skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From Arrington's blog:

> In a year or so when this thing is productized you’ll be hearing a lot more about Mary.

As you note, that was written on May 23, 2012, more than 2 years ago. According to this article[1], the company is now aiming to be selling "by 2016." This suggests there was either a misunderstanding about the time required to develop a commercial product, or developing a commercial product has taken a lot longer than anticipated.

What's interesting to me is that the recent photo from the New York Times[2], which Mark Suster also included in his blog post[3], doesn't on the surface seem to show substantial progress from what was being demoed back in 2011[4][5]. Charging a single phone from a couple of feet away is not what's being promised.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/ubeam-raises-10-million-2014-...

[2] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/ubeam-technology-wi...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8541674

[4] http://allthingsd.com/20110618/how-to-charge-your-iphone-ove...

[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoHxyweJcZI
Investors invest in people not ideas. She is a great entrepreneur and will make a successful company with that money. Doesn't matter if their initial prototype isn't working. Instagram was a check-in service while Twitter was a sound sharing website when they started. There is no thermodynamics law for social apps so nobody could blame investors for their investment back then.
It's my humble role in life to stand in front of a manager and tell them that their tech idea is garbage. For $10M a year, you could buy a hundred of me.

I think the real problem is that they're not investing their own money, and are just looking at buying some great PR to write off as a tax deduction.
That was a great analysis of their technology, but I don't think this is everything wrong with tech investing.

I think there are larger implications about how VC driven start-ups could be changing society for the worse. Whether the infringements upon the rights of lets-not-call-them-employees in 2-sided markets, or $1B valuations given to free apps whose users are [perhaps unknowingly] paying with their personal information, there is quite a lot to unpack to say the least.

A great tech writeup but I think he misses the mark on "everything wrong."
Radically improving battery life may prove to be a more difficult physics problem than wireless charging. Lithium-ion batteries were introduced in the early 1990s, and for 20 years nobody's been able to come up with a better technology.

Since the early 90s, CPUs have gotten about 1,000 times better. Batteries have gotten about twice as good.
You mean @BRIAN_____.
I like this. I saw a video on one of these that laid pipes and was part of a big network off shore of New Orleans.

This is soothing.

This makes me happy.

Humbling. I like being humbled. What if these people came to work on God's Temple? Oh, well. If they don't have work, they can do offerings and learn about dinosaurs.
A Smartwatch That Looks Like a Watch
> Long term, this is more likely to harm science-based startup funding.

Internet companies are still being funded a decade and a half after the dot com bubble wiped out orders of magnitude more wealth than this.

People will not quit investing in science.
But they plugged it into a multimeter and "the dial went up" http://allthingsd.com/20110602/demo-at-d9-ubeam/

I've never seen a Radio Shack meter before - I have no idea what that meter is measuring or what it's set to. It could be set to read micro volts, but it would be odd for them to take a close-up photo if it was reading a tiny number. But then maybe that's why they went with an analogue meter - big needle swing is psychologically persuasive.

And Dweck is no longer involved - http://www.businessinsider.com/college-roommates-founded-hot...
I concur with you. VCs have a hard time measuring technical knowledge because they lack such knowledge themselves, and first appearances are more the result of the generic lottery than skills. That doesn't mean every rich person is beautiful, but it would be dishonest to pretend that it doesn't play a big role when social interactions are involved, such as raising capital.
Personally, I have a password that my password manager generated that I use for it. I had it written down in my wallet for a while, but after typing it multiple times a day for a while I memorized it and since destroyed the paper. It's a shorter password than what I use for my stored passwords, but I think it strikes a good balance. (And it's not a GUID, but if you think you could memorize that then it probably couldn't hurt. That's risky, though -- if you forget, there go all of your passwords for everything!)

I don't know of any off the top of my head, but there was that time a few years ago when Dropbox accidentally let anyone in without a password. This isn't to pick on Dropbox, but security lapses happen and it's wise to have multiple layers of strong defense to reduce your risk. (Also, if someone compromises the email associated with your CloudDrive, they can use that to get your CloudDrive by invoking a password reset.)

EDIT: Wolfram|Alpha estimates the entropy of a password generated using the constraints I used for mine as roughly 85 bits (the relevant space would take 14 trillion years to enumerate). It actually has a pretty information-heavy password strength estimator (though I can't attest to its reliability as I'm not familiar with the internals).
Support for Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites
That seems wildly optimistic. Color got 41M in funding and was a complete waste. Nothing says a good team and lots of money will yield a successful company.
Don't these handheld devices, $79.99 on Amazon, connect to satellites to send their location?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPOT_Satellite_Messenger

"Satellite service is wireless and requires a clear line of sight toward the satellite"
http://faq.findmespot.com/index.php?action=showEntry&data=11...
Actually, what's happening is pretty obvious: they are investing in the founder, not the idea.

Think about it this way: $10 million is pocket change for VCs. Even if they lose all of it, it would barely make a dent in their yearly metrics. However, the potential gain is huge: they see in Ms. Perry someone who can identify a big demand in the market, take the initiative to try to do something about it and find a clever and catchy way to market it ("WiFi for energy"). So spending $10 million to let her gain more experience in business and build a deeper relationship with the VCs is a pretty good investment.
Speaking of perspective, the Apollo was fully-backed by the government of the most powerful economy in the world at the time - 4% of the federal budget was directed towards it, with 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 third-party employees, with a cost of ~$140B of today's dollars. How the hell is a private company supposed to compete? Not even Apple's famed $100B in cash could pay that bill.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Cost_of_Apollo_p...

Edit: It's also worth noting that the same entity that ran the Apollo missions currently has no way of putting people into space, and the last system they had also looked like a plane... and had problems with exploding and killing people.
I've been using this library for a project, and here are my thoughts on it:

1. Immutable data structures are a huge win. I can't count the number of times I've been bitten by a bug caused by some subtle mutation that happened in a part of my code that I wasn't expecting.

2. Using this library for data structures everywhere, as a replacement for native JS arrays and objects, requires you to have discipline in naming your variables so that you can infer their types. Things can get pretty frustrating when you try to map over a Set, thinking it's a Map, for example.

3. The most annoying thing might be the documentation, which consists of a type definitions file and liberal comments. It's ok, but hardly a great interface for exploring the API.

Overall, liking the library so far. I think with good, searchable docs (with examples of API usage) this could be something really great.
Slice is done in O(logN) with very little copying. This works via structural sharing with the original List.
I have a bag of gaussian spheres I could rent out for just such a project.
Arrington may have been making an oblique literary referance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

& Investors tend to invest to things they can sell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

So they are interested in ideas that have good "pitch".

The technology is only a means to an end here.
Pylucene- Part I: Creating index
Then the CA also has a copy of the private key and a malicious person could use that key.
To me part of the allure of a passive income project is being able to control more than just the technical aspects--to be able to define the customer-facing and business pieces too.

Perhaps more importantly, your chance of producing meaningful income goes up exponentially if it's a one-person show. A small startup has the overhead of at least ramen-level salaries for a few people, possibly an office or shared space. If they've taken seed money their investors will be pushing for growth over profitability or possibly even revenue. If you're doing a profit share, even in the best of cases it may be a looong time before there's any profit, even if there is meaningful revenue.

Every startup is a longshot. It's an even longer shot if you're taking a sliver of profit from people whose interests may not be well-aligned with yours.
Be Mark Cuban and have something to say about everything that you know nothing about. Start there.
>Internet companies are still being funded a decade and a half after the dot com bubble wiped out orders of magnitude more wealth than this.

Because there have been some notably successful Internet companies I would guess. But if few of the science/basic tech companies pan out (return > 10x?), it will long term harm funding in this area.
To listen to Mark Suster's post, it sounds like they did a very comprehensive vet, so I would presume someone ran the basic math like you were thinking and like the link above runs through. And with just a lay-person's knowledge of physics, my first thought was "Isn't there a lot of energy loss using sound-through-air as a medium of energy transfer?".

On the other hand, all they say is "we talked to these people and those people and those other people over there", so who knows what the actual tests were.

A lot of the discussion here is about Arrington/Crunchfund, and while I find him interesting to read and good at getting information out of people in a blogging context, I don't really have an opinion on his competency as a VC. But A16Z's investment record is pretty solid, and Mark Suster has always struck me as a reasonable guy.

As TechCrunch's post pointed out, Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of better-device-charging startups, but now I just have no clue what to think. :P But if they get it working, it'll be pretty awesome.
"It" what isn't about the price? If you feel like pointing out that cartels are more specifically about the profits (increased through raising the price), I'm afraid that's an irrelevant distraction.

We both know how cartels work. I pointed out that cartels don't last without state support. You don't feel like accepting that, just like you still haven't addressed my point about rulers.

Cartels are created and maintained by governments through prohibitively costly licences that are just denied to pesky outsiders that would actually compete with the other producers.

We're not going to get anywhere if you keep side-tracking the conversation, but that's exactly what staunch statists always do. Why? Because they can't handle reality.
Does the lawsuit between Dweck and Perry account for the time?

http://www.businessinsider.com/college-roommates-founded-hot...
How to Keep Someone with You Forever
I have a facebook account that uses an online handle and does not have my real name or my birthday. I am now locked out of it, because I tried to login to it just _once_ through TOR. I could still have logged in, but I could not get past the identity checks. Now I am still locked out, even on the clearnet.
Precisely. An absence of proper safety procedures is how.
And then there's bluegrass clogging...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs2j8f7H2WY
Yea. Batteries are a tough problem.

A battery with the energy density of TNT would be great. Not sure I'd want it sitting on my lap...
(Cofounder of 10x Management here.)

Thanks for the shout-out, Aline! You point out the main difference in our models, which is exactly what makes our talent agency work: the key is the focus on contract/freelance placement.

Recruiters who do full-time placement optimize for the short-term -- a single transaction -- which leads to all sort of misaligned incentives and shady practices. With 10x, we work with the same talent over the course of years, so we optimize for the long term and help the people on our roster for (ideally) the duration of their careers. And the talent is more than happy to pay for our services.

>>> "Agents make sense when it’s hard to find a job or when the opportunity cost of looking for work is high enough to justify paying someone else.... For engineers, because the shortage is in labor and not jobs, paying out a portion of your salary for a task you can easily do yourself doesn’t make much sense."

This reminds me of the "adverse selection" argument we hear a lot, i.e. the best programmers have no trouble finding work, so wouldn't an agency only attract people who aren't good enough to source their own opportunities? The simple answer to this: Tom Cruise has no problem finding work, but he still has an agent. He wants to spend his time acting, not negotiating, invoicing, collecting, etc.

You also mention that the talent agency model works for niche skills, but then you say there isn't a big enough market for these skills. I'd disagree with the second half of that. Technology is getting increasingly specialized. Software, hardware, electrical, all have sub-fields and sub-sub-fields and sub-sub-sub-fields. The same general model applies to most of these sub-sub-sub-fields, and there are absolutely enough of them to justify a market.

In fact, the niche skills lend themselves especially well to the talent agency model, since companies don't necessarily need to employ those people full time. Data science is a good example of this... a lot of companies could benefit from the insights of a data scientist, but most of them don't need a salaried data scientist on staff. Through 10x, companies large and small have a la carte access to pre-vetted specialists (and generalists), on demand.
What if Computers Disappeared?
It's quite possible to authorize without authenticating and vice versa, though it's a bit uncommon. They're separate concepts for a reason, though.
My dream is to collaborate with these guys. Stats nerds will rule the world.
And in this case the craft killed the pilot. Shouldn't we be designing pilotless craft?
Stephen Hawking: The Computer
> Do you realize you can connect w/ any IRC client?

Isn't that an horrific end-run around corporate security? or does irc.slack.com provide IP address whitelisting to restrict connections to those from within the company? Client SSL cert checking?

It just seems like a remarkable focal point that could give access to a lot of sensitive corporate data.
My company uses Gandi, and personally I use iwantmyname.com.

Gandi is a no-nonsense service:

* Seems very security-minded, and overall serious and professional. Nothing like GoDaddy.

* Their UI is conservative and well-organized; not as modern as iwantmyname.com, but not as antiquated as EasyDNS and Namecheap (and not a jumble of different, conflicting, confusing UI styles like the latter is).

* Supports (in fact, requires) zone versioning so you can always undo.

* Supports raw "BIND"-format zone files so you can quickly edit in your favourite text editor, rather than a cumbersome web form.

* Lets you share the same zone file across multiple domains. If you need more automation (eg., lots of very similar domains with a slight tweak here and there), just use the APIs.

* Great APIs.

* 2FA account security.

* Also provides SSL (cheap, toplevel CA) and very good, reasonably priced virtual hosting (US and Europe).

iwantmyname.com has a more minimalistic, modern UI, but lacks things like zone versioning, raw editing, and they're still working on an API. Also, their 2FA is apparently SMS-based, won't work with a standard authenticator app.

We previously used Namecheap and EasyDNS. No significant complaints, but their UIs are horrible.
The archaic convention of regarding a number with a leading zero as octal
Ask HN: DigitalOcean is shutting down my site. What to do?
I host my personal blog generated through Jekyll in DigitalOcean and they are closing the droplet for the second time. My network is disabled for the droplet so i dont have much to do. They are telling about ddos attack initiated from my droplet and previously they closed the droplet and said they can't bring it back so i moved to another droplet, now this thing is getting repeated. Does anyone else face such problem?.

-------------------
Hi there,

We are sorry to report that we have detected what appears to be a DDoS attack being launched from one or more of your servers.

To shut down this attack, we have disabled the networking interface on the server or servers involved, so further connection would have to be accomplished via the console in our control panel. You need to use the direct link provided, as your control panel access will be limited.

This is the direct link to the console of the effected droplet https://cloud.digitalocean.com/droplets/1559956/console

Please log in at your earliest convenience in order to investigate and remove the program generating the traffic. Once this is done, please also determine how this software came to be installed on your droplet and prevent it from being installed again in the future.

If you need any guidance on how to find and resolve this issue, we recommend reviewing this: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/my-droplet-is-locked-by-support-staff-because-because-of-an-outgoing-flood-or-ddos-what-do-i-do

Once you are done let us know and we will investigate re-enabling your networking.

Please understand that this is a very serious issue, and that should it re-occur we may suspend or even terminate your account to prevent further incidents. If have any questions or need any guidance on how to protect your servers please let us know.

Thank you,
DigitalOcean Support
----------------
This reminds me of my favourite VC story from the height of the dot-com bubble. A few months prior, I had announced my distributed computation of the quadrillionth bit of Pi, and the concept of doing computations using unused CPU capacity from around the Internet was getting a lot of attention. A VC asked me to look at a company they were thinking of investing in and give my opinion as someone with experience in the field.

Stripped down to its core, the company was pitching technology which would allow it to do "useful" internet-wide computations once global communication latency dropped below a certain threshold. Going along with this was a graph showing how internet round trip times had been steadily dropping for the past two decades, and projecting into the future that some time around 2006 the latencies would become short enough to make their solution work.

Unfortunately, their projection had communication becoming faster than the speed of light in 2004.

I pointed this out to the VC in question. They decided to invest anyway. My understanding is that the company raised $10M before going bankrupt.
A straw-man libertarian you met?

Freedom just means that no one forcefully intervenes in your life, assuming that you're not harming anyone yourself, of course.

Demoracy is just mob rule. You'll find it unacceptable any time you're being forced to comply with what the majority wants. You know most people are idiots, right? You don't want idiots making decisions that affect your life. Does that help?
Right, they're just guessing. As the article points out, there are better ways to do everything the Dyna-Soar could do. The US has a good anti-satellite weapon system left over from the 1980s, so there's no need to develop something new for that function.

The XB-37 probably has some other function.
2W smartphone-sized betavoltaics battery is practical, with a possible lifetime of several decades. The problem is it would be a regulation nightmare.
Telco in Australia (I've worked for all of the big ones) are exactly the same as you've described.
Fair. He did all of the programming involved, as well as all of the story and gameplay design.
(10x Management cofounder here.)

Yup, this pre-vetting is a key part of the service we provide for companies. (We work for the talent, but of course we need to provide value to both sides of the marketplace.)

A large company, which will remain unnamed, works with a handful of engineering contracting outfits, but they like us because we're the only one they trust to provide them with good talent out of the box. With the other companies, they have to go through the full interview rigamarole for each contractor; with 10x, they just tell us what they need and we hook it up.
Does the tone and shear stupidty of Dejan's comments make anyone else just want to slap him? This whole ruling was just bad to start with and is only going to get worse. I am inclined to put up a site that documents every removale and figure out some scripted method to slip links into EU country websites in an effort to make it impossible to keep up with the removal request. Yes, I know it sounds a bit spammy. I am only thinking out loud because I am so taken aback by the idiocy on the situation.
Was wondering if this is instead transformed into a wireless "near-fieldish" charging solution. Where you keep your phone on top of a speaker, then realized that the article assumed only 50% loss because of air, and in fact you can't even physically focus a 1m^2 speaker at near field.
I use CloudPull, a Mac app, to backup all my Gmail emails on my local hard drive. It also backs up my Google Contacts, Google Calendar, and Google Drive. (My local hard drive is then backed up in two ways, one local, one in the cloud.)

I used to use Backupify, a cloud-based service to backup my Google Account, but CloudPull is less expensive, and more in my control.
NASA’s Orion Spacecraft Complete
If I were a VC invested in this, I'd want hearing tests on the engineers working on this project; once a month, over time.

Of course, if I were a VC, I wouldn't invest in this, because it is physically retarded on inspection. Whoever did the dil on this is either a fool who doesn't understand basic physics, or was bribed somehow. Off the top of my head
a) sound energy falls off as 1/r^2,
b) that those sorts of energy densities are almost certainly physically dangerous to more than ears
c) sound doesn't propagate well in air at those frequencies; you're basically heating up air
d) transducers are not good at turning sound into energy
If it's static, then run it from S3. It'll be cheaper, and there are no servers to secure.
Digital Ocean is not at all safe to use. They disabled my account, having credit of 100$ of student pack. I used to pay 5$ for droplet since 4 months and they are now without any genuine reason locking my account. Neither do they listen to any queries and rather they respond back saying that We will not unlock your account.
I am also frustrated by them. It's not safe and reliable to host application on digital ocean servers because they can become assholes anytime.