skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it is actually pretty spooky setup. May be there is a Nobel Prize lurking there, yet looking at the Figure 2 of their arxiv paper http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1401/1401.4318.pdf

one can't wonder why for example the beam L4'-L5 isn't filtered out - if this beam does carry information about the image then we would have FTL communication possible.

Another question is why L3-L3' red beam - the image info carrying beam - is fed into NL2 crystal thus providing a chance to physically affect formation of NL2-D5-L6 yellow beam, ie. to exchange information. Some of the red beam photons entering NL2 would be consumed and re-emitted by the NL2 crystal's atoms (and the location of these atoms will be affected by the red beam internal density ie. by the image of the object "O") and thus would physically affect the yellow beam generation, i.e. passing some image info into the yellow beam. Thus no entanglement or other "spooky" QM features necessary for the NL2-D5-L6 yellow beam to become carrying some image info.
Full paper at https://pdf.yt/d/81I785FPAXnvTVYy
Oh, great news. that's what kept me from signing up in the first place. They replied to my comment saying they were "inherently social" as if you can't be social without Facebook.
Dropbox Slashes Its Price as the Cost of a Gigabyte Nears Zero
Firefox Nightly is now displaying sponsored tiles on its new tab page
Take the blame, not the credit
Source?

The total precolumbian population of the Americas (north, south, and central) was ~40-112 million. Less than 1/6 to 1/3 that of the present US and only slightly more than California today at the low end.

See Charles C. Mann's 1491, pp. 104-109, among others.
Yes, I'm posting my own tweet. I hope that's okay.
phpChart (http://phpchart.org) is a higher level charting library for jqplot if you don't wan to spend days to learn custom styling and scripting.
Revisiting Microsoft OneNote
I'm reminded of Hong Kong, which has dual plumbing - fresh water for drinking, cooking and washing, and salt water for the toilet. I understand most of Hong Kong's fresh water is piped from the mainland (and has been done for decades).
My information is way out of date, but I believe most Google products are still tested that way. There's a long Googler-only incubation period for everything. And Robert Scoble was probably on Google+ months before you knew about it.

The people at Google aren't stupid. They know they need to iterate with customers. But they're iterating towards a very specific event, the day when they turn it on for a billion people in 10 languages.

I'm saying that very wide launch makes it kind of sterile. And the drive towards scalability-first probably prevents them from exploring quirkier ideas.
It's not that simple, at all. From my Pinboard archives (what would I do without Pinboard?):

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/what-anesthesi...

For every 1,000 people who undergo general anesthesia, there will be one or two who are not as unconscious as they seem — people who remember their doctors talking, and who are aware of the surgeon’s knife, even while their bodies remain catatonic and passive. For the unlucky 0.13 percent for whom anesthesia goes awry, there’s not really a good preventive. That’s because successful anesthetization requires complete unconsciousness, and consciousness isn’t something we can measure.

Here we have a much more common problem than locked-in syndrome, a problem which anesthesiologists have been studying since before their job had a name, but we can't even solve that because we don't even have a decent working definition of what we mean by "consciousness" in these contexts, let alone what we can measure to determine someone's "consciousness". It's an active field of research, which is a fine thing to remember whenever we start getting too high on science fiction:

http://www.xkcd.com/1345/
This girl wanted to send a labor day message, and this is what happened
The "real" photographs would have been heavily edited in photoshop anyway.
For a comparison to historical averages, see California Department of Water Resoruces Reservoir Conditions. Where the historical average calls for about 2/3 capacity, most reservoirs are at about 1/3, some markedly less (10%).

You'll get percent-of-average from Reservoir Water Storage (By Hydrologic Region), with historical data for selected years to 1977.

A plot for Lake Oroville showing annual patterns for current, wet, and dry years: Lake Oroville Storage Level Graph.

URLs in the Reddit comment below, apologies but moblie cut & paste stinks.

http://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/2ebhyx/images_3_ye...

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/resDetailOrig.action...

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/reservoirs/STORAGEW

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/products/rescond.pdf
The beef statistic is often cited on HN, but isn't particularly relevant to the issue.

Perhaps we should be questioning making the California desert the vegetable basket of the US, at least on a year round basis.
We made a decision to go with phpChart in June. It works well in our use case. We can still add custom javascript when something is outside its offered feature set.
"rs" for "reshape array". Found only on FreeBSD systems (yes, we are better... smile)

For example, transpose a text file:

~/ (j=0,r=1)$ cat foo.txt
a b c
d e f
~/ (j=0,r=0)$ cat foo.txt | rs -T
a d
b e
c f

Honestly I have never used in production, but I still think it is way cool.

Also, being forced to work in a non-Unix environment, I am always reminded how much I wish everything were either text files, zipped text files, or a SQL database. I know for really big data (bigger than our typical 10^7 row dataset, like imagery or genetics), you have to expand into things like HDF5, but part of my first data cleaning sequence is often to take something out of Excel or whatever and make a text file from it and apply unix tools.
How to Play Back Blu-ray Discs on iMac
Can hydro power be imported from Oregon?
The Open, Creative Commons-licensed Intellectual Property Law Textbook
How was exposing PRISM worse? I'll admit to being biased in his favor, and somewhat ignorant of what exactly was disclosed and how it could help the enemy, so I welcome some input on that. My starting position is that I don't see how knowing that, say, Yahoo is tapped, has changed the bad guys' day-to-day operations to the degree that you could reasonably say Snowden significantly aided them. Or even if it did, it falls under the category of 'merely' "alerting them of our intelligence capabilities" which we both agree was a "line Snowden crossed."

Anyway, however damaging it was, my point is that some slides with a bunch of code names, "data-sharing partners", hints at legal justifications and the bureaucracy set up to carry this out, and maybe some high-level descriptions of how the systems work, is a lot different than releasing the actual code that does it, private keys to the servers involved, etc.

It's not like graph theory and data mining are elite subjects only NSA knows, so some high-level descriptions aren't going to help the bad guys much. Handing over complete source code would.
True. It's still mind boggling when I think about that.
Registration-skipping Google link:
https://www.google.co.kr/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_...
It does. But you can't have it.
Unless they carefully considered issues such as memory timing, or actually ran all the CPUs at 1GHz, just scaling results by clock frequency will make the x86s look worse and the ARMs better, because the x86s have a bigger gap between core and memory speed. Anyone who has experience with PC overclocking will know this - increasing the core clock by e.g. 25% will not make any benchmark (except maybe the most trivial of microbenchmarks) result improve by that same amount, and the same goes for the other direction: A 3.4GHz i7 run at 1GHz will not be 3.4x slower. On the other hand (no pun intended), the ARMs have a native frequency closer to 1GHz and scaling their results will not introduce as much error.
Let's start more wars! Wait? What about ISA...?
it is already possible with existing devices - like night vision googles for example, where one kind of photons hit some electronic photon capturing device, CCD sensor for example, and the CCD would generate electric current which can be used to generate another kind of photons on the screen.

Similar, in principle, information transfer is happening in this experiment too - see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8235764 - image carrying beam physically affects crystal (it is IR after all, and it does heat up the crystal and thus the distribution of the heating up of the crystal is also affected by the object being imaged) where photons used to generate final image are formed.
It can be and is. Power purchases from the Columbia River / Bonneville Power Administration are a significant contribution to California's grid.
Just put the version number in the query string:

http://coffeescript.org/?1.8.0#changelog
Through the Cracks Between Stars
Aside from it stinging if it gets in your eyes, is there a reason why one couldn't use saline water for showers?

Either way, I would suspect the dual plumbing required to pull off a setup like that would be horrifically expensive.
It sounds crazy (and is crazy), but that kind of corporate structure is surprisingly common. There's probably some executive training manual somewhere that advises this kind of nonsense. I think that manual is called "The Prince".
https://github.com/xixixao/coffee-script

I just include this is my package.json at the moment.

"coffee-script": "xixixao/coffee-script"

Have been for the last few months. It uses --> and ==> for generators with version 1.7.1

The only issue I've found with this fork is "if not yield something()" results in a syntax error, but "if not ( yield something() )" works as expected.

Just fork it to your own repo and forget about it until it's added in stable.
Can you do it in js without using conditionals.
A desal plant in Australia is a good idea because it is an arid continent and is prone to drought. The biggest desal plant in the world was not a good idea. It was not required at the time and probably wont be required for another 20 years, especially given how well water restrictions worked during the drought.

Over-building on infrastructure is almost as bad as not building it at all. And as someone else pointed out this particular project was beset by dodgy builders, unions drinking at the trough and grandstanding politicians who wanted to be seen doing "something". All up, massive waste of money.
Because people like eating meat and the fact that eating meat is like driving an SUV causes some cognitive dissonance in people who consider themselves socially conscious.
Well sure. They don't because you can get better performance if you are able to eliminate branches that you can prove aren't taken.
Because beef feed is the most water efficient crop that can be grown in many areas. Cattle have four stomachs, they are very efficient at turning grass and similar crops into calories. They are inefficient at turning energy dense foods such as grains into calories.

In other words, if the most environmentally friendly crop for an area cannot be eaten directly by humans, the most environmentally friendly thing may be to use cattle to turn them into calories that can be eaten by humans.

A large portion of North America used to be grassland fed upon by Bison. Range cattle have a very similar ecological footprint to Bison. By that measure, they are much more "natural" than any other food (except perhaps bison or mastodon). Pasture and hay land is rarely/never a monoculture, it is rarely/never sprayed with chemical. (Which is much more environmentally friendly than the organic alternative, plowing). It's also rarely irrigated. You're much more likely to find wild life on pasture and hay land.
It almost makes you think a good idea might be to fund high performing employees to form their own companies to compete with you. Basically incubate your own competitors, but hold a minority stake in their companies.
Oh, you're right. They must not be having a drought then.
sorry up now...
A Software Developer's Project Management Template
How much beef in the US is free range and grass fed? I'm betting a very very small amount of the whole.
Are you native Californian perchance? Everyone I meet from here seems to not mind the drought too much(although it seems very serious this time, boy cried wolf-type situation).
As a lighthearted suggestion: have you tried purchasing a whiteboard and practicing writing code on it?
How a tweet led to medical photo app Figure 1 getting backing from USV
Cattle is raised in places that are technically desert, like Montana, without requiring any water beyond natural rain fall. They eat the hardy natural grasses of the area. If the land was plowed to grow grains or any other human palatable vegetable crop, the soil would dry up and blow away, becoming desert like other over farmed areas like the Middle East.
True.

A virtual store could also deliver in that department though, in that knife blocks and storage containers could always be situated in the neighbouring department, no matter what the customer was actually looking for. The accessories and decorations in each in-virtual-store display could also be tailored on a per customer basis, depending on what Ikea knows about the customer. "Nice table, and I really like the placemats they have used on it...". One can imagine Ikea providing a "buy the lot" option in their payment process.
Nobody doubts there's a serious drought here in California, but those "before and after" photos (2011 vs. 2014) are misleading and likely show seasonal variance.

I can find photos predating the "before" images that make Lake Oroville look like a parched wasteland:
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/17518597
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/17518170
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/17518629

Those were uploaded in 2009 (the camera used was announced in 2006, so that's a three-year window).

Yes, there's a drought. Yes, 80 percent of the developed water supply in California is used by agriculture. But not accounting for seasonal variation in a state with a dry vs. rainy season doesn't do the argument justice.
I can think of two landmines that make most C++ issues pale. First is things blowing up at run-time due to typos or syntax errors. Second (related) is that you can't safely refactor because you don't really know the types that functions take or where they're being called from. Sure C++ can be a pain but you can build and maintain very large software in C++. It's a lot harder to do in Python (without taking other considerations into account).
Do you have plans for an Android app by now?
Sorry but this is terrible advice. The roads are deceivingly dangerous in the sense that there are so many sharp rocks everywhere that could puncture your tire. You have no idea what the condition of the roads are ahead of time, so taking any car without reinforced tires has the potential to get you in a lot of trouble, especially depending on the time of year. There is no cell phone signals and it's dozens of miles to the main highway.
Without all of the relevant data it may be hard to draw conclusions from these photos and news stories. As an example... This year the Blue Mesa Reservoir (Colorado) would have filled up but in order to keep a downstream endangered fish species around, much more water than normal was let out. Having not known that I could have made some wrong assumptions about the state of water in our area.
For dense data like that, you might give dygraphs a try.
Mirror just turned one! Birthday raffle and indie licenses 40% off
With respect, there is reason to believe that McCarthy was not entirely wrong. The evils of communist governments are also beyond dispute, in my view.

[1]. See the section on "Ongoing Debate", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy

[2]. Communist governments have been among the greatest perpetrators of democide, with the PRC at ~76 million citizens murdered, and the USSR at ~62 million citizens murdered in the 20th century. https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM

[3]. This man, in his book "Disinformation," wrote that the USSR had more people involved in covert operations and disinformation campaigns than they had active intelligence agents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Mihai_Pacepa
Very cool. The shaders fail to compile in the demo though, in Safari (on OS X 10.10). I get

[Error] Shader: invalid fragment shader 'bilateralGaussianBlur'
I'd point you in the direction of Carl Malamud, Jim Harper at the Cato Institute, and EFF, probably in that order. Jim's made it a project to liberate government data; Carl's gone further and made it his life's work.

Inside Congress itself? Hmm. I'm spending my time working on http://recent.io/ and now paying close attention nowadays. But if you're local to the SF south bay try Rep. Lofgren? I've done some Q&As with her and found she's one of the smarter and well-informed members of Congress on tech policy issues.
Ugh, yet another L2 VPN project that misuses non-rfc1918 (that is, assigned) address space for their pet project.

Just... don't.
As far as I'm aware, most beef cattle in North America is free range and grain finished. In other words, they eat hay (or their mother does) for most of their lives and are only fed grain for a couple of months before being slaughtered or on especially cold winter days.

It mostly depends on the relative prices of corn and beef. Corn is heavily subsidized in the States, so an unnatural amount of it is fed to cattle.
A few tricks:

1.) If they agree to a date when they will pay you, call them that day and "remind" them and get verbal confirmation that they will pay on that day. Ask that a reference number/receipt be emailed to you as soon as they payment has gone through. Call back later (or the next day if they don't pickup) to confirm that they kept to their agreement.

2.) Call them up and have a chat about the upcoming work and let them know that it's in danger of not being completed because you can't start it without payment for the past work. Stay professional and tell them from a strictly business point of view, you cant afford to lose any more money on their job. You'd LOVE to help them, but you just can't and you'll have to find work elsewhere and most likely won't be availible.

3.) If they screen your calls and hide behind receptionists or sub-ordinates, let the sub-ordinates know why you are calling. "Can you pass on a message for me? I am calling regarding invoice #780 for $7,400 which is now 55 days overdue." This always felt unprofessional for me, but it got results. I usually saved this tactic for "customers" (really they're thieves if they're not paying) that I don't mind losing, but I actually never did have anyone leave or complain about me doing this.
Erlang and Akka
I suspected I would get downvoted for not loving Dropbox. And I was right. Interesting.

FYI

rdiff is the reference implementation or first example of a utility written with librsync, which is the library that Dropbox used to build their "business".

Usage: rdiff [OPTIONS] signature [BASIS [SIGNATURE]]
[OPTIONS] delta SIGNATURE [NEWFILE [DELTA]]
[OPTIONS] patch BASIS [DELTA [NEWFILE]]

Options:
-v, --verbose Trace internal processing
-V, --version Show program version
-?, --help Show this help message
-s, --statistics Show performance statistics
Delta-encoding options:
-b, --block-size=BYTES Signature block size
-S, --sum-size=BYTES Set signature strength
--paranoia Verify all rolling checksums
IO options:
-I, --input-size=BYTES Input buffer size
-O, --output-size=BYTES Output buffer size
-z, --gzip[=LEVEL] gzip-compress deltas
-i, --bzip2[=LEVEL] bzip2-compress deltas
> there a reason why one couldn't use saline water for showers?

Yes. Water sent to a municipal sewer is usually recycled by sending it downriver to the next city. If you used salt water you couldn't do that.

Even the last city on the river before the ocean can recycle their sewer water for farming (although I'm not sure they do).

And with a septic system salt water would severely harm the septic system, and the land around it.

For the most part it's really hard for a regular home user with a sewer system to waste water. Water is "used up" mainly for watering plants (either residential or farming).

Or if you have a septic system.
I like to believe this happens fairly often.

It's just in the heavily politicized fields it becomes toxic to say "I was wrong."

Another reason I like to keep politics away from science.
Perhaps consider the value of all the services a family with young children would receive from the govt when comparing tax rates.
Best data I could dig up

>Most of the farms with livestock were farms with pastured livestock types and few other livestock, represented by 707,365 farms (54 percent). Farms with few livestock numbered 361,031 (27 percent), farms with confined livestock types numbered 237,821 (18 percent), and farms with specialty livestock types numbered 8,834 (0.7 percent).

>Overall, farms with pastured livestock types and few other livestock accounted for only 17 percent of all livestock sales

Of course, farms w/ confined cattle may raise free-range cattle as well.

>Farms with confined livestock types accounted for 99 percent or more of all animal units on all farms with livestock for each of fattened cattle, milk cows, other dairy cattle,11 swine, chickens, and turkeys

From skimming. This actually has some pretty interesting data, prolly warrants a more serious look.

www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/technical/?cid=nrcs143_014121
> if this is indeed a permanent change

It's not. It's happened many times before.
Makerbot is trying to be the Apple of consumer 3D printers. However, the Genius bar will still help you with your 3GS; Makerbot Support wouldn't touch my Thing-o-matic issue (and I bought that in 2012). The issue regarded the heated bed connector, which burned out due to a design flaw.

The moral is they will eagerly drop support for your $3000 purchase in just a few years.
The funny thing is, they were right. Satellite phones are a big deal in places with limited/no infrastructre.

What they got wrong was the deployment details, too much weight was put on providing service to places where nobody actually is, like 75% of the Earth's surface that's ocean. So they ended up with 66 satellites in a polar orbit.

A better idea is like the Thuraya model, put a couple satellites up in geosynchronous orbit (so you maintain coverage) and get a huge coverage cone.

http://www.thuraya.com/network-coverage

Today, with two birds, Thuraya covers 161 countries, pretty much all of Europe, most of Africa, all of Australia, and most of Asia and almost all of the coastal areas you're likely to find significant ship traffic in.

Even better, the phones are basically GSM phones and use SIM cards (they even look more or less like a normal cell phone and I believe you can use them for terrestrial service if you're within distance of a normal cell tower), you can get data service at 60kbps. Not blazing, but if you're stuck out in the middle of the Gobi and have a full battery you can check email and tweet. There's even sleeves you can get for smartphones to turn them into sat phones and indoor repeaters so you can use the phones indoors.

Two more satellites and they could provide something like 90% global landmass coverage.

Really the only people Iridium could ever have sold to would be the Navy. Which is basically what happened.

(apparently a next generation is being planned for 2015-2017 Falcon 9 launch series)
I saw something similar on the demos of what was supposed to be the Sonic X-treme game. This was supposed to be the debut of the Sonic franchise in the 32-bit world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzvS_beXtXk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_X-treme
Not an uncommon practice these days... Tell that to cellular networks and cable providers. We need IPv6.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28371780-Why-is-my-internet...

http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/11388/are-tmobile...