skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would like to see the middleware between sensors and motors be open source. To me, it seems like the complexity in prosthetics is not the mechanics, but interpreting the signals properly to control the device.

It seems like a relatively rudimentary neural net with a lot more electrical sensors than today (maybe 16 to 256, something on that order) combined with some of the new sensors like light transmission or even maybe ultrasound to "see" the muscles under the skin, could be mapped to a graph with roughly the same degrees of freedom as the human hand.

Then maybe something like KNN could sift the data and map it to the motors. I’m not very familiar with data mining yet, but surely a lot could be done with a 700 MHz Raspberry Pie and a few GB of SSD storage. I’m thinking that giving the algorithm some notion of time by recording 1/60 of a second slices or something in that range might really improve accuracy. Just throw data and processing at it rather than trying to fully understand how nerves work.

Doing the reverse, to stimulate nerves based on how much power each motor is using, should be simpler. It could be sloppier because the human mind would learn to interpret the signals better than a computer.

The software should be available for free online and work with commodity hardware, and then the prosthetic designer could customize the limb for each user. Plus it could have the ability to upload random samples to help train the next generation AI.

As long as I am dreaming, we also need a moonshot to standardize nerve implants. It would go inside the limb somewhere and then use something like 802.11 powered by inductance coils above and beneath the skin, with a faraday cage built into the arm to prevent interference. Actually now that I say that, I wonder if the noise produced by the body’s movements would be statistically significant enough for another input into a neural net.

Anyway, chemical markers on the terminals could urge the nerves to grow into the terminals. Or use a bit of foreign nerve tissue that’s been grown on a scaffolding in the device in the lab, and then implant it and put the patient on immune suppression drugs until the nerves grow together, and then take them off gradually until the body dissolves the foreign nerves and has a direct connection to the sensor. Another idea would be to press a comb-shaped device with hundreds of microscopic channels through the nerve bundle and read the voltage through each channel. It should be manufactured for longevity and to read the most amount of data possible, and just let the programmers work out how to sift through it.

Once we had good data, training a neural net to do the mapping to actuators seems like a basic problem. Like maybe sample a few hours’ worth of movements and put the whole thing online like the Netflix contest until someone has programmed a near-perfect AI. Or a series of contests, each aiming to raise accuracy by 10% or something.
In praise of unfairness
> market inefficiencies

In other words, you're telling me both people and organisations are imperfect?! Shocking.

Sarcasm aside: really, it is shocking how SW engineers could come to think that any of the inexact, data-free, human-judgement-driven sides of business are optimal--simply from the theoretical argument that a market is involved. A little economics is a dangerous thing.

I suggest starting from the assumption that everything can be improved, unless proven otherwise.
It's a good thing they didn't use HTTPS. And a good thing that something else doesn't actually rely on samsung.com (listing services, API endpoints, whatever).

This is a cool hack for now but if I had to make a prediction I'd bet there's a future coming where this isn't possible, where the two are even more intertwined -- even though most of us know they don't need to be and wouldn't design our own systems that way.
> Does the FitBit hardware have an open API that Nike could integrate with?

Yes: http://dev.fitbit.com/
It takes a good 5 minutes of vigorous cranking against resistance to grind just two scoops of coffee though. Forearms are not amused. I'm shopping for an electric.
What you're suggesting doesn't sound too far from DNSSEC as it is currently implemented to me (ignoring adoption rate). I'm questioning the need of an authoritative global naming system at all.

From a user's perspective, "my bank" and "your bank" might be the same thing, or they might be different. When I care about verifying the identity of these things, why not just go to the source? I can do key exchange every time I visit an ATM.

I can imagine using DNS with multiple contextual root namespaces, with the trust anchors being managed by more direct human relationships. This wasn't feasible when the systems were originally designed, but now we can put public keys in jewelry. Keychains on our literal keychain.
Show HN: I started with zero knowledge and now my iOS game is in App Store
I cannot speak for the people who made this decision.

But if you look at the code, you might come to the conclusion that the upstream is not so focused code quality (security!) as one might hope. There is such a jungle of code that can only be justified by the desire for more features, more portability (to crazy ancient platforms too), more speed, more flexibility... it's all more knobs and code where real security bugs can lurk. And code paths that do not get tested properly. You can also find many outright dangerous idioms used throughout. Does that mean the upstream is ignorant, or that they do not care, or that they do not have the man power to fix their aging code? Either way, it's bad.

The OpenBSD developers have different priorities, and they believe they can do better. As such, not being able to blindly pull changes and updates from the upstream developers they do not trust does not look like a significant loss. If new features are to be merged in, it has to be properly reviewed and adapted. Yes, it's more work that way. But the end result is likely better code.
Possibly this http://fellrnr.com/wiki/GPS_Accuracy

It seems Garmin is more accurate.

I saw it on reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/236lqy/gps_...
I think what listic may be referring to is that the Soviets conducted a more liberal discourse in their interactions with the Western press than they permitted domestically.
Sure. I can script a lot of things and have learned a ton by doing that. But when I'm focused on making an API or debugging one, I don't want to spend the time writing a script if there is a readily available tool that does what I need. I can better spend the time improving the app.
Really enjoy this idea, have implemented a similar prototype last year.

Another useful feature would be suggest me the best food list for the city I should eat.
See, that doesn't really describe the situation here. The internet was working just fine, but samsung.com was down. As a result, the TV wouldn't let users get to Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, or other services because it insisted it was offline, even though those services were working perfectly fine. The problem is that that for virtually every user, the TV was insisting "the internet is down," but their connections were working just fine.
I'd enjoy chipping away at this project. Have you started on anything?
Can I use vodka to clean my keyboard?
Esters don't hydrolyze that quickly under acidic conditions, especially if the carboxylic acid is bulky at all. Also, some esters have CNS effects all by themselves.

I'm pretty sure the gov't would crack down on any form of alcohol that was an ester since it's a new chemical compound and not ethyl alcohol.
This article reads like the author is just mad at some audiophile for being a jerk about their vinyl collection. Fair enough, but it's kind of straw-manning vinyl collectors.

Implying that CDs give you forensic level exact playback while vinyl is "messing up" the sound? That's ridiculous. If nothing else, digital music has to make the trip from analog to digital (ADC) and then digital to analog (DAC) and neither of these are trivial steps. Lavry Blue's cost $2500 and that's just for analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion of one stereo signal, no pre-amps or anything else. In fact, mastering engineers might spend up to $8500 for two channels of digital to analog conversion.

I've done sound engineering in the past; I love digital, I think digital has done great things for music and I think the sound quality is excellent. But there's a reason that 8-tracks came and went, cassette tapes came and went, CDs are on their way out, but vinyl is still hanging on.
Seen https://trovebox.com/ ? It started out as a thing kind like this, an Open Source photo service that could use any backend you configured, but now appears to be some kinda B2B service .... shame.
For a tiny distribution, puppy or slitaz work quite well.

Also, I would say that Arch Linux can be as tiny as you want, but it's not a fire and forget solution and I wouldn't want to maintain an Arch system for friends or relatives ;)
For all media files
I use https://mediacru.sh/

simple, awesome , fast and opensource
We discourage checking in artifacts (e.g., minified JS) into source control because it defeats the purpose in a lot of ways.

Currently there is no support for custom build/test steps but the builds that are done for Java apps are done using Jenkins so you can imagine that in the fullness of time anything Jenkins supports would also be supported as a pre-deploy step. I don't have any specific details though, as my work has been focused on the GitHub integration.
That's probably a factor, but Nike's braindead marketing for FuelBand is probably a factor. If you look at who buys activity trackers, IME, its largely people who have trouble maintaining commitment to exercise that need something to help them, and FuelBand's advertising is a lot about how it isn't for you and will make you feel worse if you aren't already fully committed.
I build "smart" TV apps for a living. Samsung's connectivity check for their TVs from 2010 has a list of five domains that it checks against. Discovered this during some debugging a couple of years ago. The list, in the order pings are made, is:

icq.com (not kidding)
yahoo.com
samsung.com
google.com
Some other domain I can't remember
> Also the manufacturers are hoping for revenue from the online services and can attract more services with a large user base so it is in their interest to at least keep supporting the existing services.

That may or may not be the case depending on the company and/or the strategy the person in charge at the time is pursuing. One CEO might completely agree with your strategy and make sure all old models are supported, another might just care about how many new TVs sold he can tell the shareholders. Then there are companies going out of business or being acquired and the acquiring company not caring about supporting any models made by the acquired company.
Be careful, there are laws which govern this, not just the grant agreement. Caveat emptor.
"...for a flaw not related to crypto..."

The thing about crypto is that almost any bug in a crypto library is related to crypto. It can't be easily isolated, and if you try, you have to actually analyze the isolation to make sure that it's really isolated.

"...disruptive decisions..."

Who is it disrupting?

OpenBSD is trying to provide value to their users. If you want slow, steady, incremental, reactive improvements to OpenSSL, every other OS will give you that. OpenBSD apparently believes its users would benefit from a proactive approach to security.
Interesting idea, but could you elaborate on the practical side of this?

Here's my take on this, in the form a ramble:

Intellisense works really well for code because there's a finite set of, for instance, methods you can call on a certain object - so I'm assuming you mean something that's more than just autocompletion.

I'm not really sure language on its own is powerful enough to handle ideas. When I think of organising thoughts and ideas I normally think of a mind map type of thing.

However, mind map software is too restrictive in terms of what you can create. A sheet of paper + pen is an excellent tool for noting down ideas and thoughts, but paper is finite and ink is irreversible: you can't move around/delete stuff.

I also sometimes have trouble with situations where idea A and idea B are related, but are situated at two completely ends of a mind map graph. So this might mean dispensing with two-dimensional mind maps entirely, but I struggle to imagine a non-annoying way of displaying a mind map in 3D.
Or get updated iPlayer from the BBC though I do wish ITV would get thier act together and produce a working catchup service.

Thats one ABC1 viewr you have lost right there guys I gave up on whitechappel as your crappy catchup service was totaly unusable.
i just downloaded it, looks cool so far. let you know after couple of plays
> Added extra, while i'm watching the race it could show me tweets in real time, but back shifted so as to make sense with the race.

I wrote that years ago, and I read last year that a kid had won a hackathon with this. I think some of the TV apps do this?

I never updated the code for the new Twitter API, could fish it out but it wasn't that hard to write really.
A sortable, queryable list of movies. A site that would retrieve a resulting (and sortable!) list of queries such as "Show me all science-fiction movies made in the last ten years", or "All Arnold Schwarzenegger movies that have won an Oscar" (trick question!)

- Yes, IMDB exists. And has some of the functionality I'd like. But it is a slow site, replete with ads, upsells, 2003-esque "only show 10 results per page!", etc. Yes, I realize they have to make money.

- Yes, there are millions of movies in existence, and thousands added to the pile every year. Not sure how to fix that data issue :(
I guess microsoft programmers sort of work the same way.

Although I'm not sure about how they manage the coding of their kernels.
I think it's being done by Caterina Fake's current startup: https://findery.com/

I'm not sure, though. The main page isn't clear about what it does exactly, and I haven't created an account.
What It’s Really Like to Be One of the Silk Road’s Biggest Drug Lords
I suppose a Chrome/firefox plugin can take care of the text. Just hide any text that might seem relevant to the filter. But yeah, as someone said, the problem will be in pictures. Also, it won't work 100%, as often, there is no direct spoiler but things that allude to something which you can then infer or guess. So how to apply the filter against those types of messages?

Interesting nonetheless. :)
I like this. I've often had a similar issue in computational physics when handling lots of different calculation input/output files with variations in parameters. I've tended to automatically generate directory hierarchies, e.g.

rc=1.0/ecut=60/kp=4,4,4/

rc=1.0/ecut=80/kp=4,4,4/

rc=2.0/ecut=60/kp=4,4,4/

rc=2.0/ecut=80/kp=4,4,4/

but some standard way of expressing it in the file name would be great, and nicer to parse out later. There are filesystems that allow metadata, but I've never seen one really being used for that purpose. You could make some associated command line tools that are equivalent to 'ls' that allow splitting/slicing the files down different parameters.
Why are recipes linear and textual? I'm surprised the recipe-book metaphor sticked with us for that long.

I want a social cooking platform where the only way to represent a recipe is with a diagram.

http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/156044/2247517/Pancak...

You're a cooking master? No need to explain you how to make a roux or how to blanch vegetables.

Don't have butter? We'll substitute the step where you need butter by the steps to make it.

Allergic to peanut? These nuts are a good alternative.

Let's build a semantic recipe platform that's not linear and add a functional twist to ingredients (the part where you can substitute an ingredient by the function that returns one).
And companies that want to take advantage of freely available volunteer run hardware/physical projects wouldn't want to commit their own resources to improve them for their needs? I don't see anything about this model that wouldn't directly translate into these sorts of projects. Why exactly couldn't physically based open source projects have both paid and non-paid volunteers, just like software projects do?
Yes. Today. This was not always the case.

Consider this; at what point was the first person hired to work on the kernel? At what point were there a majority of patches submitted by paid workers?

^And then consider that up until that point, it was all unpaid. Just... think for a while, just think please.
It's true. Sometimes giving your reasoning about things just leads to the other person trying to point out why your reasons are wrong. Rather than taking it as information they can use to improve their chances with other jobs, it's like they think it's an argument that, if they could win it, would lead to them being hired anyway.
This is true today, but it has not always been the case, and the FOSS ecosystem goes far beyond Linux.

Publicly funded research may also contribute to open source, 3d printed prosthetics.
What percentage of the population do you think can do that?
The thing about the 3-D printed ones though is that it seems like it would be easier to design and manufacture more 1-offs, customized to the needs and abilities of the user; whereas the more traditional prosthetic device will be designed, necessarily, for more general usage. The one fits the needs of an individual; the other only kind of fits the needs of the individuals in a group. I would say for this reason alone, 3-D printing is a very exciting advance.
I compiled different ideas over the week.

coMarketing: I would like to see a solution that allows smaller companies that target a similar audience to be able to put their "little" marketing dollar together and have a better chance at fighting the big guy.

Phone screen on my computer: When I am at my desk, I want to be able to use my phone from my computer. I can use the desktop interface to go through contacts, check feeds, answer texts, and even forward calls to my desk phone.

Conversation blog: A blogging platform that is based on discussion. Each blog post is a conversation between two or more people, let us stop the monologues because in real life to hear two is more interesting than one.

Alarm Band: A simple band that wakes me up with a buzz, but I just want to spend $25 for it.

PHP wrapper: I began to write a simple consistency wrapper for PHP, but I never finished. Basically it a class that gives me a clear structure on how to pass parameters for functions. I ALWAYS know to do function something (haystack, needle) then the wrapper rearranges according to the actual function requirement.
The idea of trapping water is not absurd. The name is intentionally absurd as a joke. The joke name is explicitly overruled by the description. All you need is a chemical that holds water in some manner and releases it in the presence of a catalyst. How is that concept absurd?
Take a look at Wolfram Alpha:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/Movies.html
Some Shark Tank Fun Facts
Idea: Tree of knowledge

Ever been interested in a topic that once you google you end up with explanations(quite often on wikipedia) that rely on foundational knowledge you didn't even know you should have? And then you started working your way back by googling things you didn't know until you hit something you do know and from that point you try to inch your way forward to the original topic just to get discouraged a few hours in? I know I have and it's a pain!

A well built knowledge map that would graph the relationships between different topics in a field would help alleviate this problem. Take for example linear algebra. You've heard about this fancy thing called singular value decomposition but barely know what a matrix is. You type SVD into a search box, and it generates a breadth first tree with all the topics you need to know to be able to understand SVD up to a certain depth. And then you just work from the leafs that you do understand up to the topic you are interested. This saves hours or sometimes days of just trying to understand the ordering in which you should be learning things. It essentially builds a curriculum for the user on the fly for a topic they are interested.

I would propose this as a community wiki so knowledge maps could be crowdsourced and curated as they would be time consuming and difficult to build for a single person. Would also suggest adding the ability to let users create accounts and mark off topics they feel confident they know.

Potential problems: The two big problems with this idea are
1) generating a proper knowledge map: There will be ambiguities in the edges and even the nodes of a map. Sometimes (often) you will need to be clever how you organize the information. For example, your have a dependency listing like: Matrix <- Rotation Matrix, but in reality it might be better to have something like Matrix <- Linear Transform <- Rotation Matrix. Linear transforms would act as an intermediary node for rotation, scaling, shearing, w/e.

2) a topics can be studied in different frameworks: E.g. linear algebra can be studied with or without using vector spaces. Once again, deciding how to create the knowledge graph will be difficult.

Solution: Have multiple types of edges. You can have edges to signify hard dependencies, soft dependencies, generalizations, and extensions. Maybe other types of edges. You will still need to be clever, but having a way to signify the relationship between topics will help resolve the problem.
Did you try followshows.com
probably better using a microfiber cloth (aka e-cloth), without any form of surfactant.
There is probably an interesting opportunity in this idea and many ways to execute it. There are also existing products trying to address the problem. DEVONthink and Scrivener come to mind - both seem to have customers, but they are not what my dream product in this area is... In my daily routine I use Moleskine with two colour pens where I put both textual notes and many sketches and diagrams. The act of noting down what I learn/think is helpful in remembering it, but I would love a digital version of such 'idea journal' with all the modern tagging, searching, indexing, filtering and editing digital options!