skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nope, the new fiber will be high dispersion compared to the old fiber and also will not have dispersion compensation along its length. The old cable was designed for OOK signaling. Previously optical signaling was 1 bit per symbol OOK (on-off-keying) and direct detection meaning you did not have any optical phase information to make dispersion corrections so the dispersion compensation was done in a specially designed fiber with the opposite sign slope for dispersion (DCF).

This fiber was also relatively high loss and has a narrower core which leads to higher nonlinearities in the link. The old cable tries to keep the dispersion within the range that OOK technologies can operate error-free (post FEC) so there's a lot of it typical at each repeater (EDFA). The newer coherent optical technology can transmit multiple bits per symbol (BPSK, QPSK) by encoding the bits in the optical phase. Since the phase is recovered at the receiver the dispersion accumulated in the fiber can be undone in DSP with a long enough FIR filter. So the need for dispersion compensation is gone with coherent optical. Taking out the DCF also reduces loss along the link reducing EDFA (amplifier) count and increasing spacing. Also nonlinear penalties on the newer higher dispersion fiber are lower which improves something called cycle slips that can punch through the FEC and cause you to take post-FEC errors.

The net result is that you should be able to transmit QPSK at 32GBd in 2 polarizations in maybe 80 waves in each direction.

2bits x 2 polarizations x 32G ~128Gb/s per wave or nearly 11Tb/s for 1 fiber. If this cable has 6 strands, then it could easily meet the target transmission capacity.
I can't work out if this is waterproof as standard or with the waterproof casing accessory. Any ideas? Is it perhaps just splash proof without the casing?

Also I wonder if it floats in water... would be great for chucking around the pool.
Finally someone else is stepping into the GoPro market. Good to see competition here. I know the feature sets aren't identical but sometimes worse is better.
You're not thinking strategically-slash-cynically enough.

This guy did the "show up and try" thing, which he then parlayed into the title of Official White House Tech Fixer. That's the sort of résumé-enhancing title that will bring you literally as much money as you want for the rest of your natural life.

What can you do with it? Do your stint in government, then hang out your shingle as a private consultant. That very day, Fortune 500s will start pointing firehoses spewing money at you in exchange for "consultations" where you parachute in to tell them all their problems are due to their IT staff being idiots. Your White House title will give you unimpeachable (heh) credibility in their eyes. This credibility will last for decades, long after your specific tech knowledge has become obsolete, and will draw you business regardless of political affiliation. (CEOs don't follow politics, all they know is that you're Trusted By Big Shots.) You will also be invited to places like Davos and TED to wax rhapsodic on the Importance of Technology, further prolonging your marketability. It's a meal ticket for life.

It's possible that Mr. Dickerson was financially secure enough already that he didn't need the future payout this title will bring. If anything, that just argues more that such an opportunity would be better for someone who hasn't already made their pile, because for that person, such an opportunity is how a pile is made. Trading a little present-day income for a huge payout down the line is a career approach that should be familiar to those who work in and around VC-backed startups.

Of course, the problem with this strategy is that it only really works best for the first person to pull it off. Everyone after that gets less luster from their association; there will be many Tech Fixers who will come out of programs like the USDS, but none as prominent as the original Fixer. It's a risk/reward thing -- it was not obvious when Mr. Dickerson tried it that "showing up and trying" could lead to glory; so when he tried it, and it worked, he didn't have to share the glory with an army of others. Now it is obvious, so lots of people will pile on to try doing it themselves, and they'll divide the prestige between them. So it goes.
It's nice to have concepts like "don't take the piss and it's okay" but I'm not sure how well that scales when you have more than say 20 people. (I'm sure it can!) The elements of contagion are interesting. For example: Ann works hard, and starts her teabreak 5 minutes late. Reasonably, she takes an extra 5 minutes at the end of her teabreak. Bob sees her, and joins her, getting an extra 5 minutes. If this happens more than once or twice you risk complete breakdown in teabreaks, yet telling Ann to take her breaks on time means you're an asshole. (Before you mention the ridiculousness of teabreaks they're needed in some industries. You can't drink or eat at electronic manufacturing workstations.)

A local aeronautics company (Smiths Industries) has a start time for some worker of 8:43 am.

This is rigorously enforced not just by management but by your fellow workers on the shop floor.

It is baffling how such work-cultures develop. The few times I visited I didn't see much work getting done. I saw lots of people who didn't appear to be doing anything when I saw them. (There are plenty of reasons why, not just worker laziness - maybe the firm had just finished a large contract and a bunch of staff were about to be laid off, for example).

I worked in a small sub-contract electronic engineering factory for a few (maybe ten?) years, several years ago. The worst bosses have left that company and it's a long time ago so I'm always happy to talk about it. Especially our move from paper-based stock system to sage line 100; and our ISO900x joys.
This is a potentially world-changing development. If their figures are correct, and we handicap this technology to only see a 10% improvement vs. Haber-Bosch, that's still a savings of over 300 million megawatt hours annually with the added benefit of cheaper food worldwide since nitrogen is one of the largest costs in agriculture.

I highly recommend the book, "The Alchemy of Air" about the creation of the Haber-Bosch process.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Alchemy-Air-Scientific-Discovery/d...

The subtitle doesn't do the book justice, but fixing nitrogen might be the most important discovery in the history of humanity and Hager's book does a tremendous job in telling the story.
Not a bad offering from an undead company. The lack of remote shutter and connectivity severely limit the applications.

With a remote shutter I'd be in for one just for retro-ness of using a Polaroid.
If you are using Excel, you might find my blog entry useful: http://kiyototamura.tumblr.com/post/91613880102/generating-a...
"I do appreciate knowing that this ingredient is in Colgate Total. That tube is getting thrown out!"

You go ahead and do that. Meanwhile, the rest of us will just use the damn toothpaste, because we're not perturbed by the 0.0002238% chance of acquiring cancer when we're in our old age. Or the chance of 0.0000205403% increased risk of hormone imbalance, or whatever the hell hippies complain about these days.

*Note, numbers made up. Not even these scare-mongers know the numbers because they're too busy throwing tubes out. The chances are practically insignificant that they might as well be made up.
Nope this will be 100G per wave not 40G. 40G was a stop-gap technology that never really shipped in large volume. With the advent of coherent optical, everyone just went to 100G (eg. Infinera, Ciena, Alcatel-Lucent)

EDIT: One caveat, depending on a particular link many of these systems will run at half-rate. A lot of legacy cables today are running BPSK at 50G in 2 waves (25G/wave) due to nonlinearities.
Hacker used Canadian Internet provider to steal $83K Bitcoins
IBM's Z-series CPUs are pretty ridiculously enormous in this regard. The z196 is 512mm^2[0] (compare with about 260mm^2 for a top-of-the-line Intel Xeon), and is able to run at 5.2GHz on a 45nm process. Because IBM can basically charge anything they want for these monsters[1]; their yield of working chips per wafer can be pretty terrible and they'll still make money.

Intel, on the other hand, needs to be able to sell as many chips as possible per wafer, because they have vastly lower margins. This is also why they do stuff like fusing off dead cores and cache to produce working lower-end parts from dice that aren't 100% functional out of the factory.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_z196_%28microprocessor%29

[1] Locked-in customer base, service costs dwarf hardware costs, etc.
Weird Al Is More Popular Than Ever
Yeah, so do some of the bars of soap in the dollar store, but that doesn't make them "luxury" in the dictionary sense of the word.
I love ultra low power CPUs that still are able to drive a modern minimal Linux system, based mostly on CLI applications. I thought my Intel NUC was already great, but this might take it to the next level with a completely fanless design, yet cooler and very capable.
Nieghbors have caused so many problems that people don't want them. Google "HOA hell" for more info.
"You don't have to give up your life to the government—it's possible to help in short-term rotations—but this is the best shot we have in a long time to change the way our government works."

Can you connect the dots for me as far as why, if the government needs help, they can't pay market price for the help? Or is the drawback to working for the government something other than that?
The algorithms are different. OP's Fisher-Yates is correct, the only mistake is the last superfluous iteration.
I think the point they were making is that there is no need for the government to rely on such instincts. They're very good to have, but many people have to balance that instinct to help the world with, say, a mortgage. And kids. It's very difficult to be idealistic.

Government could pay market rate for people like developers. Though there would be a higher initial cost, I would bet a lot of money that the systems they produce would save money in the end. Alas, if it's government, it's broken. And we won't see a change soon.
This is a medium-term investment of time, but my advice is to network. In my experience, personal connections are the best way to find the kind of work you want consistently. Show up to user groups, recruiting events, conferences, seminars. Work with recruiters to get started if you need to, but be sure to make connections with every client with whom you come into contact (posting on HN counts as networking too, I think).
I'd love to use a bunch of these to build a "bullet time" camera array. Can anybody think of a cheaper/easier method?
In ebook battle, Amazon is right about Orwell – and a few other things
Tandem Bikes, Cara Delevingne’s Eyebrows and Building Better Apps
Wonder how strong the magnet is. For example, would it fling off if you swung a driver it was connected to? Wondering since they show it on a putter.
Show HN: MongoApp for Mac OS X
Then we have no right to scrape that content.

Why is there an implied right to scrape?
You have defined "wrong" in an incredibly strange and useless way. 2+2=5 is "wrong" regardless what agent you are or what universe you exist in.
> don't know whether this is enough to automatically generate language bindings from it though

Yes it is and most language bindings are generated using them. This also includes "OpenGL extension loaders" which are required in C apps too.
You forgot "Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
There are simply not enough housing units available in Mountain View, etc. Local governments authorized the construction of huge office parks, but deliberately kept residential density very low. They want the economic benefits of big business while maintaining the physical characteristics of the quaint small towns that they were a century ago, or at least of the sleepy, low density semi-rural suburbs that they were 50 years ago.

Companies like Apple opened shop there precisely because at the time it was much cheaper than San Francisco. Cupertino in 1975 was something like Concord or Vallejo today.

As for the shuttles, they are a sign of the profoundly broken nature of the local public transportation infrastructure rather than anything else. If there were a properly functioning integrated regional transport infrastructure, as in, say, Berlin, they would not be necessary at all.
My favorite rule:

> 13. Default to open

> When we collaborate in the open and publish our data publicly we can improve Government together. By building services more openly and publishing open data, we simplify the public’s access to government services and information, allow the public to easily provide fixes and contributions, and enable reuse by entrepreneurs, nonprofits, other agencies, and the public.

That sounds like democracy in action to me. I'm glad the suits are coming around.
I came back from Japan last month. It's cultural.

A lot of stuff the Japanese do is from "back in the day" and there's a lot of group think that goes on there.

There's also not as much of a great sense of entrepreneurship or critical thinking going on there. Most people are like zombie's - wake up, get dressed, work until 7 or 8pm, take the subway or JR home, smoke or drink, socialize, repeat.
If the government pays its employees at market prices for tech, it'd be another sign of the bloated, inefficient federal government and, uh, socialism or something.

If they pay a big federal contractor at twice that rate, who then pockets half and pays its people market rate, then that's private sector efficiency at work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here is so 20th Century
I don't know that it is destined, it is quite fragile in some ways. I would say that it is fairly likely, though you never can tell.

It partly depends on how hot the whole Russian thing gets and on what Turkey does, as well as the US managing the very delicate business of keeping Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel simultaneously happy, so as to keep the Suez open.
V-nand is probably not a solution to scaling flash , according to memory experts :

http://thememoryguy.com/comparing-samsung-v-nand-to-micron-1...
oh sorry about that, thought it was more like show n tell :)
Soaps containing triclosan...

Toxicity is usually not contained to just one cell-type or organ. My point is that given the past toxicological evidence for this compound, this story should not come as a surprise to anyone.
Hi,

I am developing a MongoDB app for Mac OS X users. MongoApp is a GUI based tool that allows you to run MongoDB on the Mac. The app is developed using Python, TkInter and MongoDB.

If you have any idea, I'd be glad to hear.
The difference is one character: the index of the element to swap.

It's subtle.
The Flatfish prototype Firefox OS tablet is a preview device with a lot of work to be done before it's ready for primetime.

The point of Mozilla's Tablet Contribution Program (the program that provided the author with the InFocus Firefox OS tablet) is to enable our community with hardware so they can identify and tackle just these kinds of issues.
Would be very cool if it could be programmed to do timelapses with a specified interval. Also, if the recording time was like a ring buffer, it would make for a great security/dashcam.
OTOH, every day earlier that you start mining is also worth money. This favors more conservative chip design. Now that conservative 28 nm ASICs are available, they may switch focus to optimizing the design.
This is one of the most gut-wrenching condemnations of mobile/casual game development I've read, and I think anybody looking to get into that niche should stop here first:

"Yesterday 304 apps were released in the App Store. I didn’t bother counting, but about half of them look to be games. 152 fresh new dreams went on sale. How many of those will hit the top 100? Probably 0. How many of those will be profitable? Probably 0. How many will cover their costs? Probably 0. But here is the real kicker: tomorrow, 152 NEW dreams will go on sale. Today's will be old and discarded, for you only make the new lists the day you launch. Apple boasts about hitting 1 million apps. That is about the worst number a developer could hear. It means 999,999 other people are competing with me for a customer’s attention and wallet."

Author loses friends, money, and time in pursuit of a super-fickle audience, and realizes that returning to their roots as a PC gamer is the way to go.
"It's possible to hold someone guilty, and still have empathy."
Of course, that's called charity! And is probably a very integral part of the progress of our society. But, let's be honest, most people when they discuss these topics simply dismiss responsibility from the injured/suffering party and are very quick to offload it onto society.

It's kind of sad, really. Because at the end of the day, there are a lot of individuals who will always suffer no matter how much we help them (or how much money we throw at them). And then we go ahead, with our noble, but misguided consciences and tell them it's not their fault. Relieving them of the single greatest motivator for their own success, perhaps their last.
>If it isn’t selling on one platform, don’t bother with the others. Maybe you have a fundamental flaw, maybe you aren’t marketing it right.

I think this is a good observation. Porting to a dozen platforms is double the work for, say, double the customer base. If the game catches fire that's money well spent, and if it doesn't you've saved yourself a lot of money by not doing the ports. So wait to see what the reception is before you spend. If you just get a few hundred or a few thousand users, take that money and make another game.

I agree with his conclusion, too. People who play serious games want more graphics power, a keyboard (or at least a game controller), and decent sound. Mobile game users are looking for the 21st century version of solitaire, and they're not willing to pay much for it. Maybe nothing at all.
The onus is on the developer to differentiate between "making a game" and "making a game sell". Jumping platforms because you failed is throwing away all the experience and knowledge you now have for an unknown platform. Developers who can't figure this stuff out just don't get to make games for a living.

Startups face the same problem and almost exclusively fail for the same reason. And businesses in general. And authors. Musicians. Actors. Artists. Singers. The list goes on and on. You have to be good at what you do to make it your occupation.
Because it's less work to outsource? Same reason someone doesn't host their own mailserver.
>build a new low overhead close to the metal API and implement OpenGL on top of that

This is a great idea and it should happen, but a Khronos committee is not the right place to do it. The only way it could end well is if the API is first designed and implemented outside of Khronos and Khronos's only role is to standardize it with minimal changes. For example, if Khronos decides to adopt Mantle as the basis for this new API, with a few changes to make it generalize better to all vendors' hardware, then that would be a good outcome. I fear that politics may not allow something like that to happen, and that's why I think a more incremental approach is better, but perhaps I'm too pessimistic.
Yep. Give me five minutes, a pen, and some paper, and I can jot down a list of at least fifty potential confounding variables. I trust that someone, somewhere has strong and well-structured data, hinting at a causal relationship and a direction of causality. If so, I'd like to read that source.

Now, I'm not naive. I know that it would be damned near impossible to structure a longitudinal test that a) identifies all the significant variables, b) isolates the most appropriate ones, and c) controls for the least appropriate ones. But absent that sort of test, I'd like to read the tests that we have.

There may indeed be a connection between socialization and multi-factor health outcomes. Maybe even a causal link. I'm certainly willing to consider that. But let's avoid blanket arguments such as 'We've evolved to be social creatures, therefore, we need friends as much as food and water.' There are a lot of interesting ideas in this article, and the article weakens those ideas when it relies on folksy generalizations.
Even simpler than that. Healthy people are more attractive and more attractive people are more successful[1], which in turn makes them more successful socially because people like to associate with people who are more successful than themselves for various reasons[2].

[1] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox
You don't need to read anyone's mind, he's a world leader with a public history - just a bit of reading will tell you enough about him to make a pretty good guess at what's happening here.
I think the expectation of free or at most $0.99 in mobile just kills any sort of incentive to build the kind of good and rich games you get on PC and console. The false advertising of "Free to Play" games going away, while a good thing, likely won't help the situation too much.
Water Resistant to 2 meters w/o the case, water proof (depth unclear) with case.
It's funny to think that once upon a time sugar was so precious it was kept locked up in its own dedicated safe. In America these are known as "sugar chests", you can fairly commonly find them as antiques.

King Louis XVI kept his sugar in a locked container and kept the key with him. He would open it up for special guests and personally delivered small amounts of sugar to each person. Similarly, in French noble households it was common for the man of the house to control the sugar-key, and to distribute small amounts of sugar to the family as he saw fit.
Sony has been competing with their Actioncams. It's a superior product in terms of image quality (according to reviews), and that wrist screen they offer with it is very cool.
The US Digital Services Playbook
I was looking at mouser when you posted this and was getting fairly similar numbers (though not quite as low).
The price certainly does seem high.

What sort of markup would you normally expect for relatively simple electronic projects like this?
I've been told that the main devices that are used to browse the internet in Japan are mobiles (smartphones). That results in the websites being built for mobile users instead of desktops.

I'm not sure if this is true though.
I don't think Mikey's in it for the money. If he wanted, he coudl easily have parlayed his prior experiences into jobs that paid millions (he's good with stats, math, and running production services, there are lots of options for people who do that).

It was also pretty obvious the steps he was taking would lead to this position. He worked on Obama's reelection campaign and got a lot of face time with preeminent people, and felt out whether they would be open to giving him a position of some responsibility and power.

I think Mikey genuinely wants to make a difference and spent a fair amount of time rationalizing and positioning to ensure that when he did make a difference it would have the greatest impact possible and that it would happen on his terms.
Finding a problem is easy. Finding an easy problem that you can solve is hard.

For example, many folks might (or used to) think that building out a simple GUI with 3 buttons in C++ was easy (until they saw the code and didn't understand most of it compared to building an integer loop that adds 2 numbers).

IMO, go for something simple like advanced math functions. The basics almost always exist in most languages, so try out something like a rate calculator, etc.
The homeowners have votes and corporations don't. And the homeowners are either rich enough to have bought a Silicon Valley home recently, or have owned a home so long that they pay disproportionately low property taxes due to Prop. 13, and thus in either case have no incentive to let the city change from when they liked it.
Its time for PC vs. Mac Ads