skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the most common objections to UFOs-as-extraterrestrials that I see is that the distances between solar systems, and the amount of time required to travel between them is so large, even at light speed, that any such visitors are simply impossible. This objection is usually backed up with relativity, and the increasing amount of energy required as C is approached.

My objection to this is orangutans.

Orangutans are amazing creatures. Placid but intelligent, social and all in all an interesting specimen from nature. But you cannot teach them calculus. It's simply impossible. Their brains are not capable of dealing with concepts that are necessary.

What does this have to do with UFOs? There is a chance that there are concepts in the universe of which our brains are unable to conceive, just like orangutans and calculus. These concepts may be necessary to achieve travel over interstellar distances.

I understand that this is an unprovable statement. It is, nevertheless, a (admittedly fluffy) rebuttal to the "relativity forbids FTL travel" objection that is raised when the subject of UFOs is discussed. We have seen glimpses where savants are able to perform mental tasks that are amazing to "normals", giving hints that such things might at least be possible.
"...to me at least, Fountain will fail for one reason and one reason only: people do not like to pay for things on the Internet like this."

I would normally agree with this, but I think if they focused on home renovation/repair niche (lucrative with lots of use cases), it could work. E.g. If I have a busted sink and know that it would cost at least $100 for a plumber to stop by, I would think nothing of spending $5-10 online to potentially diagnose or solve it. So, key to this would be managing the pricing: ensuring that online consultation price is not above a certain fraction of offline alternative cost to user.
The CMD + LEFT and CMD + RIGHT are the ones that get me when sites autofocus. Being focused on a text entry changes those from forward/back in the browser's history to moving the cursor to the beginning/end of the line. It can be incredibly frustrating.

My favorite sites are the ones that don't autofocus, but have a keyboard shortcut (usually '/') that focuses on search. But then I love anything that behaves like vim/less.
AT&T Locks Apple SIM to Their Network
Most great inventors in history (an estimated 90 percent) are ripped off and never received credit and monetary compensation for their genius and hard work: http://cbpowerandindustrial.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/when-ha...
What's with the recent uptick in UFO article postings in HN?
This is yet another argument for using HTML5 as much as possible instead of proprietary formats for public document interchange of formats fancier than plain text. Although you might have to give up some fancier features, you can get a near-equivalent of PowerPoint, Word, and Excel from HTML5 with a lot less risk and a lot more cross-platform availability for the people you send it to.
Unfortunately, opening and forwarding random PowerPoint presentations is all some of my relatives do on their computers.
Wow I remember the squeeze, didn't know it cost Porsche it's independence. Great read!
20 years ago. Still waiting on HURD by the way and when was the last time anyone outside of the hard core techs referred to Linux as GNU\Linux
More generally, "don't open files in random proprietary formats from strangers".

People are surprised and think it's strange when I request they send me files in .txt instead of .doc(x), .csv instead of .xls(x), .pdf instead of .ppt(x), reject HTML emails, etc. Some of these people are the same ones who manage to somehow get infected with tons of malware, even when they're running an AV.

The best alternative to a .ppt(x) is .pdf, and even that has had its share of exploits in the official implementation.
You're underestimating Amazon's software muscle, they have some very hard hitting teams. Plenty of PhDs, old-time Lispers, etc.

I have a Kindle Fire HDX 8.9' tablet, the hardware is top notch and there are plenty of apps. From what I know, if an Android app doesn't heavily rely on Google proprietary APIs, like Maps, it's trivial to put it on the Amazon store.

But yeah, the phone needed to be 2-3 times cheaper to sell well.
In the USA if you knowingly violate a patent you will be responsible for triple damages. For software that would be 3X the revenue generated. This is true even if the violator does not charge - because the person with the patent is still suffering damages (lost revenue). So practically they can force you to remove it if they can show damages - which wouldn't be that hard to show in the Shazam example.
First, this is federal and not state, because they were foreign workers. It even says in the first paragraph of the article that it was the US Department of Labor rather than the California one.

Second, I hope you're wrong since a hearty income for the law firm would not benefit the underpaid employees, who I think still got a shitty deal even including the back wages.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at; if they don't merit that piece of context as I do then either I'm wrong or they are (the latter of which would fall under #1, and the former of which I cannot learn from their statements since they never addressed that piece of context in the first place).
Oh sure, I bet karpathy's explanation is great for the people it makes sense to. It just assumes a lot more specialized knowledge on the part of the reader, knowledge that I personally don't have.
Success in predicting markets is measured in profit.

This research team should start a company that offers a service that allows users to deposit bitcoins, which the company then invests according to their alleged predictions, and then pay interest on deposits, and keep a part of the profit for themselves.

Doubling the initial investment one time is one thing, but this hypothetical company being able to double its investment every 50 days for years is something else. I doubt they can. A doubling every 50 days is x160 every year.

I think claims of being able to predict market prices should be met with great skepticism. Especially prices of easily traded commodities, including bitcoins.

The only proper measure of an ability to predict market prices is profit, because profit also measures the extent of the predictions: how much can you move the market (by trading according to your predictions) until you can no longer predict what will happen? Obviously, there's a limit. No one can extract unlimited profit from any market. So there definitely is a limit to how much you can earn from your algorithm. If you can earn 10% p.a. on an investment of maximum $5000, your algorithm isn't really worth much. If you can earn 1000% p.a. on an investment of up to $100M, your algorithm is great. But without knowing these figures we really only have a claim, seemingly a claim of them being able to make a lot of money, but choosing not to do so.
> or something

... something like straight up into the stratosphere?
And because it's all closed-source, you'll never know how it was finding the wrong answers!

I think that the use of closed-source software in any public research or scientific undertaking should probably be verboten.
I looked into these legal questions in some detail in an article I wrote for CNET (before leaving to found http://recent.io/ earlier this year). The short answer is that Verizon has more leeway than it would if it's a cable company, and it's possible that VZ's actions implicate the Wiretap Act, but exact implementation details matter:
http://www.cnet.com/news/web-monitoring-for-ads-it-may-be-il...

Here's a related article I wrote about Verizon selling customers' geographical locations, app usage, and Web browsing activities:
http://www.cnet.com/news/verizon-draws-fire-for-monitoring-a...

My favorite quote from that story:
"We're able to view just everything that they do," Bill Diggins, U.S. chief for the Verizon Wireless marketing initiative, told an industry conference earlier this year. "And that's really where data is going today. Data is the new oil." "We're able to identify what that customer likes not by filling out a form, but by analyzing what they do on a day-to-day basis..."
Came to recommend the same. The great thing is the book isn't built around a 'one neat trick' approach that so much financial literature takes, but instead tries to aid in building up useful mental models -- that just happen to be applicable to financial problems.
That's interesting. Can you recommend any articles or books on this?
It's an interesting story but hard to understand why they are saying it's a hedge fund. The fact that Porsche made an investment in VW that affected the larger financial markets does in no way equate to Porsche being a hedge fund, especially since that investment was made to allow them to continue manufacturing cars, not as a switch to focusing on financial markets.
Uber Hits Vegas
Elon Musk: With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon
Juicy Startup
That is true in the USA. In the UK, for example, there is an academic exemption. Practically there would be very little damages that could be shown by infringing a patent once in a lab.
It's sort of a Wiki, but Atlassian Confluence is the tool I've been recommended in the past when faced with this problem. We have a limited number of folks in our DevOps group using it and they love it.
But nobody has payed Google for store access in this scenario. They may cut you off any time.
Did you learn regular expressions as well? I bet they'd be very useful for journalists / journalism majors.
This is even more problematic, as all it takes is for someone to be enticed into opening one which silently installs malware, and then they'll think it's "perfectly fine" and forward it to someone else who trusts them.
"Simply impossible" is not correct. "Highly unlikely" or "Highly improbable" is the right phrase to use.
No, mental tasks that some persons are capable of performing don't prove anything related to the UFO's.
Lua 5.2 has bit operations too, but they are functions not operators.
By making it very easy to port Android apps and having lower fees.
This approach is much more clear when you use inner product notation.

Another benefit is you can see exactly how it is similar to other basis like (orthonormal) wavelets, and dis-similar to so-called "over-complete" basis (complex wavelets, various frames). It also becomes easier to see what the projections onto basis vectors are doing, how/why energy is "concentrated" under a wavelet transform of natural signals, etc.
Dunno why you're being downvoted. XMPP, other than being the bomb, is open.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6121
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6120
At first I thought he was going to work for Facebook, which would be interesting and unexpected. I was disappointed that the article was just about him creating a Facebook account.
Why MySQL and SQLite, but not PostgreSQL?
For the full interview: http://webcast.amps.ms.mit.edu/fall2014/AeroAstro/index-Fri-...
The same idea we see in Ubuntu's search feature should have been the approach taken to mobile devices.
Produce software, not hardware.
It's not deployed into production yet. What figures do you interested in?
yes, and it was a complete nightmare dealing with that from the C side sometimes :/... sooo much conditional type casting :(
Important for anybody running powerpoint conversion servers to apply this patch (myself included, looking into it now).

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/3010060
News Media logic process on UFO stories:

1) Let's find the most obscure explanation for X UFO sighting that may or may not be true (aka. large spider webs that fly up to 14,000 feet in the air) while ignoring the other 100,000 + sightings per year around the world.

2) Let's post a story about a UFO and people who witnessed it, then let's close it off with witty remarks and laugh it off... because the potential for real aliens visiting our Earth is way the F* too scary to contemplate.
That web site has the worst of both worlds. It has "modern" minimalist design optimized for cell phones, with lots of colored blank space, low contrast between text and background, and few links. Then the content is GNU-quality, strong on code and mechanism and weak on design intent.

The site seems to be a plug for this video:

https://gnunet.org/ghm2014knock

This proposes a port-knocking scheme to deter port scanning. 20 minutes of sickly yellow on purple PowerPoint. That's an idea of limited value; port-knocking is security by obscurity. Any widespread use of port-knocking implies it will be known to attackers.

They have a legislative program. It's here:

http://youbroketheinternet.org/legislation/

1999 called. It wants the BLINK tag back.

The legislative proposal is to require end to end cell phone encryption plus onion routing for all phones. Maybe for other devices; there are sections in the document labelled "Fixme" on that. Specific encryption standards are specified; unclear if those are good choices or not. The overhead and lag for onion routing for voice would be high.

It's worth having this out there, but it's not a plan, it's a collection of stuff in search of a plan.
Not Sharing the Opportunity to Learn Is a Cardinal Sin
Well, the suit handles all the hard work of not dying. It could have been anyone in that suit, it just happened to be that guy.

I can stand in ovation at the engineering work in all this, but I don't see reason to applaud the rider.
Here is another visualized Fourier
http://blog.matthen.com/post/42112703604/the-smooth-motion-o...
Knowledge management isn't a buzzword you should avoid, our team definitely got better because of it (granted, we're a small company).

Redmine wiki features are okay for our needs. Any software will do you great service if you have the mindset to record your findings.
I think teaching a declarative language like SQL along with some basic, common queries is a lot easier than teaching R to someone with no technical background. Even as a CS student, it took me a couple weeks to get the hang of R.

In general, I see a trend towards teaching data science and analytics to people who aren't software engineers. I think SQL is an excellent way to bring analytics skills to the masses (over python, R, java).
What would you estimate his BF% at based on the photos?
The DoL can bring suit for back wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages - which is still not a very aggressive penalty, but would have been more impressive than this. I don't understand it.

http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/wages/backpay.htm
I'm working on a social graph of causality, which is meant to solve the problem of having to ask specific questions to find answers. I call it Causemap (http://causemap.org). Here's something I added today about the militarization of police (http://www.causemap.org/1033-program)
If something went wrong and he died that could be bad for stocks. Better keep it a secret until it's a proven success.
Symbolic math is not the same thing as formalized math, and doesn't carry with it the same guarantees of correctness. That's the price one pays for having black box functions spit out answers to hard problems in a reasonable time, they won't spit out proofs of correctness alongside their answer.

Any symbolic system should be treated with care, but they can of course be extremely useful. My typical use case is to have it compute very challenging symbolic expressions for me. I then treat it as a "very plausible hypothesis" which I then prove.
Use whatever, as long as it has good search? SharePoint doesn't appear to be as awful as I'd been led to believe, as long as you use Microsoft Everything (but does handle e.g. Word files on a share); Atlassian Confluence is tolerable on big hardware. Don't expect to get good-looking prints out, though - Scroll is no LaTeX.
For a `slightly` longer explanation: http://betterexplained.com/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-...
Knox is difficult to implement in an enterprise environment anyway -- when we evaluated MDMs, two vendors flat out said that they were aware of zero customers actually using it

The problem is, of course the security model for Android is a real mess, especially in BYOD scenarios. These garbage 3rd party solutions are there because the platform doesn't provide it.
Adobe charges up to £100 extra for using 'the wrong browser'
Understanding the fourier transform (from archive) https://archive.today/ulPFk

(original link(dead) http://www.altdev.co/2011/05/17/understanding-the-fourier-tr...)
The only way for me to stay connected with my peers from the military was via Facebook. Same with many peers from school and soon university. Social networks are there to complement real life connections IMHO not to substitute them.
Do you have any sources for this "roadmap"? If anything this built-in Sim card seems like an idea that lessens the power of the consumer and goes in the opposite direction to weaken consumer choice/freedom.
Surprise, that's a software-based feature you could build for just about any phone.

That's an interesting comment. Isn't "phone" a software based feature you could build for just about any computer? I wonder if a fully featured general purpose mobile computer and ubiquitous wifi could make smartphones a thing of the past...
For those that might have an interest in the real UFO phenomenon and serious investigations into the matter:

1) 2001 Disclosure project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vyVe-6YdUk

2) 2013 Ex-CIA deathbed confession: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CSeWkJvdbQ

3) Confessions of 4 USA Astronaults on UFOs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KyxLM2eqkk

4) After Disclosure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlhy3_akb_s

5) Citizen's Hearing on Disclosure - Testifying before former congress witnesses: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=citizens+hearing...
It's so great to see such accessible teaching materials for the next generation of data journalists. Almost makes me wish I studied journalism in college.
>I'd love to see video of it and see if he had better control than Felix. We almost lost him and I wonder if Alan had implemented controls to prevent a bad spin.

The article mentions a small early parachute that is used to prevent that spin. You can also see it on the video.
Months later and I'm still kind of bemusedly surprised the Fire Phone launched at the price that it did because prior to launch I was nearly certain that a surprisingly low price relative to the hardware would be the killer feature, given Amazon's history and the fact that the phone was designed from the ground up to herd you into Amazon's content ecosystem

100% agreed -- they've even said that their stated goal with the Kindle Fire was to bring quality tech at affordable prices; why they thought they could get away with a subprime phone at a prime price is beyond me.
An idea for a startup
I was very fortunate to have my first entrepreneurial experience last year as I co-founded my first company: an on-demand location based service(Uber for X). Even though the company is still up and running, due to some personal issues, I could no longer be a part of the team and I departed last month.

Building, launching and running an on-demand LBS company and also closely studying all the other small and big players in the market for one year gave me a good grasp of what challenges these companies are facing from the very early days.

Most of these companies (like every other marketplace) have three major moving parts that limit their growth potential:
1- Technology: building, maintaining, and constantly iterating the product for variety of the devices.
2- Customers: acquiring new customers and improving their conversion rate and LTV.
3- Independent Contractors: acquiring, hiring, and maintaining their independent contractor pool.

One of challenges that we were facing since the early days was constantly looking for new independent contractors because due to the nature of the job most of these people are looking for a temporary or part time job and are not committed to their job as regular employees.

I believe all these companies would benefit a lot from a temporary staffing firm curated only for on-demand services. Imagine an API that give them access to list of tens of thousands of people in every city that they launch who have already have background check and updated information of their driving records and vehicle. Another opportunity is to offer insurance to this rising number of people who are joining these companies (e.g. Uber, Lyft, SideCar, Instacart, Postmates, Washio, Zipments, Deliv.co, Shoprunner, Doordash, Fluc, Drizley, Drinkin, Saucey and etc.)

If anyone is interested to work on this topic I would love to share my experience and thoughts because after all it is about the economy of sharing :)
Heating things with a laser is not quite as easy as you might think. Different materials will absorb different wavelengths of light at different rates. So for example a 1um laser might not heat white polyethylene enough while it would melt black ABS. Hot air has the advantage that it is always a consistent temperature regardless of the material.
Hi! I made this and I'd appreciate any kind of feedback from you guys.
Telcos CEOs and big shareholders are extremely arrogant, but not dumb. IMHO in the US, the balance of power between telcos and phone manufacturers is still in favour of the telcos. To have any chance Apple will have to bring back most of their foreign profits (and that will cost a ton of taxes) and ally with other vendors (Google, Samsung, etc.). So not likely at all.
Does Mathematica not have some kind of "show me the work" mode? I seem to remember that Macsyma had this..
Request: Removal of “ownCloud” package from ubuntu
> You're underestimating Amazon's software muscle, they have some very hard hitting teams. Plenty of PhDs, old-time Lispers, etc.

Call me when they can figure out that $.99 == $.99 100% of the time. [Hint: At least once every few months, this isn't true for at least one of their back end services and I have to clean up after it. This is just one issue of many they have, including the fact their "primary key" for items (ASINs) can be duplicated across multiple products.]

I think many, many people overestimate Amazon's technical capability.

They are competent but they are not special.

Hell, they can take up to 8 days to ship something from a warehouse sometimes.
Would opening them in Google Drive sanitize them?
I like to think of it like a vertical line of individual LEDs that sequentially shine to show current amplitude. (Like a Cylon visor or KITT the car.)

Sweep it sideways across a dark area, and you will see the waveform as an afterimage.

But start to spin it around the center, and you get a blob of light, one that becomes tighter and more symmetric whenever the spin-rate approaches the rate of a repeating subpattern.
Curious if you happen to have a significant other or family that would consume a significant chunk of your potential free time.
I had a similar experience when I saw something that appeared to hover over my neighbor's house. It almost looked like a V-22 osprey, but this was well before that aircraft existed and silent.

In my case, it was there when I went to get my dad, and we both looked at for a good 5m until it moved past the tree line.

No idea what it was -- could have been some weird atmospheric thing, but it was very freaky.
cydia download iOS 8.0.2 using panGu 2.0
On a technicality he wasn't flying only falling ;).
Yeah, but Buffett was a investor from the beginning, not a textile manager, he just used the company to keep doing what he was doing. He also calls it his worst purchase ever.
I suspect this is why when you buy a printer at Fry's, you are asked your name and phone number. That potentially matches you to the watermark even when you pay cash.