skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Worth a (re)read is David Clark's Post-PC talk from 1999[1]. The use case examples of things may be like in the future are a bit jilted (are they ever not?) but what I genuinely appreciate is two-fold.

First, Dr. Clark nails the screen to CPU ratio. For a long time the world was 1 CPU to many screens. The downward trend to 1 screen for every 1 processor is not a floor.

Second, the examples proposed don't concern themselves with putting a processor in everything, they concern themselves with what that empowers you to do as a human being. Now that we're well into this era, it is disheartening to see that most companies presenting at places like CES aren't asking themselves that latter part of that question.

To your original point, Wired ran a skewed piece like this a few years ago pointing out that the Web is dead because other forms of Internet content (like Netflix) were outpacing it in growth. What it failed to highlight was the Web never stopped growing[2].

[1] http://anewdomain.net/2012/10/13/post-pc-era-buzzword-mit-da...

[2] http://www.wired.com/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/
This is the Kickstarter page :

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zpmespresso/pid-control...
The Z2 is a wonderful bit of kit. A few years back I used one as my main "laptop". If you're a console junkie it's surprising what you can do on modern Debian with only 32 megabytes of RAM. Most software that'll run on it will also compile on it, as long as you stick to C and avoid C++. The sound chip is fantastic as well so it makes a great portable media player, and the keyboard is backlit.
I agree.

Another example would be power (electricity). In some states, you can choose to buy power from solar, renewable sources, etc. The underlying infrastructure is the same; but the offerings change.

In the case of Internet, the government basically would give you access to some NAP or exchange; to get onto the Internet, you would have to buy access from some provider. Providers could differentiate themselves by a variety of services: some offering total privacy; some offering caching services so you get your content faster; some offering DVR/cloud services; etc. etc.

It is time we started treating access to the Internet as a service provided by the municipality, like water, power, sewage, roads, etc.
It is rather annoying that I can't bind my own keys in the same location since it does not allow binding to symbols like ',' or '.' (I use Dvorak)

Please, don't be like mirror's edge, let my bind whatever I want.
I've read that twice, and I'm still not sure if you are being sarcastic.

For me, those 'public wires' are old and slow - all 3 places I have lived recently. The government have gifted lots of money to BT to roll out fiber, and BT have taken the cash and sat on their hands. It is an awful situation - allowing BT to sabotage our nation's competitiveness whilst stealing taxpayer money [0].

So having competition on the common infrastructure is indeed good, but the overall system definitely does not work "really well".

[0] A House of Commons Select Committee slammed the whole setup - e.g. here: http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/...
The word lens is impressive. Tried it out on my university ID against some bright light, and it was able to detect even the low-contrast regions. Even my Mac keyboard. It works on almost anything.

It doesn't work on Chinese quite yet.
I put a snow monster in my Android version :) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.fizzl.ski&...

Although I wrote it 5 years ago, no clue if it works on modern phones...
> Look, whether we like it or not, VCs prefer white or asian founders over black or hispanic founders.

Something something correlation, causation...

I mean look at the YC numbers here. When 90+% of your applicants are white or Asian that's going to be reflected in the final numbers unless you actively favor a certain group of applicants over another.

We're talking about greedy VCs. Not a single one of them is listening to a pitch and going "man this is a billion dollar idea, but they're _black_, ugh..."
And another: http://serialmentor.com/blog/2014/12/27/post-publication-rev...
I met him and he is an awesome genius child. The info sec community should expect great things from him.
Very cool. Add a camera to do pick-and-place alignment automatically, and I'll take one. P&P is pointless with that much manual intervention.

Another obvious improvement: offer a hot air nozzle tool, with a preheater in the base. It would be really neat to go from bare copper to an assembled PCB without moving the board.

Oh, and an automatic tool changer. :)
What is interesting is that most homeless youth or at-risk homeless youth do have access to smart phones. The difference is that they typically do not have an active data plan and rely on wifi access at local libraries, shelters, coffee shops, etc.

I was also involved with this... more on the product side working with the shelters.
No, he's asking very good questions.
It shouldn't be a struggle at all just be conscious that freeBSD does not try and protect the user from him/her self. Case in point, "kill 1" won't do anything on linux but in freeBSD it will kill the init process.
The comment I responded to said that in addition to law enforcement, it's common for soldiers to patrol the streets, too, at times.

If I had to guess, I'd say they would prefer using the weapons they are accustomed to, which are probably not the same that LEO's use. Now I don't know much about the French military, but where I come from, I doubt the military even has appreciable amounts of semi-automatic rifles, as even the military police always use the same assault rifle everybody else does.
Private companies often don't serve (or underserve) those less populated areas. Their solution to that problem is to not provide service as they aren't required. Municipal broadband which is provided as a public service/utility, however, is better suited to serve everyone, as they are often required to do that rather than only focus on the areas that generate the most profit.
I guess you won't be playing the game then, huh? Tracking information, heh. As if that's the only use for local storage.
Why wouldn't you want to help the person improve his/her English?
Right? How do we discuss political candidates without making it a political discussion?
Ask HN: Where to host a personal blog?
I want to host a personal blog/resume/portfolio. Is the built in readership of blogging platforms like tumblr/medium/quora worth sacrificing some control over your blog? I have some web development experience so making and self hosting a blog isn't a problem, but I have no idea how hard it is to promote a self hosted blog. Does anyone have any experience with discovery/engagement of their self hosted blogs compared to blogs hosted on these platforms? (Perhaps someone who posts to both)
Well definitely don't use MD5. And SHA1 and RIPEMD160 are too short to be considered fully collision resistant.
Nothing would limit us from taking this to other cities. I'd suspect some minor technical changes. It's just how this effort was funded.
They don't need power in other places, just the ability to buy a bunch of guns there, and e.g. Germany has had shootings with clear mafia ties as well.
Have you looked at loginsight? It's a VMware product. I believe BMC's patrol also does log monitoring. These seem to be more enterprise tools, I'm not sure if it's what you're looking for.
>Michael, I think you should really ask yourself: what good can come of this?

I got this one!

The good that comes is you solve the current status quo, where on a thread like "Why silicon valley works" people make comments and genuinely feel like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8552487

>If you are a white male, in your early 20's and went to Stanford, go for it. If you're not, don't even try to play the game; it's rigged to use you, not help you.

or up-thread someone else

> Complete and utter bull. Maybe in [YC's] world, sure! White? 20-something? No-kids? Harvard/Stanford? B2C? Let’s chat! > Early-40's/Late-30's? Not-white? Married w/ kids? Not-Harvard/Stanford? B2B? Nope. (Don't bother to apply to YC either).

Theirs is a strong argument when 0.0% of founders are black. When it's 4%, man, 1 in 25 is better odds than 80% of the things you're doing to build a $100M exit anyway. You'll go for it and apply.

I gave up as I'm in a hurry, but search 'Hackernews search' (hn.algolia.com) for white/asian, "bother to apply" and similar words - there are a ton of comments by people who think they shouldn't because it's 0%. They should!!!

This blog post is totally great, and a bit surprising. Kudos.
Bluehost is a really great host that isn't too expensive. It does all the wordpress setup for you. I find it extremely convenient.
> It's a fascinating philosophy that, in my opinion, severely underestimates the human affinity for greed and manipulation.

Ironically, exactly the same can be said of Communism.
Co-Founder of Voxel8 here, our website is:

http://www.voxel8.co

I posted some more information about our capabilities in response to someone below. Let me know if anyone has any questions!
Well, for one you can be pretty sure that self-driving car software isn't going to be written by hippie webdevs changing frameworks every other week. Companies and programmers that tend to work on this kind of software have pretty good track records - we don't see planes falling out of the sky or medical machines randomly killing patients all the time. Uou're going to have an app store for your car drivers.
There were a lot of places I was able to use Google Wallet to pay where contactless payments have been disabled completely because of this. I can't blame Apple; I suppose this was bound to happen at some point once the retailers figured this out.
For example, I know of someone that changed careers into the tech industry in his mid-30s. He should not be disadvantaged because he entered into the industry later than peers.

Additionally, I can think of countless examples of "slow starters" that didn't really get good at something until there was something that caught that person's interest.

At best, this is a flawed metric with many nuances to consider. So many that you could probably make the same determination by removing age from the application.*

* If you want to collect demographic data, you can just ask for it in the submission form but not show it in reviews.
Ask HN: What do you regret not doing in your 20's?
I want to avoid regrets.
"World demand for paper is expected to grow by 2.1% per year until 2020."[1]

Though that's not exactly fair analysis. See for instance this graph published by the European Commission Joint Research Center [2][3]. Developed countries will use paper 0.5% more per year (less than population growth of 0.8%) but emerging countries (like China at 0.5% population growth) use it at 4% more per year.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901109...

[2] http://i.imgur.com/luBKny9.png

[3] http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/eur22544en.pdf
> Municipal governments are a big part of the problem. They make it nearly impossible for companies to build new ISPs.

And whose fault is that? Yep, that's right, the ISPs.

The ISPs love to play this game of "shut the door after I've gone through it". They get the municipal governments to sign exclusivity clauses and various other laws to keep competition out.

I mean, think about it: nothing gets done in the government unless someone wants it and is willing to bribe the right people for it. Why the heck would the government go out of its way to set up roadblocks for ISPs if no one wanted it?
Project Ara: hands-on with Google’s latest modular smartphone prototype
Yeah, a vacuum attachment seems like a good optional add-on for this system.
Meet the open access dinosaurs of the year
It'd be great to have other cities involved with this. It's something the funding organization is interested in.
Pointer lock and left mouse click work fine in firefox.
There's also a system of 9 hour days Monday-Thursday and then every other Friday off. It averages out to 40-hour weeks but you get two 3-day weekends a month.
No.
What was the question?
> Most of medicine is dreary repetition.

Hence why we can automate away most of the problems with it.
In my neck of the woods the BlackBerry brand itself is fairly tarnished. I'm not in Corp Dev, but I imagine it would be a long difficult road to re-brand or attempt to change the current BlackBerry image.
Adam Munich: Physicist, Engineer, and Entrepreneur
Godaddy.com must blow your mind.
> Why is education for the citizens of a country considered something that a countries government should have no part in in the US?

10th Amendment says:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

If you follow this Amendment, the States are free to educate their citizens any way they want, it's just that the Federal government isn't allowed to (a good restriction, in my opinion, since competition usually increases quality).
Whither the Blank Slate? Reception of Evolutionary Biological Ideas by Sociology
Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research [pdf]
Bayesian Adjustment Does Not Defeat Existential Risk Charity
Most of it (original and TNG) actually takes place in the 'alpha quadrant' only. DS9 introduces the wormhole to the gamma quadrant, and Voyager is mostly about the trek back from the delta. Warp 9 is garbage in the grand scheme of things eh! ;)
Did Apple just cancel all recurring in-app subscriptions for EU customers?
It appears that due to VAT, Apple may have just cancelled all recurring subscriptions via in-app purchases.

This article discusses VAT and Apple's price increase, but does not specifically mention what they will do with subscriptions:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/01/10/apple-changing-apps-prices-in-europe-shows-that-vat-really-is-a-consumption-tax/

We have seen the following emails from Apple:

Dear Wendy,
The price of your 1-month Scribd - 1 month free trial subscription has increased from $8.99 to $9.99.
This increase will only take effect in future subscription periods, and does not affect your current subscription.
Auto-renewal of your subscription has been turned off. To turn auto-renewal back on at the higher price or choose a different subscription period, click below and sign in to your account.
-----

Can anyone confirm or refute that this was done on a widespread basis?
Carriers Must End Absurd Intl Data Roaming Fees, Before Apple Does It for Them
> this will not be a zero-sum game

Is there some kind of rule at YC that mandates that blog posts must insist that nothing is a zero-sum game?
Municipal broadband has a serious problem. Namely, those that don't want it are still forced to pay for it. If you don't see how this is unfair competition well... I don't know what to tell you.
At loose ends as my senior year in high school passed (long story, short on ambition), I defaulted in to taking a scholarship at the local community college, offered to the top 10% of local high schools. A software engineer moonlighting as an adjunct taught my first course in programming (in FORTRAN, on punched cards, no less!). Somehow, he conveyed an enthusiasm and an understanding that inspired me to continue, to pursue and obtain a BSCS at a state U, and to have a happy career as a developer. I owe it all to Community College (and a whole series of other supportive events).
Pat Metheny and Orchestrion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faendyU73Wc
I will give it an upvote, if for nothing else, than for the powerful writing. He makes a very lucid point though. Even hardcore capitalists could not argue with the idea that though the success of a man should depend on his efforts, bringing him to a state when he can start making an effort should be supported.
If Kickstarter is Google then GoFundMe is Bing. While GoFundMe may claim to be better, none of my friends use it and I can't find any reason to use it myself.
Why don't you let people make their own decisions about what is good for them? It's none of your business "knowing better" than people.

And if you think Soylent's raison d'etre is "disrupt" then you're really stupid. Read Rob's blog. He writes a lot about the problems in contemporary food production and how he wants to tackle them with Soylent. If you ignore that in favour of portraying him as a blind hipster then you are not just stupid, but willfully so.

Let's not forget either that Rob and many others have been living healthily off of Soylent for years now.
Perhaps "intangible" was the wrong word. But domain names, unlike bitcoins, are actually useful for something. Bitcoins are just placeholders for value or wealth, like any other currency. The only reason they are useful is because we say a bitcoin is worth x dollars. We don't have to make an artificial distinction like that for a domain name because it is obvious what it is used for.

Even if domain names were free they would still have value, if bitcoins were free they would have 0 value.
Watch Live: Free Climbers Near Summit of El Capitan – NBC News.com
I submit this not because I think HN really cares all that much about existential risk charity, but because this illustrates an interesting way that statistical arguments can be flawed: we're generally fairly savvy about how p-values go wrong, the need for power, and so on, but it's much rarer to see someone object to the choice of distribution.

In this case, the choice of a normal distribution (or any thin-tailed distribution) almost entirely determines the result of the original argument, and inasmuch as there is no clear justification for why we would make the assumption that charity efforts follow a normal distribution, the original is just a very long exercise in begging the question.
I did need a BPA free drinking source. You're right a cup would do though.
Nah, I went to a Route 128 expo on this sort of technology in that period and pick and place machines were way beyond paper tape.

And I did a lot of thru hole soldering when I was growing up in the '70s; the LNBs were surface mount (one of the reasons they asked me to go that expo). Maybe there were some thru hold components I'm not remembering, but there was a definitely a lot of surface mounting (my intro to the concept, I think), and I e.g. remember seeing their reflow oven when I got a tour of the place.
Maybe private companies shouldn't run the physical infrastructure - maybe it should be a public utility. In today's society, you need gas, electric, water and internet (which has replaced phone).
With such a dim view of local government, I'm confused as why you want them to run your internet.
For starters, please refer to https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS. For SSH, I lack clear, good advice. I've tended to disable weaker ciphersuites using Mozilla's TLS configuration advice as a guide, and I've also tended to use larger key sizes than the defaults. As questionable as NIST's guidelines have been lately, I tend to follow the high end of their recommended key sizes, so 4096-byte public keys, etc.
I live in Provo, which has Google Fiber. As the article says, Google took over their failed public fiber project. (Google purchased the infrastructure for $1.)

Provo is a very unique city. It's a big city, but most of its residents are college students or young, newly married recent graduates. It's also a technology hotspot. Comparing the success of its fiber project to predict the success in other cities is hardly fair. For the record, Google Fiber has really lit up this town. Internet service here is unbearable unless you have Google Fiber (or deep pockets to dish out for Comcast). My building only has CenturyLink, and service just came back up an hour ago after suffering 80% packet loss for the last day. And this is our regular experience.

Competition for ISPs, especially around here, is good (Veracity has been grappling to upgrade their network, and Comcast, well, everyone still hates them). On the other hand, the behavior and quality of service from American ISPs in the last 10 years is inexcusable. While I do think that private companies will do better "in the long run", time is running out for them to prove themselves.
We did a friendly programming competition at MixRank last year writing AIs for Connect Four.

It's really a great game for playing with AI strategies since it's so simple. You can borrow our game runner and write your own: https://github.com/smilliken/aigames/tree/master/connect-fou...

You can use any language since it just talks over pipes. There's a few bots in there you can play against.
Google put it's translation engine into the client? I doubt that.
site under construction

I'll just come back tomorrow then. Seriously, though, is this tool complete enough for people that are focused on building things rather than playing with trendy toys?
yes! It is the same rule that says that we must be sad that 50% of all applicants aren't women.
Let me formulate another thought experiment. We want to investigate the subjective experience of heat. Subjects are to put their hands into water heated or cooled using various procedures and rate how hot it is on a subjective scale.
If we are ultimately only interested in the subjective experience, could a thermometer really add anything?

There is one interesting property of the thermometer, it is very good at predicting how someone would rate it. Because of "survey variance", the thermometer reading is a better predictor of subject b's rating, than the rating subject a gives.

Because the thermometer reading is a better predictor of the subjective experience, I would say that it is better at capturing the underlying phenomenon.
Top 20 Startup CoWorking Spaces
Wonder if this was a deliberate attempt to manipulate the stock price? I imagine those trades will be scrutinized carefully.
> True, but that's skill most drivers don't have. [...] after major failures (quadcopters with 3 props, planes with 1 wing) that humans can't handle.

These are decent examples, but don't most of them only account for the safeyy of the controlled vehicle itself? I mean, it's impressive that a quad copter can land itself after a partial failure, but can it do it over a crowded city? With a hazardous load? Can the control software understand NFPA 704 of it's own cargo, plus the cargo of other vehicles near it and make appropriate decisions? All of this possibly near the maximum weight ratings for it's transportation type?

I'm _all_ for automation, and I think it's the next most logical direction of our society; however, I think people tend to underestimate the totality of challenges involved especially for cargo transport.
Not to be a pessimist, but Connect Four is a solved problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connect_Four Wouldn't that mean the best AI should always win if it's first (alternatively, you should always win if you're first)?
Word Lens was the first iPhone app that I saw that really felt like Magic, glad to see it was bought up and put infront of a mass audience (where I assume it will gather data and learn)
Siri Improvements
I get poor service, crummy old modems, and glacial support from my commercial internet provider. If those are your concerns for socialized broadband, then you should already be concerned.

No one is mandating municipal ISPs. The claim is simply that there should be competition in markets, and in many cities (like mine) there is no competition by law.

My city does a great job with providing me with cheap electricity, clean water, and emergency services. Just because a group of people work for local government rather than a giant corporation doesn't make them any more or less lazy or evil.

Perhaps if my city starts investigating a municipal ISP, my one and only commercial broadband provider will finally get of their asses and upgrade my bandwidth, my uptime, and the terrible modem they made me pay for.