skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is not that it's expensive. What is wrong with Oracle's software is that people buy it mostly because migrating away is more expensive. And Oracle works hard to ensure that things will stay that way, even if that requires reducing the quality of their software.
Firefox 32.0.2
It seems like with the hangouts/google voice merger on android that it does now support it, but I haven't tested myself personally to see.
SAP Agrees to Buy Concur Technologies for Enterprise Value of $8.3B
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-18/sap-to-buy-concur-for-enterprise-value-of-about-8-3-billion.html
> I am half serious

Good. Still, it needs to be pointed out. This idea is an awesome hack to show how can you piggyback on existing infrastructure to make it work as something it was not intended to.

But it absolutely, terribly sucks at anything practical. Actually, it's a non-solution. Here's why.

> There are way fewer network round trips:

> 1. DNS query for TXT record for example.com

> 2. DNS reply with HTML content

Let me show an exactly equivalent alternative implementation of the above concept.

1. HTTP GET x.x.x.x/example
2. HTTP reply with HTML content

Both of them require you to do exactly the same steps - that is, connect to a hardcoded port of a server at a hardcoded IP address, request a user-defined resource, receive and display reply. DNS is not magic, IP addresses of DNS servers are hardcoded in your network configuration and/or in your router configuration and/or in your ISP configuration.

I know you're half-serious with this idea, but I'm going to play along. So to continue with the interesting thought experiment... if people were to start actually using DNS records to smuggle websites, they'd quickly overwhelm the capabilities of the DNS network, so the reliability and free hosting would quicky go out of window, along with all hope of ever having anything even resembling consistency in the Internet.

So yeah; a nice hack, but kids, don't try to deploy it at scale ;).
Blaming skepticism is an interesting point and makes me wonder. What about the publishing culture? Does it map more closely to incrementalism, or is it just that the surface area of the problem space has grown too vast for the human mind to generally see the bigger picture?

Should empiricism be changed to allow fuzziness and uncertainty within the process? Scientific truth seems like a problem space similar to those amenable to metaheuristics. We don't know the form of the optimal / most true model. I'm not positing this for physics. Mainly systems biology and big data fields.
I find it odd, the argument that by splitting off and going its own way, Scotland is basically guaranteed a selection of political parties offering a wider variety of choices. Unless the Yes party is arguing for proportional representation (or something like condorecet), Scotland is going to end up with a two-party system, and in two-party systems, the parties become very similar.
4chan's posting API is actually not (as of this very second) behind Cloudflare.
I guess I'm old but I have no idea what's happening here. Is this a pitch for a twitter account?
Status-Seekers and ‘Wantrepreneurs’: Still Far from Thiel’s Tech Utopia
Might as well add my one. It's not interactive, however it might give you an idea of why waves actually refract: http://youtu.be/y0gFrte5auQ?list=PLpYLorG2XEtQKD7uHC8dK1inU6...
Exactly: Tech angels who are not LPs in a VC fund are largely limited to the seed-stage investment market. Therefore founders can negotiate better terms (e.g. no cap).

Superangels / mini-VCs / actual VCs like Suster don't find it as appealing because they have plenty of Series A deals come their way.

But then again I bet they would bite at a really quality opportunity at the seed stage, because the best companies will seek larger funds at their Series A than what superangels can offer. (So they're not necessarily seeing the best companies at Series A.) Part of me thinks this "no cap's for suckers" blogstorm is just FUD to improve their collective negotiating position.

The only thing dumber than a superangel taking a no-cap convertible debt deal is a superangel passing on the next Facebook's seed because they didn't want to pay Series A prices. That would be incredibly shortsighted.
Well, Chrome still often shares the same process for groups of tabs. I think this particular feature has something more to do with a change they made to their plugin API.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=sunsetting+sha-1#!/story/forever/0...
We're close to getting cars that can drive themselves. We have cars that can detect when the brakes are locking and fix it, so that you never go into a skid. We have railroad locomotives that can tell when an axle is just starting to slip, and cut the power to that one axle, so that the wheels never slip even at full power on slick rails. We have jet aircraft engines that can report when a part is getting close to failure, so that it can be replaced at a soon-but-convenient time before it actually fails in flight.

Desktop computers. Laptops. Cell phones. CT scanners. The internet. The Large Hadron Collider. The Hubble Space Telescope. Progress has slowed since the 1970s? Really?

Progress in physical things has not so much slowed since the 1970s; it has gone into improving efficiency, convenience, and reliability. For example: In the 1970s, you were supposed to tune a car engine (plugs, points, timing) regularly. On my 2005, I had to do it after 100,000 miles. It used to be a great achievement to keep a car running for 100,000 miles; now it's just time for the first tuneup. For another: My 2005 is far more stable and easy to drive than what I had in the 1970s. This means I crash less often. That's progress.
>Headline capitalization is pretty easy: Capitalize the first word, then any proper nouns. That's it.

Not really accurate. Some publications use sentence case for headlines, but most publications use (and most style guides suggest) title case.
Workday did it for about 8 years. Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri did pretty well, with Dave just stepping down a few months ago.
Yes, a genius combination!
Luckily it looks like they’re going to stay part of the UK: the rest of us need that balancing action to get some sanity into the upcoming European referendum.
Probably a large number, but that doesn't explain why the U.S. murder rate was so high before the modern drug trade.
802.1x covers access control to networks. MAC addresses are not for access control.

Not that a court would agree with my logic, of course.
"essentially zero" is an exaggeration, but electric cars are dramatically cheaper to fuel. They use much less energy and the energy they use is in a much cheaper form (electricity vs gasoline).
> plus the cost of wear on the onboard storage system (battery, etc.)

That falls under vehicle maintenance and does not play into the cost of fuel.

> it only means the cost of energy for a vehicle is equal to the cost of the same energy on the electric grid

Yes, I was exaggerating but it is already pretty cheap. If memory serves, it is about $0.08/kWh in the US or $6.80 to charge Tesla's largest battery pack which is way cheaper than $40-60 per gasoline tank. And if you extrapolate a little, that cost is going to go down by the time electric vehicles are mature because the literal energy cost should be less and electric vehicles should be more efficient. But maybe I am wrong about that, only time will tell.
Datavisualization with Angular and D3 on the Twitter Stream API
It would be really nice if there was some text that mentioned you need to have WebGL enabled if it's not. And it might be nice if there were instructions or a description of what we were seeing.

Other than that, it looks really nice!
Ahh thank you. I was using my scroll wheel.
I'm confused at how beautiful the pitch deck is, but how messed up the landing page is in Chrome on Mac...
I certainly do think the publishing culture has become broken.

There is no doubt in my mind that if Einstein appeared in this environment he'd have been labelled a crackpot and it would have taken fifty years or more before anyone even began to take him seriously.

The fact we now have a global network of entities competing for funding from relatively narrow sources means that those that deviate rapidly get weeded out. There is at least the perception that prior to about 1990 different institutions could be quite divergent with their views on particular ideas, violently disagree, but both still pursue research in their unique directions. The world seems far more homogeneous today.
Seems interesting and as always how to export data ?
The sole argument in this article seems to be that OO systems introduce more complexity than is justified which results in larger code bases than an FP-based system would, which increases maintenance costs.

Then the article goes on to show some toy example solutions in FP style, without really touching on the challenges that don't show up until larger problems.

I can write a great Account balance summer program in Python OO too, and it'll be pretty, simple, and readable...
...which is a really big deal, in a rent control area like SF or NY where breaking lease terms is one of the few ways to get forced out of your current per-month rent.
Here's another idea I have no evidence for. Maybe it is a compounding problem, maybe it is the problem, maybe it's total nonsense.

Perhaps we are seeing the affect of an increase in difficulty of pushing the boundaries of basic science, and the difficulties of interpreting that new basic science, and thus of applying it to anything that will enhance our lives, our economies, so on.

How many people could really get to grips with Newtonian physics? I'd hazard a guess that a reasonable percentage of the world's population, given boundless resources for education, lots of time, etc, would be able to get their heads around it.

Now, how many people in the world, under the same circumstances, are capable of understanding QFT, to the point of doing something with it in the applied space? I think the percentage just dropped drastically.
True, but what makes Go different than a lot of languages is that it basically guides you into doing things in the most straightforward way possible by making it a PITA not to do so (see: the unsafe package).

If you have an infallible sense of discipline then you don't need this sort of guidance, but given unlimited flexibility a lot of developers can easily lapse into fat-kid-in-a-candy-store mode regardless of their knowledge and skill level.
Gitflow seems a bit too complicated for my liking. I've been using Scott Chacon's "GitHub Flow"[0] for over three years, with the added twist that after the PR has been reviewed and approved, I rebase all of my commits to a single commit with a descriptive commit log of changes and a link to a Trello/Basecamp/whatever card for the feature.

0 - http://scottchacon.com/2011/08/31/github-flow.html
Ask HN: It's just me or Facebook disabled mouse right click?
And with car keys and an ID card.
That was to avoid running afoul of term limit rules.
Why TempoIQ Moved Off HBase
Do you consider self-driving cars to be in or closely related to the IT sector?
From the person Thiel's debating soon: http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-decl...

You can find a video of a talk online too.
The baseband firmware is cyptographically signed by Apple (and would thus require their complicity in backdooring) and the A7 models have a so-called Secure Enclave, which handles the encryption and decryption of memory contents.

Link: http://www.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_Feb14.p...
I've read Automated Insights automated summaries of fantasy football games for yahoo. If that is indicative of their capabilities, then the role of human writers looks to be secure for some time to come.
Yeah, we went to the moon and then what happened? Genetic engineering has been around since the 70's but society has largely rejected its applications. And consider the Energy sector - when was the last nuclear power plant constructed in the United States?
A product that encourages anonymous HS bullying? Great.
Good thing they got all of their growth and massive valuation stuff out of the way first, before worrying about pesky details like calculating hotel taxes or knowing about residency laws.

I guess the lesson for startups is to break the law until you get big enough until the hit from abiding by the law becomes inconsequential, and make sure to salt the earth behind you so that your competitors can't follow your path to success.
The deck looks nice but I am still very unsure of what the product actually is.

Full disclosure: OP is the Design & Product advisor for this company
"I bet England does make them pay short term if there is a YES vote"

That is the opposite of what I would expect. England will go out of their way to help make sure the change goes as smoothly as possible. It is in everyones best interests to minimise chaos and uncertainty. I'm English FWIW.
Great question. We've actually built an exports/reporting api, but need to make sure it clears the platforms' TOS. We'll make it available as soon as possible! And, Thanks for checking it out :).
Eric Schmidt challenged Thiel's main points in a debate two years ago.

http://fora.tv/program_landing_frameview?id=16152&type=clip&...
Using a PaaS like Elastic Beanstalk will mean a new load balancer on each publish, and those can happen multiple times per hour in a busy day.
Is there perhaps a demo or video to showcase functionality, so that I don't have to create an account to learn more?

I'm specifically interested in the API functionality. We have a marketing campaign application into which we are currently building functionality to track social media posts related to a campaign. On the surface, this looks like something we could leverage instead of building it all out ourselves, but I cannot determine that from the information on the landing page.
Nice click-baity title for self promoting.
This post, product, and the fact that it's on the front page drips with cheese.
I find it interesting that the three areas you highlight are all areas that Elon Musk has companies in.

Electric Vehicles = Tesla Motors

SpaceX you mentioned by name

Energy = SolarCity

It would be interesting to contrast Peter Thiel's views on modern innovation with Elon Musk's.
A First-Timer’s Experience at Black Hat and DEFCON
I was lucky in that I had already moved across country and was using AirBnb only to be able to cover the rent for the duration of the lease.
Go's biggest feature is its minimalism, that makes the cognitive load of using Go really low, and that makes writing and reading Go code really easy (albeit sometimes more verbose). That's something that no other compiled language that I know of has. And that's why Go is so popular.
I can't think of anything from Microsoft Research that has translated into an actual product (other than maybe the Kinect.. though I think a lot of that IP was bought). They do some neat stuff I guess, but it seems like a giant money sink. Can anyone prove my wrong?

As an aside, I had a professor from the MS Research lab in Santa Barbara who was a complete moron. Seemed like he was some kind of middle manager at MS and then went to Research for an early semi-retirement
The funny thing is, if I had to pick just one of those two, I'd definitely go for online payments.
King Richard III's Final Moments Were Quick and Brutal
Newest Androids will join iPhones in offering default encryption
Hi Stronglikedan, not for the current version, but there will be in the coming days. In the mean time, I'd be happy to send you screen shots if you'd like, just send me an email: lindsay@socialight.io.
The end of an era for Oracle that existed as a software (licensing) company. I think that Ellison stepping in as the CTO is probably more important than him stepping down as the CEO.

This move will perhaps will lay the groundwork for the next tens of billions in revenue for Oracle, in cloud based software and infrastructure.
>Everything you cite is in or closely related to the IT sector, which is the exception. Every other sector has gone cold or even backwards since ~1970

Sure, the IT sector has enabled pretty much everything since the 1970s, including most of the world having a telephone in their pocket, and developments like with massive transformative potential like encoding human genomes.

But that's like writing off the Industrial Revolution as being a time entirely unremarkable but for developments "in or closely related to the mechanical engineering sector"
The vast majority of animal feed in the US is GMO.

(For starters, roundup ready field corn and soy).
bullying rocks. nice work... sheesh...
An excellent use of an interrobang!
In playing around with this hack, I discovered that Dreamhost doesn't properly escape TXT records in their admin interface when modifying DNS records. I put an iframe in and it shows the box but the src is removed; it also killed the page at that point so I'm unable to remove it...
Still pretty popular in newspaper land. Despite your protestations, both the NYT and the WSJ websites still use title case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Headings_and_publi...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/technology/larry-ellison-s...
http://online.wsj.com/articles/larry-ellison-to-step-aside-a...

P.S. The other three sites I checked (LA Times, USA Today, and Washington Post) websites do not.
Well Dart runs in a VM outside of Chrome now and could be compared to NodeJS in that regard.
The twitter thing makes it look like some kind of social news startup for each state:

* https://twitter.com/SMACKHighNJ

* https://twitter.com/SMACKHighGA

* https://twitter.com/SMACKHighOR

Their website, however, makes it look like a twitter clone for kids: http://www.smackhigh.com/

The hook seems to be that you pick your high school and that's the feed you see. It's like if everyone in your school agreed to use the same hashtag on twitter.

Maybe I'm old too, because even after "getting it", I still think it's silly. Looks like they're trying to sell news and gossip to a crowd that's already pretty thoroughly saturated with those things.
NIPS accepted papers announced
Or produce more.
How to Respond When the Media Calls During Fundraising
I'm not sure why the solution is to remove the anonymity instead of the credentialism. My solution is far more simple and takes considerably less time to implement: don't be dismissive of people.
Interesting idea to use the framework of S curves on this observation. But I think that the typical S curve model will not work on big innovations that are not disruptive towards or at least strongly related to each other in terms of use cases. What you mean is rather the concept of "Kondratiev Waves" [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave
Things do advance, but they're a lot less spectacular, sometimes because we're running into hard physical limitations. Supersonic flight, for instance: it's just super difficult to make it economically feasible. But subsonic aircraft are much better than they were back in the 1970s. Cars are leaps and bounds above what they were in the 80s: more reliable, safer, faster.

Scientists are also running against physical limitations: to do Big science, you need expensive equipment, like the LHC, but also electron beam microscopes, sophisticated automatic lab equipment, etc. so you need a lot of people to make this stuff works.

The problems we do get are more social than scientific: most new buildings aren't much better than the ones from the 70s, but that's because people aren't applying the science that exists. Transportation and energy are similar: it's not sufficient that the technology can be used, the social and economic structure has to be there to support it.

For instance, you could dream about a citywide automated contained transportation system in Montreal. You'd have a big east-west conveyor, with links to the mainland at each end of the island, plus a big north-south corridor to get across the island and cross the St. Lawrence. Then you'd only need small electric trucks to move the containers to and from stations along the conveyors.

But that's never going to happen because you couldn't put the structure in place.
This is even more comprehensive: http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/ - you get every detail you need, name, occupation, age, even credit card numbers and SSN.
Introducing Tweet-a-Program
Correlation is not causation. You are cherry picking one metric and using it to flout your point of view.
That's true. I do like several aspects of go, such as variable types going after the name
GMOs are a more complex subject, but as for nuclear power I tend to think that the lack of progress has caused its failure to be adopted rather than the other way around.

Look at the nuke plants we're building. They are still overgrown 1950s submarine reactors that only make use if about 3% of the useful energy in fissile fuel. The rest is "waste," and reprocessing that waste is expensive and cumbersome. They're also still vulnerable to a whole host of nasty failure modes. The probability of those failure modes has been reduced through incremental improvement, but there has been no revolutionary progress.

An analogy: It's as if we invented the piston steam engine and that's it. No turbines, no internal combustion engines, no combined cycle plants, and certainly no fuel cells or thermovolaics or photovolaics or anything like that. That's the situation with nuclear power. We're still building big versions of the Chicago Pile.
You are mis-reading the comma.
Arduino and Bruce Sterling Launching an Open-Source Apartment
What do you exactly mean?
I consider "self driving cars" as not existing the corporeal world.
Microsoft lays off 2,100, axes Silicon Valley research
Tesla CEO Musk Sees Fully Autonomous Car Ready in Five or Six Years
> it is primarily emotional rather than calculated

That about sum it all. My situation allow me to follow closely similar situation in Belgium and Spain.

Separatist parties mine the emotional level. The reality is that splitting countries with intertwined economies and population for generation is impossible to predict and generally require plenty of good will from one side or the other.

About everything Scotland bets on for its future need happy cooperation from the UK and Europe. From Europe point of view, it lacks the framework to support splitting countries and EU countries are wary enough about their sovereignty that it would be difficult to predict how they would react. On the other hand, for the UK, at the end of the day, that's a little slice of 10% of its population that decided to keep their resources for themselves. 10% of the population deciding what happens to the other 90% is exactly what Scotland is complaining about Westminster and London. On the other hand UKIP and others are fond of that message when applied between the UK and EU.

What a mess.
Snapchat Scores Nike’s Director of Digital to Win Sports Partnerships
Notice at the bottom of that page it says:

Embed a live DIG result (do a diggle):
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://dig.whois.com.au/diggle/philipithomas.com"></script>

Now, if you embed a 'diggle', that sound like an infinite loop possibility. Interesting, does anyone want to try it?
I don't think it's fair that renting an apartment for a year is so much cheaper than renting it for one night. AirBnB closes the gap to its natural equilibrium level instead of the artificially high one created by zoning laws and hotel taxes.
Tons of stuff has been productized in various forms. .NET generics, for instance, were initially developed in MSR Cambridge. MSR research has contributed to speech recognition, search technologies in Bing, Excel's Flash Fill, SQL Server's Hekaton in-memory architecture, and many other products.