skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aren't there some pretty fundamental physical limits here? This wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb claims that the luminous efficiency of a low-wattage incandescent bulb is maybe in the neighborhood of 1%. So that suggests that to get as much light as a 25 watt incandescent bulb, assuming that your plant is perfectly converting input energy to light output, you'd need to be continuously burning 0.25 watts. Can a plant possibly metabolize or store that much energy for long?
Haha, sounds like fun
Well, not in the immediate future it isn't. Demographically, speaking, it's heavy on the olds, and is scrambling madly to get itself ahead of steep labor decline.
I'm very interested in this hardware, but the price has been a deterrent for me as well. I would have ordered it already for $199. But for $449 + extra for the electrodes, etc., it's a pretty serious investment for a fairly unknown device.

My main interest in this tech is to be able to build a machine learning classifier for meditative states. Then when I have that classifier, I'd like to make a simple mobile app that lets people "record" and "measure" their meditation sessions.
>GoPro is headed in the direction of lifestyle branding. Original content, sponsored professional sports, brand collaboration, etc.

That's still just a camera company. All those are marketing/promotionals moves, no money makers or markets.

Same for Red Bull I'd say. How much Red Bull makes for selling the drink vs any other endeavour (if it not actually loses money on them).
In that case I'm looking forward to the days of he's and her's!
I actually preferred wordstar (though I was 9 at the time so my opinion is suspect) I still remember writing "Things that Might Have Killed the Dinosaurs" on an XT Clone in (oh god) '89.
>'Or is the drawback to working for the government something other than that?'

I would say yes.

Getting paid is not the big challenge in Government work.

It's the lack of urgency, political infighting and general stigma.

The rotations described here and the leadership position / division described in the article both skirt those issues.

* Urgency: Healthcare.gov had it. It was a firestorm visible from a continent away. Most Government IT failures don't work that way, they're smoldering trash fires that generate a meeting to figure out who's going to fill a bucket with a follow-up meeting to decide who's actually going to carry it.

* Infighting: As described, the Digital Service 'will be focused on providing consultation' not 'a group that we parachute in to write code'. They're coming in from a position of authority - above the level of typical jockeying.

* Stigma: None. Finish your rotation and go back to Google. Finish your stint as a head of an elite Federal service and name your title.
Would you mind sharing some examples?
i keep seeing posts like this:

"we made a quality game and it's not selling"

"the app store is a disaster"

"it's a lottery"

no -- none of that is the problem. the issue is that all of the easy, low-hanging fruit is gone and to get workable revenue out of a game, you need to make a quality game.

that's quality without the quotation marks.

and, i'm sorry, but the games in the original post are nothing compared to the likes of papers please, don't starve, or guacamelee! -- much less amazing upcoming indies like no man's sky or ori and the blind forest.

you are kidding yourselves if you think something like "catch the monkey" is going to sell. i was floored to see it actually made $7k in revenue. i would have guessed $1500.

you -- yes, you with your fresh copy of unity and an mvp-fail-fast-idea -- are not going to cut it on the app store. you need to put out a real, honest-to-god, high-quality game.

catch the monkey or a is for app? really?

your game is going to be in the app store next to ori and the blind forest. your game is going to be in the app store next to white night. the player is going to look at both of your games and spend their money on those -- not yours.

the app store is not a disaster -- your game just looks like a disaster sitting next to those titles.

and swapping to pc? have you browsed through the greenlight options? you think your game is going to make it there when you couldn't cut the quality bar on the ios store?

let me help you with that decision:
http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight?appid=765&browsesort=pe...

is your game more amazing than anything on that list? better than jotun? better than bounty hounds? probably not.

sure, there are some mediocre games that catch fire and shoot to the top. that's where the lottery is. chances are those 304 apps released on the app store are all crap and don't have a chance in hell of real traction anyway so their only option is catching hold of the lottery tail. if you want to be part of that viral-dependent circus, more power to you, i suppose.

quality games -- real quality, not monkey quality -- are getting written up in indiegamemag.com or the like. they're thirsty for real, quality games to write about because people keep submitting monkey-catching games or yet another boring, pixelated, hero's journey rpg to them. you can't expect spending 3 months of nights and weekends on a game and it'll beat out all of the awesome stuff indies are producing right now.

however, if your game is legit, you'll do just fine.

that's the key takeaway, make a real, value-for-the-player, interesting game and you'll do just fine. if you can't do that, accept it as a hobby or get a different job.
I actually wrote an article 8 months ago on how I do it (https://thatgeoguy.ca/blog/2013/12/26/encrypted-backups-in-d...). Granted, this is for personal use, and really relies on cron / rsync to work well.

Let me know if you have any questions about how I got it to work (for the most part, the biggest issue I see you encountering is encrypting drives on OSX).
Just a side note for those comparing these to GoPros's - this isn't a direct competitor to the GoPro; Polaroid already sell the XS100 which is actually a pretty decent action camera - probably best bang for your buck currently (I have one and use it regularly; it's still very much first gen, rough around the edges but excellent where it counts).

I think the cube is awesome for a fun, inexpensive little camera to stick in places quickly and just start filming without worrying too much - and at that price point you can buy a few and stick them in your car for a road trip, or hand a few out to friends when going down a slope; it's size, shape, colours and accessibility would be targeting even the non-action-sports crowd and there's a huge market of young skate boarders, soccer players etc etc.

I only wish they would market themselves a little better, and also fix up the poor software that tends to be on / accompanies their products.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that a consensus among dieticians and nutritionist has been reached: consume the right number of calories, eat less sugar and exercise regularly. The #1 nutrition-related health issue in the U.S. is obesity - a condition caused not so much by what you eat, but by how much you consume. (Bearing in mind that it's easier to overeat when consuming fatty, sugary, calorie-dense foods).

If we're talking about dietary recommendations like "eat an antioxidant-rich diet to reduce your chances of developing cancer by %15" - well, I've always considered those to be a little ridiculous. I should modify my otherwise healthy diet in order to slightly tip the odds in my favor for one specific disease? Nonsense.
This story has another lesson buried inside it, and it is one that I first learned not long ago in a video (unfortunately I can't find a link to it).

The lesson was: "The best way to get into business is to be in business". In other words, the best way to build a successful business is to get started. Do something, anything to get started. You have to do that to get into contact with people and start getting feedback to see what other problems they have.

I noticed the same lesson in this post. Initially, the author was making money from freelancing. But as clients began asking questions and providing feedback, a more profitable idea came to the surface.

Do something. Just get started.

Great post.
I'm old enough to actually have been a user of both WordPerfect and Word in the early days, so I saw the rise and fall of WordPerfect, along with the rise of Word and MS Office, through the eyes of a user.

Basically, Wordperfect was the best word processor out there during the late 80s to early 90s. Keep in mind that at the time, most people did not do their own word processing.

WordPerfect 5.2 I remember as being the very best word processor out there. However, Microsoft came out with MS Word for DOS, and I remember distinctly using Word 2.0. At the time, there were a lot of issues where sometimes when you typed on Word, you would get snow on the screen, but it was pretty fast compared to WordPerfect. The rumor was that Microsoft was using special APIs that WordPerfect (and any of their other competitors) didn't have access to that allowed them to have faster performance and smaller latency when dealing with larger documents, etc. But WordPerfect was clearly the superior program.

The key was that WordPerfect didn't adapt well to Windows. When Windows 3.1 came out the version of Word for Windows was excellent, vs the version of WordPerfect. WordPerfect was really clunky from what I remember, and as Windows took off, they never really got any traction and as more version of Windows and Word came around, the difference between Word and WordPerfect grew cavernous. By 1995, if I remember, no one even considered WordPerfect as viable compared to Word.

Then the whole Corel/WP debacle occurred which cemented the death of both of those companies.
HSTS Preload Submission
If we are talking about the royalty/nobility here... is it not possible that this has more to do with the fear of being poisoned than with the value of the commodity? I honestly don't know.
Since we're living around like-minded individuals but subjected to top-down centralized lawmaking, there is a large disconnect between what's happening in our backyard, in the state capital, and in Washington. Often the City Council office is out of touch with one part of the city or another, imposing rules on all that about half disagree with.

The federal system in America is supposed to emphasize differences in the states, and to some extent it still does. But Washington has been taking more power away from the states for the last ~100 years or so. This leads to large Washington-imposed mandates forced upon the states and upon the people, which leads to hostility.

Perhaps it's time to embrace the burbclave model from Snow Crash?
I funded this project on kickstart. Can't wait to get the seeds.
[video] The Evolution of a WebApp
I love how "only has the brand" is used negatively here. Having the "brand" is having everything. You can have a worse or more expensive product with "the brand". People will love/obsess over you from "the brand". It's hands down the most important thing to a business at GoPros size and way harder to develop on a global level than just manufacturing a small camera. But you have to understand consumers (people) to get that.
GPUs have for generations been designed with the intention of being able to disable defective compute units; that's why we have more than 3 models from each manufacturer. It's not done quite as much in the CPU space, but Intel does sell some server CPUs that have some cores disabled, and AMD has even sold 3-core CPUs that didn't quite pass QA as 4-core parts. There's also variability in the amount of cache memory that gets enabled on parts made from the same die.

For CPUs, it's not done at any granularity finer than a whole core - nobody sells CPUs that might have one of the ALUs disabled.
Maybe most people realize that games are not really that important in general. That's why its so important to get them addicted as opposed to making a great game. People will pay a lot more to feed an addiction than they will to be entertained.
Can anyone in the HN crowd shed light on the Intel 'S' suffixed chips? They're designed to a smaller thermal envelope, but I cannot find any description of how this works. Do they draw as much power as a non-suffixed chip until they start to heat up, and then limit themselves - or are they 'clocked down' for their entire range?

I've been trying to work out what spec I can power off a PicoPSU and this becomes important when the TDP is all I have to go on for power consumption figures.
I wonder how many of the people commenting on this thread have families. I grew up on a cul-de-sac where we knew everyone. Then I lived in a series of apartments through my 20s and had no neighborly contact. But we bought a house in a family friendly neighborhood to start our family, and we have fantastic neighbors. Block parties, babysitting exchanges, toddler brunches, active mailing list, etc.

Perhaps people just seek out the community when they need it.
When I'm doing Python the only real optimization you can get out of it is algorithmic optimization, anything else is just knowing the subtle tips and tricks of Python or if you really need it, dropping down into actual C code.
Does it matter? I mean, if I can buy something cheaper than I can make it myself, where's my incentive to make it?
I wish my neighbours well, but for me socialising is a distraction from work and family. Those are my contribution to the (wider) community. Besides, I have trouble enough keeping up with relatives and schoolmates without introducing new, geographically-oriented relationships.
Why Russia is a medieval state?
A UK perspective: over the past decade there has been an enormous growth in the buy-to-let market and the UK is now overun by the worst type of property owner: the buy-to-let (buy-to-rent) landlord or "property investor". They treat housing as a pure profit-making exercise. When more and more homes in your area get bought by property investors and buy-to-let landlords it can have a detrimental effect (I've seen it happen to my street). The neighbourhood feels more anonymous as people come and go more frequently. Neither the absentee landlord or the tenants have a commitment to the area. If buy-to-let comes to dominate a neighbourhood, can you ever build a community around such a neighbourhood?

Buy-to-let is rampant in the UK. Other European countries sensibly restrict it's growth or they enact strict tenancy laws to deter the worst type of buy-to-let landord (UK laws are weighted in favour of landlords). In the UK, we've lost any sense that housing has a social component.

I write a blog about housing in the UK and wrote about this topic five years ago. Depressingly, the situation is even worse today.

http://designofhomes.co.uk/016-damaging-effects-of-buy-to-le...
The article seems to dog on the suburbs as a big part of the problem. Is there any breakdown of the polling that shows that people in denser areas know their neighbors any better? Controlling for occupation / income level would highlight differences in neighborliness against population density.
Just bought a seed packet. Very cool!

Will the plants produce seeds? Reproduce? Will the glow genes reappears in successive generations?
Or in other words, you have huge marketing problem :). App store looks at trends to find the "cream" to surface. However it's YOUR responsibility to kindle the fire. Once fire starts, Apple can provide plenty of oxygen to get it going. This is most challenging part of any business where you have tons alternatives - whether its books or music or games. People who succeed in these kind of spaces are on top of their game to start the fire.
Couple of problems here.
You forgot about battery life, which is the primary reason to lock a platform down.
The supposedly empowering aspects of instability and insecurity make the PC a shitty platform, too.
None of those have anything to do with games.
The 'closed app store model' is a million times more open than the preceding models. Ever try getting a game published on a console, or preloaded onto a pre-iPhone mobile? Or even Steam, right now.
Bioluminescense is known as cold-light because it's so efficient - basically zero energy is wasted as heat. There will be fundamental limits (currently unknown), most likely from toxicity or waste products hurting the cells, but we are far from pushing those boundaries yet.
You can use OsmAnd to record a gps track and send it to OpenStreetMap. It will be available in most editors, including iD. Althought, you can use any gps tracker and upload a track here http://www.openstreetmap.org/trace/create
Voice may be the world's deepest voice ever to enter hollywood Hear now
Show HN: Trippeo – Simple travel and expense management
Thank you! The seeds are fertile and will retain the glow for a few generations at least (eventually evolution will turn it off due to the metabolic cost on the plant).
> (no, it turns out, you don't want to do that on fat metabolism alone!)

i'm not an expert in this field, but during my personal ketogenic diet research, i came across many elite but amateur endurance athletes blogging about their switch from carb-adapted to fat-adapted performance.

to a layman like me, it would seem that professionals wouldn't be publicizing the fact that they have switched to fat-fueled endurance training because it would be a massive competitive advantage.

the research in this area of biology is extremely cutting edge with new information being published monthly, and i can only imagine well-funded professional athletes are simply training/eating and performing at a level far and away beyond the typical enthusiast or fitness athlete. not only that - they can sustain a specialized, ketogenic diet required to actually achieve such a state.
It hurts startups - the small businesses that are specifically designed to grow quickly, in fast-changing markets.

A small business that's small because it's a niche can afford to have a dream employee work remotely. A small business that's small because it's not-yet-large in a fast-changing market will be slowed down dramatically by the timezone differences, and probably lose out to competitors that colocate all their people.
I worked with Mikey and I'm damn sure he's not in it for the money, the prestige, or anything else.
I'm interested to see the reactions this will garner from the anti-GMO crowd.
For example, one printer I saw used laser sintering (sp?) Basically you have a big box of powder which is shot at by a laser, solidifying the powder at the locations the laser hits it. Afterwards the remaining powder is sucked out and the object remains. The results is a much more solid construction than what you get with 'shooting' small blobs of molten plastic like a makerbot does. But the process is a lot more messy, and a lot more dangerous too.
>Communities, rife as they were with gossip, ostracism and superstitious cruelty, were always based on mutual need

To counter your easy dismissal I'd say modern individuals, rife as they are with selfiness, consumerism, lack of empathy and of time to connect to their neighborhood, are mostly basing their circles on career paths and personal interests, and other people being their cultural split image.
Tell me why are random strangers just as important as my family and friends? Yours, too?

The onus shouldn't be on me to prove to you why I want to favor my network or ensure their security with my own hard-earned resources. It's on you.
That was remarkably unspecific.
Direct link to download the app: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trippeo/id892522845?mt=8&ign...
Just the federal government? At least the federal government has an official journal/government gazette where federal regulations etc. are published (online, in XML, for free). Compare that to the states of Massachusetts, which charges money for online access, and Georgia, which doesn't even have one.

If you think the federal government is broken, you haven't seen nothin' yet.
Python's Mersenne Twister was first seeded with 32 bytes, changed to 2500 bytes here:

http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/7b5265752942
Is that true? A statement like, "Drive Tom's car" is grammatically correct, but I don't think it is expanded to "Drive Tom is car".
Good god, this reads like a parody. There is no totalitarian conspiracy to manipulate your facebook feed. You are not in a dystopia. Having users vote for features of a popular website is unreasonable.

If you like everything a recommendation algorithm feeds you, of course you are going to get shit recommendations. Your like data is no longer correlated with your actual preferences at all. It's an interesting experiment, but people are projecting their own fears and opinions onto the result.
> I had a playable alpha of Catch the Monkey in six weeks. It took us another eleven months to complete... In total, across all these platforms, we made around $7k. $200k and 12ish months of our lives for $7k.

> A is for App, on all platforms, was finally complete Fall of 2013. A year from when we first started it, and 9 months after we had a stable playable (store purchase-only) version. Our project cost went from $25k to $200k.

> That weekend I gathered up the family for a family meeting... I estimated $12,000 - $20,000 to get a playable prototype of the game, then we can decide what to do next... I have assembled a distributed team of 9 to help in varying capacities to make Archmage Rises a reality. Each one is being paid, with me as lead designer with full creative control.

"Family meeting! I'm about to make the same mistake for a third time! Who's in?"
GoPro is a distant second, feature-wise, to Drift Ghost as a helmet cam, IMO. There is already competition.

I wouldn't get this new cube device because it lacks a rotatable camera body (essential for flexibility in helmet mounting) and the battery lifetime is too short.
https://nextdoor.com/ is trying to help bring back that sense of community that this article talks about us losing. I think if something like this can help us get a cursory relationship with our neighbors, then that could potentially develop into something deeper and more meaningful and facilitate more offline interaction as well.
Shots from Cube from Youtube clip looks awful. :/ Check clip starting from 21st second.
The usual suspects are of course against this, but one of the reasons we started the company was to change public perception around GMOs. The technology has enormous potential to help the world, but it's being held back by public opinion. What's frustrating is that this opinion is basically not based on science or evidence, but is mobilized because people are against things like biotech patents and large companies dominating the food chain. The glowing plant changes that discussion and we hope that people develop a more nuanced and balanced perspective once they have a GMO in their own home.
While that is a noble assessment, if we look at similar industries to gaming we see that quality is rarely enough as well. Music, movies and writing have been under this model for many many years and proven that the reality is that no one really makes any money except a few at the top. They are all tournament economies at heart. VC's have come up with the pseudo intellectual term "Network Effect" but really its just the luck of a hit. Sometimes the Beatles do appear, but mostly its bands that have a couple years of success only to disappear. Part of that is because there is just soooo much competition. The signal to noise ratio is insane. This is because people create music, movies, art and now games and applications for the love of it. So even when sane economic incentives dry up there are still far too many submissions which makes any type of sustainable living still possible but highly unrealistic.
I guess I made my point badly.

Implementing algorithms is what software developers do. If, as a software developer, I'm just a middle man between the client and the people implementing everything on algorithmia.com, it's kind of stupid for me to even be involved - the client should hire the people posting to algorithmia directly.
So, uh, where do I sign up?