skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's not forget that wireless has very limited bandwidth in the first place. Once you start "sharing" your bandwidth by relaying packets for other nodes, in any large network the bandwidth available for you to use will drop off a cliff.

In other words, even setting aside maintenance overhead, simple relay overhead is also going to bring the network to its knees.
There is pretty much no market for QR code services here in the States (I would guess it's the same in Europe), which is reflected in the opinions here.

In Asia (I think China specifically, not sure), QR codes are ubiquitous and widely used.
I think artists need to consider streaming as advertising. It's a good way for your music to be discovered by users looking for new music. If you remove your music from Spotify et. al. then you'll be missing out on new listeners.

With fewer and fewer people downloading music these days, I'm not sure how valuable free downloads even are as promotion any more.
It's a basic problem, advertisers most want people who can afford to not see Adds.
I came out as thinking helper. With the promise that I could enjoy becoming doctor. What a coincidence - I dream of becoming doctor :)
Disclaimer: I'm creator of a mesh network, or a decentralised, anonymous 'reddit' called Aether.[0] [1] I'm probably biased.

The main problem with these networks is not the declining user interest per se, it's rather that they are by their own nature, a) very hard to engineer, and b) almost impossible to monetise. The engineering effort required to make a decentralised network reach resilience (and visible uptime) of the most basic Rails web app on Heroku is orders of magnitude away from just hosting it.

For A, Decentralisation is a cruel mistress; every assumption you will make about computers connecting to your network will slowly fall apart as you move deeper into the architecture, engineering and design of your services—that makes it a fascinating challenge as much as a hard one fortunately. On the more unfortunate side, you eventually end up with cases that require you to entirely reëngineer your stack to provide for them; and not providing them access is philosophically against the democratic access decentralisation offers. For starters, anything higher than C/C++ is probably a non–starter, a lesson I learned the hard way. My own work is built in Python and getting it to perform adequately well on even most medium–grade computers has been a challenge. Distributed network means distributed loads, and there is a significant amount of computers who aren't able to pull their own weight on the Internet, especially in the developing world.

It also means that you'll be bogged down with a lot of platform support issues, small bugs etc.

For B, there are two issues. The first issue is that in a decentralised network it's almost impossible to target a specific person or entity to pay if you're not willing to create an exception for yourself (i.e. all computers able to call your servers, and consequently in absence of your servers the network goes down) but if you're willing to do that, you can just make it into a traditional system in the first place, and you just made it both subject to your whims, and as fragile as any other centralised service. That's a no-go.

Beyond this, the moral imperative is that you shouldn't be charging for a service that doesn't cost you money to maintain. For additional services, sure, but you still need to figure out how to attach an additional service without which the core network continues to function.

In general, it's a massive engineering task that isn't lucrative, and the effort required to maintain and keep functional increases exponentially as the network scales. For me, I'm stuck at packaging the new version for the last few months because PyInstaller doesn't like the way I split Aether into two applications—and you end up with these corner cases nobody on the entire Internet has ever encountered before. There's no Stack Overflow for that. It's fun, but it's also tiring.

[0] http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/27/5150758/aether-aims-to-be...

[1] http://www.getaether.net
The cellular network example depends on somewhere having a reliable, direct connection to the parent network.

So, the need for a reliable, direct connection trumps the need for mesh networking.

If you solve the problem of having a reliable, direct connection somewhere, it's more effective to extend that solution rather than also covering the problem of mesh networking.
Just as people could install ubuntu and "just use wine" if they want to run windows programs without paying for windows.
It seems very unlikely that Apple didn't plan on the app store for iOS from before the first iPhone was released.

I give credit to the jailbreak community for exploring new ideas, but 20% of Apple's wealth? Not a chance.
If this would've been in the US, absolutely.

The quality of connection between UK citizens, and law enforcement is significantly different, due to actions on both sides: specifically:

* UK police tends to seek full understanding prior to taking any action

* The standard police unit is not armed, and their legal rights are significantly limited

* In general, their strategy aims for avoiding situations to escalate

This allows for the vast majority of situations to be resolved peacefully, and in mutual respect.
I leave drawing conclusions, and comparisons to the US armed force to the dear reader.
Would it have to be variable? If it goes through a CVT, then you can keep the output whatever speed you want.
With much greater ease than you could multitask on 8mb of RAM and a 32Mhz CPU: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Centris_650
Giving the benefit of the doubt to the gazillion lines of code running on your computer, that you and several million other people downloaded from the same place, with verified SHA sums, is actually pretty reasonable. If you're truly paranoid, all you have to do to ensure that you're benefiting from crowd-sourced verification is verify the SHA sum code.

Stuff running on some website that only the web site admins can see is not in the same ballpark.
The No-Pay MBA
Was Snowden's Heist a Foreign Espionage Operation?
V1 of the basic net/http go web skeleton
Any feedback is very welcome. =)
Well, after each desktop Firefox update I ask myself, "Am I better off now than I was with the last version?"

In the Phoenix, Firebird and Firefox pre-4 days, I'd quite often find myself answering with "Yes". Since Firefox 4, though, I'm not sure if I've answered with "Yes" even once. Sometimes I'm not any better or worse off, but most times I'm worse off.

For example, extensions would break very frequently for a long time after Firefox 4 was released, although they eventually managed to get that straightened out. Then there's been the progressive dumbing-down of the UI, to the sorry state of affairs after the recent Firefox 29 release containing the Australis disaster. Useful functionality has also been removed, such as the status bar and the ability to disable JavaScript through the preferences dialog. With each update, a lot of us users now have to install more and more extensions just to restore useful functionality that has been removed.

Worst of all, I don't think there's been any significant improvement in its RAM usage, its speed, and other factors like those. Yeah, I know about the are-we-fast-yet style benchmarks, but those don't translate well to the actual experience when using Firefox. Chrome, as much as I dislike its UI, still feels far more responsive and efficient than Firefox.

As for Mobile Firefox, yeah, I'm comparing it to other mobile browsers from Google and Opera, for instance. I find it slower, I've had it crash more, and I don't think it really offers any significant benefits. If it's no better than its competitors, and worse in some ways, it inherently can't offer a good experience.

And it's nonsense to suggest that Persona was "widely used". It saw basically no adoption, compared to its competitors. The same seems to be happening with Firefox OS. Some people try it out, and there is some hype, but it's still a very, very marginal player in the big picture. It won't have any impact on "walled gardens" when almost nobody actually uses it. And in many ways it forces developers into a "walled garden" worse than that of its competitors, with JavaScript/HTML5/CSS basically being the only option for developing applications.

From a technical standpoint, the Asm.js versus Native Client debate is over. Native Client is a much more general, technologically-superior approach. Asm.js is basically just a human-unfriendly subset of JavaScript, without the benefits that a more general approach offers.

I think the Rust crew could have pulled off Rust 1.0 by the end of the year had they stabilized the language and standard library a few months back. But that didn't happen, and we're still seeing relatively significant breaking changes happening to this day. It just doesn't leave them much time all to freeze the language and libraries, and to then give it the significant amount of testing and bug fixing required of a respectable 1.0 release, before the end of 2014.
Shrug. Most of the code I have to deal with regularly is primarily commented with profoundly unhelpful, often blatantly incorrect nuggets such as this. Forever what and never why. It seems better if it just faded into a fossilized archeology that only needed to be Gandalfed in the most dire circumstance.

In my situation, making the comments "stand out so that people will make better ones or fix them" seems optimistic to the point of being naive. We may in the end be down to the old "what should be" vs "what is".
Holography is a specific thing, let's not confuse things by assigning magical powers to the Rift.

Holographic displays already exist, usually they're transparent, they work by letting you focus on things through the display and the display stays in focus, making things like AR and HUDs work much better than other types of displays.
I feel like I must have progressed as a programmer somewhat. Even though I doubt I could write an article like this from scratch, I can now at least follow it, and there are no more "wtf did he do there?" leaps of logic.

Post this again in a decade, and we'll see how I fare then...
Thinking helper - But I have to say there's not a job there I would enjoy. I think I prefer a more mixing of being a programmer creating stuff that helps people.
They said nothing about refreshing the page. Keep watching it.
> Yes. It's deliberately gimped because the author of the function decided Freedom™ is more important than functionality and so they hid it behind a license check.

Would have been a good comment without that remark, and almost certainly why you got downvoted. I gave you an upvote anyways, because the link is actually relevant and helpful.
This is somewhat similar to something I have been working on at, but which is focussed more on finding the right "next move" within the technology industry.

Essentially you rank your skills based around enjoyment and experience and it tells you what types of roles might be of interest to you.

https://www.msgooroo.com/career/skills-editor
The video is wonderful - one of my longtime favourite talks.
I think iceweasel is much closer to firefox than wine is to windows!
The ultrasonic transducer probably does a pretty good job of warding off animals. Nothing quite like disturbing the wildlife while counting how many people are disturbing the wildlife.
I'm blind and use echolocation regularly for things like biking, increased awareness of surroundings, etc. Any chance you might add some sort of audio-only interface? Off the top of my head, you could make the user's breathing noises echo off of obstacles. Breathing could echo off of walls to indicate obstruction in specific directions, for instance.

Your trailer doesn't tell me much as a non-visual user, but I like the idea of the noises you make being audible to whomever is hunting you even while they tell you what's around. That seems like a nice strategic element.

If you're looking for additional thoughts/design advice, I'd be happy to brainstorm further. I design audio-only games (albeit typically titles like traditional games but with audio-only interfaces) so have put lots of thought into this subject.
What's the current roadmap for getting Rust 1.0 out the door?

Last I saw, there were over 1500 issues in the project's GitHub issue tracker. Even assuming a lot of those may no longer be relevant, and assuming minimal growth, that's still not a small number of potential problems to deal with.

And we're still seeing disruptive/breaking language and library changes, like the box-related ones recently. I know, I know, I've heard the "let's break it now rather than later" argument from you guys before. But these kind of changes don't instill confidence.

2014 is nearly half over. I know that production-grade programming language implementations don't just happen over night. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of thorough testing, and many bug fixes to result in a truly stable release. All of that takes a lot of time.

While I'd like to be wrong about this by the end of 2014, the current state of affairs is not very encouraging.
Spam hits three year high-water mark
Show HN: Floppy Bird Game of Thrones Edition
ILLIAC I Programming Manual (1956) [pdf]
I'd love to be a cynic, but my family's AT&T bill went down when we got on their new family plan back in February. And now we have way more data than we can use. I can only assume it was due to competition in the market in family plans.
* GL extensions are written as diffs vs the official spec
So if you're not a OpenGL Specification Expert it can be extremely
difficult to understand some/many extensions.

This is spot on. I was thinking last week about writing a webapp that displayed the spec with a list of extensions you could check to have them merged in.

Then I decided I was yak shaving and went back to actually working on my project.
My AT&T bill dropped by 25% just a few months ago.
True, but they should not have asked him to take it down.

I can think of scenarios where it would be reasonable for the police to ask someone to stop legal behavior - "please stop pissing off your neighbours" - but this is not one of them.
Maybe by Microsoft's definition of 'most'.

* no variable-length arrays

* no qualifiers in parameter array declarators (`int x[static 10]`, etc.)

* no `restrict` keyword

* no compound literals

* no designated initializers

There's probably more.

On the web you'll find the same quote copy & pasted over and over saying that support for compound literals and designated initializers was supposedly added in VS2013, but it does not appear to be true. Either that, or I haven't found the hidden switch to enable it. By the way, C code still needs to be compiled as C++ to get anything beyond C89 to work, which should give you a clue as to how serious Microsoft is about C99.

What's true though is that stdbool.h was added. It's a start, I guess...
They have a version called EnChroma Cx Receptor that is meant to fit over your glasses. I found out about these today thanks to this post and plan to order a pair.

http://enchroma.com/shop/cx-receptor/?attribute_pa_frame-siz...
Florida Satanist Wants to Open Meeting With Prayer
Yep, I asked the question live and the answer was that dynamic code would use an interpreter where AOT was not feasible.
Happily, from Oracle's perspective, their legal win in their case against Google will not doubt quickly be leveraged to kill off the MySQL forks for copying MySQL's copyrighted APIs.
I can see this kind of thing become much more common - There is an obvious need for X, we're willing to motivate Y. The internet allows Hobby tech guy to join the fray and change the world. Lofty goals.

As a side note, this kind of thing very much reminds of me 'nwavguy'. An anonymous audiophile who created a cheap and stunning piece of hardware.. Sometimes a single guy with the right motivation and knowledge can innovate.

"NwAvGuy boasted that his minimalist amplifier—which can be purchased for as little as $129 — “proves you don’t need exotic parts or esoteric circuit designs for best-in-class sound, accuracy, and performance.”"
carriers dont deliver "10mbits" which becomes "15mbits" with LTE.

LTE, GSM, etc. use "radio bandwidth". Thats waves in the air if you will. The faster the wave oscillate, the higher the frequency and the shorter the range at which it will keep oscillating.

Radio bandwidth is a finite element and thus frequency ranges are assigned to operators, to wifi, to your microwave (yes it emits on 2.4ghz and interfere with wifi in fact), to your TV, to handled radios, to your drone remote control, etc.

To give an example, an HSDPA channel is 5mhz. In these 5mhz you may be able to send up to X mbits depending on how the signal is encoded (how the signal is encoded is actually what provides the spectral efficiency).

Recent advances, in particular OFDM allowed us to transmit more data for the same radio bandwidth (aka frequency range). Variants of OFDM are used for xDSL, Wifi (not all standards) and LTE (and many other things, including that HD video feed from sport cars or the ISS).

So, since the milkshake's straw does not and CANNOT change size (again: radio bandwidth - spectrum - frequency range) are we are bound to the laws of physic. We're more efficient in the way we organize the data (and mainly, how we're not losing the data - thats the main advantage of OFDM - if you're interested in how it exactly works, wikipedia)

I really despise articles with sensationalistic headlines, that attempt to carry a point through misleading or even incorrect statements - even if often the result of genuine ignorance.

Also, i'm in the USA and I pay 30/mo for 5GB LTE, unlimited DC-HSDPA, unlimited text, 100m calls.
It's not great (calls should be unlimited) but thats a good enough deal. If you're paying more you should consider dropping verizon/att - not blaming milkshakes.
Wouldn't the latency be just awful if you connected to someone through lots of wifi hops?
How to get people to share your posts on Social Media
I've gone without phone or data service on my cell for a couple years, getting by entirely on Wi-Fi, and using Google Voice for the handful of occasions when I needed to call someone.

When I signed back up, I was happy to get unlimited data again, for less money than I'd been paying a few years ago. Back then, it was extra for a data plan, and extra for a "smartphone" data plan -- making my bill over $100. Now, I'm paying less than I was after corporate discounts were applied to my old plan.

And mobile data, even just 3G, is fast. And often I'm upshifted to HSPA or 4G, which is faster than the Wi-Fi in some bars. Plus apps and websites are built to use less data than a couple years ago, using AJAX and other methods to cache and reuse more data on the device, such as UI elements and layout. The app is just the mobile browser page, and that is a client that calls an API, minimizing repeated network calls.
Would like to be able to play with it before I have to join anything.
This article is seriously flawed. Yes, 4G transmission is more efficient for the allotted wireless spectrum, but users are guaranteed to be using more bandwidth, so the effective number of users per tower stays the same or decreases. And it costs more, not less for 4G rollouts.
Counting embedded devices in this discussion as part of the Linux population is questionable at best. There isn't an init system debate for embedded devices. I've not seen any indication that Samsung will be changing the infra based on the init system war, any more than GE is going to change my microwave.
Hmm, I'll have ask my rebranding rajahs about that one.
Curing blindness will involve more than restoring sight
It's not AC because the flow of current doesn't reverse direction. It's pulsed on/off. The last stage isn't rectification, it's an LC circuit to smooth out the resulting voltage. The reason higher frequency switching is for smaller value capacitors and inductors.
I'm no mechanical engineer but at first glance the conversion efficiency of using a CVT with a synchronous AC drive (vs. direct coupling the motor rotor and the flywheel rotor and using a variable-frequency induction motor + back-to-back converter) would seem to be lower.

Modern VFDs have very high part-load efficiency and we can easily maintain a constant power characteristic through the full speed range by operating in the field weakening mode. One way or another you're losing energy in frequency conversion, it's just a question of whether you do that mechanically (with CVT) or electrically (with back-to-back converters).

Also keep in mind that for grid storage devices, we're usually talking about 500+ kW on each flywheel which, at low speed, is A LOT of torque.
IMACHINARIUM (stop motion)
I think this is the crux of the matter. Who cares about simply seeing ads? Its the tracking that goes along with them that is worrying.
From the guidelines:

> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

It's pure noise, no signal. To make the site a better place, just flag/ignore it and move along, then go submit stuff you'd like to see on the site. As Gandhi probably never said: Be the change you wish to see in the [site].

Edit: An aside, for 'dang: Please, please implement private comments, so I can write things like this to people without it showing up for everyone else, thus just dropping the SNR further. I'll buy you coffee/beer/dinner if you do so!
that, exactly that. this is the point.
proprietary does not mean closed source. it means that it belongs to one entity (it is owned)/incompatible.
That would explain a lack of participation, but this seems more like a lack of offers. It doesn't cost the company anything to put up a reward.
if you paid for a pay for firefox, the ads would still be there, since the ads don't come from firefox (to this day, firefox is still ad-free except for the default search engine setting)
I agree with most of the statements - but one aspect I think a lytro camera is better at: street photography.

Quick, shots of street moments. Shots where you have no time to focus properly, but want to focus the field of view on a subject...a lightfield camera is great for these situations and I think isn't played up enough.
You could make an argument that it's technically "peaceful" since it wasn't violent. But it was clearly threatening, and meant to be be threatening. It's not like they were investigating any wrongdoing, since they acknowledged there was none. They were there to send the message that he had an enemy that pulled the strings of the law. It was intimidation.

It's technically peaceful in the same way that me raising my fist while staring you in the eyes is technically peaceful, although that's a very barbaric type of threat while this was a very civilized one.
However, there is also a downside to a higher switching frequency. In the inverter transistors are used to generate the high frequency AC voltage.

A transistor generates no loss if it is in the full on or full off state (saturated). But every time a transistor switches from the on to off state (or back) it goes through its linear region. While in the linear region the transistor acts as a resistor and generates heat. If you increase the switching frequency the transistor switches more often and thus generates more heat.

The solution to this problem is to use more efficient transistors or decrease the switching time (the time it takes to switch from high to low, or back).

Of course higher switching frequencies also have lots of other problems such as radiation, skin effect, etc.