skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a supposed demo of the device in action:

http://on.aol.com/video/ubeam-wireless-power-demonstration-a...

Only thing is that I want to see what's in the box on the left. There's nothing to show that the transmitters are actually transferring power and aren't simply telling the other side to turn on and change resistivity to a hidden battery on the left hand side (or even draw from the battery in the iPhone connected to the left hand side)

Furthermore, that's a pretty janky analog multimeter to be using for anyone doing electronics, and it's currently set to measure resistivity, not current or voltage.
Do you recommend I memorize a GUID? It's not quite "Correct Horse Battery Staple"

Has any CloudDrive service been socially engineered? I didn't find any results in my rudimentary search.
They definitely tested the engines on the ground[1]. You have to give the engineers the benefit of the doubt, at the very least.

[1]: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JBrl96U...
> After all we have so many laws that offer similar type of protections already, such as a wife not having to testify against her husband. At some point the society decided that it's the "right thing" to do.

To put it in context: spousal privilege is rooted deeply in religious tradition going back hundreds if not thousands of years. It fell naturally out of a belief that people already had (the indivisible marital unit). That's what it takes to overcome the default presumption that "the public has the right to every man's evidence." Now, the fact that something has been the case for probably 800 years doesn't mean it can't be changed, but does suggest that if people really had a problem with it, they would have taken issue with it by now.
Unfortunately it is not that hard to get someone's first name, last name, and their entire SSN (not just the last 4 digits), especially if you have a bit of money to spend and know the right places to look.

Personal aside: does anyone know if I could call Verizon support and ask them to require a specific passcode be used before accepting any call relating to my account? Before I call and ask, I'd like to know the odds of them actually agreeing and actually abiding by it.
Virgins galactics spaceship explodes
"It’s also a truly fascinating, troubling demonstration of how the ruling could work."

It seems to be working exactly as it was intended.
Inescapable? Sure, if you ignore sample size. There aren't enough countries period, and I don't think they're all similar enough in meaningful ways, for any subset to be considered a representative sample for just about anything.

I don't know enough about the debate to form an educated opinion one way or the other, I just can't stand hyperbole like this, especially when the underlying assumptions are so fundamentally flawed.

Edit: And over all of eight months. Wow, yeah, now I'm convinced...
Here are the published patents thus far:

http://patents.justia.com/inventor/marc-berte
http://patents.justia.com/inventor/matthew-angle

The problem I can see is that the filing date for those patents is far later than public demonstrations such as the one at D9 on or around 04/22/2012
Netezza is fast. It solves many problems very well. It is expandable. How can it be free and expandable at the same time while also being blazingly fast?

Free hardware?
ISRO's Mars 2 mission set for 2018
According to this list, Colombia has fewer drug related deaths than any of the countries you mentioned, Sierra Leone about the same as Japan and the Netherlands is below Saudi Arabia.

I can't find the source of this list or any comparable ranking. But except for some countries, this lists seems completely random to me or is using not comparable numbers from each countries in/official statistics
What we learned from getting rejected by YC
got some great feedback from the community here and decided to revise and repost this
Satellites offer the same capabilities. What satellites don't offer is the ability to retreive (capture) objects, and maneuver (evade) at all altitudes. From the anti satellite efforts by China this decade I infer that evading ASAT weapons the primary goal, and that retrieval or placement of something are strong possibilities as well.
The following is purely personal opinion. Feel free to disprove me.

I think at the moment, and into the foreseeable future, a human at the pilot seat for an experimental craft, where all sorts of unexpected scenarios could pop up, would be much better suited than an automated "test" pilot, given that sometimes you don't even necessarily have the correct parameters of your plane/rocket to program a successful autopilot.

Keep in mind that people at Virgin Galactic will have finite resources. Even if you can automate something that can access very unexpected situations and make a correct decision on what to do, the cost of doing that vs a test pilot is going to be much higher.

As far as I'm aware, aircraft autopilot systems do not perform well when unexpected mechanical failures occur and usually defer to humans by sounding alarms and such.

As for rockets, especially test ones, usually the automated system that makes a call when mechanical failures occur involves self destruct to prevent collateral damages.
IANAL but it might still affect their distribution of the paper in Europe.

EDIT: according to response, the law does not affect newspapers, which I guess makes sense, otherwise anyone could prevent anything negative from being published about them.
Short version: It's better to require plaintiffs have standing (actual controversy) than to allow them to bring hypothetical controversies to the courts.
Pretty sure 10<sup>12</sup> indicates that they're talking 10 to the 12th power. Seems like they just needed one more proofreader.
I see debt people- the ten scariest economic charts in the world
The more cache you have, the harder it is to get it to the frequency you desire. A larger cache also means a more power hungry cpu producing more heat and subject to significant reliance on Moore's Law in order to avoid stalling out on cache size and being forced to go back to RAM.

Also, its a lot easier to scale outside of a chip with external, or on-package, DRAM which allows for modularity within the the same cpu segment.
Pricing is hard, especially on truly high tech product. It is always sold for less than it is truly worth, a hit you take for the art.
China completes first mission to moon and back
When I read the investment announcement I thought "Hmm, there must be something big/new I'm missing." If this author is correct, then there is nothing new here. Just the insanity of thinking you can transfer power efficiently with sound. How could you make a $10M mistake on such a fundamental issue though?
Or just rearranged his sentence at some point and forgot to change units.
It's not just SMS that's the problem though. In many cases any random person off the street can call up your telco, pretend to be you, and get all of your calls and voicemail forwarded to them.
The American prohibition is working exactly as intended.
The Streisand Effect has an upper limit on the number of people it can affect at any time. There's only so many 'scandalous reveals' the public mind can handle at once.
Supersonic laser-propelled rockets
One thing that nobody has mentioned yet is that generally speaking, when you are booked, your possessions are confiscated (including your phone) and your fingerprints are taken. It is very trivial to transform even a latent fingerprint and fool even high-end devices (using play-dough, for example) into authenticating.

Therefore, cops would technically not even need you to be physically present to unlock your phone. Chances are, your thumbs or index fingers are the ones used to unlock your device, so if I were a cop, that's what I'd try first.

I'm not sure though how this would stand up on legal grounds. Anyone?
Well, sitting here on my chair talking about constitutional legalities, on a discussion forum, I'll need all the luck I can get ;-)
Question: I realize that the manufacturer has kind of dropped the ball, but would flashing the firmware with dd-wrt allow the user to patch the gaping security hole? Or does it go deeper?
> Leaving aside the fact that Lazic’s request is misdirected, under the ruling — it applies to search engines, not publishers, and only within the E.U...
I recently did some research on exactly this topic.

What I discovered is that the pay gap for people doing the same/similar job with the same level of experience and working the same hours is fairly small if it exists at all. Different studies measure it as between 0 and 7 percent "unexplained" pay gap (ie, not a result of degree, experience, hours worked, or other legitimate differences.) And it's not like these were all right-wing studies; some were coming from left-wing women's labor organizations and still saying they couldn't detect a wage gap after controlling for the relevant factors.

The one "counterexample" someone tried to post for me was about freshly hired women in medicine, who make less than freshly hired men in virtually every medical specialty -- but the study they cherry-picked data from actually discussed how the pay gap between men and women in the same specialty had widened recently, specifically because women were negotiating more non-salary perks (like family-friendly hours) in exchange for lower salary.

The actual amount of proveable wage discrimination in the US is very small -- I was looking at labor department statistics, and the total for discrimination settlements was measured in millions (in an economy measured in trillions). This included both out of court settlements and court-mandated settlements.

I don't deny that some wage discrimination exists. But the data suggests it's not nearly as widespread or systematic as commonly believed. (And IMO it's self-evident that it's not -- because if it was, the economic opportunity for companies paying women fairly would be staggering. They could get the cream of the crop of women for average male salaries.)
Michael Arrington, who funded uBeam's seed round through CrunchFund [0], wrote about a sneak peek of the product [1] two years ago:

"She then performs the closest thing to magic I’ve seen in a long time."

Investors fund things because they don't understand it. (Although, two years to a Series A is pretty slow in today's climate.)

[0]: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/11/disruptive-defined-ubeam-la...

[1]: http://uncrunched.com/2012/05/23/serendipity/
Stochastic Optimization of  Floating-point Programs  with Tunable Precision [pdf]
I am not a physicist, and this is not an excuse for due diligence, but investing in this problem is certainly better than investing in the next app that sends messages or brings you beer.

I feel there is a lack of initiative, money and publicity towards inventors solving real physics problems.
So many problems due to regulation, mostly that in the labor market...
Solution to 1 and 2: allow jobless youth from Southern Europe into Japan. This will help solve 3 and 10, as now these countries are spending significant money on these nonproductive youth - this can instead be invested.
Because with a can-do attitude, who needs your fancy equations and negative attitude?

You just need to look at it from the right angle. With your eyes closed.
Virgin has to get Brandon to space this year or their funding is subject to considerable clawback.
That probably has to do with the fact that most of the real physics problems are being solved by theoretical physicists.
"Now, the fact that something has been the case for probably 800 years doesn't mean it can't be changed, but does suggest that if people really had a problem with it, they would have taken issue with it by now."

I think it certainly does suggest that, but it's worth noting that what we really have a problem with shifts over time. Whether that's going to be relevant here, I can't say...
"“Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read.

If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

To read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended.”

― Salman Rushdie"
> solving real physics problems.

Except the author says:

crazy ideas that are physically impossible
[with] dishonest PR [are raising lots of
capital] while great ideas that have huge
potential are sitting by the wayside trying
to rise above the noise.

A couple more well-capitalized total flame-outs will sour investors on this entire space, meaning that the companies that obey the laws of thermodynamics will be even more screwed than they are today.

I'd rather this entire space be ignored than see top-tier VCs sour everyone on the industry.
I wouldn't call prohibition a triumph of democracy; just a different kind of failure mode for democracy. There was a relative minority of the population that wanted prohibition and were able to form a very effective "lobbying" effort, otherwise known as destroy any candidate who was against prohibition in the primaries. It is the same type of thing we see today in issues such as gun control, where we have massive popular support for one side of the issue (increased background checks), but it is still politically dangerous to pursue it because of a powerful lobby.
Exactly, cultural characteristics matter. Japan is a collectivistic culture with a high trust of authority. I would imagine that individualistic cultures with low trust of authority are likely to experience greater drug use.
> Also I think if society would have tolerated alcohol prohibition that the government would have been happy to keep that going as well for similar reasons.

See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542155. In fact, at the time prohibition was proposed, alcohol taxes made up fully 1/3 of federal revenue. The money and moneyed interests were aligned against prohibition, not for it.

I think a lot of people look for ways to get around the fact that when you give people self-determination as a group, they might vote for things you don't like with no nefarious undertones in play. The simplest explanation is this one: I don't vote, my mom does. There are more puritanical people who simply don't want to live in a society that condones drug use than the opposite. It's just like how when people in arab countries got the opportunity to vote, they voted-in conservative Islamic governments. Sure they are opportunists taking advantage of those tendencies, but at the end of the day, you have to grapple with the real fact that people have ideas about what their societies should look like, and democracy means that they get to carry those ideas into fruition.
Don't investors do some sort of due diligence before dumping money on things though? Surely Michael Arrington or Marc Andreesen has a guy who can tell them when some crazy idea violates the laws of physics, even if they don't understand it themselves.
Putting the physics and this product aside, let's go to another core "law": make something people want. What do people want? Better battery life. What are you doing? Finding a worse way to charge a battery.

Quick recap

Problem: Battery life is much shorter than consumers would like.

>Solution: Make better batteries that last longer, are more durable, and can be recycled into new batteries (to keep costs down in the future)
I'm guessing the spammers generated millions of dormant accounts using TOR or a public hotspot/cantenna before Google implemented this. But I'm also guessing that el goog has an automated system to notice the patterns.

Ranting, but to this day, I still can't use google search reliably over TOR, meanwhile the spammers and adversarial people who scour Google's results for whatever purpose have almost certainly hacked the captcha, otherwise they would stop their grokking of the SERPs and rethink their retrieval methods, like get a channel bank of dial up modems, redialing once they get to a captcha. On certain TOR exits there is no captcha, so I assume they're probably new nodes or light traffic nodes. The captcha block page even says this: your computer is sending us a lot of queries. Here's one such unblocked node. It's in the ukraine, ~10MBPS, uptime of 31 days. It's about middle of the road in terms of bandwidth and has a somewhat short uptime.
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/31D01A8CD3799E0CB6A56D...

In my spare time, I run an exit node, but what I'm really doing is using my switches mirror port into my WAN connection to capture 100% of all TOR traffic for SEO purposes, and to find what and how people are hacking, etc....

It's ironic that google fights for the right to index everyone's content [see germany news et al] but the reverse? Oh no, no way! The SEOs will figure out our secret sauce and use Google to steal the best ranking content. And yes, I realize Google's guidelines are for the good of the web, I'm just ranting.
I'm skeptical when people say that. Long term, this is more likely to harm science-based startup funding. If these investments don't pan out, they're more likely to just stop funding science/basic tech startups than they are to fix their DD issues.
We could say: This article illustrates what is wrong with tech blogging.

Taking a media story of a funded startup and running with this sort of conclusions is short sighted at best. There might be much more than this, the probability for funds like a16z to invest $10M without a bit of research sounds rather low to me.
Slack's value comes from integrations. The way it compiles all the information from a variety of services in one place and presents it in one format (chat messages) removes a ton of overhead and inefficiency.
That quote from the FDA is referring to ultrasound imaging, which is performed with transducers in direct contact with the body. Even in those instances, ultrasound is regarded as one of the safest medical imaging techniques.

Nonetheless, while I suspect this technology is safe, I agree they shouldn't hand-wave over that aspect.
Hi,

Quick comment on item 2.3: SHOULD NOT update a var using loops or conditions.

you conclude that this expression is the best option:
val sum = elements.map(_.value).sum

This expression is not equivalent to the previous options in performance and memory, as the map expression will create a entire new sequence.

For large sequences, a better option is to write:
val sum = elements.view.map(_.value).sum
Gravity visualized (2012) [video]
> the probability for funds like a16z to invest $10M without a bit of research sounds rather low to me

Well, it's a probability, and it's greater than zero. It could happen.
>I'd rather this entire space be ignored than see top-tier VCs sour everyone on the industry.

Agreed. However, if they don't know how to do DD a better one option would be just to fund more companies at a lower level. With a more realistic valuation that reflects the risk involved. However I don't think they like spreading their cash out like that.

Overall, it seems like there's probably not enough seed level funding for science/basic tech startups.
The consensus of the forum seems to be, no, no you can not.
Not to mention that if you see the assignment, you know that it's returning something, so you wouldn't (shouldn't) assume that the method is necessarily mutating the object. Plus I like the idea of moving towards immutable by default and calling methods that by name are explicit about mutation.
The European Union's "Right to be Forgotten" legislation only applies to search engines and link aggregators. It does not apply to newspapers, so it will not affect their distribution if they do not comply.
Congrats on being invited to an interview, and for your progress with Sniply. I understand completing an application even if you don't intend to join a YC batch, but why submit it? Did your team previously want to get into YC, but decide not to right after receiving the interview invite?

The feedback even rejected teams receive after interviews seems incredibly valuable, and it's definitely coveted by those who were rejected with no feedback. You said that your team will probably apply again in the future. Why not try to get in now, unless something prevents one of the cofounders from being able to fully commit to YC this batch?

It seems like your team is doing great, but consider that the YC partners or alumni may know and be able to help you out with something you aren't even aware that you'll need help with yet. I don't see the benefit of your decision. Perhaps some of your answers will help me understand.
The criticisms seem valid, but I'm surprised by the extreme negative reactions. VCs have a lot of money to play with, which they usually pump into the latest photo sharing/email organizer/whatever app. I'd prefer mistakes like this to getting more yo like apps funded.

Plus, who knows. we will probably never have ultrasonic iPhone chargers but maybe ubeam will pivot or stumble upon other unrelated ideas or uses for their technology, as often seems to happen with startups.
I'm also a physicist, though not in the world of ultrasound, and had similar concerns when I saw uBeam turn up on HN today. I thought about writing up my concerns (power loss, inadvertent heating of the wrong thing, cranky animals, etc.), but decided to hold my tongue.

If you have $10M to invest in a startup, then you certainly have $10-20k to contract someone knowledgeable in the field for a week to vet an idea for sanity. As a skilled but low-paid academic, I'd jump at that gig, as I'm sure many others would.

If the investor's done their homework, then perhaps there's a clever trick of which uBeam makes use. If not, then perhaps the investor will lose money. Either way, it'll sort itself out.
Ask HN: Passive income as a dev?
Hi!

Lately, I have been on the fence about going back to the freelancing adventure - I'm currently a dev. (also called a "CTO"). I had a fair success with it on oDesk and could imagine living from it if push came to shove; however, I'm very interested by the 'passive income' type of online businesses.

How could I, a competent full-stack developer, work toward creating passive income, a little bit at a time, so that in a few years, I can start living the dream of taking freelancing jobs only when I want to, rather than when I need to :)

Usual passive income strategies (based on producing content) aren’t very attractive to me. What seems to be up my alley, is to help startups with little or no technical skills to build their MVP, get it from rough idea to a working, deployed, product then let them deal with the actual work of selling it, in exchange for a small equity/share of the profit (the passive income) and a low flat rate based on requirements. I think that overall, it's a good deal for people currently struggling to find the right technical partner or having issues with finding reliable developers with experience taking 'vague requirements' and turn it into 'something marketable'.

Does this approach make sense or do you think nobody will ever go through the hassle of onboarding a ‘technical partner’ they don’t know and isn’t interested to stay in the long term? If you put it like that, it sure sounds like a silly idea :) But my hunch is that while yes, it’s not an ideal situation, the alternative, for some startups, is even worse: never getting a working product out of the door, spending weeks in dead ends due to lack of experience, or paying a freelancer 100$/h for 2 weeks, pay the bill, and then never sell the product.

I’d love to know the thoughts of this community on this, and how you’d get started on this? Other ideas are welcome!

Thank you!