skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"This is related to another comment about two types of genius. There are people who solve a problem the same way that you do, just much much faster. You can imagine doing the same work they had done, but rather than an hour or a day, you would have got to the same place after months of hard work and dead ends. These people are much like ourselves, only a lot quicker. Then there are the other people who show you a solution, and you have absolutely no idea how they even got started. Feynman fell into this latter group." [1]

"Upon starting high school, Feynman was quickly promoted into a higher math class and an unspecified school-administered IQ test estimated his IQ at 125—high, but "merely respectable" according to biographer James Gleick;"[2]

I think people with extremely high IQ tend to be "fast thinkers" and they seem to rely more on logical thinking while those who have sufficient IQ tend to be "deep thinkers" and rely more on intuition/epiphanies.[3]

John von Neumann would the "fast thinker" type of Genius.

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FeynmanAlgorithm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#CITEREFGleick1...

[3] “I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking”
― Albert Einstein
How Steve Ballmer Became a Rookie Basketball Mogul
My reading of the caption is that they projected the 3d center of gravity out to or down onto a 3d surface of the earth (along the line connecting the center of gravity to the center of the planet).
People tend to complain about problems and ignore things that are fine.

While a desire to avoid pointing out any positive of a situation that drives them crazy frequently may be part of the reason it isn't mentioned I think it pales in comparison to just forgetting about whatever isn't a problem.
Hardware startup never like software startup, because hardware product built by the whole ecosystem, such as supplier, manufacturer, etc. And software is built by your laptop. :)
QWOP Athletics
I'm reminded of the story of Rat Park: http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park/
It's interesting to me that the main defenders of the status quo with respect to taxi regulation tend to invoke themes of social justice and egalitarianism (and criticize, either overtly or covertly, their opponents' privileged perspective).

This is interesting to me because none of the studies I have come across concerning taxi regulation emphasize these arguments; they mention them only in passing, if at all.

Take this paper from the November 2007 issue of Transport Policy, "Entry Controls in Taxi Regulation: Implications of US and Canadian experience for taxi regulation and deregulation": http://schallerconsult.com/taxi/entrycontrol.pdf

In its discussion of the rationale for taxi regulation (section 3), these reasons are given:

- economies of scale may disproportionately favor larger companies
- regulations guarantee availability of off-peak and low-density service
- many aspects of taxi service cannot be examined prior to consumption
- insufficient barrier to entry may lead to oversupply

Or take this OECD Policy Roundtable debating taxi regulation from 2007: http://www.oecd.org/regreform/sectors/41472612.pdf

The reasons given there (p.22) are:

- lack of regulation leads to "excess entry" into the market
- high taxi supply could take people away from more "economical" transport options
- arguments about pollution and congestion
- cyclical demand could lead to wage downturn when demand subsides
- cyclical demand could harm service quality, since long-term players can't become established.

So out of all of those arguments, maybe one has anything to do with these egalitarian concerns that Uber/Lyft critics invoke. And many of these arguments are very directly obsoleted by Uber/Lyft-like business models (particularly the ones concerning incomplete information prior to the hail).

So why suddenly are taxis the champions of the underprivileged, and their competitors the tools of young rich person oppression? If protecting the underprivileged is "the entire point of taxi regulation in the first place," why are these social arguments missing from pre-2009 (when Uber was formed) literature?
You are probably right about the specs being nailed down a long time ago, but I don't think it really would have made a difference. The only possible scenario where Amazon can reliably sell smartphones at a price of $650 would be if they scored exclusive rights to distribute the iPhone 6.
I work in the Wi-Fi sector. It's amazing how much data clients can and will collect and use for retail/advertising purposes. Chances are whenever you see a 'Free Wi-Fi' sign your presence and dwell time (at the very least) are being recorded.

High-end systems can track an individual and follow them on a map, noting things like which stores they visit at a shopping center. The sheer volume of data collected is fantastic (from the perspective of a data-nerd like myself) and scary at the same time.
> All the world's a stage,

> And all the men and women merely players.

I think one benefit of privacy is the ability to maintain multiple identities. Not just "secret" identities, but also the ability to play different roles depending on the context. I'm not sure how to explain it exactly, but I feel like a loss of privacy would bestow upon me a pretty heavy cognitive burden. Even if my behavior isn't embarrassing or self-sabotaging, I have better things to do than justify my every waking moment and tailor a consistent & comprehensive identity. It would be the equivalent of spaghetti code.

And in keeping with the information asymmetry theme, I can't see how this could be feasibly implemented. If everyone agreed to an entirely transparent society, it only takes a single agent to exploit the system by keeping secrets anyway. There would have to be absurdly harsh disincentives for defecting in order to keep the system pareto optimal.
I think there is no distinction to be made. Consider encoding information in a 4-cube (hypercube) constrained by Maxwell's equations. (Let's make the space discrete so our heads don't explode.) You will find that you can only encode an amount of information proportional to the cube of the 4-cube's edge length, not the 4th power, because you are constrained by Maxwell's equations. If you further insist on keeping the information unchanged with respect to time, you'll be restricted to an amount proportional to the square of the 4-cube's edge length.
Seems like he could have just tested his site before deploying it? If IE 6/7 were such major money makers for him maybe he should have made sure they worked.

And why did he find the bug and "not immediately fix it"? That itself is ridiculous as well.
I believe Strilanc is talking about dimensions in phase space rather than in physical space. If you plot all the possible configurations of those points on a graph, that graph would have 30 dimensions. Whether or not that is a valid point is beyond me.
The huge problem with this is upload time and bandwidth. For me at least to upload 1TB to the cloud on my reasonably crappy speed ADSL+ connection (1 mbps up, 4 mbps down) it would take more than 2000 hours, assuming constantly on connection and no upload traffic limit.
Webservices that don't work in mainland China
Amazon as a whole has razor thin margins. They can't afford to squander hundreds of millions of dollars on anything.
Any idea how many Amazon ordered to be manufactured?
My first stat class was an introductory statistics class that was geared towards biology students. It was pretty terrible.

When I got into CS grad school I took more rigorous statistics courses and fell in love. I mean, head over heels in love. I tried to transfer out of the CS graduate school and into to the statistics graduate school. Because I would lose funding and would be starting over I instead decided just to quit when I was awarded my masters instead. (Now I just spend my days code JavaScript and CSS...what happened..)

If I would have been exposed to statistics earlier in life I'm absolutely certain I would have majored in it in addition to computer science.
I think they could have deluded themselves into thinking that a $650 phone would work much more easily 2 years ago than today, for instance.
If you think this is complicated, you should see the alternatives!
Seagate Ships World's First 8 Terabyte Hard Drive
https://twitter.com/LizardSquad/status/504416785194434562

It's obviously suspect considering the source. Twitch dev on reddit said they were looking into it 2 hours ago and hasn't come back to the thread yet.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/2eoeab/twitch_down/
Very clever and quite accurate once I bumped up the link count. Running Chrome on Win7.
This is really interesting. It would be great to see how this plays out, as there are "menu effects" and "reputation effects", intertia and such that would make it awkward to have society make this change without people publicly admitting what they are doing.
True, TextMate's agony is at a lower pace than Sublime Text, but it's still not having the metabolic rate of Atom and the likes.
The 120 second interval is the minimum from RFC4787 Sec. 4.3 REQ-5. (There is an exception that permits shorter intervals but only for specific ports, in particular port 53 for DNS.) If Linux is using 30 seconds then it's in violation and someone should submit a bug report.
> I love tu use it when I'm in San Francisco but cannot shake the feeling that we are screwing ourselves long term by supporting it.

Have you considered not using it?
I can see how that could be the case. They wouldn't have had my $650 even two years ago, but its possible they would have had a better result than they did in 2014.

In the future, I think Amazon still may have a shot at producing a decent phone at a reasonable price.

Hell, I just bought a Galaxy Nexus (from Amazon) to replace the LG G2 that I broke (didn't feel like spending $600). In spite of its age, its hands-down a better phone than the G2. If they get the form-factor and the software right, there are lots of people who won't even care if the CPU isn't the latest and greatest iteration.
> "Lots of people think NAT is a show-stopper for peer to peer communication, but it isn’t. More than 90% of NATs can be traversed, with most being traversable in reliable and deterministic ways."

All the traversal methods require coordination with a 3rd party (ie: centralized) server so - yes - this is a show stopper for P2P.

As public addresses become more scarce, and carrier NAT becomes common, the problem of finding that intermediary will only get worse.

IPv6 should be a solution, but it won't get off the ground if carrier NAT gets priority, for example. (Or if ISPs just put firewalls everywhere, and other "best practices"...)
Fun list so far!

I'd vote for Not YYZ, which will only make sense to Rush fans and morse code freaks.
I'm sure the mafia would love the end of the witness protection program. And fundamentalists of any religion would like to know who exactly is breaking which one of their arbitrary rules and where they live, when their kids go to school etc. Pedophile offenders would like to know when which child is home alone etc.

Privacy has a purpose, damn it!

These are extreme cases, but they still are about the privacy of people. The article mentioned good less extreme examples.

Just who you are voting for is already something you have to hide (in general). If you wouldn't have a right for secret elections you could be forced to vote for a certain candidate or your vote could be bought.

Yes, the governments keep things secret that shouldn't be secret (e.g. contracts/agreements with other countries, i.e. how the big countries fuck the little ones). There is a saying: use public data, protect private data. In German: Öffentliche Daten nützen, private Daten schützen. (it rhymes)
OWASP Password Hashing in Ruby
A Year Without Privacy – NoahDyer.tv by Noah Dyer – Kickstarter
No, it's not that white people think they are discriminated again more than black people. The idea is that discrimination based on race is bad regardless of who it is practiced against.
Does anyone know if anyone has created a hacker news clone joomla extension?
Exactly, I still have no idea why anyone in the right mind would want to go to a mid tier private school that no one has heard of yet still charges the same tuition as Stanford and Harvard!
There are quite a few. It basically varies with the type and size of internet cafe. Large commercial internet cafes with dozens of machines that only do internet will often be locked down and reset the PC after each user. Many will have software prohibiting just about everything. Some will not. Smaller places like copy and photo shops that have a dozen machines or coffee shops with several machines will often have machines that allow portable software use.
I shouldn't need convincing. Apple's own actions should be proof enough, don't you think?
Those two buttons are sitting on a preproduction branch as you write this :) great call, agreed
Thanks narsk!! Get in touch through the app if you'd like to share any more insights. As a young startup we're always looking to broaden our perspective.
Too Young to Understand
>When big tech companies are offering a Stanford graduate with only a few summers of programming internships under the belt for 150k/year

Aren't most of these offers in a part of CA where the cost of living is just as ridiculous as the salary? Therefore making the salary not ridiculous at all.

I work in the DC area, and veteran programmers normally can't get anywhere close to that unless its a contract job with no benefits and shitty working conditions. Even still, it will likely be about 30k less than that.
Just to be clear - you're talking about Nuclear Explosively Pumped Flux Compression Generator correct?

From 2010: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2552508/posts

"BP with oversight from NATO and the help of several government agencies has successfully tested a Nuclear explosively pumped flux compression generator (EPFCG). It is a device used to generate a high-power electromagnetic pulse by compressing magnetic flux using high explosive."

This part was curious:

"The USGS and Canada Earthquake center are reporting a mild earthquake in the region registering between 3.8 and 4.2 magnitude."

I agree though, getting something this powerful into a suitcase would be a feat of engineering and would leave the operator in a very dangerous position.
Thanks for following up. I had assumed you were talking about some aspect of the site's design so I just looked through the html for a couple minutes before giving up. And now I'm too busy being impressed to feel like a dumbass
You should have sex with your ex 10 Reasons Why
They do that complete render in 177kb...? I remember crack intros but that's insane. Is this in C?
It's not exactly pure PR/propaganda, but it's definitely the most consumer-oriented of IEEE's publications. I'd place it somewhere between mags like Popular Mechanics and full-on topic-specific engineering journals. I actually find it quite good in general, though I don't like reading about war tech; I'm sure the U.S. military pushes hard to get stories in it. And most people don't realize that most technology follows a military->big business->everyday consumer path.

Which is why anyone who is not completely narcotized realizes self-driving cars won't be hitting the suburbs until they're thoroughly deployed in the military and internal to big business. So we are being duped in the way that our daydreams are supporting research that we'll be the last ones to enjoy... just look at the internet and cellphones. The military and big business had them for decades before "us".
Having worked with Meteor for 8 months by now, my love affair with it is slowly fading.

I guess I've realized that it's too far on the left on the [framework...library] scale for my liking. It's very "don't call us, we'll call you". Which is awesome when you start because you just sort of put stuff out there, functions, collections etc., and Meteor magically picks it up and does stuff with it. Yes, you can still debug everything and it's all open source so nothing is black boxed, but it's still really annoying when the magic doesn't work or worse, when it works but just not very well. As with one of my apps at the moment, that is suddenly slow. Everything works so there is no error message that I can use as a break point. But it just takes a long time for my update function to be called for whatever reason, and debugging that takes me far into territory that I don't know about and frankly don't care to know about.

Libraries, on the other hand, require you to say more specifically what you want to happen, but then you can either see that it happens or not. And debug that one particular function if it doesn't, or if it's slow.

I have tremendous respect for the work that they are putting in; iteration is really fast and problems are being solved quickly so there is no doubt in my mind that Meteor will become one of the major platforms of the web like Rails did, but it's going to be a while before I will be using it for new projects.
Actually this is entirely achievable right now, with very little code. You can use WebRTC in chrome / firefox, which implements all the nasty details of peer-to-peer communication for you (and uses TLS-esque security). All you need is a STUN / TURN server and something to do the initial handshake and you're off to the races.

I've not gotten around too it, but someone should setup a webserver that speaks the protocol (perhaps with this: https://code.google.com/p/libjingle/) then you serve your site as a static HTML file on AWS or similar, spin up WebRTC, and then communicate with your server that way. Now you can serve a whole website sitting behind a firewall.
As you point out, most people are critiquing the state intervention for being woefully outdated and not inline with market economics (as they always seem to end up being overtime thanks to technology). No-one really thinks the Taxi companies are the "evil" ones because they were handed monopolies on a platter then got comfortable and fat with their position.

If the local administrators have the power to hand out monopolies, they should also have the responsibility to retract it when it no longer makes sense. A repeated and long-delayed failure to do so is harmful to society, whether or not it was had good intentions at the beginning doesn't absolve it of criticism now.
Except there are other, easier ways to contact google or facebook employees. Why would anyone do what you suggest instead of using linkedin or github? There's no such alternative for contacting lyft drivers in this case, so you're analogy is not very accurate. Also, lyft drivers aren't employees of lyft, which strains to your analogy more.
Interesting how you thing it is obvious that you are more capable than low-income folks with the same test scores as you, or that you assume that there aren't low-income students with the same test scores as you.
Show HN: Choice.js
This is pretty common comment pattern on reddit (everyone hand-wringing self-righteously over the "problem" of a few, heavily downvoted comments). It's disappointing to see it here. And yes, I realize there is some irony in this comment.
Stock Android really is the best experience. You can tell it was designed with a sort of consistency and fluidity that all of the manufacturer skins lack. I would also take a Galaxy Nexus over any skinned Android device; with the exception of HTC Sense, which has really improved since the disastrous Gingerbread days.
But a market for governments does exist. People "buy" or support their governments through elections and immigration.

Edit: On second thought, perhaps you were talking about not a particular government, but a system of government. In that case, immigration is the only choice.
> Some NAT devices support various methods of intentionally opening ports from the inside. The most common of these is called Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP).

UPnP should be avoided whenever possible. It's a hideous protocol. NAT-PMP (originally from Apple, now RFC6886) is dramatically simpler and ideal for small networks. Its successor NAT-PCP (RFC6887) is only slightly more complicated in order to better deal with large enterprise networks.
Stalled? I can't understand why people has this perception. You're not the only one; SublimeHQ forums are full of people complaining that "Sublime project is dead".

The guy releases a new version almost every month. He doesn't talk much, but keeps chugging along, fixing bugs and releasing incremental functionality every month or two.

True, it is still beta. But so what? ST3 has been incredibly stable since the first version, and all beta versions are a free upgrade to all ST2 licensed users till it is out of beta.

Plus, if you're really missing any functionality, just go ahead and develop a plugin. It's easy, and you don't need to open source the entire editor for that.

I think we should give the author a break. He built one of the best editors out there, and I really hope he can make a living out of this product, in whatever way he can.
Sort of. Without seeing the data I can't say for sure, but I'd bet the cancellations occur almost instantly after seeing who the driver is (someone who already had been pitched). They don't really lose in that case because they haven't done anything other than accept the ride.
Computer engineering is probably a special case. It’s easier to demonstrate skills independent of credentials. Eg, a prominent open-source project or successful app likely proves employability as much as a degree.

It’s also true that the value of an elite education decays with time. The studies I’ve seen (someone help me with a cite) seem to indicate that after 10 years, choice of school has very little predictive power for one’s career success.

I think elite schools probably are helpful for elite engineering positions. One would expect a compsci degree from, say, Carnegie Mellon if hiring for, say, compilers or chip design or operating systems. But even then, successful work outside of university can trump the credential.
The dominance of 'free' App Store games, as seen in one handy chart
Yes, I understand that others think it matters; I never implied otherwise. Aside from that, it matters not one bit what "X" is, except in the circumstance where an employer wishes to gauge whether he can offer less than he's prepared to.
> A contribution to Firefox OS is a suggestion at best, but one that can be unilaterally disregarded by Mozilla without any sort of consequence to Mozilla. That's no different than making a suggestion to Google about Android, or to Apple about iOS.

You are seriously saying that Mozilla's openness is no better than iOS's? That's one of the more ridiculous anti-Mozilla statements you've come up with over the years.
Education Company Dedicated to Interest Learning
Why is subtracting two times in 1927 giving a strange result?
One thing that's great about the GN phone is that you can swap out the batteries to obviate the need to carry around a portable battery. You can't do this with the N4 (can't take off backplate) or the N5 (you can take off the backplate, but there's a metal brace holding the battery in place).

My friend still has his GN phone from its original launch and carries 2 extra batteries with him at all times (he's a real estate broker so he needs to always be available via phone)
21 Things Hackathon Hackers Want
Just to put it into perspective, Amazon has 132,600 employees.

So if a full 25% of Amazon employees decided to be company men/women, that alone would account for all their sales.
On the topic of legality/forbidding scraping, Kimono offers webmasters analytics and control of the scraping users do through its service. I'm not sure if this service is actually live, or forthcoming.

https://www.kimonolabs.com/webmasters
I inexplicably feel compelled to chant "Big Brother!"