skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's useful to distinguish between "kinds of problems". The problem of understanding friction between two polished surfaces is a different category of problem from that solved by Yo or Groupon. The payoff of the former is the satisfaction of curiosity, and, arguably, an irreversible advancement of human knowledge. The payoff of the latter is, at best, a small improvement in utility of a small percent of humans over a relatively short amount of time.

The dirty little secret of the valley is that (most) people don't care about this distinction. There are plenty of people made rich by AOL buyouts and MySpace acquisitions - and they are just as rich even though their creations didn't last. There is a tacit acceptance of the truth that technology is fashion, not science.

Why is this distinction important to your point? Because "ripe to be solved" takes on a very different character in the fashion technology sense and the science technology sense. Indeed, I'm not sure it can even be applied to fashion technology like "Yo" since the elements of success are entirely self-referential, as with all fashionable things. Or do you think "Yo" was really just waiting for TCP/IP and Objective C and the iPhone etc. before it could be "realized"?
I agree with your sentiment here but "theft of value" is just a restatement of the same concept as "copying is theft".
A little bit of an overclock, use SD as boot only with a fast USB stick and things work real snappy.
But Femtolisp isn't Scheme, it's a non-standard Scheme with its own custom built-ins. It's quite impossible to run a Femtolisp program using a Scheme interpreter without modification.

Formal grammars are enormously useful, I almost always refer to them at some point when learning a language. It's an important part of being in an ecosystem larger than oneself. I'd question how a language without a well defined grammar has well defined semantics as the OP claims.

How many languages have you learned the syntax of by reading the source code of its parser? How about when the parser is implemented on a language you've never used?
I was surprised at how inefficient some of the drivers' behavior was. I thought after dropping off a fare they would all immediately head to an area they knew of that might have a high likelihood of generating fares. Instead many of them seem to just wander around aimlessly looking for the next fare.

edit: spelling / grammar
I get your point, but I do have to point out that the title is misleading in that it mentions that "the internet crushed Clinton's book" but does not quite mention "how".
The copyright notice is on every single page of the linked PDF, and every page at krazydad.com has a copyright notice at the bottom. What trouble are you having, exactly?

Additionally, you don't have to provide a copyright notice or any licensing terms for your copyright to be valid an enforceable (with some very special exceptions blah blah).
I program for a living, but I've not taken any programming tests since I was in school. How do people know that I'm doing a good job without my taking a standardized test?

The answer is one we've had for a long time - talk with the teachers. Teachers are professionals, paid to educated children and evaluate what needs to be improved. We developed normal schools to train people how to be teachers. These became known as teachers' colleges, and then became education programs in a university.

In addition to continuing education programs and peer development, we also have oversight programs in place, including the department head, principal, and local school board. Among other things, these are supposed to help identify teaching problems and remedy them.

Unfortunately, management is both support and punishment, which can lead to power imbalance where a school board member says "My nephew must be on the football team or else you won't get a raise next year!" One way to limit this power imbalance is to set up a teacher union or tenure system. Another is for additional community oversight, which may include the parent-teacher organizations like the PTA.

Therefore, your question sounds like you trust the authors of standardized tests (who are often in for-profit companies that sell the tests, sell standards, and sell text books which match the standards) more than you trust teachers or the professional education system.

Why is that, do you think?
Watch out, you'll gain a ton of weight on a diet like that! :)

The problem with the diet thing is that everyone is different. If you have found something that works for you, that's great!
Pretty cool results. I wish I could use linux as my main OS but OSX is everything linux is and more. UI and UX is better also so I'll take the trade off any day.
Instead of that, the author could just talk about why interlacing was used in video in the past. No need to bring any DRM context in the discussion. The tone of the article is what's offending, not the technical details.
Agreed that every maker gets it wrong, but not for the stated reasons.

The main way they get it wrong is that snoozing/stopping requires cognitive and physical capabilities unavailable when the alarm sounds.

I use an alarm only for special occasions, days when I need, MUST get up earlier than usual. I'm fortunate to have some schedule flexibility, so I mostly get up due to some combination of increased light levels, lighter sleep, and the dog whining because she needs access to the yard.

No alarm on those days. I wake relatively capable. I can operate a door, a Keurig, not spill my water when I pick it up with one hand while reaching for my housecoat with the other, etc.

When I set an alarm I have an early morning meeting or flight. In all likelihood I will be awoken from a deeper sleep than I would wake from normally, and I will be both cognitively and physically impaired. Much of the time, my wife will have no need to wake, and when the alarm sounds I will want to suppress it quickly.

All modern phones fail at this, suck so outrageously it is almost criminally ludicrously funny.

It's way too early. My fingers feel three sizes bigger than they really are. I cannot focus reliably, I am stabbing at the screen, and if I jiggle the damned phone, its orientation changes and now the vertical slide is horizontal or vice versa or whateveritdoesn'tfuckingmatterSHUTUPNOW!

At least with an old fashioned alarm clock there is a big physical switch that can be stabbed stupidly and clumsily to immediate effect.

Said switch either turns off the alarm or buys me enough time to regain some semblance of a double digit IQ and recall how to suppress it completely.

I want a cannot-miss BRS on the phone. That would work for me. Either it would turn off the alarm or the snooze would revive it when I am in the kitchen dealing with the dog and the Keurig and the cat and so far from my sleeping spouse that the snooze would be harmless.

(Big Red Switch, in case you were wondering.)
It's not a new problem, but the history of telecoms show exactly why it's a bad solution. Do you really want to go back to the days of AT&T controlling everything?

Do you want a local PUC deciding how fast your internet should and how much it should cost? Do you want them deciding that 5 dollars more a month isn't worth tripling the speed?

It works for power and water because the infrastructure doesn't turn over very fast.

If you had your way in the late 1900's we'd all be on ASDL right now.
there's no ISP I've ever used that allows unfettered upstream access to port 80 from my home, for example.

Back in the day, I used to subscribe to Sprint's wireless cable equivalent. It had a range of 30 miles from the base station, and provided cable-equivalent speeds (for the day; the upstream was very slow by today's standards). Notably, they also provided a static IP address and unfettered access to ports 25 and 80, so I ran my own personal web and mail servers.

As you realize in your last two lines, if we had more competition, ISPs might still block ports by default for consumer safety, but provide a no-cost, no-hassle option to unblock them.
Probably because carping about word choice diverts the conversation, with no benefit in this case because the meaning was clear. Please stop.
> Pirates did the big labels a favor: small, independent artists can't make a living anymore because everyone just expects it to now be free.

This is a point I hear often, but there seems to be no consensus. If I understand you correctly, are you saying that small, independent artists used to make a living just from CD sales?

I've only met in person poor musicians, those that make money either from street concerts or the occasional gig, which were consistent with Courtney Love's position[1] that CD sales are not really important when it comes to revenue. But I'd love to hear an argument from the other side.

[1] http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
I sort of want to see this extension exist, just for the caption....
That's also how it works in France.
Perhaps they're disabled.
I've been led to believe (by conversations here on HN as well as elsewhere) that DSL in the US is operating under that regime -- the phone companies are required to lease them out, so you can have 5 different providers all selling you DSL over the same wires. But DSL bandwidths strongly lag behind cable modem bandwidths because the people laying the wire have no desire to upgrade for the benefit of their competitors.

How much truth is there to this?
Company says it's created the world's blackest black with carbon nanotubes
Anyone else try it?

I was curious and tried his live demo URL. and I used OS X's built in screen capture while using Chrome. The screen capture worked, no special tricks needed. I didn't see any visual degradation between my screen shot and the original.

The long and short of it is his DRM did not work.
Grasshopper is a testing platform.
> Even if you pick an open source friendly SoC vendor like TI, there are currently no GPU designers for these SoCs that have open source drivers. It is unlikely improvemants can be made in that area that anytime soon.

Intel looks pretty good, current gen tablet SOC and followons have i915 lineage GPUs. Bay/Cherry Trail.

AMD too, current tablet SOCs and upcoming ARM models.

There are also reverse engineering efforts at various stages for Mali, Adreno, Tegra. Tegra even has some fledgling vendor support.
I check rapidly the free sample and I found the use of Laravel framework to be irrelevant. All examples could have been done with simple Html and others front-end libraries. It will confuse novice people. Should have just focused on front end.
Google Code Project Hosting is no longer allowing file downloads, and it doesn't look like the service is still being actively developed.

Which is surprising, considering the integration opportunities around other services like https://cloud-playground.appspot.com/playground/
Grasshopper can hover for a while because, at least at that stage in its flight, it is heavier than the returning F9 core. As it burns more and more fuel it becomes lighter and lighter, and I believe that towards the end of Grasshopper flights it is too light to hover.

The landing that Grasshopper has been doing recently, and which the F9 core will do, has been termed a "hover-slam" by SpaceX. Basically it decelerates rapidly, hitting 0m/s right when it also hits the ground. If it did not cut out the engine right at that point, it would begin going back up (until the fuel ran out).
Yes, that's it. Maybe I'm just behind the times but I'd never heard of IFTTT before and it looked intriguing.
The first problem with your submission is that you submitted an incorrect URL that doesn't point to that page.

If a story has had significant attention on HN in the last year or so, we kill reposts as dupes. When posting, you should first check HN Search: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=timeline+of+the+far+future#!/story.... As you can see, it appeared in the last year. I think 23 points counts as significant, especially since there was a huge thread the year before.

Coincidentally, we updated the HN FAQ last night to answer this question.

Finally, please re-read the HN guidelines. Questions like this aren't supposed to be posted to HN itself. You should email hn@ycombinator.com.
The electricity and water systems, while definitely needing upkeep, don't need to prepare for a doubling of usage every few years.

Edit Plus, the electric company definitely does some kind of demand shaping: shutting off AC compressors on a rolling, as-needed basis. In water emergencies the water company will declare which days I can water the lawn or wash my car. "Utility" isn't synonymous with "totally dumb pipe."
You may feel it was a "great product" but apparently people were not willing to pay for your great product. Several companies and people get paid giving away their software.

I suspect that your DRM was so overly burdensome that it turned away any potential customers, you in effect screwed yourself.

If the DRM does not get in may way, or require me to do anything(i.e it is invisible to me) then I might buy that software, for example Steam Games, Spotify, etc have DRM that is invisible to the End User. I will grin and bear this level of DRM, begrudgingly. However if you go much beyond this no thank you.

If your software has Activation Keys, Installation Limits, Locks itself to my Motherboard that I change ever 6mos, or other crap like that then you would never get a single dollar from me.
Water consumption in Munich during the world cup final (german)
So, disclaimer. Journalist turned web developer here. But I really don't think newspapers are going to go extinct, really ever. They are one of the only permanent records of history. Digital publications disappear like yesterday's rainclouds. There will always -- always -- be demand for physical products, because as humans we are very tactile. I think one of the root problems is in the quality of the journalism. Experienced journalists aren't staying in the game because there's no money in it. The ones who do stay in it are one of three things: crazy, passionate about the job despite the compensation, or not dependent on the income. There's a very limited group that can make it.

Add in the fact that there's an extraordinary amount of pressure on journalists to produce unrealistic product goals and you've got a recipe for a mass exodus, paving the way for a decline in the industry.

Next, consider that you've really never paid for news. You've always paid for the advertisements in the newspaper. That's the business model journalism is built on. So people don't want to pay for something they've historically not paid for.

So what you're seeing now are a bunch of experiments in journalism business models. After a while, you'll find several that really work. In fact, I think there are several that show promise now. The only problem is you need someone with the financial ability, vision and appreciation for the work to back the industry, and I think Bezos has those things.

The bottom line is that there is always going to be a demand for newspapers and news in general. In fact, people have been predicting the demise of the newspaper since TV was invented. But the bottom line is that newspapers just fill too many roles for them to ever become obsolete. Also, I need lining for my bird cage, so I'm gonna go grab a paper now.
If I had to pick out common criticisms, Openreach can take their time if you have to deal with them directly (getting a line installed in a new office or apartment can take a few weeks), and there seems to be very limited innovation in the last mile - even in London it's hard to get more than 20mbps, and many people in rural areas are stuck with a crappy DSL line at 2mbps or so.

That's exactly what I'd expect. Make infrastructure a low margin utility and a true monopoly and you'll get utility-grade results.

If everyone here (as I do) hopes they'll have gigabit speeds to their homes in a few years, you have to plausibly explain how those upgrades happen in a utility infrastructure regulatory world.
Aren't you just the argumentative one?
Or maybe just, you know, don't click them?
It's not a great article, but the author had access to Chris Lattner, who is a legit bad-ass that I enjoy reading about.
Doomed to Repeat It: Learning from the things we make over and over
Honestly, I have no idea if you're doing a good job. At least (as far as I know) you're not asking for federal funding for your job.

Well, I don't have to trust the authors since I can see and evaluate the test for myself. I can't really evaluate every teacher and analyze the pressures on them.
I'm not sure I understand the issue here: If you have an at-least-once queue, it might still be reasonable for the application to directly write to a transaction log somewhere that can be reconciled for auditing, but that audit should always pass (even under fault conditions): there is either a design flaw in the system or malicious insider tampering if the queue does not deliver the message. Is it necessary to audit for that sort of thing on a sub-day level?

It doesn't seem like an appropriate place to put a wait-and-retry loop -- it absolutely breaks the entire point of queueing if the sender does not consider the task completed and flush all of its state once the message has been successfully enqueued.
Can Silicon Valley make Wall St. safer?
> and there seems to be very limited innovation in the last mile - even in London it's hard to get more than 20mbps, and many people in rural areas are stuck with a crappy DSL line at 2mbps or so.

This is the entirety of the problem with the DSL-style line sharing. If the companies operating the infrastructure get paid on a per-customer basis, they have no incentive to make the service better by improving service for individual customers. The incentive is to provide service to as many customers as possible regardless of the quality / speed of that service.

If you want DSL-style line sharing to work in the US, the line owners will need to charge the ISPs on a per-gigabyte basis. This pretty much requires the ISPs to charge on a metered basis as well. This would be an overwhelmingly bad thing for companies doing business over the Internet.

I've been banging this drum for a while: companies will act in their own best interest, so you have to align the economic incentives with the desired behavior. If you try to regulate to enforce the behavior you want without the proper incentives, the investment dollars will just move somewhere else because it becomes too hard to make a profit.
The taxi data just has startpoint and endpoint correct?

So the route in between each trip is just a guess?

Edit: Whoops, from the about page:

> The raw data include only start and end locations for each trip. These points were run through Google's Directions API to create the routes shown in this visualization. Of course, these are Google's best choice, not necessarily the one the taxi took.
Not just that- he attributed his Nobel to that research!

http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/FeynmansWobblingPlate/
This is a complicated issue, of course, but here are a few basics to guide the conversation:

1. When passing out tax dollars, the tax payers want the recipients to be accountable. That's true even if the accountability is misguided, partial, biased, creates some bad incentives, etc. Saying "we want tax dollars to educate children, but we don't want any responsibility to show you results" is just not a sustainable situation.

2. The more remote the taxpayers are, the more they will rely on cold, objective numbers to satisfy the accountability. A local community knows more about how its students are doing and whether the school is accomplishing its goals and will rely less on the numbers. Federal dollars being sent thousands of miles away will come along with standardized tests, because the taxpayers have no other way to judge whether their money is accomplishing anything.

3. Some subjects are more easily tested objectively than others, e.g. arithmetic tests are more accurate than creative writing tests.

4. People tend to optimize more for things that can be objectively measured, e.g. money over happiness; or math over painting; or horsepower over interior comforts.

5. Tests are most effective when they don't directly influence the test-takers. For instance, a street survey about who can name the 9 justices on the Supreme Court might tell us quite a bit about the knowledge of average citizens about government. But if we keep asking the same question again and again all over the place, people will learn the answer to that single question, making the results look better. But the citizen's knowledge about government hasn't really changed much.
I now get about 30down/20 up at my house with LTE from ATT and pay for and get 15/5 with ATT U-Verse. 6 months ago we paid maybe $160 per month for two phones and 2 GB per month download. Now it's $160 per month for 4 phones and 10GB. So it seems to me that, when I factor in the cost savings of $50 per month of shutting down cable internet, won't I be happy to soon spend $200 to $250 per month with ATT LTE to get 30/20 and say 100GB per month?
> is it even possible to copyright something like this

No, I don't believe so:

"The U.S. Copyright Office has taken the position that "in order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable."
"This means that when you host a website you will have to append a port to the end"

No thanks.
Are you deleting messages after you receive them? I haven't run into any race conditions but I suppose if I did, I'd use redis's HyperLogLog or something similar to see if I've already processed the message.
Obscurity is a far more common problem than plagiarism. The best solution for this is to put a signature in the image. Most people aren't trying to steal an image without attribution, they just want to share something they liked.
> manually selecting which outputs to post

That is not the law. The actual work must demonstrate creativity, and a mechanically generated works of this sort do not.

"The U.S. Copyright Office has taken the position that "in order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable."
Grasshopper and F9R-1 (their newer test vehicle) are widely believed to fly with extra mass as ballast in order to make them easier to control -- most likely just as extra fuel in the tanks which they don't plan to burn on that flight.
The route information between trips is just a guess. So he could have really just stopped for dinner or something.
“Hacker News” punched on a DEC-029 cardpunch
DSL in the US used to operate that way until it failed spectacularly due to the reasons you mention and the FCC reclassified DSL as an information service.
What are you policies around running Tor nodes?
Card punch emulator
Probably includes drivers with optimizations for Intel Haswell chipsets...
Could you please elaborate what's offending you? (author here) for me it was just a fun experiment I didn't intend to offend anyone
Only has data for begin/end points of the trips. They're just using google directions to move between the sampled data points - they don't have minute by minute gps location of the cab.
Maybe he works for Quartz or Vox!
Didn't 1996 telecom deregulation mandate sharing of last mile copper, creating short-lived (~5 years) DSL CLECs funded by about $20B of public IPOs? Various tactics were employed by incumbent telcos to slow down the CLECs, while nominally complying with the requirement to share the last mile.
If amazon loses my confidence I think I'd start shopping at Walmart before I switch infrastructure platforms... I see AWS as a century old business, just in the same way PG&E and utility companies of the 20th century have developed a stronghold in energy distribution.

But if I had to host one myself, http://nsq.io/ is the way to go.