skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm am American. Lets talk about cards for a bit, then?

I have a debit card, a credit card, a student ID that doubles as a payment card and rfid to get me into work. I also have a second rfid card for another building on campus that isn't part of the network, because apparently doors aren't on the internet yet, and a car insurance card that's basically a small slip of paper. That's my everyday wallet carry.

I also carry some keys: 3 for work, one for my car, and one for the apartment. I also have some loyalty cards on the keyring, for grocery shopping, and for the public library.

I also have several cards I leave at home: a debit card that's only for medical expenses paid out of my HSA, a visa gift card from the grandparents, a debit card from the local credit union (I signed up for because my online bank didn't accept checks at the time and I needed to deposit my first paycheck), a different credit card I don't use often because the cashback is crap outside a narrow set of rotating categories (but can't close because it's also my oldest credit account).
I've noticed a refreshing contrast between Thiel and Graham's lectures concerning startups and what you typically read or see on Amazon's best seller 'Startups' category. It's nice to hear giants in this field basically tell you, "Go do something you think is cool or important, and do it much better than anyone else is even capable of doing." It's obvious of course, but it's a point that gets buried and needs to be resurrected every so often.
>> Almost nobody in this industry has "mild forms of Asperger's."

but you're wrong.

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.htm...

http://blog.codinghorror.com/software-developers-and-asperge...

(not that I put much faith in Gawker..) http://gawker.com/5885196/the-tech-industrys-asperger-proble...

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111102/full/479025a.html
Thoughts on PlayStation Now
Look at it another way: imagine a camera with a certain shutter speed taking a picture of a cat. If the cat is asleep in the same place, centre frame, then the picture will almost certainly be of the cat.

Should the cat wish to not be photographed then the cat could go into one of those poses used when hunting prey - ears flattened, tail down etc. The cat will present a smaller cross-sectional area and not be seen as easily. Who knows, could be mistaken for 'a bumblebee'. This is 'cat stealth' - see 'ninja cat'.

Alternatively, the cat could just leap past the camera at phenomenal speed. Most of the exposure will be of the background however there could be some light blurring where the cat has leapt across the frame of the picture. On initial inspection a cat would not be seen, just some shadowy/tabby artefacts.

If the camera was one of those early CMOS sensor things and the light levels were low then the shadowy/tabby artefacts might not make it past the background noise that came with those sensors.

In this way a sufficiently fast cat could hide in plain sight from a camera that had an early CMOS sensor. To make extra sure that the cat was 'invisible' the cat could be instructed to flatten its ears as it rushed through the frame.

Clearly I wasn't around in the late 1950's, however, I think my analogy describes how 'early stealth' worked by just being very quick. You should get the concept now.

In the military/intel or even normal companies knowledge and information isn't globally shared so maybe the author didn't know some aspects of the project or those details were not pertinent to what they were doing. I should have cited sources but cat analogies are more fun.
"Censorship" isn't unconstitutional (e.g. obscenities laws). Certain kinds of censorship may be, and they have specific names.
That sounds really dangerous. It probably wouldn't be too hard to inject arbitrary data into the server.
Worth noting that $1mm in the 40s and 50s is much more in 2014 dollars.
Base load power is something of a misnomer. You can easily design a nuclear / coal power-plant that goes from 60-90% capacity vary quickly. The issue is that lowers efficiency, both when operating outside the normal range, worse simply having that capacity also lowers peak efficiency.

In the end it's a trade-off from a more flexible grid vs more flexible power-plants. Granted, most coal/nuclear power plants are not currently designed to be flexible for these reasons and they take a while do a cold start vs simply changing output within a fixed range.
feels good to know I'm not alone. thanks for asking :)
Three months left for the Internet of Things to commit its first murder
I'm am American. Lets talk about cards for a bit, then?

I have a debit card, a credit card, a student ID that doubles as a payment card and rfid to get me into work. I also have a second rfid card for another building on campus that isn't part of the network, because apparently doors aren't on the internet yet, and a car insurance card that's basically a small slip of paper. That's my everyday wallet carry.

I also carry some keys: 3 for work, one for my car, and one for the apartment. I also have some loyalty cards on the keyring, for grocery shopping, and for the public library.

I also have several cards I leave at home: a debit card that's only for medical expenses paid out of my HSA, a visa gift card from the grandparents, a debit card from the local credit union (which I signed up for because my online bank didn't accept checks at the time and I needed to deposit my first paycheck), a different credit card I don't use often because the cashback is crap outside a narrow set of rotating categories (but can't close because it's also my oldest credit account).
I use Ubuntu Linux, and I've got PhantomJS installed. Whether I use Nightmare, Nightmarejs, or Phantomjs on the command line this is what I get:
ReferenceError: Can't find variable: Nightmare

nightmare.js:1

Should there be more instructions for installing? I believe the brew command is something for Mac users only...
> Web services are 'in' because that's the only way software can't be pirated.

That is cognitive dissonance. If your revenue is derived from advertising then users installing ad blocking software is revenue-equivalent to users pirating your software. The fact that it's legal for users to do when piracy is not provides no support for argument that ad-supported services are on stronger financial footing.

The reason ad-supported services are winning is much simpler. Users prefer them to paying. So if one competitor is "free" (with ads) while another is charging money, the market picks the free one. But ad-supported services don't inherently require centralization or feudalism anyway.

> The internet is the Wild Wild West.

The internet has never been the wild west. Modern computing devices are dramatically more secure than physical things like your house or your car. The internet is so far away from the wild west that we consider even the possibility of a security breach under rare circumstances to be a serious vulnerability and work quickly to close it. And the feudal lords are the ones making it worse -- is it even possible to patch a vulnerability on an un-rooted iPhone which is too old for Apple to patch it officially?

Having said that, I don't disagree that the reasons you're listing are the ones used to justify feudalism, they just happen to be factually incorrect.
I think you need to update your figures. High-end consumer luminaires have been coming in above 100 lm/watt total system efficiency for at least a year or so now, and with CRI superior to fluorescents.
Since Thiel talks a lot about "monopoly theory" it's probably worth reading some of the people who've been talking about this for longer than Thiel's been in business (i.e. before the late 1980s). The two most prominent are Michael Porter and Warren Buffett. Buffett's annual letters to shareholders make excellent reading, and the book Understanding Michael Porter is a very good summary of Porter's thoughts.
Exorcising the CAP Demon
It is not often I find an article written about true design. Great read/conclusion.
Ten B2B &IoT startups pitch at Alchemist demo day
Belkin Breaks Its Routers Worldwide, Issues Temporary Fix
Raging hardon from all the adrenaline gushing in while storming the castle playing G.I. Joes with people lives - thats the justification.
One interesting application for super-bright LED's is home theatre projectors. Until very recently such projectors used lamp modules (usually metal-halide) that typically have an operating lifespan of a few thousand hours at most. That's a very rough estimate. Failures can happen sooner and they occasionally implode. Also, brightness usually drops off gradually as lamps age. New lamp modules usually cost a few hundred dollars. These lamps also produce a large ammount of heat and require active cooling, which makes projectors noisy unless carefully designed for quiet operation. For these reasons, home theatre projectors probably remain more of a niche product than they might otherwise be.

LED based lamps are starting to show up in this market sector. Current LED-based projectors are mostly portable projectors that offer low brightness and poor image quality, but some home theatre models of decent quality are starting to appear. At present, they're expensive, less bright than most projectors based on traditional lamps, and still require fans for active cooling. However, as LED's become more power efficient and economical, these projectors will hopefully become brighter, passively cooled, and significantly cheaper.

Projectors are not appropriate in many environments, especially those with high ambient light levels, but LED's may help them make major inroads into the big-screen market.
The gods of the internet
>> "Google is still essentially a better AltaVista/Hotmail and Facebook is still essentially a better MySpace."

Not sure I agree here. There's much more to both companies than simply google.com the search engine and facebook.com the social network. Both firms have invested heavily in companies and technology that they feel will be leaders in future industries. And by 'future industries' I mean industries that are literally in their infancy right now but are poised for explosive growth in this century (robotics, aerial technology, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, etc). To tie into Thiel's thesis, they are likely preparing and planning to become monopolistic forces in these new fields as well, which is probably a very sound strategy.
Here's one article on it:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230462610...

And some hard data and analysis: http://www.thetransparencyproject.org/Availabledataset.htm

In their study specifically of Bwin (an online casino) they found that "of the 4,222 casino customers, just 2.8% — or 119 big losers—provided half of the casino's take, and 10.7% provided 80% of the take".

However, online casinos don't attract the kinds of customers or the level of action that many physical casinos do. Many older players - who provide the vast majority of slot machine revenues - won't go near online casinos. Further down in this article they quote a marketing consultant for dozens of physical casinos saying "Bwin results are in line with his own estimates, based on confidential casino data, that many U.S. casinos get about 90% of their revenue from 10% of customers."

I have read a few academic papers on the subject, that also indicate numbers from 80% up to 92% being provided by roughly 10% of players. The fact that in the Bwin study, 2.8% provided 50% of the take, is breathtaking as well.
The Emerge Alliance[1] is an industry group that has been working on this issue, though they've started with a spec for datacenters (as stephen_g alludes to). I think the consensus is that it is definitely more efficient to convert to DC at a single point, but one located as physically close to the loads as is practical, because of the line losses mentioned. Definitely something that will make sense for commercial buildings/campuses and multi-unit residential, and single family homes are not too far behind, I think. I can picture homes sometime soon just being wired for AC in the kitchen/garage/utility rooms with a LV DC grid elsewhere. The lower safety requirements for low-voltage really open up possibilities for system design and integration in the built environment.

http://www.emergealliance.org/About/Vision.aspx
And then there are places like Mountain View and Cupertino that were happy to have companies headquarter there but then refused to allow new housing to be built for the workers, putting even more pressure on SF to pick up the slack.

I was not aware the numbers were that bleak. Is that total housing units or just rental units?
that already exists (at least in the inverse). It's called a no-subletting clause.
It would be so great!
Fair point about not accomplishing a whole lot (outside of Finney). Ambitious, maybe, but not so effective.

Also reminded me there's a DIY Bio mailing list, with lots of interesting bio-hacking sorts of things going on.
Navarra obliga por ley a quitar el wifi de las escuelas
New Study Finds Steep Increase in East Coast High-Tide Floods
need help to submit news on ycombinator.
Grow your own tiny forest on the web
See, this is the part that truly makes me ill. I don't want the government, at any level, to outsource its habituation. Regulations are one thing - on the local level they're usually tolerable - but bureaucratic integration is another.
Yahoo India is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_centre_%28business%29
This the video of the talk where Alan Kay talks about Innovation Vs Invention:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o
It didn't go away. It just dropped the trappings of a counterculture because counterculture itself has lost relevance in a world where there is no real mainstream to be counter to.
Mapbox Enterprise: The best of Mapbox, on your private infrastructure
Rewardle makes 30K annual revenue but has a market cap of $30M
I guess that's what the platform.qbix.com app is set up with. Q apps can be configured out of the box to let people sign up using email, mobile, or facebook. You can also code your own adapter (such as using some other OAuth) and if you do, contribute it to the community.

I should mention that the main reason "mobile only" is the default is to try to prevent sybil attacks ... if you're a startup looking to launch an app, the last thing you want is to have some jokers create a million accounts and overload your site with inane stuff. Q expects that you'll require an authenticated session id for most of the "expensive" stuff like realtime pushes, notifications, or whatever your app wants to implement. But if people can sign up with 1 million fake emails, that won't do much good. It's hard to make it expensive to create hundreds of accounts and requiring a cellphone number is the only way I know, aside from requiring valid billable credit card numbers. Facebook commect MAY be a close second.

Also, people tend to pay more attention to SMSes which improves your retention until they download the native app and switch to in-app notifications. (You alluded to this by saying you got a lot of SPAM... that's why Q always has a way for users to unsubscribe.)
My course does about $1,100 a month on Udemy. I'd recommend it. That said, I would make sure that I had a clear early marketing plan in place beforehand. You can make a pretty decent passive income once you get the ball rolling on there. But you're gonna have to roll it yourself at first.

My course: https://www.udemy.com/building-and-selling-a-niche-website-f....
I'm always a little wary of predictions that try to tell me when the "game-changers" are nigh. I have no doubt that we live in incredible, historic times - I'm super psyched about it.

At the end of the day, though, I think that the cost of flushing a toilet is too high for much of the world. 1 cent? Maybe in my purchasing power here in the first world. There are plenty of other people who, to be crude, don't have a place to shit, and it's worth a lot more than 1 cent to them to have that fixed. If anything, that's the takeaway here.
Signing the URL should prevent that, but it still seems overly complicated.
@kumarm - any chance you could put the PDF somewhere? The link has been taken down. I was really looking forward to combing through that.
AngularJS: Looking under the hood [Part 1]
Art is subjective, code is not. Good code is testable. Good art is not testable.

Top40 music is palatable to many and is the exact result of what you describe: practice, research, focus, coaching, and peer review on a massive financed scale that "startup" bands could never afford.

Yet despite that, the indie music scene has never been more vibrant and alive than it is today. Instead of a small number of bands/groups producing music that all indie fans like, there's a huge pool of artists each producing their unique sound based on their own personal values of how music should be produced (including things like practice, focus, peer review, and other things not mentioned like experience, personality, and culture). That, to me, is art -- not a rehearsed manufactured production but an embedded experience unique to the artist you are listening to. That's what you heard in popular music until the mid nineties. The lack of quality popular music is not due to lack of craftsmanship.
I take objection with the article regarding "Pretending that syntactic overhead is the issue". Or rather, I would say it's an incomplete way of looking at it. Non-statically typed languages (I'm thinking reasonably full-featured languages like Perl, Python or Ruby, not Bash) are, IMHO, go-to languages for certain tasks because they allow you to get results quickly. How?

* Less typing (there is freedom in being able to cobble together a reasonably complex program in a single file of a few hundred lines in an editor, vs a number of files and thousands of lines in a IDE).

* Advanced features! It is only now that closures, first-class functions, etc, start to trickle down to mainstream, statically typed languages. And they do make for shorter programs (see, eg, the post on expired links on HN).

Of course, it's not to say that non-statically typed programs don't suffer from a number of drawbacks, but dismissing conciseness as something trivial does not, I think, accurately reflect reasons for why people use this kind of language.
Some of the smartest colleagues I had at Yahoo were based in India. The way Yahoo worked, all interesting projects/teams were based in SNV with satellite offices working on maintenance projects and legacy stuff. So sunsetting of projects might explain this.
Looking Beyond San Francisco
RNTS Media acquires Fyber for $190M
Ham sandwiches are regulated, by multiple federal agencies no less: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/dec/...
How can anyone be happy with American citizenship when it places you under some of most bizzare laws seen in first world countries including huge tax code?

I really don't understand why Americans aren't moving out and dumping their citizenships in droves. I know that earning money in USA is supposedly easier than anywhere else but still...
"Working programmers" and "published academic type theorists" are examples of meaningful-to-me hopefully-non-partisan classes of speakers. I can't manage to parse what I wrote any other way, I don't know what you read.

In this context, advocates of a particular programming language, or particular paradigm, are what I had in mind by "partisan", in that I believe them to be likely to have relatively-agreed-upon definitions of "strong" (within their language community), and I also believe those definitions to be amusingly self-congratulatory.

Also, btw, while I think that homeopathy as a "medical discipline" is contemptible, it's pretty stupid to say "biologists are correct about the meaning of this word, and homeopaths are not". The way that words work is that they mean what people use them to mean. This, in fact, is my point about the phrases "strong typing" and "weak typing"; in my experience and my literature surveys, these phrases are NOT used consistently, and thus i.m.o. if you wish for your audience to hear the thing you intend to mean, you're better off avoiding those phrases.
Great news. I guess efficiency is following a similar rapid growth to power.
What a headline. Even I, a regular cannabis consumer and drug policy reform advocate, fell prey to this. I saw another article earlier today about this and thought something like, "well, no surprises there."

But indeed if this were some soccer mom, I sense my reaction might be different.

This is a pretty serious crime and the legal implications unclear. Any thoughts on what will happen next?

edit: I just noticed this is Radley's writing. Love that dude - definitely full of hacker spirit.
Cute. Wouldn't that be a reason for the account to be booted out of Facebook in the first place?
Trouble at the Koolaid Point
Shellshock May Affect Windows, Too
A friend of mine reached out to me via LinkedIn several months ago, stating he could probably use Tableau and some public datasets to DDoS the medical peer review system and earn tenure at the same time: low impact factor * a million is still going to be a lot better than the alternative. Sadly, I didn't hear anything terribly insightful when I asked him about spurious correlations and data mining as a perjorative term, so I left that one alone, and I assume he doesn't have the balls to go through with it since you know, there are actual people in the tenure committee who have to review your CV.

One angle that isn't quite clear to me from the article; if you build a system to harvest datasets, find correlations, and push them through a set of templates with conditional subtemplates based on saliency, with correct citations of source data to produce a single article, is it wrong to put your name on it? And if you do 30 of them?

Obviously selling your naming rights to papers harms both the community who might wish follow up with the authors on scholarship, and those who use peer reviewed publications as a filter. But I think the real lesson here might just be that abusing the university administration's institutional data analysis platform to game your tenure case seems like a waste of time in comparison to selling one weak article a day for 10,000 bucks.
How is this bs even legal?... I'm going to render a spaceship and put it up for pre-orders.

Do not give these people your money, nor the other tech companies that pull this kinda shit when so many real innovations are in the market.
I don't know the details, but I learned last week when I was in LA that LA allows "short term vacation rentals" that I believe are distinct from subletting.

So I believe that these two are not necessarily the same, depending on the city's legalese.
It never ceases to amaze me. Every time I think the conspiracy theorists are the real lunatics, the government manages to one up them. First Snowden, now this. Truth is truly stranger than fiction.
One interesting thing is really considering whether X and Y really are independent. Much of the software world has taken the position that if Y is too big, X will stay small. This is why open-source exists, basically. So there is a dependence, at least in some markets. In other cases, having a large Y gives the creators the resources to make X much bigger.

For those who would like their work to positively impact the world, and not starve to death in the process, it's something that needs to be considered: how high of a Y is workable in the given environment?