skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's also unacceptable to wait 2 days to get what I order.

In Seattle, there is often an option for same-day delivery. I suspect they'll eventually roll that out to most cities, assuming it's a successful experiment. I had a ~3 hour turn around the other day (ordered something at 11am and it arrived around 2pm) for a total shipping cost of $2.99 w/ Amazon Prime. It was kind of crazy and made me realize I'm living in the future.
Try Finally Python Quiz
I'm not trying to argue that decentralization is bad (Napster vs. BitTorrent is a great example). And there's a lot of cool technologies around decentralized / anonymized networking. My central point is that a trustless, distributed database i.e. the blockchain doesn't really offer practical advantages / new applications over what can be done today w/o such a database.
Yes they do. They buy transit from (e.g.) Cogent. The reason Netflix has peering agreements with Comcast is that Comcast's peering links with those providers don't have the capacity to carry the volume of traffic its users are requesting. I suspect Netflix would be equally happy if those peering links just got fixed.

> I want my website to be delivered to all Comcast customers for free, do you support that?

Sure, if your website has a peering arrangement with Comcast. Comcast isn't required to offer one to you, though.
The inevitable arrival of subscription-based Windows
Senior citizens. Not sexy, but it seems like a massive underserved market.
The sentence "While it’s understandable for Netflix to try to make all Internet users pay for its costs of doing business"
should probably end with "we would like to shift some of our cost of doing business back to Netflix"
Here are some quibbles - it's not a "new" surgery. Benabid's first cases were published in 1987 and people have been steadily doing them since. FDA approval was in '01 or so. I think the amount of patients who have received the device is now north of 100k. Medtronic's patent on subthalamic stimulation has now expired, and St. Jude and Boston Scientific are readying competitive devices (and better in many ways, IMHO) for their own device approval trials. (Boston Scientific's device traces its lineage to Al Mann and the cochlear implant, which is a fascinating story in its own right).

It's not even a fancy device in its own right. For the EE folks out there it's just a wire hooked up into a device based off of Medtronic's cardiac pacemakers. It's a square wave that's generated by a capacitor discharge, with some simple bread board inside to allow programming of pulse duration, voltage amplitude, and frequency.

That being said, the effects are indeed fascinating, and no one is sure exactly why it works. The best review papers that I can be gotten if you pubmed Cameron McIntyre, Svetlana Miocinovic, Jerry Vitek, or Phil Starr. There's also an interesting one looking at FFT-generated power spectra taken from measurements during surgery by Cora de Hemptinne which is pretty good.

Mike Okun and Kelly Foote are pretty cool people, though, good to see them getting a shout out.
GNU Oleo has a curses mode.
Do good math jokes exist?
What angers me most is FCC and Comcast both are spinning this whole thing as "improving" net-neutrality while in reality is is plain, simple and naked "net anti-neutrality". They are obviously behind this push as lobbyist. Do they think people are complete idiot to buy off statements like charging content providers actually reduces their cost?
Having given some parts a good read and skipped over others, I am not confident the story was worth telling. Every drop in the ocean has its own story, sure, but why do I want to hear about these guys? It's not really aspirational, it's not really original, it's not really thrilling. I feel like it adds false dramatic weight to a bunch of dudes in one of the richest places in the world, trying to strike it richer. Their worst case scenario is many people's best case. I know that's a fallacy along the lines of "someone always has it worse than you" but I don't really understand why this particular story was told. Maybe I'm just not the target audience. But who is?
Amazon has messed up my last few next day orders, seriously breaking down my confidence with them. I made a purchasing decision based on price with next day vs price in store right now. I went with amazon and 1 out of 3 items got there the next day. The other two items listed with delivery by 8pm, which I waited late at the office until after 8pm and I got an email telling me they would be there 2 days later and that they were refunding me. I don't care about the refund on shipping, the items were business sensitive and needed ASAP, so amazon really lost my confidence that next day actually means next day (this was not the first time either). So I think amazon definitely needs their own shipping because these third party companies don't give a shit about amazon customer service. I know Lasership especially in NYC has straight up lied to me about delivering a package that they forgot and just went home.
Link to the Open Xanadu demo:

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/126637177/Phase_1_no_nav_...

Doesn't work for me due to Javascript errors, but I figured I'd post it all the same.
Andreas is not a great choice. His people skills are terrible. They are so bad that he no longer writes his own emails to employees. They have to go through a PA to make sure they have a human element.

The @RealAndreasGal twitter account that was recently deleted was so amusing because the things that it said were exactly on point. Same with the 'ShitGalSays' Tumblr account which is still around: http://shitgalsays.com/

Andreas is strongly pro-whatever partners want in Firefox OS. Expect DRM and other forms of lockdown to start appearing under his rule. He has no interest in the Mozilla mission.
In summary:

NetFlix argument: Comcast is using its bully position to extra a toll from service providers and service subscribers. A Comcast-TwC merger would make it worse for Netflix and everyone else.

Comcast argument: Netflix is wrong. We bully all the content providers, not just Netflix. So, er, yeah, they're wrong.
Where exactly is Netflix getting all this free network equipment?
PHP: a fractal of bad design
TLDR - Netflix abused net neutrality to their benefit so therefore we get to kill net neutrality.
So Netflix is wrong, because? I really didn't see a single counterpoint in that response.
> "fossil evidence suggests complex life evolved on land"

Yeah, and it's survival bias as well, because by definition you don't get much fossils in water. And by far there's way more diversity of life in water so that would suggest clearly otherwise than what the title suggests.
I realize that it's an aside in the article but I wanted to contradict something:

> What’s less well understood is that Apple’s board and investors were absolutely right to fire Jobs. Early in his career, he was petulant, mean, and destructive

This idea (Jobs needed to be away from Apple to improve himself) gets mentioned a lot but I think it's nonsense.

First: Jobs was petulant, mean and destructive to people he disagreed with – for his whole life. He never dropped this trait. It might have appeared that he mellowed but he really just left an Apple that he no longer controlled and started another company where he had full control (he owned Pixar as well as NeXT but never exerted full control there).

Second: Was Apple really right to fire Jobs? In his first 7 years at Apple, Jobs oversaw (not designed or engineered) the only successful product lines in Apple's first 20 years: the Apple 2, the Mac and the Laserwriter. The latter two happened against the best wishes of the board who only wanted to focus on the Apple 2. In the 12 years after Jobs left, Apple never launched another successful hardware product line, it merely upgrading the existing products (Mac II, PPC Mac or unsuccessful ideas like the Newton). The early 90's at Apple's R&D in particular was completely chaotic and directionless sinking billions into Pink, Taligent, OpenDoc, CHRP and other doomed initiatives.

Jobs didn't need to leave Apple to fix himself. He left Apple because he disagreed with everyone (in hindsight: probably rightfully so) and he couldn't fire them. When he returned, he had the authority to fire everyone he disliked (and he did).

As for the comparison to Larry Page – I don't think they were as similar as the article implies. Jobs – for better and worse – was his own special brand of crazy.
I gave up on G+ because they kept making it more and more unreadable. Posts ended up being pictures wherever possible. Then they made things go horizontally and vertically in random sized boxes. You could switch to single column mode, but ended up with almost no actual text on the screen - http://www.rogerbinns.com/galleries/From%20Posts/plusunreada... shows in yellow to tiny areas of actual content.

I still don't understand how anyone actually consumes G+ content in non-trivial amounts. The irony is that Google Reader was all about consuming content, but nothing was learned from that.
Technically Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme, but it has structural incentives for speculators to rope in more and more other speculators to drive up the price.
I'm still in the middle of reading, but I think many people (especially outside of the Bay area) have a certain perception on what the life of a startup founder is like. And the point of the story is to presumably give a real-life view of things that may be different from the popular perception. In other words, maybe you were not really the intended audience.
How are we supposed to believe them when they say that "there is no need for us to engage in a point-counterpoint with Netflix"

If you won't challenge Netflix's argument, then it's your word against theirs. And one of those two companies isn't trying to become the largest ISP in the country.
"Internet interconnection has nothing to do with net neutrality; it’s all about Netflix wanting to unfairly shift its costs from its customers to all Internet customers, regardless of whether they subscribe to Netflix or not."

Really it's Comcast's customers who are using Netflix and those customers are paying them for an X Mbps connection. I don't see what difference it makes if the data comes from Netflix or some other source. It sounds like what Comcast really wants are data caps for their users but those don't do well with consumers. Instead they're targeting the largest content suppliers.
Netflix never attempted to directly send data one-way to Comcast for free. It paid tens of millions of dollars a year to a transit provider, Cogent, that has a peering agreement with Comcast. It only stopped paying Cogent and started paying Comcast (an estimated $25-50M/year) after Comcast refused to provide adequate connectivity between its customers and Cogent for months, despite their links being maxed out at peak hours. Netflix was becoming a casualty of a long-term contract dispute between Comcast and Cogent over peering fees. Comcast was being greedy, trying to get paid twice for the service its customers already pay it to provide.
Interesting, I get the feeling though that RH also thinks this isn't the right approach, that some more though needs to be put into the client-server interface still that goes beyond vanilla datomic.
Is this the Don Hopkins who invented pie menus?
> In actuality, no they didn't try to factor out socioeconomic factors that shouldn't matter (like those you mention) from those that should (like better nutrition).

You don't think occupation has a significant effect on lifespan? Someone whose career involved breathing coal dust, spraying lead-based paint or pumping leaded gasoline, manufacturing products with asbestos or heavy metals, etc. is significantly more likely to suffer health problems later in life. Even just having to work two jobs and not getting enough sleep will catch up with you over the course of 40 years.

> On the other hand, they have a large sample size (I can't find it, but from one aside it looks like around two million records) and they're only comparing two groups: above average and below average. I would imagine boundary cases like your first example would average out.

But that's the whole problem. You don't know if they average out or not, and if they don't in the population at large then no sample size is large enough to save you.
Do you actually know what kind of bad shape our electric, water, and sewage systems are in? In many cases, they consist of century old infrastructure with pipes leaching lead into water, sewage systems overflowing raw sewage into rivers, etc. Even with these companies being defacto monopolies in many places, they keep the infrastructure in far better condition and invest much more on upgrades than public utilities do. And I doubt you'd like the result if telecom infrastructure was upgraded on the timelines utilities operate under.
two guys do vague personalization startup. they're very anxious and unhappy. have trouble getting investors. then some sorta commit. then venture firm sorta commits. they are briefly elated, then anxious and unhappy. then some others sorta commit a bit more. then venture firm backs out. then some others invest anyway. they remain anxious and unhappy.

(i've helped a lot of startups in my time; the story sounds vaguely correct. certainly i've seen the "we're in, we're out" dance plenty of times.)
Why Email Works Less Well Now| And What to Do About It
I got to "An MIT AI PhD can generally walk alone into an investor meeting wearing a coconut-shell bra, perform a series of improvised birdcalls, and walk out with $1 million." and stopped reading; does it get better, or more credible? Also: the rug store? Really? This is the one on University, right?
Factor in nuclear-as-drop-in-replacement for coal, or future solar / wind generation capacity then purchasing an EV now still makes sense. Cars are on the road for 20+ years, new generation capacity is coming online constantly, so I think it makes sense for people to buy EVs.
Page wants to be Jobs and wants to be Facebook. They are playing catch-up in both cases. They want to say basically "we will tell you what you should like and what is nice and better for you, trust us". Well sometimes that works but often it doesn't. In this case it didn't work.

I just got annoyed by G+. The realname thing, then being badgered about it. Every one of those annoying "invitations" turn me further away from it. Maybe I am just different or too contrarian, but that kind of sealed G+ in my head as "stay the fuck away from this annoying thing".
I'm not too versed in this argument, so could someone please explain why Netflix's activities aren't covered by the normal peering agreements that make the "internet backbone" work? Doesn't Netflix pay it's ISP appropriately which gets disseminated by the other ISPs the traffic gets routed through?
I wrote a comment on this site:

"
I call BS Comcast, You had larger transit networks in place and refused to activate them until Netflix paid. That has nothing to do with costs to consumers. They are just murdering your antiquated business model and you keep crying foul. Fios is a much better product than anything you offer."

It is currently being moderated by "Comcast Voices", lets see how much they support a Open Internet.
To clarify, you are blocked from sending over 100? Or you are going over said "limit" anyway?
You're describing a pyramid scheme, not a ponzi scheme. They are not the same thing. A ponzi scheme has someone claiming an investment has abnormally high returns and strings people along by paying them those returns out of pocket (or rather, from the investment of people convinced by prior returns) and then at some point runs away with the growing amount of money being reinvested by the marks.

A pyramid scheme is where each person who buys in sells parts of their own share to the next mark, usually kicking up a fee to the person who sold their share to them. The returns at the top come from the exponential growth of fees from the bottom.

Bitcoin is only really superficially like either of them, mostly because there is no direct kickback aspect of it. If it's any kind of scam it's an asset price bubble.
I suppose this is probably a browser bug given that I use a somewhat nonmainstream browser (Xombrero[1] on OpenBSD) but I get this error from time to time browsing HN. I've never seen it happen on any other website:

Error performing TLS handshake: An unexpected TLS handshake packet was received.

Does HN do anything "nonstandard" with their https configuration?

1: https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero
Sorry, I was referring specifically to your statement: "the only thing that counts down the lifetime of the battery cells are actual charge cycles"
> Please don't say "market cap" when you mean revenue or market share. (Market capitalization of a stock is the number of shares of the stock multiplied by the price per share.)

And please don't downvote without fist spending ten seconds to look up the companies' financials.

I meant exactly what I wrote: "market cap." Qualcomm had a larger market cap that Intel (at least it did yesterday). It did not and does not have greater revenue than Intel, especially when you strip out the wireless side and only look at CPUs.

The point of bringing up market cap is to show how huge these companies are that Intel is competing with. Everyone knows Samsung is enormous, so I didn't bother pointing it out. A lot of people don't realize how huge Qualcomm has gotten. But it's not because of Snapdragon.
And arguably Detroit did cease to exist. The auto industry that was based there is much more dispersed. The same thing would happen to Silicon Valley. Capital will be focused in markets where new companies can reach consumers fairly, leaving the US bereft of an innovative digital economy.
Truth is, the type of use these batteries get isn't well understood yet. No one really knows the long term effects, we can make educated guesses but until a lot of them are in the field with average use cases for years, we won't see much of the nuance.
Yeah!

----

Certain statements in this communication regarding the alleged superfluity of disclaimers, including any statements regarding the expected length of such disclaimers, benefits and synergies of the disclaimers, future opportunities for the more disclaimers, and any other statements regarding future expectations, beliefs, plans, objectives, financial conditions, assumptions or future events or performance that are not historical facts are statements made within the meaning of RFC 1438.
sadly... you might be right. I wish there was a collaboration group to fix ipv4 incrementally
'Secret' in Tech Journalism
I guess one of the benefits is that you're decoupling the energy transfer method from the energy source. If there is new development of solar, wind, geothermal, wave energy etc. electric cars will be ready to receive energy from them versus trying to replace ICE cars. Even if the energy is derived from coal, cleaning the waste products at the factory is easier and is easier to upgrade the filters rather than replacing catalytic converters with better ones on regular cars.
I'm not convinced a web insider was the right choice. The web desperately needs some new thinking -- people that don't believe the technology clock stopped in 1995 with the big hand stuck on "JavaScript" and little hand on "HTML".
And is Comcast supposed to wire up every server for free? If I stick up a box and slap on a 1Gbps uplink to some hosting company that only bought 100Mbps from Comcast, should Comcast now give my and my hoster free access because you decided to download a video file from my server?
> Banks may be greedy but in exchange for their greed they protect my money

...provided tax payers bail them out, at least that has been so in the recent past. So banks dont really protect your money.

There indeed existed regulatory separation and barrier between the risky side and the non risky side. A client of a bank could choose which side to be on. But bankers thought this was too much of an imposition on their creativity. It still would have been fine if the removal of the barrier was not forced on other banks and countries, which I hear they were.
The quoted AT&T piece is quite interesting:

http://www.attpublicpolicy.com/consumers-2/who-should-pay-fo...

Particularly because the comments on the AT&T page by its own customers completely demolish the argument.

These ISPs are seriously arguing that the cost to upgrade their own networks to deliver the content their own customers are requesting should fall on the other side of the link. They're arguing this apparently even after Netflix/Akamai/etc have build CDNs to deliver the content right next to their subscribers. They're not even having to build a backbone.
Another reason to do business with your local small business ISP.
The Comcast argument that "Netflix [...] try to make all Internet users pay for its costs of doing business" reads to me like, "We can't actually offer everyone the bandwidth we have sold them so we either have to raise our rates or charge the largest content providers in order to keep our profit margins."

There may be one, but this isn't a very compelling argument as to why large content providers should need to pay Comcast.
Or like having an aspbergers stalker?
From head injury to math genius
Tesla is interesting, but there may be an upcoming battle between EV and fuel cells since it seems Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai are supporting fuel cells instead of EV. But Tesla is not alone (Nissan, BMW) so this may be a battle that will split the industry. A big part of this fight will be infrastructure. Currently, gas powered cars have these advantages:

- Fast refuel time (Only a few minutes to fill a tank)

- Ubiquitous (Gas stations everywhere)

- Standardized (Gas station nozzle works in any car)

EV is currently very weak in these areas. Recharge time is orders of magnitude longer than filling a gas tank. The common expected use case is to charge at home overnight, but this excludes a huge fraction of the population (anyone living in an apartment/condo). Apartment owners have little incentive to install chargers. And there's a standardization problem. Nissan Leafs cannot charge at Superchargers. There's a lot of fragmentation in this field.

The fuel cell cars are avoiding these issues and they may take a lot of the market that EV currently doesn't serve well. Hydrogen stations are often publicly funded and not tied to a specific auto manufacturer. Refuel time is similar to gas stations. And they are slowly building more and more hydrogen stations (in California). It seems California is being used as a test market for fuel cell cars. If it succeeds, then there could be a strong nationwide push. To someone living in an apartment/condo, fuel cell cars have a lot of advantages.

Many assume that the EV is the successor to the ICE vehicle. But that may not be true.
Design finally won “a seat at the table.” Is it now set to lose it?
Dr. Aubrey de Grey discusses the science of immortality (SENS)
If you want to make the decisions you've got to also be the one supplying the cash.
Up Close on Baseball’s Borders
No it's not like that. You're sort of implying that Netflix/Cogent should get free peering with Comcast because subscribers want to access Netflix.

With this logic, why should anyone have to pay for hosting bandwidth?
We’re migrating repositories to new hardware
He does not know otherwise and is mistaken. When Brendan's comment dispelling the rumour that he'd been offered to remain as CEO it was brought up in the Mozilla governance newsgroup and other places. Mitchell Baker clarified that he was not asked to stay on as CEO but was asked to stay on in another, lower level, position. Unfortunately some employees still repeat the false claim.
The FCC is about to axe-murder net neutrality. Don't get mad – get even