skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What's your definition of sane? None of those countries have the scale, frequency and volume of demand that resembles anything like the US.[1]

The most relevant statistic in the link you reference is "Pct of population" with the US at 14.3% and Germany at 11.9%. Two and a half percentage points does not seem like such a big difference in scale.

My attitude isn't "why not me" but "why is this so absurd"? I got in to both countries, but one was a total clusterfuck and one wasn't. Obviously one of them is doing something better than the other. I'm positing that the ultimate solution to demand (if one exists), is more in the direction of the German system than the random lottery of the US.
Ugh, seems like another article that derives causation from correlation.

Specifically:
"We have evolved for it, to the extent that those surrounded by a tight-knit group of friends who regularly gather to eat—and, crucially, gossip—live an average of 15 years longer than loners."

Perhaps the reason that people with a large group of friends live much longer is that people who are in better health tend to have more active social lives. If you have some sort of disorder or are extremely obese could it be that you're less likely to be able to spend time with lots of other people?
Glowing Plant Is One of Y Combinator’s First Biotech Startups
Apart from the power considerations, that's very expensive. The cost of silicon grows more than linearly (I don't remember the exponent, someone help me out here...) in area, because of yield issues: the larger your chip, the more likely it is that an imperfection will cause it to be worthless. With very regular designs like DRAM and flash the reduce the impact of this by redundancy, but last I heard this wasn't really considered practical for logic designs like CPUs. You can sacrifice an entire one, although apparently you have to provide for that by making a voltage island round each one, which uses some area not to mention being a nasty analog complication, although I think those are coming in anyway due to the desire to reduce base power by switching unused blocks off.
Email me. I could def. hire you for a few small jobs - michael at realpython dot com.
Itaniums did this and it contributed to the expense. I don't think that "scales" for our priorities (power, cost).
Have you seen the Presidential Innovation Fellows (http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows) program? We're a group (about 60 alumns so far) focused on doing CfA-esq projects within the Federal government. Jen Pahlka just finished up spending a year with the program helping scale it up and do even more awesome things. Ping me if you're interested.
Geer is a pretty salient guy. There are several gems buried deep in the text here:

>> "For me, trust is the availability of effective recourse."

That's a tidy little definition, and quite pithy. And this next one might apply to engineering in general (he brought it up in the context of "fast/good/cheap---pick 2").

>> "I think security engineering are [sic] about tolerable failure modes -- are about what the tolerable levels of failure are."
Anyone want to take a guess at Google's motive (other than goodwill)? Better access to East Asian customers?
I'm also wondering who exactly would use this service. Any worthy developer should be able to read a description / paper on an algorithm he needs and then implement it in their language of choice.

Also, a bulk of the work would probably go to massaging your input to satisfy the input constraints of this web service. If you go that far, you might as well implement the rest of the algorithm yourself.

Maybe instead of an Amazon-style store, it could be more of craigslist/elance/topcoder type of store – people submit the exact classes/data/input they have, with the desired output. Developers write code (and the platform checks input/output validity), and the submitter can then haggle with the coder with the best score for the fee to pay. I guess it could be used as an outsourcing tool for companies that can't be bothered or don't have the brains to develop these kinds of things. Just an idea.
Advancing Moore's Law in 2014 [pdf]
Are there Windows/Mac clients for Iris?
Yes, this is the release that will get me using Ghost. I've been waiting for them to introduce multi-user blogs for a while.
Related: the previous HN discussion on "human-scale" cities. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090190
This really makes me nostalgic.

I miss the days when Wired actually had decent content.
OSS?
The current state of AppGrid, Zephyros, Phoenix, Hydra, Penknife, and Mjolnir
I think your idea is completely crazy. Feel free to disagree.

I think the only realistic way forward without breaking backwards compatibility is to build a new low overhead close to the metal API and implement OpenGL on top of that (e.g. adding a new MESA backend). Doing a new API on top of OpenGL first is quite impossible.

But I wouldn't mind breaking backwards compatibility either. I think D3D does the right thing here and every major version is incompatible with the previous version. Porting to the next version isn't too difficult (mostly a search and replace job) but it's still not source or binary compatible. I think this is the major reason why D3D is a cleaner API.

> If driver overhead is minimized, so that OpenGL is as thin a layer as possible over the real hardware, then changing the API becomes trivial: you can just wrap OpenGL and expose any API you want on top.

Given the convoluted mess that OpenGL drivers are (I work on one), it is very unlikely that such things will happen. We can't reduce driver overhead by adding new stuff. Some parts we can help (see the "Approaching Zero Driver Overhead" talks) but there's still an inherent overhead from all the state validation and other complexities.

Also, wrapping OpenGL into anything nicer isn't really possible. Otherwise there would be lots of neat 3D APIs implemented on top of OpenGL and you could choose whichever you like. But it's impossible to work around the idiosyncrasies of OpenGL.

And writing wrappers is fundamentally incompatible with low overhead anyway.

> Then, if someone writes a popular API wrapper, Khronos can take that API and standardize it as the next version of OpenGL

That "someone" would need to be a major established player and the API must be something that actually catches on. It must be complete and functional.

Khronos isn't just going to fork a random dude's GitHub project and go from there. There are practical reasons but let's not forget the legal issues either.

This scenario isn't just gonna happen.
So this was published a year before the company was sold to Novell for big bucks, AFTER this guy was canned. So there is an ax to grind, for one. Not to say the history isn't interesting, but this is one of those memoirs written from the perspective of the ousted dude (who wasn't even a founder) who is so sure he was the wronged party.

It's still a good read.

The book I would always like to read would be from Bruce Bastian, the co-founder that got Peterson (the author of this book) the job. Why? Because he was Peterson's brother-in-law.

So Bastian is a really interesting guy. Peterson writes him off as being kind of a "dreamer" and downplays a lot of his brilliance, but others have noted the importance his smarts played with making WP good. Anyway, in 2000 or something, he came out of the closet, which is like a huge deal if you're like the pinnacle Mormon software company in Utah. IIRC, he was totally shunned by a lot of people from his former company, including his co-founder.

He now gives money to charity, donated millions to equal rights causes and generally seems to be a good, decent man.

Anyway, I'd really love to read about what it was like to be closeted in that type of environment in that period of time, while also building what was at one time, a massively successful software company.
I live in an inexpensive part of the country, so salaries obviously vary based on that. $80-150K is the normal range for a PI here, but the sky's the limit if you can pull in a lot of grants/royalties.

There are no set hours. You work when and where you want. (I usually roll in around 11-noon). They don't really care how you spend your time, as long as you publish and get grants. Patents are just icing. Obviously clinical hours are in the 9-5 timeframe though.

I don't really know the normal IP cut in detail. I believe it is roughly 50% of the patent royalties, negotiable depending on how much pull you have. But if you are the actual owner of the business as well as the patent creator, then you get both the royalty cut and the business profit, whereas if you just sell the patent you get only the royalties (but obviously that is a lot less work).

EDIT: I feel compelled to point out that it's not all roses. The flip side of the freedom is that you are judged solely on your results. If you can't produce, for whatever reason, you're going to have a hard time. There's little job security. And so forth.
Actually, American Indian culture had developed a way of life that preserved a beautiful land in a sustainable manner, while much of the world was embroiled in war, feudalism and disease. True, there were inter-tribe rivalries as well, but the land was relatively peaceful and undeveloped compared to what Europe was experiencing with the Seven Years War, Protestant-Catholic Wars and massive civil wars at the time. I don't think the early Europeans necessarily understood Amerindian culture, but they were definitely the beneficiaries of it. If American Indians had executed a more cogent immigration policy, the transition to a modern economy would probably have been easier for the natives.

Of course, much has changed since then -- with finite resources like fresh water and land in good climates being consumed in many attractive countries.
For an operation like this you'd need, at most, a couple of kilobytes per second. It runs as its own pool. Internally the traffic would be much higher.

Running a wallet with a full block chain would take more bandwidth.
The Government Digital Service are doing wonders for UK government web applications - which have gone from 'pretty terrible' to 'global standard setting', for the ones that they've got around to so far: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/

Hopefully, this success will be repeated in the US.
I don't think legislation/policy is the solution. We have seen time and time again that when the government steps in they create ineffective and ridiculous boundaries that do little in practice. Problems like these need to be solved with technology, user friendly and default encryption would go a long way in most of these cases.
I have a side-project which scrapes play-by-play data from NBA games to gain more insights into these games.

Here is an example of the (un-finished) side-project: http://recappd.com/games/2014/02/07

I'm far from the only person scraping this data. Look at sites liked http://vorped.com and http://nbawowy.com for even better examples.
Apple's is at least better than Google's Play Store; it is next to impossible to find games that are not those cookie-cutter check-every-five-minutes-to-collect-coins type games.
How do you define added. If you have pure apple juice, it has 35g in an 8 fl. oz. serving (using the Martinelli's in my pantry as an example). There is no sugar added, but it clearly has plenty of sugar. What happens if instead of adding the sugar to the apple juice, I were to just reduce the amount of water instead? I'm still not adding any sugar, but the concentrate would clearly have more sugar than not. How is this much different than producing maple syrup, which is pretty much designed to be sugar?
I'm one of the founders of this project, and will be available to answer any questions you have.
I was complaining to a friend recently about how the city of Mountain View has approved so much new commercial property development while approving very little residential property development. And he brought up a good point. A lot of the unused space in Mountain View is superfund sites. The development of new commercial space is happening at these sites (the whole area around Moffett including Google). It's easy to ensure commercial entities are meeting the requirements to mitigate the pollutants in these areas (proper HVAC and ventilation systems, etc) than with individual residences - and the limits on the amount of exposure are also lower for commercial areas vs. residential areas. So this could be a strong factor on why there's way more commercial development than residential in Mountain View and surrounding communities.
Lets be clear, those old stories are in regards to soaps!
> This will get it pretty close to the company’s data center in The Dalles, Ore., and give that facility a better connection to Japan.

That seems like enough to me.
Games are a hard business. There was a gold rush to the App store. There have been smaller gold rushes to Xbox Live Store and Steam. Long before that there was a gold rush to PlayStation development. Before that, there was a boom in PC-CDROM at software stores.

This reads to me like someone who didn't know the business well and failed at mobile. I think he would have failed on PC if he had started there instead. He may succeed at the PC now, but that is partly because he learned a lot. I hope he does well going forward.

The low barrier to entry is making mobile casual games like flash games. Nobody wants to pay, and good games are hard to discover in sea of titles. There is still money to be made in mobile.
That jumped out at me too. My wild guess is that the older fiber is a 10G system, the new one is 40G.

From [1]
> Unity cable system consists of eight fiber pairs, has design capacity up to 7.68 Tbps, with each fiber pair operating at 96x10G DWDM system.

From [2]
> the SJC cable system consists of 6 fiber pairs with the initial design capacity of 28 terabits per second,

Taking a guess that there are 96x40Gb/s x 6 fibers gets you to 23 Tb/s, so in the right ballpark. (Wavelength spacing on a fiber is different between 40G and 10G, so this is a bit of a shot in the dark.)

Caveat: 40G used to be near and dear to my heart (Big Bear Networks), so everything pretty much looks like that nail to my hammer.

[1] http://submarinenetworks.com/systems/trans-pacific/unity
[2] http://www.globe.com.ph/press-room/globe-regional-connectivi...
They're ASIC processors. It's already set in stone (silicon, whatever).
It's mind blowingly expensive. A very quick breakdown of the main parts:

ADS1299 ~38USD for 1k+

ATMEGA328P ~ 2USD for 2k+

RFDuino ~ 20USD for 10 +

Accelerometer ~ 2USD for 1k+

Board ~ 5USD assembled for 1k+

I'm also not sure I'd want to have an RF module near a 24 bit ADC.

Total is probably around 75USD for 2k+. Simple layout as well.
No WiFi. No remote control. Not bad for $99 though!
On a slight offtopic note, I wonder why Japanese websites are still stuck in the mid 90s to early year 2000 style. One example of this is the imageboard type of websites, which interestingly enough has caught on here in the US.

I wonder if these better connectivity will bring more cross culture web designs or applications to both places.
>nothing to sell but their bodies and the labour these bodies can produce.

Makes me think about all of the times I've worked in a factory, a restaurant, or on a construction site.
For the last ~5 years, I have disengaged from almost all political conversation because it's mostly tabloid nonsense.

This is the first thing I've seen in 5 years that actually excites me about politics again. I just started reading about this, so I don't know if it's any good. However: Mikey Dickerson and his team are making all of the correct noises, and I'm very excited to see what comes of this.

This is a good (policy paper?) describing the initiative and some of the ways Mikey et al are thinking about the problem:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/egov/digit...
I worked with Mikey on healthcare.gov and he's the real deal--wicked smart, but also humble, patient, respectful, grounded, and keenly insightful into how organizations work and how to fix broken ones.

The day healthcare.gov launched, six people total got through. Six. Nobody even knew when the site was down, except by checking CNN. Two months later, Mikey had rallied the 20-something contractors into punching through dozens of problems, and had recruited a team of (now-) 30-something engineers from Google, Facebook, YC startups, and other fine places to come in on rotations to keep the momentum going. As a result, 8 million people got health insurance.

If you haven't already seen it, I recommend this talk and Time article:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0albm_hhQzM&feature=youtu.be...
http://blog-assets.newrelic.com/wp-content/uploads/80893.pdf

And those of you thinking about joining: do it please! 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.

(If you're interested in joining, feel free to email me a resume and I'll make sure the right people see it: brandon.ballinger@gmail.com)
Yes, GPL: https://github.com/project-iris/iris/blob/master/LICENSE.md
It's against the HN guidelines to go on about getting downvoted. Please don't.

Complaints about the HN hive-mind are also tedious. And they're (mostly) evenly distributed across ideologies, so they say more about the complainer than they do about HN.
As I said downthread, this was because they were a Orem, Utah company founded by BYU students that hired mostly BYU students. Thus, the culture isn't typical of software or even business culture of the 1980s, it was typical of Mormon culture. Very different.
It would be purely user-hostile if all Facebook users feel the same way your sample of users does, but that's not necessarily true.
That's only if you look at the 'Top' lists. It's pretty easy to find interesting games if you look around. I have a lot of game guys on my google+ account which also help.
Nice project, but it seems like it would need some (financial?) support:

> As of the current release, my focus will shift back to finalizing my dissertation and inherently, my PhD. Since I can no longer rely on university support for Iris, I am actively looking for an official backer who would be interested in taking Iris to the next level and turning it into an industrial strength project. If you are interested, or know of such a person, please contact me at peterke@gmail.com.
Good point. The "paperless office" has long been a target and symbol modernity in office environments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperless_office
Show HN: Blocksign, a Bitcoin service for legally signing any document
I agree, but I think general American sentiment is against it. "They are taking our jobs"
Where did you get the $99 figure from? I looked all over the page and couldn't find it. Not bad at all for $99.
Be aware that the 'sugar' lobby fought hard not to have sugar demonised the way fat was by the WHO. This really is of their own making.
The automobile – most environmental wasteful design ever?
Garry Kasparov loses bid to be chess kingpin
From Liberal Arts to Product Management
And what is the solution? Everyone here has instant communication and if you have even a small social life, such as many who work hard all the time for their dreams, you can still see friends once a week and family once a month or every other month.

It's not a great idea to compare today to yesteryear because back then they didn't have facebook, twitter, iPhones, Skype, Google hangouts, the internet etc.
Writing and Using Generic Functions in Swift
Photojojo is selling it for $100.

https://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/polaroid-cube-camera...
fair point, "purely" is an exaggeration, but it is at least telling that not a single one of my friends actually wants this behaviour.
I can't find the article I read about this last year, but it's largely cultural. There is a greater expectation of information density in Japan, look at their advertising or TV news for example. Also, there is a severe paucity of Japanese (East Asian in general) web fonts so they're stuck with a lot of dated fonts from 25 years ago. Additionally there is just a different aesthetic there.
I think import.io is buggy to say the least, having used it in the past to scrape some websites, it was pain to work with. Kimonolabs is still very lacking in terms of ability to handle different websites, it is very much limited to a certain portion of the web, it looks like they are more about creating APIs...APIs that people are supposed to find interesting and valuable but like the topic of this question, it seems like it's only valuable to someone who has a direct need for that dataset, by itsef would serve no interest to say.

Having private access to Scrape.it, I can say that it focuses strictly on making a great tool and the ability to scrape websites without costing a fortune. I know the founders and they are extremely dedicated to making a tool that can pretty much handle anything you throw at it like AJAX, Single page apps, crawling selected links and all sub links after the page. They've just begun adding login and form support so should be able to play with those as well very soon. It only supports csv output at the moment but hopefully they can make available like API output.
"If you want to work in fast food, you should be okay with the wages they provide".

You are assuming people want to work there and that they have a large latitude of choice.

Yes, it's not entirely the same because if you are educated, you do have some mobility and discretion at where you work, but there's much more available affordable housing in SF (all of SF, not just the popular places) then there is between Sunnyvale and SF combined. Just do a search of housing under $2k a month on Craigslist if you don't believe me. Available units for rent doesn't start picking up until you hit Santa Clara or Campbell.

This is why I oppose people who oppose luxury shuttles: Because they should be putting their effort into increasing available housing for everyone in the bay area.
In short, convert the input string into an array of its character values, group those values into sub-arrays of length 'x', add together the aligned values in each sub-array and modulo each by 256, output the resulting values in hex pairs joined together in a big string.

Example, with a hash length of 4: "helloworld" => [104, 101, 108, 108, 111, 119, 111, 114, 108, 100] => [[104, 101, 108, 108], [111,119,111,114], [108, 100]] => [67, 64, 219, 222] => "4340dbde"

So if one character is different in the string, only one hex value in the output will vary too. However, a flaw of the plan is that changes spaced out at an interval that matches your hash "length" will only affect one hex value in the output, but you run into the pigeonhole principle if you want a hash of limited size to have the same or similar Levenshtein distance as the potential inputs, but I suspect there are far smarter solutions :-)
Downtime for August 11, 2014
Russian smartphone maker of Yota devices planning move to Canada
Great, will do. Thanks Michael.
In this case, "added" would mean "extra," as in any amount you add on top of what is produced once the apples are converted into juice.

I agree that some stuff already has a high amount of sugar in it naturally, but I think in the grand scheme of things they make up just a small minority of all products. My concern is for more common stuff, like bread. Why does bread have to have high-fructose corn syrup in it again? The answer is that it doesn't.
That company that lost an employee should have been paying them more. Any company paying below market rates will have problems retaining their best employees.
Welcome to 2014, where people gladly and boldly proclaim their love of greed and selfishness. Some people work for the government to make the world a better place instead of finding ways to make people more addicted to Facebook or clicking on Ads to buy things they don't really want or need. I understand that you don't care about anyone but yourself, but is it really necessary to shout it from the rooftops?