skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You recharge your phone's battery. :)

Best WiFi today will consume about ~2mA when in standby. They are using ElectricImp which is a little worse.

People often look at "sleep" current of a WiFi module and think "oh boy I can run this for 2 years at like 100 micro amps". That is true if the WiFi module is turned off; useful if you are waking up, taking a reading, pushing data to the cloud, and then going back to sleep. But for a door you need to be listening on the network for an incoming packet all the time. How else would you know that the user wants you to open the door right now?

Alkaline AA batteries AT BEST have ~2600mAh of capacity. They run at 1.5V. You have 2600 x 1.5v = 3900 mWh of energy in each.

A Wifi module consuming ~3mA and 3.3V runs through that power at around 3900 / (3.3 * 3) = ~394 hours or about 16 days. 4 AA batteries and you'll get about 64 days or little over 2 months of usage.

Of course you'll get FAR LESS because:

A) You have to convert battery voltage to 3.3V and you'll get about 85% efficiency for a high current (300mA peak) needed for a WiFi device

B) You burn more energy when you actually send packets

C) You need quite a bit of power from those 4 AAs to actually turn the lock so you can't do the math assuming all your power is available for WiFi.
I'd love to read a blog post about your experience writing that, and to see the code!
San Francisco had real time information about a large percentage of it's parking spots and it was available as an API. Apparently, though, this is no longer the case:

http://sfpark.org/how-it-works/open-data-page/

"As of December 30, 2013, the parking sensors in the street will be turned off and their data feed will no longer be available as parking sensor batteries have reached the end of their useful lives. This means that the real-time information on parking space occupancy will not be available for mobile apps and similar uses. The SFpark data feed and app will continue to show meter parking rates, as well as real-time space availability and rates at parking garages."
Human memory-stimulation devices get $37.5m research boost from DARPA
I'm pretty sure it would end up being slower, if only for the overhead. But don't take my word for it, go ahead and run it.

I know it's not too hard to write gates for testing with QCViewer [https://github.com/aparent/QCViewer], (Linux only for the moment, I'm just going to be improving and possibly porting it to OSX)
> How should hardware projects source such a company? Is there a directory?

That is a very good question. I am in interested in that too.
Ugh. The venue is going to packed, we really don't need anyone else advertising this :\
Difference is you're charging your iPhone every day. WiFi is power hungry, but the iPhone 5 has ~1,500 mAh of power, and WiFi takes a continuous ~50 mAh. That gives you around 30 hours of constant wifi usage on an iPhone. Now that's not counting everything else happening on the iPhone, which is quite a lot, but this is back of the envelope math and I'm hoping I can reveal the order of magnitude involved.

On the Lockitron, it depends how long it takes to wake up and ping while maintaining a low latency. In this case it's probably something along the lines of: wake up for 25ms every 1s and check if somebody's unlocking. This saves you 95% of power usage (950ms/1s aren't spent powering wifi) with a max of 1s latency. But I'm not sure if 25ms is enough to ask for new messages over wifi. This still gives you 2.5 mA averaged, which will drain that iPhone battery in 600 hours, which is only 25 days.

And I bet this sports a smaller battery than 1,500 mAh.
There are product dev companies everywhere but I doubt any would go on record to vet anything. A good lawyer could hold them legally responsible. There are so many, many caveats that they wouldn't want to be legally held accountable for anything, and rightly so.

It is incumbent on Lockitron to seek their advice and review for their own sanity and meeting their legal obligations to their backers.
There are many things that deserve to be public goods -- schools, libraries, parks, restaurant health inspections, and so on.

But on-street parking in crowded urban areas with good public transportation? Absolutely not. Why should I take the subway or bus, yet have my tax dollars subsidize a select few who want to park on the street for free, or park for less than a market-clearing rate?

This app is great because it highlights how much money the city, and therefore taxpayers, are losing. I agree the app should be shut down, but only because the city should build its own so it can take the money directly.
The title of the article says "Human memory-saving devices", but none of the devices actually store any memories. They're currently just being designed to help people form and retrieve new memories by stimulating certain parts of the brain.
Your phone has a couple thousand milliAmp-Hours and expects to be recharged every 12-48 hours.

A door lock might be able to store twice that... but it needs to last a year according to spec. The power budgets aren't comparable.
> This also meant protracted lead times as well as the potential for vendor lock-in for our most specialized parts.

Those are your parts; the designs are owned by you. You are always free to ask around for other manfs to make them.

> Even what seemed to be commodity components like switches, screws and motors would be made to spec.

This makes the product sound terrible. I really doubt they need to make screws or switches.
Wifi and the square of the radius
That's very true. They don't even hate non-White people. They just don't know enough of them.

I'm non-White and was in Montana for a while. At first interaction it was obvious some people didn't even like talking to me but when I was breaking the ice and forcing some conversation they were very good people. Even interested in learning about my background.
Libraries are a form of insurance against the societal costs of illiteracy, which is related to crime.

http://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/if-you-wa...

---

Though the library may appear to be free, the truth is quite different; it is not that the library borrower is getting things for free, it is that they have already paid. Libraries are the result of a community pooling resources (often gathered through taxes) for the funding and purchasing of materials that are then made available to all members of that community.

... Just as a community invests in infrastructure like roads, bridges and water management systems – a community invests in a library. Libraries, if you will, represent educational and intellectual infrastructure. A recognition that just as a road makes it easier to reach your destination, so too does access to information enable one to complete a journey of another sort.

... what occurs in a library is the development and maintenance through the economy of a genuine structure for sharing. Numerous people contribute a little and from this are able to get a lot, but the value they extract from their investment is not in the form of a sack of money with a dollar sign on it, but a larger social value. It is a value that would be diminished by turning it simply into a profit-generating scheme.

---
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8028773
I don't think that's accurate. Mature product development companies regularly turn out products of this complexity, or much higher, in 12 months or less.
http://www.californiaconsultants.org/Home.cfm is a good place to find reputable EE consultants in the area.

The "pitfalls" Lockitron encountered were so obvious, from the get go than a decent EE reviewing things would have been able to warn them. The similar thing holds true for ME.*

* ME = Mechanical Engineer.
Fortunately scout labour is free :)
What are these obvious reasons?
"you're removing fertilizer that would otherwise help the growth of current/new trees"

There is astonishingly little fertilizer potential of fallen wood (and the little there is remains in the ash). In parks it is controlled primarily because it acts as an ecosystem for levels of the pyramid, so overharvesting in dense areas is a problem.

"The vast majority? I doubt either of us is going to do a study on this particular stove"

Good thing we don't have to.

https://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/390169

"carbon monoxide and particulate matter emissions reductions of 91% and 94%, respectively, while lowering fuel usage by 42%"

I'm doing my best not to be confrontational, but your only "fact" is the misapplied notion that trees can only release carbon that they've previously absorbed.

Well, it's good that you're not being confrontational, especially when you are speaking such utter nonsense, with a complete lack of any facts whatsoever. We are talking about a stove picking up scrap wood, which is, by every scientific definition on this great Earth, carbon neutral.
You say "obviously corrupt" like it's a bad thing. I say they're helping circumvent terrible laws that are actively harming people.
Just wanted to agree, kudos to better tooling support being an important enabler of AOP (beyond research prototypes, that is). It is not separation of, but cross cutting concerns what is highlighted, i18n, logging, error handling, target platform, etc., all with potential variations. While these commonalities are usually dealt with by throwing them to a library, the interactions of the alternative layers (there will be since they are going to be heavily coupled by the very definition of "cross cutting") is better dealt with, or could potentially hurt less using some version of AOP ideas (EDIT deleted FODA reference).
Yeah, I was looking at it from the wrong angle, I didn't realise that the lock itself was running on battery! That makes a lot more sense then :)
So they picked the favorite in the final and missed the third place game. The singularity is almost here.
I think this is just about in-groups and out-groups. If you're reasonably liberal-minded, you probably count the human race as a large in-group. They are favoured over animals, and then even more so over plants. A lot of people probably have groups that go family > friends > group/organisation > race > human race > pets > animals > plants.

I put 'race' in here. It's a hard to define concept, and I don't necessarily agree that it exists, but don't have time for that level of discussion right now. However, it's a useful generalization. A lot of people do have a tendency to group together according to race. For most people that's probably a lot to do with familiarity and commonality though than any strong racist feelings.

The only difference with the intentionally racist groups, is where on this spectrum they consider their out-group to lie. Put in these terms, I think it's easier to conceptualize. Personally, and I don't want to get political about this, but as a vegetarian, I feel my boundary includes animals. I don't want this to sound like a holier-than-thou argument, it's hopefully an objective judgement.

I find it difficult to conceptualize including pets in the in-group, but excluding animals we use as food. It makes no sense to me, and just feels like a hard-wired level of compassion that I have. I cannot on an emotional level process the concept of desiring killing animals. But on a logical level, I can see people that do think like that, and I respect people's choices. Now in my ideal world, people would naturally want to think like me, but I have no desire to waste my time trying to convince people otherwise.

Now, if you take a view that just humans are separate from animals and that we don't have a spectrum of care towards living things around us, then it's very difficult to conceptualize racist attitudes as rational or at all fair in any way.

I'm not entirely convinced of his argument that there are not necessarily economic factors in this. I can afford to be a vegetarian, (financially, socially, etc) and I'm not in a position of desperate need, or war or any situation where I need to reconsider my position. I do know for sure though that in times of crisis, this in-group is bound to shrink.

I think the general tendency of liberal thinking to be about sharing with society as a whole, vs more right-wing tendencies to look after your own is also just about where you fall on this spectrum of care to those around you.

If you're anxious or under stress or impoverished, or in any other situation that would make you feel under attack or that you have to protect your own, then I think you are pretty likely to tighten your in-group to a smaller circle.
Making pain relievers "a whole lot easier for abuse" is a good thing. Many people would like to obtain IV solutions, but due to monetary/legal restrictions, have trouble doing so. Instead, they must use other products and convert them into a IV solution. By removing the "anti abuse" parts, Purdue can ensure less people are harmed performing an improper injection.
I've never understood why keypad locks haven't been more widely adopted in the West - they're very common in South Korea (and probably many other Asian countries). Lockitron seems like a solution in search of a problem.
Looks like a great site and well executed. Im left with the impression though that the layout/design could do with some extra polish. Im not a designer myself so cant really make useful suggestions.
Perhaps submit your site to :-

http://www.reddit.com/r/design_critiques/

to get some feedback.
A similar but more subtle problem happened to Java’s arrays regarding aliasing and subtyping a long time ago, which could crash the JVM.

Really? I don't remember that, and i was writing Java a long time ago. I'd be interested to be reminded about this bug.
Freakeconomics analyses how dangerous it is to walk while drunk, and found it was 8 times more dangerous than driving drunk, for the same distance. cf http://freakonomics.com/2011/12/28/the-perils-of-drunk-walki...
Gambling in multiplayer games
I agree. I'd say it was overconfidence more than incompetence; coupled with a slightly unhealthy dose of overpromising/misleading on key features.
>A lower body fat is healthier up to a point. Single digit body fat level is just an unhealthy as a 30% body fat level.

[citation needed]

>Anand is at 19% and I believe it is because lack of lean mass; that´s why I recommended him some weight lifting.

My point was that this belief doesn't make sense. Some people who lift and have a lot of muscle mass are lean, but many others aren't. A billion people who don't body-build are leaner than the OP. An objective observation of people (or even countries of people) who are or aren't fat doesn't generate very convincing evidence for the theory that people are fat "because of a lack of lean mass". It's because of their diets.

On the contrary it tends to be exactly those groups most interested in weight training who are the fattest— e.g. Americans and, to a lesser extent, Anglophones in general.

http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Health/Obesit...
I had a Lockitron and I had to send it back. I rather enjoyed the idea and I truly believed they would eventually arrive at the right combination of firmware and software that would allow it to behave the way it was intended.

After owning it for nearly a year and having it only work reliably probably 20% of the time I had one galvanizing experience with it that made me arrive at the realization that it is fundamentally flawed.

It is a motorized lock connected to WiFi with a back up of a standard key lock. As it turns out, if the Lockitron runs out of battery mid way through actuating the lock it will freeze the lock in that position. No amount of manual force though just the key backup will work.

I spent several hours locked out of my apartment one night requiring emergency service from my complex management and asking a guy to wake up my neighbor so they could climb a ladder and break into my apartment via my balcony.

Cameron and the Lockitron staff I interacted with was very good and understanding at all times- but I just could not trust the Lockitron any more. Since it was a battery hog and the battery dying midst turn is a critical problem and there was no notification whatsoever of the battery condition (at the time) AND I couldn't use the manual back up, I had to return it.
What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?
2014 World Cup Game Predicted
Top Free iOS App Is an Anticapitalist Spoof That’s Making $50K Per Day
> When Lockitron’s crowdfunding campaign rocketed beyond all expectations, one of our close advisors from the software world asked us why we couldn’t iterate Lockitron in batches. “Ship 1,000 units, pause, and learn from what users wanted in the hardware, then build another 1,000.” With limited resources, this simply isn’t possible; each Lockitron prototype was a $3,000-5,000 investment.

I feel like I'm not understanding this passage.

Is he saying iterating in batches of 1,000 is impossible because it would add $3-5 cost to a product that they sell for $179?
The demo is neat, although the flashy, impressive part (NL->program) predates this particular piece of work. For example, Greg Little's "sloppy programming" is from 2008-ish: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/projects/keyword-commands/in...

Le and Gulwani's paper does cite Little, but the refutation is a bit weak.

> Little and Miller propose a code completion tool that synthesizes the most likely Java expression in a code context from a set of keywords [23]. Smart-Synth is different, in that it synthesizes a complete script and does not require extra contextual information.

From the video, a "complete script" appears to be 1 or 2 simple expressions. And not requiring contextual information sounds like it can't take advantage of contextual information.
Show HN: Routy – A clean, minimal subnetting calculator for Android
The maps alone [1] seems to sum up so much of my experience with prejudice over the years. I grew up in and around and still live near DC which is near/at the bottom of the scale here.

First, it wasn't until I found my way onto the Internet regularly and into online games in particular in the second half of the 90s that I witnessed hate for Jews outside of history lessons. Suddenly, mixing in real-time with a not terribly diverse crowd from all the country the very word 'Jew' was an insult and heard regularly.

Next, in the early 2000s as my career got underway I ended up working with the people who vendors would fly in from cheaper parts of the country.

At the time, the staff in our group was better than half black with middle management comprised of a black man, hispanic man and an orthodox Jew. We had several people come who were particularly about who they were willing to take direction from and at least one who was sent packing mid-project for his very strong opinions on ethnicity.

Finally, as we move through tourist season in DC I've already had my summer dose of tourists talking about how 'wasting money educating negros is killing the country' and Obama's birth certificate.

I guess I should be very glad to have been born into such a melting pot.

1: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/13/sunday-review/...
"Um, you do realize that this has also been ILLEGAL forever, right?"

Um, no it isn't.

"You, as an individual, are supposed to pay sales tax on your purchases."

You, as an individual, are an entirely different entity from Amazon, which is a company located in another state.

"Would you much rather that we start convicting people for not paying sales tax?"

Sure I would. Why are you advocating that the burden be put on the entity that isn't breaking the law rather than the one that is? Why are you advocating that states be able to place the burden of enforcing their local laws on an entity located in another state?

"Amazon enabling millions of people to dodge their sales tax isn't disruption"

Amazon isn't the first company to sell stuff by mail order, dude. The Sears Catalog first came out in the 19th century.

And yes, high-tax states whined about it back then, too.
September? Seriously? Who planned your launch?
Region locking fun. The worst part being they say in the eula that you can not use VPN services with the Origin shop. So the choices is between either play guess the interface with real money or having them be able to say we blocked your account you no longer have access to your games.
I think that's what he is saying but I disagree with his numbers. For 10 units machining plastic costs a lot of money. But you wouldn't do that for 1000 prototypes. You would use something like vacuum casting to make the housings and the gears are made from blanks and machined. It might cost you at WORST ~$300 (likely a lot less) for the 1,000 units.
> when you do get through to some Danny DeVito at the other end

What does this mean?
Actually doing the arithmetic and demonstrating that an alcohol stove plus a standard-sized container of fuel weighs more and doesn't give you the USB charging capability gets me a -1?

Nice.

We won't even go into the fact that some people go backpacking in places where fuel has to be flown in (which, coincidentally, also tend to be the places where having a GPS or satellite phone can save your life).
Can I have a million bucks?
IMO, the Stromfront-type writings consist of about 30% legitimate grievance and perhaps 70% crackpottery, all portrayed in a grossly simplified and vulgar way. Part of the fuel for the crackpottery, is that the media/NYTimes in general ignore or downplay the legitimate grievances. Once you stop believing the NYTimes, well, what do you believe? You can believe anything a random site on the internet says. So one obvious answer, which you left out, is to actually address the legitimate grievances.

The other obvious answer is censorship. Why don't we have a Stormfront TV channel? Because such a channel could never get a cable license, and if it did, it would get sued out of existence. Surely some lawsuit can be conjured up to shut down Stormfront, and make it impossible for other web hosts to host such sites?

So either address the grievances and make peace or crush them underfoot and leave no doubt - those are always the two traditional ways to deal with hateful dissenters.
Gas is certainly more efficient. And every time local fire departments get called out for CO alarms or gas smells, I'm reminded why I had the gas line on the house I bought disconnected anyway.
I documented punching an old lady in the head, so it's ok.

No, it's not ok. Origin is a piece of software used internationally. Many countries have explicitly ruled that the EULA is not an out of legal requirements of those countries, which are more protective than the legal requirements in the US.

You can't just go and do something illegal and claim it's ok because one country has interpreted that the EULA lets them do that due to that same country's laws being heavily biased towards the corporation. That's what the GP was saying.
I didn't think it until you said it, but now I totally agree :)
Glafe.

For full disclosure, I own glafe.com and will sell it to you.

(Although the above is true, I mean to say the sentence above with a touch of sarcasm and a hint of cynicism). Not entirely serious.