skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know you're talking about product launches, but you reminded me of something I've been wanting to clarify about Show HN. I hope it's ok if I share it here. It's not exactly off-topic, since Show HN is definitely for product launches—but it's for other things too.

The way Show HN has evolved over the years, the bar for it is naturally low. Show HN is for something you've made that other people can try out and talk with you about in the thread. That can be anything from a first project or weekend hack to a feedback-honed product like you've described above. The only rules are (a) you made it and (b) it works.

By "it works" I mean that it isn't a landing page or an email signup or a fundraiser, but rather something other people can play with and give feedback and ask questions about. That definitely includes new products, but also other things. Who knows what people might come up with! It just has to be interesting.

A risk with setting the bar too high is that some users will feel like contributing isn't for them. We want to avoid that. There are many talented people who maybe haven't done anything of their own yet, or haven't yet shared what they've done, or who suffer from that curse of our field, impostor syndrome. It's painfully easy to look at the polished work of others and think, "I could never do that". One reason we want Show HN to be welcoming to all levels of work is so there will be plenty of examples where people think, "I could do that". Not as in "meh, that's nothing," but in the DIY spirit of "hey, me too".

But the main reason is that many kinds of things—including seemingly trivial things—can be interesting. There's a secret relationship between the high and the low. They thrive together.

Masterful paintings are wonderful but first sketches are interesting too, especially in a workshop or a studio, which is the kind of place we want HN to be. Besides, first sketches have a way of turning into something masterful later. Most won't, but some will, and we love it when HN helps that happen.
I don't know if I'm ready for that step yet.

One thing that attracts me to Atom is the infinite UI hackability. If I don't like the color of the text in the tree view, I can change that, just by writing CSS. It's an editor by the web, for the web, and of the web.

Sublime, however, feels much more fluid. When I open a file in the tree view, it animates down (have yet to get that working properly with Atom - it animates but it looks choppy). It's faster, for obvious reasons. The themes I have in place look damn good, and I have a git package that can show me a diff of the file I'm looking at (oddly, Atom lacks this feature).

I very much look forward to following Atom and maybe in a year or two, if they've gotten it up to a level of performance I can tolerate, I'll give it another shot.

Ultimately, right now the choice is between the performance and usability of Sublime, vs the aesthetics of Atom. Sublime's performance actually gives it a bit of an aesthetic edge over Atom, so despite the hackability of Atom's UI, it's just not there... yet.

I'd love to make the switch, but the subtle (though perceptible) UI lags and smaller ecosystem make it a subpar choice right now.
Indeed, it's strange looking in from the outside that they consider the country to be so precious in this fashion. I would not go if I were paid a large amount of money to do so, and I have been offered exactly that numerous times, so that's not just hyperbole either.

The US is not a shining city on the hill, it is a slowly sinking empire with walls made of disjointed, often incoherent words, that even the people charged with enforcing the measures extrapolated therein don't actually understand letalone hope to reasonably enforce.
Kotlin Milestone 8 released
I will give you a Full and Extensive Course in Forex trading for $5
There are many, many, many cites I could pull for this, but might as well grab the a pertinent graph where the Supreme Court considers the question of whether a seizure of contraband specifically authorized by an act of Congress at the border nonetheless violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on "unreasonable" search and seizure. After extensive analysis of relevant case law and the history of the United States they conclude:

Border searches, then, from before the adoption of the Fourth Amendment, have been considered to be "reasonable" by the single fact that the person or item in question had entered into our country from outside. There has never been any additional requirement that the reasonableness of a border search depended on the existence of probable cause. This longstanding recognition that searches at our borders without probable cause and without a warrant are nonetheless "reasonable" has a history as old as the Fourth Amendment itself. We reaffirm it now.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt//text/431/606

Reasonable people can disagree with the Supreme Court on whether their application of the Constitution is as broad or narrow as it should be in any particular circumstance, but it is fairly clear that they did not write "The Constitution does not apply at the border!"
The shipping container certainly created one million jobs globally. I have read "The Box" also, and the job creation was in the factories around the world. The job loss was mostly the longshoremen and the break-bulk process that was wasteful in comparison.

Creating 1 million jobs might mean disrupting 100,000 others. Or maybe it will just mean removing waste in large scale processes that we currently do as a society. My friend Mo is doing this http://www.gizmag.com/infinite-pipeline/23762/ which could help bring water to places that it wasn't economical to do previously. This would change the life of those people who need to fetch water every day. Spending half your day getting water is a huge waste of human potential.
I used to live in Long Beach, and you're right that the transit is quite good between heavily trafficked points and along major corridors.

But the huge area the system needs to cover means most of the resident population is significantly underserved. As a random sample, I just put the 15 miles between Lakewood to Carson into Google Maps and the transit routes start at 2 hours each way, even during peak hours! It's a 20 minute drive.

A major challenge for people living with limited means is how much slower life is when they're dependent on public transit to get around. LA's limited network removes many seemingly-accessible employment or education options entirely.
To be blunt, this project will never gain traction because not enough people are willing to store their browsing history somewhere outside of their control. The back button issue shows a lack of attention to detail. Something that's extremely important when dealing with sensitive personal data.
Wow, I didn't realize that Amazon Blockview (part of A9 at the time) was so short-lived. I used it all the time in Seattle when it was running.
... And why is that valuable to society? Because then consumers have money to left over to spend on other things.

See "secondary effects that result in more/higher-quality employment."
What a brilliant and effective tool for propaganda and other forms of social control.

We should be sure to only show people patriotic words on July 4th so they can think patriotic thoughts and suffer none of that negative criticism stuff about the government they are so abused with normally. Maybe we should do that for all National holidays. Or maybe we should just do that all the time.

Good thing it wasn't a military branch providing funding for this. That would be scary.
Haha, yeah, that's how I found about the scheme. The wikia's a very interesting read btw. Taught me stuff I never knew existed before. A real TIL
Nutrition: Vitamins on trial
Whoa, thank you!
There are various 6-to-4 technologies and tunnels, presumably they use one of those in conjunction with 6lowpan or similar. I'm guessing the radio side uses the old analogue TV bands, because the whole thing sounds very similar to the "Weightless" whitespace radio system.
Can We Predict Which Teens Are Likely To Binge Drink? Maybe
Synchronous, Asynchronous and Parallel Async benchmarking in GO
And there should have been a completely separate layer that would have caught the data sent by the glitch. To rephrase the question: "How did GS not have defense in depth here?"
First thought that came to me as well. Also, a good way to get people together if you use the scheme for your will or something ;)
It's not that google is responsible, it's that google should help track what happened.
not available on Firefox. Can't use it.
Your analogy doesn't make sense because Verizon doesn't select which calls you receive. A phone company that drops any calls (positive or negative) is just defective. Facebook always curates what they show on your newsfeed. The neutral case where the experiment isn't being run still involves Facebook picking and choosing what to show you.

If you want an analogy relating to socializing, how about a dating site experimenting with showing you more or less attractive people? Is that terrible and unethical?
It makes me sad that asking Google to fix their problem is the best solution Goldman Sachs can come up with. A few other options off the top of my head:

* DDoS the gmail account in question with spam, particularly spam that looks like it contains confidential information.

* Create a clever job ad on reddit, advertising a GS position in IT Security division by tracking down an email user supposedly played by a GS confederate, and then provide the gmail account in the ad

* Blackmail the unintended recipient, perhaps by sending the sort of data it's illegal in the U.S. to even own

* Mock the "From" header for thousand of typical spam messages with the gmail account address, send them to destinations that are sure to pass through Spamhaus & co.'s filters

* Fill the user's inbox to capacity; e.g., sign up for Quora with the gmail address in question

Certainly on the gray hat side of things, but asking Google to delete an email isn't exactly kosher to begin with.
I don't think you have to worry about side projects, generally, from a programmer's perspective. The guy in question, if I read the right link, was a "strategic partnerships manager", which is another way to say "sales guy". I'm oversimplifying, but the point is that his job was to develop relationships for his employer, on his employers dime and time. The relationships were his work product. In the sales world, those non-competes matter because relationships follow people, generally speaking. When a relationship manager goes to a competitor, he puts his first employer's business at risk. Directly.

This is not at all like programmers working on side projects. The equivalent thing for a programmer would be to run off with the source code you wrote for your employer and take it to another employer, which is an obvious no-no. The grey area for side projects is defined by how much your employer thinks it might be competing (or directly related to) your paid work. Some employers explicitly don't care, while others do. You need to consult your employment agreement first and the state law where you live second. If it's not clear after that, consult a lawyer. FYI: this is a good thing to do before taking a job.
Also, they propose violating constitutional rights to privacy to enter into and modify one person's email for a civil (commercial) matter.
Log files.
This thing doesn't model the brain, despite what the article claims. It's not about a brain model, it's about the data and its model. They're painstakingly adding lots of data about the world, which could serve as a resource for a brain-like model.

It's also neither closed source nor secret. The article is a bit crap so don't base your criticism of the project just from what you read there.

It's been popping up for ages, for example Businessweek, 1997:

http://www.businessweek.com/1997/25/b353210.htm
I'm way out of my area of expertise, but I'd really like to know more about the underlying technology. I searched around a little, but I'm not sure about:

1. The frequency band(s) it operates on.

2. Average/best-case data transfer rates.

3. Energy usage. Sending 10 bytes uses 0.026mA? Ok... that's current, not energy. To get power usage (watts), you need voltage and current. To get energy usage (joules, watt-hours), you need voltage, current, and time. I assume the voltage is the same in the Bluetooth comparison, but it's unclear if both radios are on for the same amount of time.

4. The bridges. Claimed coverage is up to 50 square miles, so sqrt(50/pi) == 4 mile range. Are directional antennas required for that? Is this a limitation of the protocol or the radio?

Based on the information available, I'm guessing this is an IEEE 802.15.4[1] device running on the 900Mhz ISM band. Transfer rates probably peak at 250Kbit/sec.

I think the energy comparison to Bluetooth is disingenuous. Bluetooth probably has more expensive startup costs. Sending 10 bytes may take much less energy, but Bluetooth's faster data rates may allow it to win on a 10 megabyte transfer.

It's interesting, but I really want to know more before considering the product.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.15.4
In my previous companies in Italy we received multiple times requests to renew the registration on some kind of internet company registry in Germany. Fortunately the accounting dept asked us in IT "what's this / should we pay it?" and we directly sent those letters to the trash.
They should wikileak it.
That's the best start I've see to a route map. It looks like the data was collected by GPS, which is a good idea. Still, a lot of routes that I've used are not mapped and the maps that exist are of variable quality.

I think that organized projects based on smartphone users should be able to solve the problem eventually.
Let's look at who's behind it, what it is, how it can be used, and where the benefits accrue:

* Who: NRG, while not a utility, is an owner of utility-scale generation capacity. They wholesale electricity to utilities for distribution and resale. Their portfolio is largely fossil-fuel but increasingly renewables [1]. They see themselves in the "death spiral" some other generation suppliers do [3][4].

* What: Per [2], it's a combined natural-gas-in ( 50KW Th ) heat-out / grid-power-in / gas-to-electrical-power-out (Stirling engine, 10 KW max ) / grid-and-home-power-out (15KW max) / solar-power-in / battery-power-both-ways (15KW max) / inverter system, tech specs subject to change.

More per [2]:

"A single unit can integrate natural gas, solar panels,
wind turbines and batteries for storage," NRG says. "The
device is connected to the grid, which allows the two to
work seamlessly together. But if the grid's power goes
down, the engine's energy stays up. Any excess generated
energy can be sent back to the grid and may be credited
for your benefit."
.
Aside from the 15 kW maximum electrical output, output
can be used for space heating (35 kW or 0.12 MMBTU) or
hot water (200 gallons per hour at 70° rise). Additional
uses include snow melt and spa and pool heating.
.
The technical specifications are subject to change.
.
When necessary, the unit seamlessly transitions to a
backup power system, to maintain continuous operations,
NRG says.
.
The Beacon 10 unit's dimensions are 3 ft. 8 in. long by 2
ft. 6 in. wide by 4 ft.high, which NRG says is slightly
larger than a washing machine.
.
The unit weighs 1,500 lbs.

* How it can be used: Disrupt the utility's business by selling or leasing equipment directly to end users, and by doing energy arbitrage with the utility.

The whole business of solar integration and battery integration is optional, and smells of "greenwashing-by-association" to me: The cheapest install of this machine would not include a solar component nor battery, each of which might be very expensive in addition to this machine. Who could afford all that? Certainly not everyone.

* Where benefits accrue: See [5] for the long story, but it looks like NRG mainly. If you lease it from NRG, you may not get as much of the benefit of energy arbitrage.

* What I think of it: Regulators should insist on a "connection charge" for this and accept energy sold at wholesale prices, while selling to the user at retail prices. Disclosure: I own a solar system with net metering, but believe a "connection charge" is entirely reasonable /for those who have their own generation capability/ and thus use the grid for sale of distributed generation, but /not/ for those who don't.

=======

[1] http://www.nrg.com/renew/renewable-generation/

[2] http://www.energychoicematters.com/stories/20131022a.html

[3] http://www.utilitydive.com/news/facing-decline-nrg-energy-fo...

[4] www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/NRG-Energy-Deploying-Dean-Kamens-Solar-Smart-In-Home-Generator

[5] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/who-wi...
I think what she meant was being put in the same category as people who had committed real crimes which warrants harsh treatments like confinements. I don't think she meant treat me specially :)
https://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#reduce

Reduce (also frequently called "fold") turns a list of items into a single item (of maybe the same type or maybe a different type). It does this based on a function that tells you how to update that single item as it looks at each list item in turn.

For instance:

def fn(a,b):
return str(b) + a + str(b)

reduce(fn, [1,2,3], "0")

That says:

Start with "0" (we call this the accumulator value)
Read the first element of the list (1)
Pass "0" and 1 to fn
Turn 1 into "1"
Stick it on the front and back of "0"
Return "101".
Use "101" as our new accumulator value.

Read the next element of the list (2)
Pass "101" and 2 to fn
Turn 2 into "2"
Stick it on the front and back of "101"
Return "21012".
Use "21012" as our new accumulator value.

Read the next element of the list (3)
Pass "21012" and 3 to fn
Turn 3 into "3"
Stick it on the front and back of "21012"
Return "3210123".
Use "3210123" as our new accumulator value.

Notice that we've reached the end of the list, return our latest accumulator value.
Add to your Safari Reading List from Chrome
Found this gem today, thought I'd share it to the community :)
Report touts Bitcoins over bucks for OPEC
For what it's worth, I've asked plenty of dumb questions, and have found the Haskell community happy to answer them.
Just to be clear, NSLs are largely unregulated by the judiciary and are frequently overbroad in the information they demand, but they aren't arbitrary gag orders.

They can keep you silent about the fact that you got an NSL (and that therefore there's an investigation going on), but not about the content itself.
Thanks. My hope is that the search is good enough that it doesn't matter how much is indexed -- you'll always be able to find what you are looking for. This is one reason, to start, I felt it was easier to index content server side..
It's quite clear what happened. GS told us. A GS employee emailed sensitive data to a gmail account... and now GS wants Google to go in and delete an email from a private user's account without their permission (and possibly without their knowledge).

There is nothing to "track". GS screwed up... now wants Google to "save the day".

Given by the press around this, and the likelyhood the gmail account owner noticed the email, we can assume the data is already in the open... so retroactively deleting it accomplishes nothing. GS needs to start informing their customers about their data loss and possible outcomes.
What was the difficulty in making the camera unit watertight? I'm guessing a simple solution like transparent globe would cause reflection problems but why couldn't each camera be housed in a rubber-tight casing? The lens could be made waterproof by design and everything else would be in a sealed rubber glove. I'm not implying that the guys who mapped the entire world in 3D couldn't figure out how to waterproof cameras. I'm asking what the core engineering problem was in attempting to waterproof these cameras.
> "I went on to develop aerial cameras for Google, but that story will have to wait for Google to publish some details."

I'm wondering what, if anything, that statement has to do with the Skybox acquisition, or if the two are previously-unrelated parts of an overarching aerial imaging plan.

Google is so far ahead of others in mapping it is downright scary.

I read somewhere speculation that Apple's iBeacon could be used to create precise indoor maps of public or semi-public spaces. But then I read about Project Tango, and wonder...
Modulo IORef and similar.
I think the website compares it to BluetoothLE which is a really low energy. But typical BluetoothLE data rates are much much lower than 250Kbits/s.

I'm still surprised that they can bring it down to lesser active current draw than BluetoothLE which was designed for low-data rate, low current draw, short distance comms.

Edit : Here's a app note on real life current draw of TI's BluetoothLE solution.

http://www.ti.com/lit/an/swra347a/swra347a.pdf

Edit 2: Here's another research paper comparing ZigBee and BLE solution's current draws. ZigBee is almost an order magnitude larger in current draw.

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/192688/IWS%202013%20wirel...

Edit 3: Old but good presentation on power usage in 802.15.4.
http://www.cens.ucla.edu/sensys03/sensys03-callaway.pdf
This is interesting from the context of a whistleblower. What if the contractor intentionally emailed the file to an external address because they had found out some kind of management impropriety.
> iCloud will offer this in the coming iOS / OSX releases.

and... nobody cares.
What problem does Helium solve, when Wi-Fi, BT and Cellular works for most people?

Most wireless access methods are inefficient and consume large amounts of battery because they try to cram dozens or thousands of devices into extremely limited, heavily regulated, congested spectrum. Most wireless technologies work very well in laboratory conditions - but then suffer in the real world because of this.

It's not clear whether you are doing anything new here to overcome this fundamental issue, except attempt to introduce another 'standard' to compete in the same crowded space.
If a feature gets released, it is for people to use it. A judicious hand with features saves a lot of trouble down the line. If you are adding too many features you get a big pile of features like C++. I don't see how it is worth arguing that people developing something like a programming language need to very carefully weigh these decisions instead of throwing everything at the wall to see if it sticks.

The main reason to load up on features is that you are anxious your audience won't like you unless you do, but it is a wrong idea about design.
One thing that bothers me about this article is the clear line between herself and the criminals. In general, there seems to be a tendency to classify criminals as a completely different type of human being. I think that this is a lot of where the problem comes from in the first place. It's drawing a firm "us vs. them" line that justifies your actions and motivations while disregarding the motivations of the people who have committed crimes.

Yes, they may have committed crimes (and even maybe they haven't), but they're still human, and they have justifications for the things that they did. They have paths that led them to their choices, and it's foolish to completely disregard their humanity by sweeping them into a 'them' category that isolates their decisions and way of life from your own decisions and way of life.