skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Firefox OS sounds great, but I don't think that's what this post is really about.

It is about OP gaming his/her carrier's promotional gimmick to get free data usage added to his account, 2mbit (mbyte?) at at time.

I did something like this once, I wasn't caught, but nonetheless it didn't turn out well.

Back in 2005, AT&T would do something like take a dollar off my bill for each dropped call.

At the time, I happened to work in a building that had some kind of Faraday cage built into the walls (EMSEC), so I had a reliable mechanism for producing dropped calls on demand.

I would just dial the local Time & Temp line on my way to the front door, and then when I stepped inside, the call would drop and I would get the dollar credit. This worked, until it didn't.

After about a month, my phone service was terrible and I was unable to place or receive international calls. I ended up talking to tier-III tech support and was informed that the cell tower closest to me was rejecting my device so I was talking to a more distant tower. (I never learned why that prevented international calls.) Apparently the tower had automatically weighed and measured my device and found it lacking!

After the tech reconfigured the tower, my cell phone service was good again. I chalked it up to karma and ceased to commit that particular form of fraud.
What is flawed is the state of the affairs in the patent mechanism, not the premise of the patents in principle. I am against the issues resulting from frivolous patents too. Unfortunately, in my opinion, most people against patents do not reason about their philosophy making it harder to convince the authorities against patents.

My understanding is that before patents, people and companies would invent but keep their invention a trade secret for as long as they can, which meant they had exclusivity to the invention. Patents allow such exclusivity for a limited period of time in exchange of disclosing the invention and losing rights over it after a specified period.

The patents applicability criterion correspondingly includes non-obviousness which is to judge if someone else could come up with the same invention without investing significant time and effort or not. Majority of the ideas are "supposed to be" ruled out by this criterion.

The state of the affairs however is that most obvious of the things get patented because (1) obviousness is unmeasurable, and (2) searching the prior art fully is impractical.

Short message: You cannot call all swans white simply because most you see are white.
Robots Ask for Help with Inverse Semantics: Stefanie Tellex Wins RSS Best Paper
Maybe if his phones could act as modems, he'd have unlimited (but slow?) data - leave one on back home with a dialin server, and dial into that from the other one :)
Starting Points for Learning About Open Source
Do you think mathematicians start over from learning how to count everytime they encounter a new problem? That's different from looking up the 10th digit of pi: that's encyclopedic.

Knowing what a classifier is is simply more than encyclopedic knowledge that you should probably know before joining an AI company.
A typical paywall, i.e., a paywall made for (against) less tech-savvy users …
CBP can and does in fact carry out checks for undeclared cash exports in the jetway for international departures. Not every departure, obviously, and I don't think the selection mechanism is public, but it's a thing they're documented as doing.
Theses API are broken on some of us.
Snapchat Valued at $10B in Latest Investment
You paid for the recline space behind you.

Actually, if you look at the airline's contract of carriage, you paid a lot of money for, well, basically nothing whatsoever, especially in the US. You really ought to be on your knees offering prayers of thanksgiving for the fact that they let you on the plane at all once they got hold of your money; as to some sort of right to reclining space by virtue of having bought a ticket, well, that's just plain laughable.
That's really confusing. You compare it to racial and sexual discrimination, but then say that $100-200 more would be OK. You seem to switch between making a principled stand and trying to save money, depending on whatever's more convenient at the time. Which makes the "principled stand" sound like a crock. So let's concentrate on the price.

First of all, how do you decide that $200 is OK but $350 is not OK? The airline industry is pretty competitive. If one doesn't offer what you want, use one that does. If none of them offer what you want, it's probably because it's not actually cost effective (assuming that it's legal).

Secondly, you're just wrong about the cost. I picked a United roundtrip between IAD and SFO, and they want a whopping $84 for Economy Plus on the outbound leg, and $79 on the return leg, on top of a $414 base roundtrip fare. That's $174 extra for the roundtrip, within the range you state as acceptable. For another example, I flew IAD-PEK on United earlier this year, and it was $200 each way for Economy plus, on a $1,400/person trip that takes 14 hours each way.

I checked on American and for a similar trip they wanted $50-60 per flight for "Main Cabin Extra" which is their equivalent. Finally, I checked JetBlue, which cost a total of $115 extra each way for "Even More Space".

Now, one might expect you to delighted at this, since apparently you didn't know before, and it's exactly what you asked for. Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen, though.
They'll fill the seat anyway once you haven't checked in.
There's no denying the geometry of it, but you are being selfish by thinking you have the right to wedge yourself in a seat that's too small for you. Just because it's the cheapest option doesn't mean it's appropriate for you.

I'm 198 cm and I only fly in first, or in an exit row if needed.
pass object references by value (is their a better name for this?)

Barbara Liskov used "call by sharing", aka "call by object-sharing" or "call by object".
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/40480/is-java-pass-by-ref...
paste and join are useful too; paste complements cut, and join is like the SQL join, but for text files.
As someone who hasn't a clue about this whole situation, can you give an example of one of these "vicious lies" that she was spreading about Google?

I tried googling it, but couldn't even find any statements about Google.
This is why I consider Dollhouse the single most terrifying piece of science fiction in recent memory.
If I'm understanding correctly, I think the difference between "undefined behavior" and "returns an unspecified value" is consitency. If you had something like:

int i = [UNDEFINED BEHAVIOR];
if (i > 0)
COND1;
if (i > 0)
COND2;

then most people would expect that either COND1 and COND2 both execute, or they both don't execute. But I believe that a compiler is theoretically free to produce code that executes one but not the other since the value of i is undefined. In other words, the compiler doesn't have to act as though i has one specific value after that assignment. It can assume any value it likes independently each time i is used. It can assume that i is positive at the first check and then assume it's negative the next time, even though it might be provably true that no code between those two checks can possibly change the value of i. The change to "unspecified value" would mean that the compiler can give i whatever value it wants to, but it has to be a single defined value, and subsequent code must not behave as though i had multiple changing values.

But I'm not really a C programmer, so feel free to correct me if I'm interpreting this wrong.
Bitcoin, Startups, and Suicide: Being an Entrepreneur Is Hard
They do - it's called "first class".
It is not sufficient but it might be enough to fulfill compliance requirements. Yep, that is only cover your ass security but it is still better than no encryption at all … the glass is half full vs. the glass is half empty although we should of course aim for the full glass.
Dropbox Ups $10 Pro Plan from 120GB to 1TB
Bluetooth-enabled cooler breaks Kickstarter record for most-funded campaign
I think the Adafruit response wasn't ideal, but it looks like the buyer foisting of some manufacturing spec problems on to Adafruit.

It sounds like the user was destructively testing some parameter of the product that wasn't on any spec sheet. Then asking Adafruit to bear the cost of sifting through the product to filter the higher performance parts. When you're looking maintain some specific some off-sheet performance characteristic you usually want to source from the manufacturer or a distributor that's close to the manufacturer, not a hobby/maker type shop like Adafruit. It will almost always cost you more at that point too because Adafruit type suppliers can give you lower cost because hobby/maker buyers don't need the same tight consistency that a more industrial / research application might need. They could be buying odd lots off a different manufacturer every time.

Edit: looking at Adafruits product page, they don't even have a spec sheet but a general description for ITO glass. The better way to handle this would have been to nicely ask Adafruit for the name of their supplier (or maybe former supplier) because you wanted to get something specific out of the glass.
You're flying though the air at 550mph - a feat thought impossible a mere 100 years ago. I can't believe the things people find to complain about. Are our lives so boring that this drivel is actually printworthy?
You seem to be too quick to label the person in front of you 'selfish' when it is you who expects him to give up his comfort he paid for so that you can enjoy one that you did not pay for. He has no such obligations. I think someone else is being a selfish freeloader here.

Inside an aircraft, space is for sale, if you need more, pay for it, or rail against airlines to provide you better service. The person in front of you is simply collecting what he/she paid for.
One of my issues is that this article discusses the Zumwalt's main failures as being too 'avant-garde' where it was a classic example of a jack of all trades, master of none. The whole ship was supposed to have swappable 'mission packs' that would let it do anything while being stealthy, fast, cheap, modern etc... The article has a very pro-Zumwalt / Bath Iron works (mentioned several times) spin to it. The EM Briefcase was written by the president of the company cited in the article (Metatech). It sounds a lot like PG's suits essay.
Show HN: Aggregated and social-ranked tech/geek news (beta)
Photosynth is still around. The current version is more limited than it used to be, it only supports straight lines and circular panoramas. But they're working on a more impressive update. Here's a preview http://photosynth.net/preview/view/df869f96-2765-4939-8eb3-2... You can zoom in an out, pan around, and hit 'c' to see a wireframe.

Edit: you can also make Deep Zoom images offline in the Image Composite Editor, but that's been around for a long time. https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/I...
Google Adds 152 Patents to Its Non-Assertion Pledge
I don't think it should be too difficult (not saying that d3 doesn't have a learning curve). There are some examples on the d3 gallery that would probably be close.

http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4060606
http://www.trulia.com/trends/2011/09/house-hunter-by-day-not...
http://prcweb.co.uk/circularheatchart/
http://bl.ocks.org/tjdecke/5558084

Heck if you point me to a stock dataset I could probably code up a simple example that you could tweak. (no promises though ;)
There are hostile interviews, but not all interviews are. I'll borrow from Michael Church [1] in describing what I consider a hostile interview. A hostile interview is any interview in which the interviewers are actively trying to remove the candidate from the pool. This can be a very subtle thing; as an interviewer, you have to ask yourself: Am I asking questions in order to attempt to weed out this candidate? Does this question have a right and wrong answer? And if so, what does it mean if they get it wrong? Did I simply discover a limit of their knowledge, or is it more ominous?

An important point is that you can be quite friendly and amenable, while still asking hostile questions intended to directly weed out candidates, as opposed to plumbing the depth and breadth of their knowledge and experiences.

[1] http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/how-the-other...
The Newsweek headline is pretty misleading, although the study lends itself to being misread.

It looks as though the "emitter" of information (the person who begins the communication) used two different motor movements -- one that represents a 1 and the other that represents a 0 -- to communicate a stream of binary information. An EEG picked up those motor-based signals from the subject's brain.

Then that binary information was sent to another location, where transcranial magnetic stimulation was used on the "receivers," who sensed the 1s as visual stimuli and the 0s as no visual stimuli. After each bit was communicated, they told the researchers whether they saw any visual stimuli.

In other words, the "emitter" didn't just think of a word and that word somehow magically popped into the heads of the receivers. We're a loooooong way off from that.

In fact, if I'm understanding this correctly, the entire gimmick about words like "hola" and "ciao" being transmitted is misleading, or at least irrelevant in terms of what was actually achieved.

Really, the best way to sum this up is:

Binary information is transmitted with significant accuracy using non-invasive neural sensors (for detection) and non-invasive neural stimuli (for reception).

And indeed, I have a sneaking suspicion that neither the accurate detection of binary signals using EEG nor the accurate communication of binary signals using TMS is particularly groundbreaking ... in which case, the only thing novel about this study is that the researchers decided to pair the two.

EDIT: Actually, the paper seems to be implying that accurate communication of binary signals in a computer-to-brain interface is indeed groundbreaking (From the introduction: "the realization of non-invasive CBI in humans remains elusive") but if that were so, one would think that the EEG component of the study introduces needlessly complexity; the researchers could just as easily begin with a predefined stream of 1s and 0s, rather than trying to extract them from someone else's brain.
Ask HN: Good desktop software for time tracking?
Hello all!

The company I work for is looking for a desktop application for time tracking of projects.

Here is what we need :

- works on Windows and Mac

- does not require an open browser to work

- can add notes to each time segment (in order to know what's being worked on)

I'd really like to stay away from anything too "big brother"...but it's becoming important, as we grow, to have a good idea of how much time is being spent on things.

What do you guys/gals think?
sed -E for awk or grep -E regexes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8232896
Why are Stars Star-Shaped? [video]
Give me a break. Is it absurdly childish to give pregnant women special seats on a bus because in general they are less mobile? It's common to base a social norm on the general characteristics of a class of people.
dc.js has similar goals (though more focused on large, multi-dimensional data sets), with 1 extra year to mature

http://dc-js.github.io/dc.js/
I'm with @lostcolony: if I were interviewing and a candidate said "don't do that, it's unpredictable, do this instead" it's a great answer.
As a 6'5" lankey mess of a spaghetti noodle, I absolutely hate flying (or sitting on buses, despite my undying love for mass transit... but I digress).

I had a guy turn around and yell at me once because he tried to recline, my knees got jammed beneath his chairback, so I quickly snapped them out. He thought I was protesting against his recline by kicking the back of his chair. I tried to explain to him that my legs were just stuck and needed to move them, thus the literal knee-jerk reaction, but he wanted nothing to do with it.

But I guess if presented with the opportunity to be shorter, I wouldn't take it no matter the circumstances; I love being tall.
Reclining your seat in coach is a horrible, selfish thing to do. I'm 6'3" and all leg. On most flights these days, unless I spring for Economy Plus or similar, where you get a few extra inches, my knees are smushed up against the seat in front of me already. If the person in front of me reclines, it actually presses hard on my kneecaps. I've actually been known to press my legs against the seat in front of me so that they can't recline. It's kind of a dick move, but much less so than reclining your seat.
Fair enough. As long as you are reasonably careful like with your example this will work alright for many cases.
Undefined behaviour means that anything can happen, the program might exit,start displaying random numbers or format your hard drive.
I have that installed and it's doesn't have a lot of stuff that I use daily... Like facebook messenger (shamed to admit..) and such.

I try my best to use as much OSS on my phone as possible (I compile my own OS from CM), but it's really hard to get everything
Since Facebook bought them, how about Facebook?
A lot of questions I want to ask. The first being, is it open source?

Also there is no central server, but currently message are given by the company... Which means all mining or currency creation is handled centrally. Ergo central server.

Metadata collection is still possible because identifier hashes have to be unique. So its really not secret who is talking to who (much like PGP).

Still no mention of the algorithm. Is it a public/private scheme? Because that bad, as computing power advances those will become easier to crack meaning permanently stored, public messages will become readable ~5-10 years after sending.
Chicken & egg. I once started with a similar idea - meeting sport buddies - but on a country scale. I found it very hard to gain enough traction for people to actually be able to meet each other.

Because.... what value does it bring for Joe who's living in SF, that Jane from NY wants to go for a work-out? I think "importing" events from other sites is one option to get things going (still - quite a lot of effort). Other idea - is to start locally, run a big ad campaign, get in touch with sport centers, etc, then "conquer" other cities, one by one.

Good luck! :)
What are you talking about, pretty much everything can compile to JS these days.
Ask HN: Ohours.org is closing down – what's an alternative?
I want to host open office hours but need a better tool to manage requests than gmail + google calendar. I liked the idea of ohours.org with requests, scheduling, etc. -- is there an alternative I could (ab)use?
And if its' a business trip, or the front row seats are already taken? I've been stuck in the last row of an airplane before on a last minute flight... my knees were wedged into the joint from the seat in front of me, and when they tried to recline it popped my knee cap out of position. fuck you
The classic example of undefined behavior is "nasal demons". Which is to say, that when you hit undefined behavior, the compiler would be completely within its rights to make demons fly out of your nose.

"Undefined behavior" means the compiler can do anything. In your example, the compiler could execute one statement but not the other. Or it could execute both of them fifteen times. Or it could reformat your hard drive, or start a war. All would be legal according to the spec. (Feasibility of implementing such things is, of course, another question.) The more mundane consequences are more likely to be what you actually see, but the point is that you can't really reason about it in the abstract. You have to know exactly how your particular compiler handles it, and it can go well beyond just executing your code in a funny way.

For one real-world that approaches "nasal demons", early versions of gcc would start a game of nethack if they encountered a #pragma statement in your program.
Entangled Photons Produce Quantum Images of Invisible Targets They Never Hit
Bjarne has been on a bit of a promotion tour recently. Here is another Q&A session he did with Slashdot on the 20th [0]. I suppose this is because of the recent standardization of C++14.

One thing I don't particularly agree with is that some of his examples of C++ code use features that will not be made available for years, likely around or after 2017 when C++17 should be standardized. This is assuming compilers implement the standard quickly, which is worse on some platforms than others (cough Visual Studio cough). What I'm specifically talking about is any example that mentions concepts, but at least he is clear that concepts are only currently available in a branch of GCC.

[0] http://features.slashdot.org/story/14/08/20/011231/interview...
Ryanair 'solved' this problem by fitting non-recline seats (which also means cabin crew don't have to check seat positions before landing).

There's also no seat-back storage which increases leg room (or rather lets them fit more seats in the same space) which also removes the need for cleaners to check seat pockets reducing turn-around time.
Death Valley National Park: First Observation of Rocks in Motion
Loyalty leader Belly expands its footprint by rolling out to 2,600 7-Elevens
Terrible "study". Why compare to some traditional tribe? The number of confounding variables is incredibly high.

Why not to compare to their neighbor without allergies? That might actually teach you something.
Is nogapp opensource? I can't find the source..

edit: nvm i see it now. For ref it is at https://github.com/microg
This Map Shows Which American States Are Richer Than Entire Countries
Singularity University class of 2014 project videos
> my conclusion is that free call is not attractive at all to general public

Well Google has the free calling built into Gmail and Hangouts now so I wouldn't be so sure about that.
I upvoted you to try to bring you out of the gray because I think you're making a useful point (though I don't think your tone is effective, which is probably why you got downvoted).

Write access to minds is, uh, pretty serious. And we generally suck at writing secure software. So yeah, this is scary. As much as I love the idea of this tech, and want to live in a world where it's ubiquitous and safe and we don't need screens or keyboards etc., I'm not going to be beta testing any of this stuff.
Support for JS-built apps [Phonegap, mobile-web] would be awesome too!
at over 3X the price per seat...
looks beautiful, thanks for sharing!
Most responses are hyperbole. Undefined behavior likely doesn't include making up new code; its not certain where you will end up, but someplace in existing code is a certainty.
The things people choose to blog about...
Out of curiosity, do you not watch TV series or movies (on a monitor), or is it just cable TV that you don't watch? What about popular music, news, video games and other cultural expressions that all subtly promote materialism?
Show HN: Brain Putty, match-three where objects are different
Thanks for sharing your thoughts – much appreciated! We think there's something special about a place where the purpose is to actually play sports. There's something about cultivating that niche.

We are absolutely going to implement several of the features you mentioned, and hadn't though about some of them, so thanks again!
This is one area where I wish the Unix philosophy (reuse of tools) was taken a bit further. Too me, every command should be callable as a C library function. That way you wouldn't have to parse the human readable output through a pipe. Not only that, there needs to be both human-readable, as well as machine-readable output to all commands. For example I would love to be able to call "ps" from another script and easily select specific columns from an xml or json output.
This works pretty well too: http://www.amazon.com/General-Brand-Black-Masking-Tape/dp/B0...