skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trains in Europe are a pleasure compared to most of the U.S. system. I'm not sure if it's because Amtrak shares track with cargo trains or what, but the ride is pretty bumpy, noisy and much beyond a few hours not worth it with nothing to do and noway to sleep. I've done 20+ hour trips twice on Amtrak and I'll never do it again. I can see doing maybe a D.C. to NYC trip, but the economics of such a trip don't really work out for me over a plane even if door to door the train is only slightly slower (in fact I actually like the drive better).
> although no discussion

No surprise about that. I imagine a large portion of us completely ignore posts directly to youtube with no context outside of the title. Personally, I also wouldn't have shared around a video consisting only of floating images and text with technoish music playing. Seems like that is the youtube channels niche, though.

Interestingly, the formula for the Fourier transformation is wrong in both of these posts. In the image, the integration is from infinity to infinity, and in the video the limits of integration are negative infinity to negative infinity.
Bit of a learning curve for sure, but flying them was amazing when you got good at it! I remember especially the Apache being a juggernaut in any situation, even in dogfights with planes like the A-10.
Oh, just using words for maximum effectiveness. The title wouldn't have carried near the political weight if the title was "don't even think about competing against established carriers in Africa, we own this bitch" or "Africa has billions of dollars in opportunities for risk-averse inverters and burgeoning oligarchs." or "Trust us, we got this telecommunication and logistics in a politically unstable atmosphere all figured out, there's NOTHING competing forms of communication could ever offer the people of Africa."

See how ineffective these titles are? Isn't it much more effective to assume the identity of fiscal conservatives and deflate the funding out of a potential market before it's even born by appealing to those who make most of the economic decisions?

I think it helps to consider HN not as a public forum, but as a capitalist/democratic wind vane or a PR game sandbox. Remember, you can say whatever you want here but only up-voted and approved comments will be seen by others.
This is a cool idea, my wife and I did the cross country ride (Oakland to Washington DC) in sleeper cars and it was a lot of fun. Some great scenery and a lot of time to think. Weird things at the time were the plastic utensils in the dining car seemed a bit jarring, and of course train stations in the USA can be fairly tawdry compared to European stations.

There are lots of things that challenge rail in the US, perhaps the most obvious is private ownership of the rails themselves, as opposed to freeways which are state owned and maintained. That shifts a lot of costs on to fewer payers. It also means the rail owner's trains get priority (in this case freight) so scheduling is quite difficult to maintain. There is also a tremendous amount of bureaucracy and complexity built into the system which I've found resists even modestly determined prodding. As part of an exercise in home schooling we tried to find out what it actually cost to put in the San Jose light rail in order to compare that to what we had learned about the Northern Pacific Railroad at a wonderful museum in Sacramento. All of our efforts to get what I had assumed was just boring public data were met with suspicion and resistance. That was pretty weird.
Hopefully trains will again become competitive as politicians get around to pricing the considerable environmental externalities of air travel.

Edit: looks like this is coming along, http://theenergycollective.com/parthvaishnav/287406/icao-dea...
Wolfram stuff is like a completely different world that doesn't acknowledge anyone else. In context to them it makes sense, but to everyone else it's WTF and meh and not much in between.

I remember the pre-Wolfram Alpha marketing. It wasn't nearly as impressive as they made it out to be. The product was cool but to hype it up like that only did damage.

To be honest it always reminds me of Futurama: "welcome to the world of tomorrow!" (which is actually pretty shitty).
I'm just asking if anyone has any research that shows exercise helps people lose weight.

Lots of things that seem obvious turn out to be mot true or much weaker than people thought when put through a proper trial.

To answer your specific question: muscle weighs more than fat, so if a person reduces fat percentage but increases muscle percentage will they lose weight or not? They'll be fitter and healthier, but will they be lighter?
It is a Spanish premium subscription number. To subscribe you need to opt-in, either by web (getting a PIN code you need to enter to confirm the subscription) or by SMS (You need to confirm by replying to a free message from the short code).

I guess this app is going through SMS opt-in, sending the reply behind the scenes.
You're aware of satellites, right?
Seems reasonable, the more information people have the more they are able to leverage the resources that they have available.
A) SnapChat was valued at $3B, making them rich (in theory).

B) SnapChat's reason for success is its value proposition of secrecy, via ephmerality.

C) Startup founders want to be rich.

D) Therefore, startup founders will make an app based on secrecy.

Whether lemma B is actually true is what VCs are gambling upon.
I think people in reality TV aren't necessarily self-aware enough to know that they are debasing themselves.
>Why can't it just be a "dumb" fantasy? Why does it have to be a dumb libertarian fantasy? I don't see anything particularly libertarian about it.

Well, other than the libertarians who thought of it, and those that support it.
God I love the mobile version of nytimes. Please always post these.
7 Steps for a Smooth Transition From Freelance to Full-Time
You are quite right, which is why I said, "Epidemiologic studies tend to support the notion that in a practical setting (not an ideal laboratory)"...

These are studies of what people do in the real world, not whether thermodynamics applies to people (which, of course, it does).
You might check out VidCast at http://dabble.me - it has a bookmarklet compatible with Twit.tv making your experience with finding a video on Twit.tv & casting it to your TV a bit more streamlined.
What are a couple of really well-run African governments?

Interested to know.
You are aware they are way above national airspace that matters, right?
I think/believe you're looking at invalidating it the wrong way.

Patent should be non obvious (I don't remember the exact wording). The prior art for this is not "another bitcoin exchange", its another currency exchange period; adding a new currency to your currency exchange is an obvious step, and should be treated as such.

If the judge act as an idiot and pretend this is new, then you can complain prior art for bitcoin exchange specifically. This way, you don't have to do it again and again and again with the gazillion crypto-currencies out there.
Which is funny because most people in power are not libertarians

I didn't know someone had to be in government before their ideology could be considered silly.

Libertarian bashing seems to be fashionable lately.

Of course it is. Many of the libertarian voices I hear these days are off the rails. Some, but not all, of my politics are libertarian but in the last few years I stopped saying as much because I don't want to get lumped in with the loons. There is a lot of untenable wishful utopian thinking seen as axiomatic going around these days.
It's hard to judge your situation from across the internet, but I'll point out two things I've learned over the years:

1. Personal responsibility varies from person to person, related to such as personality and maturity. I enjoy maintaining a functional and orderly living environment, where some people don't particularly mind slightly more disorder if it means less work.

That's ok, in itself. But problems like yours arise where people are mismatched on responsibility. Living alone guarantees that this never happens, but is not the only way. If you can find peers who share your sense of responsibility, then living with many others can still work out.

With that said, I know my priorities bias me to optimize for responsible people first, so I opt to live with the small number of people I can find.

2. I've found Hacker Houses intellectually frustrating environments in surprising ways. I realized over time that I enjoy living with people doing vastly different things, well outside of technology or science. Living with people who are thinking about the same things leads me to tunnel vision and eventual irritation/cynicism. Maybe that's just me.
Never Miss a Day – 100 Days of sketches
We are. Currently released two full-stack Meteor.js responsive, mobile-optimized large-scale web apps, one in production, the other one in pre-beta sneak preview.

- Citypath.eu — City travel app. Job work for a client.
- Popol.li — Popularity poll voting app. Our own side project.

If you want to learn more, do get in touch over Twitter: @sewdn or @rhythmvs
He's doing a shitty job of pointing out that "negligence on the part of financial institutions" has been re-branded by the industry as "identity theft" so they can transfer part or all of the liability to the customer, and even get you to pay to protect yourself from their negligence. If he'd spoken plainly and not tried to mimic one of a hundred libertarian web sites that rail on such things it probably would have been clearer.
A few years ago there was even a small "gold rush" for emoji domains.

http://www.panic.com/blog/the-worlds-first-emoji-domain/
The one thing Amtrak needs to be focusing on now is fixing their terrible ancient, expensive trains.
If you are only happy to fund celebrities, then what advantage do they have to show more pictures of their non-celebrity selves?
Sorry, "many African governments".

The African governments effective and non-corrupt enough to provide basic 21st century amenities like internet access are, practically by definition, not the African governments that we are talking about. What need do those countries have with drone-internet if they already have widespread uncensored internet access?

When we talk about drone internet for Africa, we are talking about drone internet for African countries that have at best benevolent but ineffective or resourceless governments.

As far as I can tell from wikipedia, there are only three African countries where significant internet access is present: Morocco, South Africa, and Egypt. Egypt however has a recent history of internet censorship/blackout and an uncertain future for internet censorship.
Show HN: Chromebrew – the package manager for Chrome OS
I'm stupid and completely ignored that bit.
TIL piping data together for big data purposes is called a protocol and not a dragnet.
It's really, really strange to me that F=ma is not on the list. Also very important, but missing: Hooks law, Ohms Law, the Ideal Gas Law. The binomial theorem and Taylor series are just as important as Fourier series, if not more so.

A very strange, almost arbitrary list. Thumbs down.
i'd love to see it in action. and the examples don't work,
at least not to my satisfaction. could you mount a demo?
full-screen-height editor on the left half of the window.

-bowerbird
Developer/designer partner for a side project.
Hello Guys!

I am Gianluca Rispo, a hundred % Italian designer. Except that, I am a really great thinker with a lot of ideas.

I was wondering if there were out there, someone who has design (hybrid front-end, UI) or development skills who wanted to partner up in these neat ideas for possible future startups.

Feel free to contact me on twitter @GianlucaRispo or email gianlucarispo (at) outlook.com

Cheers!
Is this another one of those Wolfram projects where the results are returned as images?
The problem is that the term reverses the arrow of causality. It indicates that there is some specific "identity" that an individual possesses, and thus implies the individual has a responsibility to protect it from being "stolen".

> There was no way to hold them [the copier of his ID card] responsible

With the term "identity theft", one concludes that his damages come from being the victim of the copier, and that this crime was never solved. However, every harm that befell him was actually due to other parties that operate completely out in the open, but they manage to escape your blame!

> prosecuted for or imprisoned for crimes they had nothing to do with

The real crimes are the utter incompetence of the prosecutor and the extrajudicial punishment from merely being targeted by that system.

> people to be chased by collection agencies

The collection agencies are committing harassment and extortion, rooted in negligence.

> credit ratings ruined

Libel and tortious interference by the credit bureaus.

In all of these cases, the term "identity theft" primarily serves to obscure the root of the problem, which is the utter lack of diligence by creditors and the unearned importance given to the results of their sloppy process. The parties responsible for the above transgressions seek to pass the buck by glossing over their glaringly simplistic assumptions, because any actual fix would make their job much harder.
XPrivacy should really come installed by default with Android: the new versions are really quite good (especially with the cloudsourcing and on-demand bits) and really highlight how atrocious most apps are with your personal data. And it is a hell of a lot more effective than relying on companies like Avast to detect and remove bad actors from the market. I've lost track of the number of times random apps (most of whom are just shells around a website) ask permissions for my full phone number, Google and Facebook accounts, contact info etc. for no reason at all. At this point, I'm scared of using Android without the module. (not that ios or windows are any better)
It really is a terrible term though. I dislike it enough that I sent Al Franken a letter asking him not to use it during hearings (though given that I'm not in Minnesota it probably wasn't even a symbolic act).
No they won't be lighter, but they will still lose weight.

You unfortunately used the phrase in the literal meaning lose weight, while it is commonly used to indicate that someone is going to start reducing their fat percentage and improve the body shape. If the word phrase has a different meaning to you, fine, but whenever it was used in conversations I was involved in it had that definition, thus the confusion. You should have used the word mass and there would be no misunderstanding.

Exercise will definitely work, but it might not strictly lower your mass.
Sure tax it to oblivion. Air travel impact per person is surprisingly low (comparable to driving). Trains have lot of fat which is not included in their footprint.
AT&T cuts prices again
I think Stallman will argue that Open Source co-opted ideas from the Free Software movement. If that's true then you don't really have "Open Source" without Stallman's Free Software ideas.
Craig Venter Has $70M to Tackle Aging Related Disease
Packet-moving still comes with a lot of potential issues and possibility for malfeasance, though. Just look at Net Neutrality. Or NSA surveillance.
Ghana and (southern) Nigeria, where this guy has been, are among the most urbanized parts of the continent.

There are a lot of dense conurbations and they are fairly close to one another. That's obviously relevant for cell service.

Many parts of e.g. east and central Africa have lower-density settlement patterns that may be tougher to cover.
Then let me amend my statement: I have not heard any mention of this being free from a credible source. And yes, I've looked.
Note that this is still just an application for a patent. It may get denied (but probably won't).
Many Windows-based corporate VPN clients like to tear down the connection on every little net hiccup, forcing you to do redo your SecurID or whatever login. And Windows IP stack likes to tear down your TCP connections on any brief loss of link, so eg. your SSH session cannot survive this type of event.
No worries. Your concern was spot on, anyway.
"Changed the world" can be for better or worse. Much as TIME's "Man of the Year" doesn't (necessarily) go to the person who had the greatest impact for good (Stalin (twice), Hitler, Khrushchev, Nixon & Kissenger, Ayatullah Khomeini).

The financial meltdowns of the mid 1990s and 2000s certainly had significant global impact, to the point of getting a lot of people to question what they thought they knew of economics. Fairly famously Alan Greenspan, who admitted that he was waylaid by the whole thing. I just happened across his recent book whose title is intruiging, though by reviews and what little of it I skimmed, the content is less than overwhelming: The Map and the Territory.

I'd need to find the backstory on the title, but it is strongly reminiscent of Robert Pirsig's Lila, the opening chapter of which starts with the author navigating a river by what turns out to be the wrong chart. Confusion over our mental models and reality being a major risk factor to current affairs.
In retrospect, I think this is the result of Facebook transitioning from a "private" social network to a public network, when they decided to accept anyone over the age of 13. When Facebook was college-only, I think one of the major appeals was the ability to widely share information, with the one restriction being that it was kept to your peer group. I think there is a whole host of things that young people are willing to share openly with their peers that they also don't want to share with their parents or other authority figures. Further, in many cases, that desire for privacy is not misguided; protecting controversial beliefs from people that have power over you is actually kind of wise.
I will fund a pseudonymous celebrity, or a pseudonym with a track record. I will fund a non-celebrity with no track record IFF the project is interesting, credible, and the team shows both a sufficient investment to date that I don't think it's a "scam", and understanding of the upcoming challenges so they'll finish it.
Free software is not "inherently" anything specific. Free software as defined by the FSF might be what you said. But someone else might think free software means nothing besides that you can download it free of charge.
This could be some of the best publicity and promotion that Uber ever gets, and they didn't even have to pay. Having cops tell a group of independent and creative people what to do is brilliant.
Amtrak's NE Corridor is wonderful (I also do the NYC<->DC regularly) but elsewhere its a lot worse. I also did DC<->Norfolk a lot, and that (a 4-5 hour ride) was often delayed 2-4 hours and sometimes as much as 24.
Thanks for the question! The correlation here is r=0.38 with a p-value < 2e-15. We've added this note to the post.

(Note: I'm one of the authors of the post.)
You are conflating "celebrity" and "somebody who is likely to deliver and not waste your backing money." As someone doing a Kickstarter fairly soon, this is an issue I'm working to alleviate, but not with cute pseudonyms.

I mean, WTF is this (from their Kickstarter page):

Why should you trust us? The fate of our company and
its team depends on the success of this game.

Well, of course, but that doesn't do anything to substantiate why they should trust the project owners. The project owners might be complete idiots laying their company on the line for something they can't do, what reason has been given to think they can do it?

Betting on people with a track record or demonstrable ability to finish a game is only smart.
needs a tl;dr.
Spreading mind numbing american media is libertarian?
Black-Scholes is relevant to any HN readers with stock options, but I agree that it doesn't belong on the list. And why isn't F=ma on the list? That seems really fundamental. (Maybe they didn't want Newton over-represented, but I'd pick that over gravitation.) And is Euler's Formula really important enough to be on the list? (genuine question) I'd put De Morgan's law on the list because of its importance to computers, but technically I guess it's not an equation.
Caribbean nations prepare demand for slavery reparations
The original topic here was "why don't planes have GPS trackers on them and constantly report in, if trackers are so cheap and every car/truck/container/phone on the planet can have one?"

How does a plane get data back to the ground when it's 7 miles up and 1000 miles from shore? You have to have a satellite or long-range VHF link.
So they have some money now...

Countdown to lawsuit wanting revelation of information, and / or damages starting ... now.
I remember having one of these. But I had completely forgotten about it until I read the article. Logo, wow.
Or not a bomb, just some maintenance problem. No group claims responsibility. The point of bombing seems to be to strike fear and send a message. The passport thing is curious but stolen/fake passports can be of use for other things that are nothing to do with terrorism.
TweetCaster for Twitter
And the other side ah "so this illegal contract you have forced my client to sign" doesn't get your employers arguments off to a good start.
I'm not sure that government regulation makes that sort of thing less likely, especially in some of the more corrupt countries in Africa. If I had to pick a method of providing net neutrality and preventing eavesdropping, I wouldn't pick regulation; I'd pick real competition among ISPs, and increased use of TLS, respectively.
The best way to evaluate a patent application is to look at its claims first. Here's the application in its published form:

https://www.google.com/patents/US20130173416

The claims are on the right on Google Patents and at the end of the official PDF. Independent claims are the most important; dependent claims are only valid if the claims that they depend upon are also valid. Here, claim 1, which is independent, involves a lot of language having to do with digital goods and inventory. Already that's confusing because digital goods don't tend to have inventory; they're digital. Claim 2, which is dependent upon claim 1, gets into digital currencies. The other focus of the patent application relates to combinations of digital goods. I'd expect the examiner to push back on claim 1 to clarify what they're actually talking about and limit it accordingly.

Is there a lot of prior art out there dated before December 29, 2011 (the application's priority date) that could block this applciation from ever going anywhere? Yeah, there is. Will I file some with the USPTO in a few minutes? Yeah, I will.

Meanwhile, keep in mind, patents are inherently confusing because by the time one gets granted it has three numbers already, and that's just in the U.S.: there's the application number, which here is 13/340,494, the publication number (before publication, no one can see the application so it can't yet be considered prior art in others), which here is US20130173416 A1, and the grant or issue number, which right now would be somewhere in the 8 million range were it to be granted. A lot of people and institutions mix these numbers up, including even Westlaw, which calls publications "applications". A publication is a snapshot of an application at a particular point in time.

Anyway, don't freak out. There's worse [actually granted] patents out there. Also, none of this is legal advice and I'm not a lawyer.

Update: I just filed the following potential prior art:

1. http://www.google.com/patents/US20020161692

2. http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/14/gumroad-lets-you-sell-anyth...

3. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/
See also: http://www.whatsmyuseragent.com