate that to the lack of outrage at Snowden’s revelation, and a couple more recent news on privacy: “Our personal information is violated, stolen? Whatever…” Snapchat would make ‘Silicon Valley’ part of that line. Admitting that this is unacceptable would help regain the general perception that personal information needs to be handled with care, generally is and that large brands can be trusted to protect it (be it from black-hats or unwarranted government officials) — yet again, I'm not sure we can read this in SnapChat’s message.
I could have sworn I saw an EFF (?) link back in June (post-Snowden) containing a list of FOSS alternatives to a bunch of services (Gmail, Skype, Google Analytics), etc. For some reason I can't find it now, though - hopefully someone else has this saved somewhere.

EDIT Thanks to vezzy-fnord below: https://prism-break.org/en/

They seem to have updated their layout since then, but I'm fairly certain this is the same site that I was referring to.
Email has a light-weight de facto security system where people can't send you an email without knowing your address. Obviously, this isn't perfect, and it was never truly a security feature, but, nevertheless, it is there, and for all of its manifold and obvious faults, it mostly works this way. People are used to this. Taking it away will bother people.
Japanese nuclear plant control room infected by malware
Apologize for off-topic, but what's wrong with target="_blank" in an anchor?
Because GB Is "Great Britain" (England, Scotland, Wales)[1] which does not include Northern Ireland.

UK is "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" which is all four.

It was a politically motivated move basically.

[1] Lets not get pedantic here.
>whether people who do Hacker School will feel comfortable wanting to use the word to describe themselves

>and whether we would be alienating anyone who would otherwise enjoy coming to Hacker School.

Maybe you just need a big thesaurus and someone who has a good feeling for the political atmosphere of your group.
You can also look at it the other way around. In the summer, some (north) parts of Norway you will always have sun :)
You need to give me some feedback before I send you script :)
Andrew has said in the past that his intent is to provide a migration path from classic South to "South 2.0" which will backport migrations to earlier versions of Django (versions 1.4-1.6, I believe) and also build on top of the migration infrastructure in Django 1.7.

You should be fine sticking with South for now.