skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With part of the moral, for me at least, being that while isolation (physical and technological) may have its merits to those in the Amish community, it makes it easier for them to fall for something like this. (Although why people trust somebody with the gift of the gab handing out oranges and visiting RV parks for 5 years is beyond me; I run a mile when I encounter people like that.)
I got excited for a moment and thought this was a TV white spaces deployment, which (in my mind) holds the best promise for establishing a nationwide wireless mesh network[1]. Base stations that support TVWS are beginning to appear on the market.

Still, it's an interesting scale-up of weak signals.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_spaces_(radio)
Follow-up pledge
Russia may legalize bitcoin
I think most people would prefer a scenario where they live to the age of 80 at the kind of physical peak they attained in their 20s to one where they live to 120 in a state of ever increasing decrepitude.

Put another way, the dream is to give you 5 decades of being 25, not 5 decades of being 85.
The next 2048??
Cryo, we know that module well and it works with Helium. Dresden make an excellent SoC. Shoot us an email, hello@helium.co
TTIP: debunking the business propaganda over investor rights
Compiled links from "Ask HN: Where can I post my startup to get beta users?
The article is making the following argument:

- Some professional association call for licensure.

- There is a case of bad licensure in Utah.

- Therefore all licensure is bad.

- Therefore all professional associations are bad.

I would cite that reasoning as an exemplar definition of crackpot.

Or more likely since it lists a $30 license as one of the 10 most burdensome "licenses to kill for", it is just plain dishonest.

I assumed that you shared the article's reasoning since you linked it.
How our high growth startup works 100% remotely
London Calling
It's fascinating that in 2014, transportation is still such a big hairy problem. Everything from local cycling routes to taxis to fights is complicated, big & hairy.
Pedro, thanks so much for the feedback.

Indeed! We take it under consideration very seriously. For us, the ultimate added value for the fan is to be able to follow their idols' products through the content they share and know exactly which product they used in that moment. Having said that, the purchase seems almost like a perk.
Trying to human-translate the first part of the article:

XKeyscore-Sourcecode: Tor-Users are marked and surveilled as extremists

According to an analysis of the XKeyscore sourcecode by German public broadcasters ARD and WDR, people showing an interest in anonymization on the web by, for example, googling for "Tails" or "Tor" will be added as extremists to an NSA database and monitored from thereon.

That's at least the gist of it. I'm pretty sure you'll get more background once the anglosphere awakens.
Have you actually tried it?

Seems like the people who actually have found it a little more complicated than that (see http://discuss.atom.io/t/coffeescript---extends-vs-util-inhe...).

To quote the post:

The difference is important. CS copies functions from parent to child on top of
setting the prototype while the std library just does the latter. Inheriting from
require("atom").View breaks without doing this manually (which isn't obvious at all).
If this is not being done for performance, it should be documented; otherwise, those
methods should be moved to the prototype.
>Much faster if you are willing to punish your users for using subpar browsers that don't keep up with current technologies and standards.

Actually Chrome is a complete mess ES6 compatibility wise.

Most of the interesting stuff is unimplemented still, and what is there is hidden in options the user has to specifically enable.

Sure, the standard is (now) only due for 2015, but Chrome dragging its feet is also one of the reasons for that. And it's not like FF waited for the standard to be stamped and released to have the implementations according to the standard already working.
That's not using those features. That's using a bizarro extra step to the workflow to get a non native implementation.
I notice j.py in that list. I forked that a wee while back, and have been enhancing it ever since:

http://www.al-got-rhythm.net/kd/
"Edit: some say it's not really the XKeyscore code"

Yeah, looking at the code it definitely involves TOR, but I'm really interested in the "searching for these Tools -> you're now flagged" claim+proof because that is just so wrong.
Facebook Acquires LiveRail For $400M To $500M
If you have any questions or suggestions let me know, I'm here monitoring this thread.
Is Your Android Device Telling the World Where You've Been?
Alternative domain to HN
Create a "Fight the NSA button" that links to a google search for Tor or Tails then post it on everything.

If they really are doing this (and considering recent events I would lean that way) that would seem like an effective irritant.

EDIT: For clarity, the button should explain what it will do, putting someone on a watch list without their consent is not a moral thing to do.
It looks like a selector for 3 known TOR directories IPs, either based on HTTP or HTTPS traffic.
NSA policies are simply insane and/or lazily thought out. I mean we even learned a while ago that not using Facebook makes you "suspicious" - Seriously? Or maybe watching a certain type of Youtube videos.

My point is I wouldn't single out just Tor here. They probably have dozens of other such idiotic policies that lead to abuses and putting people on "lists" that then they can take revenge on, such as through adding them to no-fly lists and so on, with very little to no recourse for the people affected (if they even ever find out about if or why they're put there, since it all tends to be secret).

What happened to innocent until proven guilty? The NSA is simply out of control and needs to be reined in, otherwise expect abuses against people that haven't even heard of Tor.
Or embed a google search within an iframe.
I have a hard time believing that Google deliberately set out to capture wifi payloads. Apart from the obvious illegality, what use would they possibly have for such data? Google already knows an immense amount of detail about its users.

They screwed up (twice, if you count failing to delete the data) and thats a serious matter. But deliberately wardriving entire countries? Hard to believe.
Because the capital that you invest has been taxed before, when it was earned. Kind of harsh to tax 40% on your income, and when you save it, tax again the same amount on your returns.
Why didn't the team just bolt together off-the-shelf DSLRs for this?

It seems like a lot of the low level problems were already solved by commercial camera makers many years before.

Even today with the R7, why not just bolt together Gopros and manually set the Aperture, ISO and shutter speed. You'd get better quality images, waterproof cameras and they'd be significantly cheaper.

It's a shame to see a talented engineer distort the truth about Wifi packet collection, especially after Google were shown to have acted deliberatly (rather than "a single wrong line in the configuration file") source: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...
Is creating jobs any entrepreneur's goal?

Absolutely: their own job, for starters!

More broadly though: some of the most oft-cited reasons by people starting small businesses (tech included) is quite explicitly to be able to do stuff they like and be paid for it; or be able to surround themselves with like-minded people working on goals of common interest to them. Other times, family members, friends or colleagues/guild members come together to provide themselves with a steady source of income --that's how most law firms and medical practices get started, after all.
- Therefore all licensure is bad.

Uh, care to share where you read that? What I read was:

"Almost nobody is calling for wholesale abolition of professional licensing. I sleep better at night knowing that the commercial pilots flying over my apartment are trained and licensed."

"A bolder idea, of course, would be for states to get rid of the licensing rules that are doing more harm than good." (emphasis mine)
Disable / Block Candy Crush Requests on Facebook
Show HN: Browser plugin that turns 'disrupt' into 'bullshit'
Gliff app - new football forum app. Feedback appreciated.
HN - We're just about to start marketing push on our app Gliff. It's for football fans to have conversations in a more impacting and engaging way. We've adopted a words+pictures approach to posting a status/conversation.Be great to hear your thoughts!
Fair enough. My point was supposed to be more limited, saying that a JIT'ed solution is not a cure all for performance considerations. Sure, it is great that there is a JIT compiler helping out. It just is not necessarily enough on its own to even the performance gap between native and not.
Should politicians manipulate citizens?
Is this a response to the blog post "The Worst Programming Interview Question" that went last time on HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7953725
> your home country, if that

I can vouch for this: I'm a white male with no physical disabilities or impairments, as an entrepreneur (and employee) I am not welcome in my home country [1]. In this climate many have "resigned to their fate" which means there is a somewhat substantial amount of South African expatriates. This has resulted in us not being welcome in the 1st world countries that we assume our hard work will be appreciated in.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Economic_Empowerment#Crit...
TV white space has certain problems that make it unsuitable for extremely low-power applications. For one, the FCC requires you to periodically query a web service to determine which channels are currently unoccupied at your location. If you are mobile, you need to query every so-many meters (~50, I believe, but don't quote me on that), which would mean querying every 40-odd seconds assuming an average walking speed of 1.2m/s.

Even if you're not mobile, e.g. an environmental sensor or relay station, you will still need to periodically check to see if there isn't a wireless microphone or other device occupying the band you're transmitting on.

Querying a web service over a 3G connection will cost you anywhere between 2-6 Joules depending on hardware, network conditions, network features (fast dormancy, state transition time-outs) etc.

So for battery powered and/or low data rate applications, staying in an unlicensed band like 433, 868, 915, or 2.4 is still the best option by far.
Sheryl Sandberg Not Sorry for Facebook Mood Manipulation Study
I think it just shows that you do computers wrong.

Okay sorry that sounds snarky and unproductive- What I mean is, as a model for how human evolved navigation works- a persistant work space with effectively no need to "save" work is more like reality. If you scribble something on a napkin, and leave it on your desk, the desk doesn't demand you name the napkin when you try to leave the house. At the exact moment you need to leave to go to work, is the exact moment you are least prepared to think of a name and location to find something later.

But with a persistent workspace, you can just shut the program instantly, without being spammed by 15 "save, discard, cancel" dialogues. Pressing the power button on the computer, and having the computer just.. turn off… and then turn back on having not forgotten anything by accident or otherwise. You can name and save stuff AT YOUR LEISURE.

that.
is.
the.
future.

…. of 1996. It's 2014 now and we've just now gotten round to adding it… to one program. a text editor. now we just need to get the rest of the developers in the world on board with this really obviously correct thing to do.
> "... that just ensures that I have way too much of some things."

That only matters if the body cannot quickly flush or discard the things it doesn't need. It's probably different for each type of supplement. As a supporting example, it would be quite difficult to drink too much water as there's an easy mechanism to deal with it [1].

[1] Before anyone leaps on that statement, yes, I'm aware that it is possible to overdose on water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
啥意思？谁能用中文翻一下
That's true, but I still believe the person should be held accountable for fraud, regardless of how easy his targets were to dupe.
It's an antioxidant. You sometimes see it on labels as ascorbic acid (if the product isn't touting its health credentials).
Hi Viral, do you have an intuition for why Numba would be faster than Julia here? It appears Julia spends a lot of time calculating the log on line 71.
Is it possible that this, and the release of this information, is part of a NSA strategy for deterring people from using TOR or encryption? Internet users will now be too scared to be put on some list to even look up information about TOR or PGP.
[Recommend HN:] Affordable startup videos:
>You know what else I hate? Typing in long commands in the Mac OS X terminal and then them wrapping weirdly.

Are you escaping your color codes in PS1 correctly?

Bad:

PS1="\033[1;32m \w \033[m $"

Good (notice the extra \[ and \]):

PS1="\[\033[1;32m\] \w \[\033[m\] $"
TIL. As a long-time DOS user that often gets a bit lost on Unix systems I cannot stress how awesome it is to have found out about this!
Developers: stop re-AOLizing the web!
The title of the published research paper is: "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks."
You list Qt core but that's not what I use Qt for. I use it to make GUI apps and it's pretty darn good at it.

QML is the way forward for making GUI apps, you are not supposed to use javascript much (although you can make complete apps with it). You are supposed to have your complex logic in a C++ backend which interacts with the QML frontend.

Maybe QML will have Rust bindings.
An even creepier experiment by Facebook
traceur-compiler can preserve ES6 syntax (without desugaring it), it's only missing automated feature detection at runtime (which I wanted to add more than an year ago, but was busy with other things).
The button requires user action, the iframe is passive I'm not convinced getting someone put on a watchlist without them taking a specific action is a particularly moral thing to do...

For the sake of clarity I wasn't suggesting the button be put on without a clear explanation of what it did.
I do something similar, except that the anchor is dinner at the appropriate time for the destination TZ. On my last two trips from Boston to Bangalore (9.5/10.5 hours depending on DST) this has led to approximately zero jet lag, compared to before when my second day there and my first day back would be almost total wipeouts.

My friend whose sister works in this area scoffs, and says that she recommends something very similar to the OP instead. Maybe my success with the fasting method is mostly placebo effect, but hey, I'll still ride that for all it's worth. ;)
Didn't notice any of that. I use [httpsb](https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/). For Firefox, NoScript should do the job.
4th of July Menu 2014 and Recipe Ideas
Khal (command-line calendar) v0.2 released
> There are busses too, but I never use them.

Don't forget the trams above ground too (6 lines running, 4 more planned).

The official public transport organ has a (flash :() map which you can switch between rail (trains, subways and trams), day bus and night bus: http://www.ratp.fr/plan-interactif/carteidf.php
Not really a good analogy, though. There were serious benefits to getting off horses, even if we ignore the speed promise of automobiles. Moving to a text editor that is written in JavaScript doesn't really seem to have much promise of gains in the future.

Though, the enthusiasm there is nice and there is no reason to bemoan its existence. Just don't be surprised when the things it can do have already be done in more venerable environments in the past. :)
thanks for compiling this.
Right, I agree. As I read about the project, it was clear this wasn't an ideal use case for TVWS.

Are you sure you have to query the TVWS database out-of-band? I assumed the cognitive control would run over the TVWS connection itself.
The Ultra-Simple App That Lets Anyone Encrypt Anything
Kamen has demonstrated a great talent for generating media coverage of his products - think back to the incredible level of media attention around launch of "It"... which turned out to be the segway. If he's working on a new product, expect a similar level of media engagement.

There's a good book about development and launch of the segway "CODE NAME GINGER: The Story Behind Ginger and Dean Kamen's Quest to Invent a New World"[1]. It's in paperback as "Reinventing the Wheel: A Story of Genius, Innovation, and Grand Ambition"[2]. It also has some interesting coverage of what happened inside the company during that time.

[1] http://www.stevekemper.net/disc.htm

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Wheel-Genius-Innovation-Am...
I absolutely agree. The analogies I use when describing this are with the food (and medical/drug industry). Unless you grow/rear your own food, you really have no idea what's on your plate and your ability to comprehend the totality of the system that got the food there is quite limited (unless you work in that industry or devote significant time to it). Therefore, there is regulation intended to protect consumers from harm and from making poor choices.

It's true that regulations can be perverted and manipulated by incumbents but in my mind that's a separate issue (related to lobbying and politics). It doesn't mean we should throw out the laws all-together.
If by extremists they mean freedom extremists then that's fine with me, bring it on NSA.
Genuine question: if we wrap an IC engine with a heat sink that captures the excess heat for re-use, what do we get? And is overall more or less efficient than using the sterling engine in article?
> I told her that they should have thought about that when they flew me down the first fucking time.

Thanks for that!

On the other hand, most likely the other Python team would grind you on Python and again nothing on ML, and of course your Python ML projects suck because "blah blah blah"
Not really directly supportive of Byerley's point, but this recent Cornell study on gas well leak potential might be of interest: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/06/four-10-wells-fo...

> shale gas wells were six times more likely to leak, compared with conventional wells.
Metaflask - A repository to organize the Flask ecosystem
Generators have to be marked as an asterisk as otherwise there's ambiguity; until recently 'yield' wasn't a reserved word, so it might be a variable name or anything. Without disambiguating (via the *) old JavaScript can potentially break.
That's the point. A watchlist with every human, and its friends on it, is kinda useless.
I would add:

TOOLS
...
* 'tree' instead of 'ls -R'
...
I really really hope it changes to [] in future. I am scared of the code with lots of <>, I don't know why but I lose context.
I have regularly read that all it takes is 15-30 minutes of direct sun exposure per day to generate the RDA of vitamin D. Is that inaccurate (as someone who slathers his kids with sunscreen I would really like to know)?
I went through old emails and I was using it in early February 2003, so not quite 2002. I showed it to a number of people and some said, well, it's interesting but will never take off, others thought it looked really useful. One comment "Hey there is a boulangerie (bakery) right where you are staying!", this is cool. (Pity the bakery went on holidays just as we arrived). As others pointed out it was buildings only, so I knew what to expect to my left and right, but had, for example no idea how wide Boulevard de Sebastapol was but I did know there is a KFC on the left (still is looking at Streetview now). One good thing about the pagesjaunes solution was that they walked rather than drove the streets. As my journey was along Rue Berger (from Chatelet les Halles heading towards the Pompidou Centre), the 2014 Streetview experience is pretty hit and miss.

Still I thought it was cool, and even took a bunch of photos (Digital, brand new Sony Mavica writing to CDRs in the camera) of the walk from the station, duplicating what I saw before setting out.
Stirling (and other thermal-cycle engines) are about 30-35% in converting heat energy to useful work. In this case electricity. So dividing 10 kW by 30% will give you the rough energy input. Casting that in therms/hr. (usual natural gas billing unit in the US is therms), it's about 1.14. Residential price is on the order of around $0.80 - $1.50/therm, so you're looking at about $25/day for 10 kW of continuous power. Which isn't far from what you'd be paying for electricity: $21 - 29 at $0.09 - $0.12 per kWh.

In terms of volume, 1 ft^3 is about 1025 btu, a therm is 10,000 btu, so you're looking at 97.5, let's call it 100 ft^3 of natural gas consumption per day.

As for running a Stirling engine on solar energy, or another heat source, yes, you could do that. Again, you need 33 kW of input power, which means a 33m^3 collecter surface -- that's 5.8m on a side, or 19 feet.

Because the Stirling's hot end is a point, you'd need tracking systems or a working fluid to deliver heat to it from your mirrors.

Incidentally, you can answer a lot of these questions using GNU units, written by Adrian Mariano. The great thing about it is conversion between different units and relationships, e.g., energy per hour per unit area. I find it invaluable in looking at energy, renewable, and related issues.
Open to RTC
I was talking on the phone to someone in another country (a US friendly country) and the other person mentioned Tor. The second he got to the end of the word the phone call cut out. I haven't had a phone call cut out in years except that one time.

It was most likely a complete coincidence but it would be very interesting if anyone else has ever had a similar experience.
At least they would need to seize from several people.

And apart from that they can just seize my unencrypted home backup.

Unencrypted, because I want to be able to restore the rest if a bit flips in some file. And my PAR3 tests were really unconvincing.
Programmer excuses
Hmm, I'm getting a 500 error. What's up?
Ask HN: How would you change your mind?
A recent HN post introduced the idea that changing your mind is one of the most difficult things we do [1]. This got me thinking what makes it difficult.

It's probably not difficult in the same way running a marathon is. It's not the sort of thing you could treat with willpower and discipline alone. What makes it difficult is how convinced you are you shouldn't change your mind. You think your current opinions are correct. But besides yourself being mistaken without realizing it, you are also convinced other people -- the ones trying to help change your mind -- are mistaken too. You don't even entertain a contradictory thought. You are being relentless but with only the bad parts.

If you wanted to change your mind then, how would you do it?

How would you collide your misconceptions with those of others and come away a better person? And how can you do that as systematically as you train for a marathon?

The surprising thing is it feels like something that requires loose shamelessness than strict discipline. You have to admit, as often as possible, that you don't have the answers. A weak willpower appears to get you further here since you don't fight each counterargument to what you thought you knew.

What do you, personally, do right now to change your mind? Have you discovered tricks that help? Do some tricks work better than others?

Is there a process to the madness?

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7895364
They're just screenshots to make the TV show more interesting. They're obviously not showing the entire source on air.

If they claim to have the entire source code of XKeyScore and knowing that Snowden accessed so much, why should we doubt them?