skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If only I could short the stock on these guys...

Short-range electrical wireless charging is a perfectly good technology. The problem is that there are three proposed systems, all incompatible, each with shipping products but little volume. Somebody needs to kick some butt, get everybody to agree on one system, and get those charging pads in every business hotel room, and every Starbucks in the developed world. This isn't a technical problem. It's Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD, which held up high-definition discs for about two years.
Plus, pg says do things that don't scale initially.
Kickstarter plz.
In ths US, drugs are basically the opiate of the masses. In particular, minorities. The drug laws are basically the rich white people saying: heads I win, tails you lose. As such, nothing will change. Nobody runs faster from a school with minority over-represenatation faster than a (white, affluent) liberal in an expensive zip-code.
You already do. Lithium-ion batteries have 25-50% the energy density of TNT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density (to fill in the missing volumetric density entry, you need to know that TNT has density 1.7 g/cc)
Blow wants to optimize for (developer) speed and simplicity over memory safety - roughly, "Go's simplicity, minus garbage collection" instead of what he calls "big idea" languages. Which I would never go for myself, but he's very adamant on this point; he dismisses most new ideas in PL theory entirely in favor of focusing on the engineering problem of smoothing out basic issues seen in his existing C++ development environment, where, to paraphrase him, "everything is junk and it demoralizes me". In that respect there's plenty we could learn from this project and its whole-process agenda, even if it isn't introducing sexy new methods. There are very few PL projects that aim only to work on boring everyday problems.
Apparently they support TypeScript, which would give you types without the pain of a naming scheme....
I feel bad for the telcos (and other agencies that try to keep our private info). I called up my ISP a few months back and was presented with a variety of security questions that I couldn't provide the answer to. I certainly didn't know the 4 digit passcode I created 2+ years ago and I haven't used since. My fist couple guesses on my favorite movie were wrong. It was only after my second guess of my best friend during elementary school (probably worth a blog post on the changing winds of our memory) that I was able to access my account. The problem was that I threw all sorts of answers at the customer service rep on the other end of the phone. They were willing to ignore all of my incorrect guesses in hope I would eventually hit on something they could verify. But that is exactly the problem. If I wasn't me I wouldn't want someone getting as many opportunities that I got to eventually hit the right answer to prove they are me. So where do you draw the line between customer support and customer security without either enraging real customers or allowing people to illegally access customer accounts?

TL;DR Someone create a startup to better identify people remotely.
I used these docs when I was exploring the Immutable.js API! Very helpful, but Immutable just updated to v3 (your docs are v2), which introduces some breaking changes (for example, Vector is now called List). Would you mind updating your docs?
How about just adding aliases to existing methods, e.g. plus() and add()?
Replay: Unknown Features of the NetBurst Core
“any use of Title II would be problematic.”

For you, not for us.
> Buildings tend to have walls that are built right up to the street edge forming a 'corridor' feel.

I can't stand this and wish it were regulated. I stopped cycling in Tokyo because those walls up to corners make for a lot of blind turns for both me and drivers, and as someone with a hearing impairment, I can't count on being able to hear the car before it blindsides me or vice-versa.
It also would have to be at least an order of magnitude more energy to charge a phone than is allowed during obstetric ultrasonography.
Cyclists drink half a liter per hour in cool conditions. In the hot, humid conditions necessary for this to produce its maximum of half a liter per hour, they should drink at a much higher rate.
5W of ultrasound focused on something the size of a phone (roughly .01 m^2) is at least 500 W/m^2. That's 147 dB, I think?

(10 * log(500 (W/m^2) / 10^(-12) (W/m^2))/log(10))

A giant 0.1 m^2 tablet charging at 12W (120 W/m^2) needs only a 140 dB field. A watch, which might need 1W but with a cross section of more like .001 m^2 (for 1000 W/m^2), needs a 150 dB field.

If something intercepts the beam at 1m instead of the 3m the device is charging at, the cross section of the beam is about 1/3 by 1/3 the final cross section, which since it has to have the same energy (actually would need more to compensate for attenuation through air) would be nearly a 10dB increase?

Is 160dB of ultrasound (at 40kHz or 110 kHz) safe... for a few seconds? for a few minutes? a few seconds of exposure, daily? To your eardrum? To your eyes?

Higher energies needed if the phone isn't perfectly oriented. Worse case is small edge-on orientation to the transmitter.

Higher energies needed for less than 100% transducer efficiency, and I don't know what kind of engineering magic they've done for the transducer but what percentage of the energy could a thin skin over a device possibly convert? 80%? 50%?

The beam could be 170dB, or more.

I want to believe, but this is too sketchy without more information. Large companies have been conned out of millions by small teams peddling snake oil. I'd first want to see it demonstrated with nothing but the transmitter plugged into a socket (through a power meter), a phone at a known, low battery level, and nothing else with wires or metal in the room. Then I'd like to see a test of the transmitter aimed (from above) at a glass of water with a visible thermometer, to see what it does to water.
Please, generate 2^<length>+1 of them and let me know how it goes.
But the general picture for the one who frequents to HackerNews to get about DigitalOcean is that they are very good at resolving issues and my experience now is very bitter. I will not rely on them for hosting anything important. Considering to move on. They have not replied to my ticket and now my blog is down. previously it got down for two days and finally i moved to new droplet.
"True. But it is almost pointless to compare these two programs since Apollo was so much more complex."

That's funny, because you were the one who compared them first.
At the moment, i am considering moving back to Linode. I dont have experience with S3 but will give a try as i am not very sure about what will happen in Linode too
I wonder what the power requirements are,

The cooling system has to be cooling the air that passes through it down to the dew point, if the ambient temperature and the dew point are too far apart, it's going to consume too much power to be practical.
Being a test pilot for an experimental airborne craft isn't the kind of job that people get coerced into doing.
Right, but that's the point of a GUID. Claiming no chance makes it sound like its distinct from other GUID generators in that way. I think the intended claim is "here is a scheme for roughly timestamp-ordered GUIDs", which makes it clear that the timestamp-ordering is the interesting part.
I would bet he did it to show the shear stupidity of the 'right to be forgotten'.
> btw, does anybody else think it's weird NYC hasn't integrated either airport into the subway system?

For LaGuardia, it's basically NIMBYism.

JFK has the AirTrain connections to the subway and LIRR. Why that, why not just an actual subway? Bureaucratic turf expansion - the airports are owned by the Port Authority who has deep pockets and wanted to build a system under its own control.

Being a NYC lifer, I always forget that's not normal - in other cities I'm always surprised to realize when the airport is smoothly integrated into the transit system.
The analogy I like to make here is The Beatles and "Magic Alex." A cautionary investment tale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Alex
I find it interesting that when the Google predictions match the CDC estimates poorly, the conclusion must be that Google got it wrong. But the CDC estimates are based on patient data that has been filtered through doctors' judgements, and those doctors only got to see the people that made use of health-care services. I think it is a quite reasonable possibility that Google's predictions were on the mark, and the CDC estimates were where the problem was.

Of course, this is a science article for the general population. I imagine there is significant analysis that were not being told about. Perhaps there are very good reasons to believe that it is Google, and not the CDC, whose estimates fail to match reality.

Still, I have to wonder.
Yes, on their way, technically 99.99% uptime is bullshit. because they can make us lose customers and users due service unavailability and downtime.
I used to suggest digital ocean to my friends but now, I deny people for the same due their such behaviour.
Sure, but if it's saved in the browser than it can be extracted from the browser
How Secure is TextSecure? [pdf]
a) Travel within the solar system? where do you want to go live, Mercury, Venus? Mars is almost as worthless too, its gravity is 1/3 Earth's. Can't live there for long.

b) We just need to make it cheaper? how, exactly, are you going to get up there except by burning obscene quantities of solid (fossil) fuel, as we do now?

That's where the thermodynamics things comes in play: you have to pay the energy cost, there's no elegant "oh, we're just going to fold space" or some such bs. And fossil fuels are finite by definition, need I remind you.

It's not "we just need to make it cheaper". It's coming up with new breakthroughs in physics that no one can assure even exist.
The Myth of Chinese Super Schools
I guess the delusion I'm under is that it's possible to have the cake and eat it :) Large startups with seed money won't probably be needing my service under the conditions I described in the OP, and small startups will be struggling for so long that unless it blows up to become the next big thing (probably won't), the actual passive income I could get wouldn't be meaningful. Thanks for your input!
Another difference, the Apollo astronauts carried slide rules to do calculations during the mission.
Nitpick: The slide author correctly spells "zwei" but deliberately misspells "schwartz" and "vier".
some of the comments here and the article remind me of clinkle - see http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-story-of-clinkle-2014-...
Highly recommend s3 - it's fast/cheap/highly available. You don't need any server to host static site.
a16z can make stupid investments, but usually they don't. my guess here is there is more to this than just simple quackery.
If you consider what the military has spent money on using weird submarines (aka tapping underseas cables, including ones within Soviet waters), I think it's pretty obvious what the XB-37 is doing, just as the article hinted.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/the...

Other possibility, which I suppose could be ruled out, or partially verified, if one studied the orbital mechanics of the thing, "rods from god."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
> 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 necessity for something has never stopped the military from trying to continue to develop new tech.
Someone has to point out that you have fallen into dogmatic thinking when it comes to our "space future". There is nothing promised, nothing that can be taken for granted, nothing shown to be possible (beyond the current limits of our physics which are: getting to the moon at enormous fuel expense, and 1-way ticket to die in Mars)
do things that don't scale =/= do things that don't work
>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

That would indeed cause a problem in a country with an "absolute novelty" requirement in patent applications, but the United States is not a such a country. In the US, the inventor has 12 months after the first public demonstration to file for a patent, and in this case, the patent was filed within 12 months.
Risky business: Top 5 failures of US commercial space program
"Move Fast and Break Shit."

The tech industry seems to earn a lot of money, employ a lot of people and have us on an unparalleled rate of change.

Their current theory is, 1 in 100 things pan out and when they do they make up for all the fails.

This article doesn't really provide evidence this high risk approach is not worth it. Who knows, perhaps other applications might pop out of the technology. Perhaps it's a more obvious 99% in the fail basket. But being overly cautious can also cripple you.

But a good write up on why the tech sucks.
GroupMe Account Takeover Vulnerability
Hello everyone, I reported this flaw to GroupMe. If you have any questions about it, feel free to ask.
Any IEEE members here who could take a look at the following paper, which may shed some light on what is and is not possible here, and then summarize it for us?

----------

Roes, M.G.L.; Hendrix, M.A.M.; Duarte, J.L., "Contactless energy transfer through air by means of ultrasound," IECON 2011 - 37th Annual Conference on IEEE Industrial Electronics Society , vol., no., pp.1238,1243, 7-10 Nov. 2011

doi: 10.1109/IECON.2011.6119486

Abstract: An alternative approach to the wireless transfer of energy is proposed, employing acoustic waves in air. Unlike conventional methods, acoustic energy transfer is able to achieve energy transfer at high efficiencies over distances that are large in comparison to the dimensions of the transmitter and the receiver. This paper gives an overview of the principle and explains the different loss mechanisms that come into play. A theoretically limit on the achievable efficiency is calculated. It exceeds that of a comparable inductively coupled system by an order of magnitude. First preliminary measurements indicate that AET is feasible, although the measured efficiency is lower than the predicted theoretical limit.

URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6119...

Update: I was able to get a 5 minute preview of the paper from DeepDyve.com [1]. They got 53% efficiency at 1 meter, but that was at very low power (something like 37 uW). They weren't using particularly high powered transducers, though, so could have gotten more power if that had been what they were aiming for, but probably still a long way from charging a phone. They say that the challenge for acoustic energy transfer will be in developing the high power transducers that will be needed.

[1] For those who have not heard of DeepDyve, they provide access to a very large number of journal articles for prices that are much lower than what the journals charge for individual articles. Yes, I know that ideally all of this stuff should be available to the public for free, but until that happens DeepDyve is worth considering. They have a "Freelancer" plan that costs nothing up front, and gives you 5 minute full previews of articles. You can purchase "tokens" in packs of 5 for $20. You can rent an article for 30 days for one token. They also have a $40/month subscription plan that lets you read unlimited articles, and gives a discount if you want to buy a PDF. You can cancel the monthly plan at any time, and your account converts to Freelancer, and you can switch back to the subscription plan at any time.
India's first pet-service finder app on iOS
Alternate solution: broadcast invisible energy through the air that your phone can pick up so that it always maintains its charge.

I understand that according to the posted article it's physically impossible for UBeam to operate in an effective fashion without vaporizing everyone in its vicinity, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We shouldn't discourage creative solutions.

Building better batteries has proven difficult. It's probably useful to continue to explore solutions from conventional and unconventional angles (at least as long as they are theoretically possible).
Medical ultrasound imaging uses far higher frequencies than the patents for uBeam claim, so they can't be compared. And even medical ultrasound isn't fully safe, there are some indications of brain damage in mouse models after long exposure to ultrasound.
To get as basic as possible, an iPhone 5S has a ~6 Wh battery that Apple claims will operate the phone for up to 250 hours on standby. So, if your phone is sitting on your desk doing nothing in an area with good signal, it will require a mere 6/250 = 0.024 Watts just to keep the battery from running down further than it already has.

Delivering even this tiny amount of energy to a phone-sized traducer that may be tens of meters from the emitter and oriented randomly is going to be very difficult. An omnidirectional emitter would likely require more power than a Megadeth concert and heaven help anything with a millimeter scale resonant frequency that's in the room! Tracking the phone's position and delivering a tightly focused beam is probably the only realistic way to go about this. That means you will need some very cutting edge focused ultrasound beam transducers (not cheap) that can mechanically track phones (not cheap) which must be pointed by something like a kinnect (not cheap) and a clear line of sight to the phone (completely unlike WiFi). It's probably going to have to let the user know when there isn't a clear LOS too, because it would suck if your phone died because you set it down behind a plant.

I can't say all this is outright impossible to do at a competitive price. Danny didn't convince me that it's impossible. It is probably pretty close though.

So, why is this company being funded to do something that's probably impossible? Well, Danny is right about one thing: Investors often invest in impossible things. Just google "over unity" generators (better than perpetual motion devices basically) if you don't believe me. Earlier this decade Steorn suckered millions of euros out of investors with a lot of talk and a few cheap parlor tricks. UBeam might not break the laws of thermodynamics, but Steorn literally scoffed at them. People still lined up to invest. Whether Steorn and his co-workers were/are truly insane or con-artists has not been determined to this day. Their website is still live so, against all reasonable expectations, Steorn is still viable!

Personally, if I wanted to scam investors I'd choose something that has a direct impact on the layman's life and theoretically has the potential to be big. Simultaneously, it would not obviously break the laws of physics but would be difficult enough for a company to spend years working on it only to fail. UBeam would be a pretty great setup for a scam actually.
MEDIUM

-or-

how to take a written article with associated images (pretty much the only thing that html/css does well), and make it less accessible for the web
And that depends on what your definition of "\"" is.

And that depends on what your definition of "\\" is.
In case you want to change your mind XeTeX is now optional. Please note that there were good reasons to require it, as we do projects in languages having right-to-left script, or use higher Unicode characters (such as Kannada).
Bravo, what an amazing way to explain the concept.
You've clearly put a massive amount of work into this API, which I applaud.

One trick I use in FSet that you might want to copy is default values for maps. This is particularly handy when the range type of the map is another collection: you can make the default value be the appropriate kind of empty collection, making it unnecessary for code that accesses the map to check for a null value. In Java, for example:

FMap<Foo, FSet<Bar>> m = new FHashMap.withDefault(FHashSet.emptyMap());
// now I can do:
for (Bar b : m.get(x)) ...
// without worrying about whether 'm' contains an entry for 'x'.
I think they do. We introduced slack at my employer a few months ago and we now have nearly 400 users on there. Traffic to our core mailing lists has dropped to almost nothing, I've replaced several weekly status meetings with low traffic slack channels and most of my co-workers now consider it indispensable. It's also been crucial in helping us establish a new remote office and some other remote workers.

If it's anywhere bear as transformational for other companies, I can see it continuing to grow for a long time.
I am not a physicist and have no clue about the viability of the startup. What I do know is that an awful lot of the comments here are begging the question.

They tend to be of the form: "Since they were invested in, they must be good/viable/work!" What the fuck, folks? Have you lost your collective minds? You should know better than this.
Indeed. It was particularly interesting how he described the "emergent" nature of the direction in which the celestial bodies finally conform to (clockwise/anticlockwise if applied to a 2d space). Wouldn't it be possible for a few planets to escape a collision and orbit in an opposite direction? Is collision necessary imminent from a stochastic perspective?
You have to explicitly enable that feature for your team.
Syria War 2014: ISIS Tanks Convoy Destroyed by Kurdish in Kobani
I've been looking closely at the UBeam demo video at

http://on.aol.com/video/ubeam-wireless-power-demonstration-at-d9-517342543

There's a lot of information one can get from that video if you turn the resolution up to 720p and look at still frames.

The meter is reading voltage, on what appears to be the 10 VAC scale. (Someone wrote it was on ohms, but it's not.) About 4V is coming out. We don't know what, if anything is the load, and there's no current measurement, so we can't compute power. It's interesting that they're measuring AC voltage while supposedly charging a DC device, a phone.

The ultrasonic transducers seem to be common hobbyist-level range sensors as used on small robots. Like these:

https://www.futurlec.com/Ultrasonic_Sensors.shtml

At 00:31 into the video, there's a good view of the back of the board holding the ultrasonic receivers. If you take a screenshot of this and enhance it, you can see the wiring. There are just two wires coming out of the receiver, and it looks like all the sensors are just wired in series. That maximizes voltage at the expense of current, of course.

The transmit array has 10 transducers in a hexagonal pattern, which helps focus the beam. (That transducer is a rather broad-beamed device.) The transmit end is powered by a hefty looking power supply, so those transducers are probably being driven hard.

With that setup, they should be able to get a few volts out of the receiver end, using the same kind of off the shelf transducer at both ends. This is something you could put together in a day or so after ordering the parts. There doesn't seem to be anything new here at all in the demo version.

The efficiency is probably a few percent. That's for this ideal case - transmitter pointed directly at receiver. The Wireless Power Consortium inductive wireless charging people report 60% efficiency, and they're trying to get to 80%.

The patent application talks about steering and focusing the beam, but you're still going to need line of sight, and a big emitter array.
Did you actually read their email to you? You have console access so you should probably access your droplet that way, find how your droplet got compromised and remove what's causing the outbound DDOS. DO is an unmanaged service, so if you're incapable of managing and securing your server, perhaps try a managed provider.
Fab Lab Moves Downtown as San Diego Creates Its Own SoMa