skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If we're talking off-line power supplies, it most definitely _is_ AC for the simple reason non-ideal transformers will pass no DC.
And, further, inductors and capacitors (LC) are all merely losses to DC signals. These components only have a meaningful function for AC waveforms (even though, in the case of a buck converter, a DC signal is superimposed).
The rise of vagueness as a service
> (i.e. what if my ringback tone is a busy signal?)

My father used to take the handset off the hook during important family meetings. Anyone who called during that time got a busy signal. This was long before ringback tones were a thing.

I've also heard of a similar technique being used to fight telemarketers a few years ago. Many telemarketers run a program that automatically detects nonexistent numbers and removes them from the list. So this guy made an app to imitate the phone company's 404 error msg (or whatever the audio equivalent is) whenever he received a call from a known telemarketer. I don't know whether he did it with a ringback tone or just played an mp3 after picking up, but anyway, he no longer received any calls from telemarketers after a while.
Think up, and think down, the tree: you thank your parents for being awesome by, being awesome parents to your own children. (Think of the last line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 13: "You had a father; let your son say so.")

I interviewed my parents, grandparents, and relatives to write a family history for my children. (And my wife's, too.) It was one of the most powerful things I've done, and this process brought our entire family closer together -- and it wasn't easy, there are many tough, painful moments in my parents' and grandparents' lives, including still unresolved fights.

I'd strongly urge any fellow hackers to record their parents' stories for posterity.
It's hard to tell if one is even in the intended audience. A smaller inverter? What are the specs on the current one...how much improvement is necessary...how long does it need to last? Do I need access to a semiconductor fab?

I can sort of infer what they're asking for since they're not making a deal with LTC or maxim or lambda or whomever,
but it's a bit annoying to have to standby while google starts the hype train.
It's basically a form of DRM, and the first time I saw it I was pretty taken aback too. Although this time, I'm actually on Oracle's side, since their workaround is yet another example that shows how technological measures to enforce copyright are an awfully bad idea.

Maybe when more people realise the distinctly unique aspects of digital data and how, for lack of better words, pliable and copyable it is, we can have a real copyright reform. Of course that requires the population understand this type of thing, but a copyright reform is exactly what companies like Oracle don't want, so the probability is pretty low...
Show HN: Google Privacy Enhancer – "smoke bombs" your search history
Enclosed tube maglev system theoretically capable of 1800 mph tested in China
This was my weekend hack project. I'd be interested in hearing what people think.
I pay $70/month for TMobile with unlimited LTE. My coverage isn't as good as ATT while traveling, but its fine where I live. Is this a sign of "gouging?" That it costs more for a service with good coverage in the less populated parts of the sprawling US?

Why are 4G prices higher in US? Demand is higher. Supply is more costly to build. Econ 101.
Have to file a foia request that could take years and be denied isn't exactly open.
Gender and UX
The primary reason is that these APIs are very thin abstractions over the actual assembly-level instructions sent to the graphics card. It's certainly possible to write a higher-level abstraction; it's been done many times, in the form of game engines and so forth. The risk of doing so is that you narrow down the possible types of visual effects you can implement, and historically, the implementation of unique and original visual effects was a big part of the way AAA games competed with each other.

In principle there's no longer any reason why it has to work this way, because now we have shaders. These are a more domain-specific tool than a C API, and can thus safely present large cross-sections of graphics card functionality in a higher-level way without taking power away from the graphics programmer. So, for example, people modding Minecraft can introduce their own visual effects stages by hotloading shaders into the standard Minecraft graphics pipeline.

EDIT: I haven't talked about performance. For game developers, rendering a frame quickly is as important as having total control over the output of the rendering process. For the most part, building an API higher-level than OpenGL also means dictating a particular scene graph structure, as with OS-specific window system APIs. If the API imposes a certain way of organizing your scene graph, this can have serious impacts on your game's performance, because the scene graph traversal is optimized for one type of scene and you're using it for another. I'm not sure I'm simplifying this explanation very well, but that's the gist of it.
In as much as the metadata is accurate, the information can be interpreted in any meaningful way, and considering selection bias for things that people actually make available via these services (however, if something isn't listed with some index that makes it discoverable, it doesn't matter what the license is):

Freshmeat: 21185 projects tagged "GPL", 49 projects tagged "CDDL", 2500 projects tagged "BSD", 1807 projects tagged "BSD Revised", 1311 projects tagged "MIT/X", 1079 projects tagged "Apache 2.0", 314 projects tagged "MPL"

Sourceforge: of 1236 "OSI Approved" listed via the search refinement interface, 983 GPLv2, 22 BSD, 10 Apache 2.0, 8 MIT.

Unfortunately, neither Github or Oholo provide aggregated license information or it's not easy to find [0]. I did find this two year old post [1] about licenses of the most watched repositories on github, but popularity of the project isn't necessarily an indicator of popularity of the use of the license -- except as much as the type of license indicates which projects people will want to use because the the license lets them contribute. I do vaguely remember some random blog posts that attempted to do license counts in a repeatable and objective way, but my google-fu is failing me right now.

These are hardly conclusive numbers, and it becomes difficult to consider it in aggregate. Is all of OpenBSD considered one "project", as it's effectively distributed as one piece, or are the individual components themselves projects? Is everything in GNU core-utils one project? Maybe each binary counts as the use of the license. However, just going by these services' self-promoted "project" delineation being ~10x in favor of GPL (GPLv3, LGPL may or may not be included in the above numbers), the non-GPL licenses seem to be significantly low enough that "The GPL is the world's most popular license" may be a reasonably safe, even if not entirely accurate, position to take. I suspect that if you pick 10 projects at random, more than half of them will be GPL.

[0] A four year old post on this not being straight forward on github at that time. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/github/9WH6LtsPYtM

[1] http://ostatic.com/blog/the-top-licenses-on-github
I'm not a fan of Go, its syntax, or Rob Pike in the slightest but aren't go-routines as first-class/ default at least an improvement over most Algol-derived languages' support for concurrent execution models?

In the final analysis, this is hardly enough to convince me to use the language (as I've never found concurrency difficult in any other language to begin with and there are better ways than go-routines to make it 'easy'); however, I'm probably not in the target audience.

My impression is that Pike is endeavoring to create for his new corporate overlords a language that fungible enterprise developers can be at home in. And, it probably is better than Java.
Creating a Code Contract for your peers (& yourself)
Another solution is to use soft-switching (zero-current or zero-voltage switching) methods.
You can kinda do it with the Xposed framework and XHaloFloatingWindow (http://repo.xposed.info/module/com.zst.xposed.halo.floatingw...).

You can snap applications at borders and have a bar between to resize them, kinda like a tiling manager. But from my experience, it's not nearly as good as a tiling window manager, or even Windows on a tablet.
Sorry didn't quire follow the idea. Are you saying it will help companies hire quora users? Or is there more to it?
Oh, that is completely not true for commercial AC power transmission -- just look up at a big power pylon and see the multiple power conductors per phase.

See the pretty blue picture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect

Skin effect in copper is about 9mm at 60Hz
Granted that what we have now often seems like a pile of kludges. Probably because our modern systems evolved "organically" over a span of decades, and technical issues have been solved with compromises rather than careful planning

...However, I'm pretty sure if you booted up a SmallTalk machine from the 70s, you'd find there were A LOT of bugs and unfinished corners. The UI was really not polished or user friendly. The impression I got is that they barely had it working, that it was more of a tech demo than any kind of finished product. I don't think you'd want to trade any of your modern software for something from then. I mean, yes, they thought of clever things back in the 70s, but don't go imagining they had some nice, clean, perfect implementation of those ideas.
Yes - I totally agree. I was really just congratulating myself on being able to follow it. I find it interesting that this was easier for me to follow than the original maths papers on lambda calculus, but I suppose that's just a matter of familiarity with the syntax.
The first step to reinventing the future is in having a good understanding of the past. If you want to know what could come after Smalltalk, well...

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/211297/managedtime.pdf

But that is totally off topic (and perhaps you already know this is my research, and just trying to make a point?). The article is not about discovering something new, but a useful reminder of what we already should know.
You should probably put that disclaimer on the GitHub README. Lots of folks will have no idea.

It's a testament to your good design that it looks finished though. Kudos! :)
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~gongsu/desiderata_textonly.html
Very Strong C++ Track at the NDC Conference
No. The APIs are covered by the GPL just as the implementation.
I lucid dream almost every night. For a good deal of my life I thought that everyone did.

When I am dreaming I have to check often that I am not actually awake, so I have a trick I use to make sure that I am dreaming. I know, it sounds a lot like Inception.

A little more - I had night terrors up until I was 12. I would walk though my house in a frantic dream state, sometimes seeing things that weren't there on top of things that were. Maybe the lucid dreaming and early night terrors were connected.
Any chance you could add interactive login and detect the use of 2FA?

Also, did you think about offering this as a service, using servers around the world to confuse Google even more? :-)
Only 8 for Datomic; I thought HN was only Clojure users?
Have you changed your password lately? Does it even matter?
Which brings up the question: what's the point of keeping the original company? You're unlikely to have as much equity in a company with so much history as opposed to if you were to found a new company.

This reminds me somewhat of Warren Buffet's biggest mistake, which was that he had made a lousy investment into a Textile-manufacturing company called Berkshire Hathaway. Having a disagreement with its CEO; he acquired a majority stake of the company, and fired its CEO out of spite. But he couldn't get all the stock; and when he completely reshaped the company into what it is today, half of the value he created ended up going to the company's original stockholders, instead of himself as it would have, had he started from scratch with his own company.
Yeah, so your code can only run on Windows. That's clearly the future. You should trust Microsoft, the company with the most vision.
I found out about ring-back tones by accident when I was trying to use Twilio to write an app to call an automated snow closing hotline record the message and then tweet if there was a closing. When ever I called with twilio the call _always_ failed and after contacting twilio support and they couldn't figure out what was going on either I just sort of put it on the back burner for a while. Then the next winter season rolled around again and a bunch of co-workers were complaining about how they couldn't call the snow closing hotline from their Google Voice enabled phones. Someone who worked with the people who had implemented the system went to ask how it worked and discovered it used a ring-back tone to play the message. At this point I realized why Twilio always thought the call failed since you can't start scripting a call in Twilio until it is actually answered.
There was a period of unabashed embrace of technology in the wake of WWII. Much of that had to do with the advances and successes of technology during the war: radar, missiles, the first jet aircraft, penicillin, and of course, the atom bomb.

Vannevar Bush was commissioned by FDR to write a proposal for a national scientific research initiative, which appeared as Science, the Endless Frontier. This ultimately replaced the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development with the National Science Foundation (following some not-atypical politicking and hurdles).

The mood began to change in the 1960s with opposition to nuclear testing, the appearance of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, concerns over pollution, overpopulation, and limits to growth, the emergence of the environmental movement, and other reactions to the earlier spirit of scientific, technological, and industrial progress.
Prices are coming down because the government prevented the ATT-Tmobile merger and Tmobile decided to start competing on price. Thank goodness for a little government regulation and that created competition.
It is successful content creators who have a lot of leverage. Aspiring content creators (and distributors) have none.

"These are just all for-profit companies hoping to make a bunch of money off consumers."

Unfortunately you have completely ignored all discussion of The Internet being a communications platform, and not merely a commercial platform.

Ignoring that point entirely has allowed you to continue making your own point, which is to refute the idea that we should care what happens to a bunch of for profit internet companies.

I agree with your point, FWIW, once once a company reaches the size of a Facebook, or Netflix I don't care what happens to it.

I do care desperately that individuals are able to easily create and distribute content to each other, of any kind.

The Internet as a communications platform that is available to everyone, for everyone, is what is endangered by the proposed anti-NN measures.
Please don't get me wrong, I think this is a great contribution; many of these ideas are hard to follow in their original presentations, especially given notations that are very hard for us to identify with (next up...monads in Ruby).

I took an advanced logic class in university where we went on to re-derive the natural numbers (and operations on) using sets alone; this is well known, but to the typical CS undergrad, it was kind of crazy and eye opening!
But arduino. Arduino arduino, arduino. Don't you know it can last five days?!
I don't know if Valve does this on purpose, but their remake of titles (Team Fortress, Counterstrike, Dota) all keep essentially the same gameplay mechanics but introduce new enhancements (graphics, UI, matchmaking, etc.).

This is important for eSports. Having to learn a new game every 3-4 years so you can follow along is difficult for viewers. It also allows professional players who invest the training to transfer their skills more easily.

It's different with other companies -- Blizzard, for example, created a new game in StarCraft II. It shares a few similarities with Brood War, but the differences are vast. I really, really like Valve's approach.
Yeah, agreed, that's Dota's single biggest flaw: it's hard for newcomers to watch it and enjoy it like a game of football. Although, in fairness, football's popularity may have something to do with that.

If you watch Free to Play (linked above) it helps clarify things somewhat. (It's pretty interesting anyway.) But it may be an unsolvable problem, which would be unfortunate.

Then again, the tournament scene is still in its nascent stages. Once the production quality goes up some more, there may be a brief intro for each hero selected that describes to the audience what the hero can do and what its items usually are and what they do.
It's used as a cheap way to implement a school closing hotline where people all call to receive the same message.
Out of curiosity what's your "reality-check"? I get to a state half-in-half-out where I can sort've feel my body and everything is black then I just sort of fall into 'unconsciousness' if I so choose - at which point I'm lucid-dreaming.
On Being 40
...thankfully, not totally abandoned: http://www.uberent.com/pa/
I don't think you understand what I'm saying.

The people who maintain the system are not helped by incorrect information. The information describing how the code works in comments is invariably incorrect. None of the tools we usually employ (unit tests, regression tests, compilation, etc.) apply to the comments, and describing the HOW of code in comments breaks the DRY rule unless the comments ARE the code.

Now, as I said, sometimes you need to describe intent. Most of the time, that is better done through liberal use of functions, purpose-specific types and function names.

For example: In C, there are multiple types of integers defined that all reduce to roughly the same types: size_t, ptrdiff_t, etc. Does the compiler care if the type is unsigned int or size_t? No. Apart from the portability reason for using these types, the other is to describe intent. A variable of the type size_t should store a size. Now, we could make the variable an unsigned int, and in a comment say that "this variable stores a size". But will this comment stay in sync with the code, when the variable later changes to a ptrdiff_t because it is now used to compare pointers? No. The comment won't get changed, because humans are fallible, and changing the comment would require making the same change in two places, one of which is ignored by the toolchain.
Non-mobile link: http://www.smh.com.au/business/alleged-insider-trading-case-...

There are some odd vague statements in there about the AFP (Australian Federal Police) making "covert enquiries" to Facebook.
Government regulation doesn't create competition.

Edit: It's remarkable that any statement regarding regulation that isn't overtly Marxist immediately gets half a dozen down votes on HN.
Got the same thing. Pretty close.
> but people are seriously deluding themselves when they think ads enhance the browsing experience.

That's because people tend to think of ads as one thing, when in reality, paid for features that enhance the browsing experience is something that people are quite happy with.

Firefox already does this with the search bar, and with default new window screen, both of which advertise for Google. It happens to also provide a service people find useful.

It sounds like Mozilla is seeing how it can apply this type of advertising to other parts of the browser.

> We're stuck with ads anyway, so why don't we come up with silly reasons to like them

HN supports ads. We just don't see it as ads because it's highly targeted and something we are interested in. Is it any less an ad because you want it?
I'm not blind, but that's a GREAT IDEA. I'd play it that way!

It could be called bat-mode!
Do you ever suffer from sleep paralysis?
Those are some good thoughts. Interactive login probably wouldn't be tough. 2FA is beyond my skills, though.

Interesting idea on using worldwide servers! You could likely rig something like that with Sauce Labs or other cloud-based Selenium testing services.
Yes, I have some experience with lucid dreaming about 15 years ago. It is a hell of a lot of work to achieve a lucid dream (without using any technical help). As far as I remember the technique involves trying to fall asleep while maintaining consciousness (which is very difficult to achieve), and also doing regular 'reality checks' (am I awake or dreaming?) during the day. Stephen LaBerge did a lot of research into lucid dreaming, and his books are useful guides for learning how to LD.

The main use-case for lucid dreaming is fun. Being in a dream and being able to control it and fly about in your own dream world is a pretty amazing experience.
Speaking as somebody who contributed a pathfinding fast-failing optimization, the development team is really helpful and the codebase is quite nice to jump into!

If you want to get a feel for RTS design, OpenRA is great stuff. Plus, it's really fun, so there's that too.
I would pay quite a bit to have lucid dreams every night. The more control I'd have over the dreams the more I'd pay. Imagine never really losing consciousness. Would be a whole new world.
Happened a couple of times here too, just hit back and go on.
The codebase is in C# if anyone wants to jump in.

Also: https://www.bountysource.com/trackers/36085-openra - yes, that's $1600 in bounties.
Simplify your zsh setup
Love the project. Crashes on my mac though :(
According to the article, the ads in the New Tab page will be selected before Firefox knows anything about the user's browsing habits. So there's no guarantee that they will actually be useful to him/her. If they do turn out to be useful, that's merely by chance.

Mozilla could try to ramp up the usefulness of the ads by selecting a bunch of popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and IMDb. But since those sites are already so well known, they won't have much incentive to pay for the privilege of being on the New Tab page. Many of them can already be selected in the Search bar.

Useful ads need to be contextual, but contextual ads require tracking the user's browsing habits. As a result, it is very difficult to display useful ads while respecting the user's privacy as Mozilla wants to do.
I'm incredibly interested in the challenges you guys faced - the mesh network and view source parts of OLPC were (to me) the most important and life-changing aspects. Bummed to hear that one of them at least was problematic.

Was there a blog post or anywhere you guys catalogued these problems, your approaches, and what could be learned? I'm looking to take on a similar challenge as a generalist and would love to learn from your attempts :)
For me it is. For example, I read "Fermat´s last theorem". The great thing is that the author tells in a vivid way, how different mathematicians attacked different parts of the theorem, starting with Fermat, up to the present
. He also explains how the tools developed along the time found real world applications.

I can not say that I understand the concepts explained at the book, but now I feel that I could even start learning Number theory (well maybe this is a stretch, but you get the idea)

On a side note please for give my parent comment. I was writing from the Iphone seated at a plane, so I had to hurry and didn't have time for corrections.
Mac version can use microphone input. Check your Sound preferences and you need to do calibration in game.