skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I agree with your basic point: that we need to be careful and thoughtful about how new technology is used.

However, I think there might be some misunderstandings here about how research works.

In the Rapoport-Kedzierski-Sarpeshkar paper[1], you will find no mentions of prosthetics or anything similar. It does not touch on applications. The mentions of prosthetics you cite all come from the MIT News article[2], written by one Anne Trafton, who is not a researcher. She apparently interviewed at least one of the researchers (Benjamin Rapoport). And the only quote from him is simple agreement: yes, that's the sort of thing you might eventually be able to do with our work.

This gives an easy answer to your question, "Why are articles about emerging technology overwhelmingly positive?" The answer is that they are written by -- or using information from -- university P.R. people. The job of these people is to make the university look good.

One of the challenges these people face is that university research is mostly not aimed at products. It is basic research without any immediate application. So they try to explain where the research might eventually be headed. And of course they use positive examples -- remember what their job is.

You note that, "... the publicly authentic researcher is really rare." This is true. But an important reason it is true is that the researcher who communicates about research with the public -- in any form -- is rare. Mostly researchers aim their communications at other researchers, leaving it to others (as in this case) -- or more often to no one at all -- to present their work to the general public.

And then we have your solution, which you say you will describe in detail tomorrow. I'll read that when you post it. But for the moment, you're talking about regulation.

I can't imagine how that could work in a positive way. Are we going to forbid any research with (say) a military application? You are correct that there are possible nasty uses for brain-machine interfaces. Meanwhile, the world is loaded with handicapped or otherwise debilitated people, and with all respect (seriously!) to the builders of prosthetic devices, at the moment, their work is mostly awful. Are we not going to allow research that would help all those people, just because we know that (say) the Pentagon wants to use it, too?

This is especially important, because the nasty folks are going to get it anyway. We already have a proof of concept for a successful secret basic-research community: the NSA's enormous mathematics research arm. The university-research people at least make their findings public, so that we can keep an eye on them. Let's try to avoid regulating that away.

P.S. Thanks for posting the article links.

[1] http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

[2] http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2012/glucose-fuel-cell-0612
How would you position yourself differently from intercom.io? (I use them currently and they seem to do what you mention).
Man, these bring me back. I remember looking through these 5 years ago and loving them.
> Is the FCC the best option? No. But we've gone past the critical point. No longer can you purchase a connection and expect to get full bandwidth at peak times.

I don't see why you should be able to expect this unless your paying extra.
A Theory On The Rise Of Tweetstorms
Solar Panel in the Roadways
What about the danger of re-classifying internet services such as google as a common-carrier?
It's an interesting idea, for sure, but I just don't see how it makes any sense at all for roadways, where the tiles will be subject to constant stress, grime/dirt (which will reduce the already-not-great efficiency of PV cells), non-constant sun exposure, and prime opportunity for theft. We have lots of not-yet-utilized solar space already that won't be subject to the downsides of this kind of technology. Frankly, it seems like a solution in search of a problem to solve. Also, they've got to be a hell of a lot more expensive than asphalt.

I can totally see this as a technology for building patios and sidewalks on privately-owned land. It would be really cool to have self-lighting pathways that also serve to generate power for my household, but in terms of sheer economics, it's going to be hard to make the argument for a lower-efficiency, higher-install-cost solar brick than to just slap a PV array on my roof.
Apropos help in emacs is nice. For similar in vim type :help blah<ctrl-d>
How a team of students beat the casinos
HP's newest 7-inch Android tablet is just $100
> No other software product that I've ever come across or used has had a better documentation.

Vim requires so much documentation just to be usable. There is no GUI to hint at how to do anything. No toolbars, no application menus, no context menus or buttons. Vim's documentation is probably somewhat responsible for its popularity. I've never not found something I needed in Vim's documentation.
StackOverflow's reason does make sense. I've found it best to ask on a related mailing list. By related, I mean, if looking for a tool, ask the associated OS users language mailing list. If looking for a library, ask on the associated programming language mailing lists.

Mailing lists tend to be better than sites for this sort of thing because people who reply there are possibly putting in more thought into their replies and secondly, replies might lead to a discussion that'll make evident the tradeoffs you'll make going with one choice over the other (and there will always be tradeoffs). The thing that mailing lists lack when compared to StackOverflow is the rating mechanism and the ability to easily search/find answers to commonly asked questions.

Edit: Saw iKlsR's answer after I typed this out. I'd assume the stackxchange site he suggested would work better (assuming it has a large enough active audience).
The article didn’t mention at all how the participants were asked to express their level of satisfaction, so you’re just tearing down a straw man.
Yes! I need a sync engine between both of this, and I is harder than I tough. I wish to join forces on this, but not much love for SQL this day with all "all backend is NOSQL!"
IRC channels for domain-related groups are also an excellent resource for this kind of discovery.
Analysis of Over 2,000 Computer Science Professors at Top Universities
No, it doesn't. What if there is #COMMA# in one of the fields?
This is a 'feel-good' idea but it's just a waste of resources. Why not build a good road and a good solar panel separately? Combining them like this makes for a very expensive solar road that's bad at being a road and bad at being a solar panel. It's not like we're short on space to put solar panels, and maintaining roads is already expensive enough as it is.

A waste of time and money.
It's not a standard but it should very well be one, in my opinion. Whenever someone has to process CSV I always point to it to make them aware of it, that a lot of subtle points like escaping have already been defined to be done in one way. There is no good reason to NOT follow RFC4180 if you want to produce/consume CSV.
Libor is an example of lack of regulation, though. There was no oversight involved; some dude at Reuters called up some handfuls of banks and then averaged out the responses, and it was self-regulated via an industry group.

Regulations are about shifting incentives and in the case of Libor the banks involved were both investment and commercial banks and thus had enormous temptation.

Anyhow, you can't eliminate bad actors and thus reducing their frequency and intensity is the whole point. These crises have negative costs to everyone, and for most of these the inefficiency cost of regulations is utterly dwarfed by the cost of big crises.

Won't argue against how much easier the justice system is on you if you're rich.
Some of these "flops" include: the RSS spec that evolved into the currently used one, XML-RPC, SOAP, OPML...

You must have a very high standard for success ;)

Edit: arguably podcasts were first implemented by Winer too
Just out of curiosity...

What are some of the sensible, low-hanging fruit you have in mind?
I don't follow. Are you trying to insult me?
Intercom.io is similar. Intercom.io is seen as a service to help retain your customers. Though there are overlaps, our focus is to build an API that makes it easy to configure any kind of rule to trigger messages.

We hope to make it easy to configure rules like "send an email if a customer's total order value crosses $1000" or "Send a reminder if a customer's activity over a week is lower than their average" and so on.
Especially dates.
It was why I wasn't using Libor as the primary example. ;) But ya, it would have been stronger if I hadn't noted it at all I suppose.

Anywho, best of luck :)
Nope.

Checkout online.net vs. any of those ;)
Different orgs have different cost models, and AWS is most definitely NOT more expensive for lots of them.
It's also not always about bare bottom possible price for 'colo' type hosting. There's a ton of value to bringing up capacity for a few days and then making it just go away, which many F500 and govt shops struggle with.
Hey all. Surprised to see our little site at the top of HN :) We'll be updating the website at some point with more news. Till then, sign up for notifications and check out trybtc.com and blockscore.com.
Then people will switch, but the complexities of the software AWS, et al makes me think that it'll never beat bare metal for a relatively stable load.
Symlinks sort of allow for graph-like structures in the filesystem, no?
I've been over at emberjs' discourse site[1] a lot recently and I've been really impressed. They still encourage people to use stackoverflow for problem solving particular problems but for discussion it's a perfect complement.

[1] http://discuss.emberjs.com/
6 weeks after release, Samsung S5 VZN/ATT still not rooted. Bounty at $17k
Mass incarceration, in this case, is the trend in massive upward growth in prison population since 1980 (up 790% federally) and also the way in which we rely on incarceration to deal with social and economic problems - for example, globalization and technological change have drastically transformed the economy and forced poor colored communities into the underground economy. Instead of finding ways to integrate former factory workers into the new economy, we have cut welfare and started locking them up disproportionately.

In short, the United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other country, and we do it because we aren't brave enough to deal with our problems more directly. That is mass incarceration.
The Programmers’ Stone – Neuroscience
Hence 'relatively stable loads'.

I never said it was worthless, just for alot of cases it doesn't make sense.
>'What on earth makes these enterprise companies believe That they can take Cisco hardware & believe that they Can be more cost efficient than AWS/Azure.'

In my experience, it's a combination of fear, bad math, effective sales reps and a strong sense of self-preservation.

There are undoubtedly places that self-hosting is more efficient or a simply superior option, but the typical enterprise is unlikely to fit that bill.

Trying to enact change in enterprise IT is like playing the Game of Thrones. There are all sorts of entrenched interests and alliances at play.

Even as CTO, shifting a decent sized environment to the cloud surely costs your reseller more in margins, and possibly your account manager more in commissions than you make in a year. It also likely means cutting staff.

Regardless of their level, people get very nasty when you 'mess with their money.

It's a hell of a lot easier to just keep up the status quo and keep everyone happy. Furthermore, when the shift becomes truly unavoidable, the people powerful enough to have made the move earlier aren't going to be the ones losing their jobs.

What's really tragic is that recent history suggests that the shops which are slowest to transition will be eaten by their current allies in the end.

All of the big enterprise companies will gladly sell the executives on managed services - conveniently funded by removing entire swathes of staff.
The backbone stuff in there kind of made me raise an eyebrow... not sure I really want it.
Tappy Chicken
This stuff is like crack to me. I love these sort of explanations. I have absolutely no ability to do any of it and can only kind of follow it, but it's so facinating to read about.
Other ways would be analogous. I can't think of any way to do this in a hypothetical lab situation such that it's not vulnerable to my criticism. Can you?

What you could do is look at actual data (for concert tickets, plane tickets, train tickets, etc) and see if complimentary increases in ticket quality really correspond to increased purchases in the future. You might also be able to rig up an exit survey with objective questions like "do you regret your ticket purchase" and "would you recommend us to your friends" and compare the answers given by regular ticketholders and those given by ticketholders given a complimentary increase in ticket quality. But, again, that wouldn't work in a lab setting.
Strawman reply. I was commenting about the key goal of prison in the first place, and you are replying as if I was inferring that who goes to prison was fair - that is not at all the point I raised.

Before prison, the common practice in antiquity was to exile people. Which has the exact same effect as prison: to remove people from everyday society. That's why the primary goal of prison is to achieve the same thing: removal of individuals who cause harm (whether they are actually doing harm is a different discussion).

If you want to reeducate people, I'm not sure prison is the right place to do so.
One example of laws is insider trading. If you ran Bitcoin exchange, there is nothing preventing owners to exploit information that only they have. It's huge blind spot.

In reality, however, you don't need elaborate specific regulations. Most fraud prevention laws appears to be specific on surface but they always have one subjective caveat that if company knowingly acted in bad faith, the executives could be on trial.

So once a law is enacted saying X is regulated, it just means that enforcement authorities can come after you even if there is a wide spread suspicion of fraud. Then its just matter of invading company's internal documents, emails, databases to find that it acted in some bad faith and broke some law. Outcomes in top cases is typically dectated by public anger, events like proximity of next elections and lobby politics. Law is usually flexible enough to achieve that outcome.
Ease of use is as important as raw power. This is slower to load than the pure HTML versions of Flappy Bird that are out there, but the idea of Write once publish many is appealing.

I am not 100% certain I'd pay $19 a month as a hobbyist, but an excellent deal for a small game shop.
You know, I can't think of a really good site for this, which means that maybe it's a good startup idea. Index by language and environment and category, and allow users to submit descriptions of the trade-offs between specific versions of different solutions for the same thing. Maybe vote on them or make it a universally-editable wiki or something.

Basically, a site where I could look up, say, C# ORMs or Ruby on Rails authorization gems and see detailed descriptions of what's available and what the major tradeoffs and differences are between them from people who have actually used them would be freakin' awesome.
It would be much cheaper to just have solar panel covers over the parking spaces. And that way the cars get some shade too as a bonus.
Mastering anything is hard. But kids play basketball.

I can cook, but I'm not a master chef. That doesn't mean I don't do it. Nor does it mean "cooking is hard".

Riding a bicycle is a lot harder than basketball.
There are a ton of Chinese document-sharing sites similar to Scribd, and they use all the same horrible DRM-ish tricks (some even split the text between Flash and HTML) to make it difficult to save the content. I was briefly involved in a project to reconstruct a PDF from the contents on one of these sites, and the end result did work pretty well.
Which other article(s) do you feel are more accurate and paint a more complete/clear picture?
> I wager all by itself costs more than paving a traditional road.

Compared to a single road paving, the hi-tech road is more expensive but this road is supposed to be more durable than traditional paved roads. That means you need to compare the cost of several road pavings to get a more accurate comparison.

The hi-tech road is supposed to be installed once for several decades, where paved roads are re-paved every few years. This increases the cost of the traditional paved road.

Also, these hi-tech roads are supposed to subsidize their cost with energy creation.

> If there was demand for putting more utility wires underground wouldn't they already be simply burying them which is much less expensive?

Burying power lines is expensive. On its own, too expensive but combined with this project, it could be fiscally sound.
Solar panels on roofs of buildings
You just choose a placeholder that does not appear in the data. You could even implement it in a way that a placeholder is automatically selected upfront that does not appear in the data.

When it comes to parsing, the thing is that you usually have to make some assumptions about the document structure.
Heroin is a mid to upper class drug
http://www.slant.co
The problem with IRC channels is, conversations there then to be time-sensitive. So except for the most popular channels with plenty of people active all the time, someone (in South-east Asia, for instance) will not get the benefit of good answers from a number of people.
I don't have any good suggestion, but I feel like stack overflow is ripe for disruption. Most people only end up at the service because it's the incumbent, but the site has done a very poor job of transitioning from a place where you ask questions to a place where they need to curate results.
Garbage in? Garbage out. You give me a shitty file, you get shitty results. Tough shit.

None of these questions are particularly daunting. CSV means "comma separated values", so if you want to play games and use other delimiters, please fuck off. If it's not a comma, then guess what: it's not delimited. New line characters are well-known, and well-understood, across all platforms and easy to detect. If you manage to fuck that up in your file, then take a look in the mirror, because the problem is you. Enforcing the practice of enclosing the target data in quotation marks among users is a good idea. It's something that should be supported and encouraged, and ignored at one's own risk.

Additionally, employing an escape character (such as backslash) to allow for the use of a quotation mark within enclosing quotation marks is a nice feature to add in. After that, the concept of a CSV file has provided enough tools, to tolerate [an arbitrarily large percentage] of all use cases. If you need something more robust, XML is thataway.
Syncthing is less purely peer-to-peer. It's easy enough set up a central server and have your devices only sync to that server because of the way connections are made.
Please don't. Comments like this have no place on HN, regardless of how idiotic someone else's may be.

We ban people for this kind of thing when they don't have a history as a positive contributor. Your history seems excellent, though, so hopefully the favored penalty here—extremely mild admonishment—will do the trick.

On another note, I'm happy to report that many users flagged this comment. That is a good use of comment flagging. (When you think a comment has no place on HN, you can flag it by clicking on "link" to go to the item page for that comment, and then "flag". We monitor those flags and take action based on them.)
A Lattice for Speculative Data Flow Analysis
From the Maltese Falcon:

Kasper Gutman [to Sam Spade]: I distrust a man who says "when." If he's got to be careful not to drink too much, it's because he's not to be trusted when he does.
They don't hug either. A mother can't hug her son. The example does imply they are not an affectionate people.
Not even worth trying? It seems like a smart enough idea to at least test out.
The key word is "supposed". If glass tiles were a good choice for road surfaces, I'd expect we'd have seen them in use by now. If it's just economics that have stopped glass tile use in roadways, I'm still dubious that the energy production from these units will come close to offsetting the additional expense.
The Coder Factory Hits Perth
Road engineering is a pretty mature discipline. If this idea can't pass some of the basic known challenges in a thought exercise, why bother testing it? For example, they have no explanation as to how the tiles will be adhered to the surface. Silica has poor adherence to asphalt in wet conditions, and silica can react poorly with alkyds in portland cement. Both of those are big hints that it might be impossible to stick these tiles down for their claimed 20 year lifetime.
I suspect that if you took the reconfigurable displays out of the pitch, far fewer people would be keen on the idea. I think that's the bit that captures the imagination.

I think we'd get better mileage from modular roof materials like roof tiles or sheeting with in-built solar panels, or window treatments like awnings.
My first gem – RubyRetriever, a ruby web crawler and file downloader
Slightly relevant since you mentioned Quora: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7796834

Scribd and Quora considered harmful

Specifically, @nelson suggests "And instead of Quora use Ask MetaFilter or StackExchange." He goes on to say:

> Quora’s business model is to trick people into sharing information for free, then put it behind a login. It’s like Experts Exchange 2.0! For instance, on Quora you can read Who owns the copyright on content contributed to Quora? Only you can’t just read the text. Depending on your history with the site and the way you got there you may see a giant popup demanding you log in obscuring the page, or the first answer clear and then the rest blurred, or if you're lucky just the page. It appears nondeterministic.
Lets put it this way: if you're anywhere you only have to melt snow a handful of days per year it is not worth it to have heating. Anywhere snow is seriously inconvenient this idea is silly.
I didn't say new mines and mining companies are impossible. I said new diamond mining companies are probably a very tough sell, for the reasons I gave. A new mineral without a highly concentrated competitive landscape, or which is extremely plentiful in multiple countries, is probably a much better investment.

Read the article. De Beers didn't lose market share to a new mining start up, they lost it because political issues caused certain partners to leave the cartel (especially the Russian and Australian mines).

It was only when the cartel was severely weakened that the newer Canadian mines were able to opt to sell their diamonds independently, at which point De Beers had already fallen to 50%. Even these mines are not startups: the Diavik mine is majority owned by Rio Tinto.

>>> But look, if you're going to just keep inflating perfectly normal business barriers that affect any kind of business into reasons why somebody shouldn't get specifically into the diamond business, then it's you who probably shouldn't get into the diamond business.

My point is that the barriers are harder for diamond mining than for other businesses, like chat apps in 2011. Dismissing the barriers for a highly capital intensive and risky industry with a small number of major players seems reckless and makes it hard to take your points seriously.

>>> Somebody else with investment capital to burn sourcing product and building a market, like every other business in history, shouldn't let you get in the way.

Nobody is standing in your way. Go build your diamond company. You don't need the permission of Hacker News.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=1984+kindle+mass+deletion
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