skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think its simple. Municipalities should at this point feel responsible for ensuring their residents have good internet access. Its also good for the tax payers, because its money going back into the government, and not into the coffers of some mega-corp who's just going to hoard it.

I think there is a balance to be had between too much government and not enough. I think its easy to sway too far one way or another as history has shown, and neither are particularly good. Corporations will run rampant just like government will, given the freedom to do so.
How I Built My First Electric Bike
It kills me to read this. I've bootstrapped two startups and I do remember days when I ate crap and worked into the wee hours.

My advice to anybody in a situation like this is to make sure to be around family (or really close friends) because they'll call bullshit on you when you start going off the deep end. I also made sure to be on a rec. sports teams. This made me get out of my office (read room), have a good time and keep in shape.

Bootstrapping is hard work, but you cannot let it destroy you.
Facebook’s First Media Kit
Some work on these issues is being done by the Free Network Foundation, https://thefnf.org/

Edit: There's also Guifi.net in Spain, http://guifi.net/en
The Blue House
Not at all! I feel like it's silly to compare the two sites at all.

The user base for GoFundMe is completely different from Kickstarter -- they're aimed at personal fundraising (e.g, "medical expenses, education costs, volunteer programs, youth sports, funerals & memorials" [1]), whereas Kickstarter is aimed at "projects" with a "clear goal" and a tangible result.

The mechanics of the sites are also very different: Kickstarter projects run for a fixed period, and release money to the project owner only if the project has hit its goal at the end of that period, whereas GoFundMe campaigns can run indefinitely, and give money to the project owner as soon as it's donated. (GoFundMe campaigns can have "goal" dates and/or dollar values, but they usually have no effect on how donations work.)

[1]: http://www.gofundme.com/questions/ under "What can I raise money for?"
Pointer lock working for me in chrome, but left mouse to fire only works intermittently. Assigning space to fire works though.
BlackBerry surges on report of Samsung takeover approach
We are still a long way from vehicles without human occupants.
The most modern lorries by Mercedes-Benz are very autonoumous, but still need a driver to be with the lorry.

Since lorries rarely just go from marked up parking spot to parking spot, but at their destinations probably have to navigate unconventional layouts, etc, they will for the forseeable future include drivers.

But what I expect to see happen, is that the logistics will become more decentralized, since the driver can now spend more time on administration, and less on driving, essentially taking over the job of the company command central.
Интернет,решения и съвети – Internet tips
“ПЕРЛИЧКИ” – ОДЗ № 2 “Звездица Зорница”
As the largest factor in accidents other than DUI is inattentiveness[1](tired or texting) then self-driving cars with limited ability for drivers to perform actions that could cause an accident or effect efficiency would be a huge boon.

Imagine saying, "sorry my car cut off your car!" with sincerity and a little tongue-in-cheek humor as well.

Then there's also the efficiency factor as far as maximizing capacity in lanes and maintaining speed to streamline commuting. Merging could be vastly improved if cars were able to zipper merge better.

[1] http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/humanfa...
cool! thanks for the link.
I wrote a novel based in part around the idea that one could prove something like Boltzmann's H-theorem (which has problems of its own) for evolution: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/...

Darwin's Theorem would start with the facts about genetic material--the probability distributions for replication--and use further distributions of features, consequences for reproductive advantage, and so on to demonstrate that it is mathematically necessary for evolution to give access to a more-or-less unbounded adaptive landscape.

The book is actually mostly about sex, violence, politics, religion, regret and redemption, so it's not as dry as that probably makes it sound!
I have found that the best math teachers were from community college. One teacher explained the solution to a calculus problem I had developed out of curiosity , and it wasn't even on the curriculum. He didn't have to do that, but I appreciated he did
It never arrived because touch screens will never out perform a mouse and keyboard.
Perhaps in the future when tablets/phones/rifts have a better man machine input interface
Exactly. They ask for age in their application and not gender or race.
The community college effort is a worthy one. With a renewed focus on it, it may help make tuition higher up more competitive. It may also make the freshman/sophomore level basic classes much better.

I know part of this is to battle rising student loans. Loans will be much cheaper if they can have community college as an option to start with that the government won't have to pay higher tuition for. It is actually very smart in solving the student loan issue, the balance of lower tuition and not having to pay for the first 1-2 years of university tuition will be very big.

I think some kids need something to go to right out of high school if noone was there to help them be serious at school. It is also badly needed for adults that might need a change of career or some path forward.

We need to do this and require 1Gbps internet across the US if we want to compete and care about our own infrastructure and people. We need to do this before we fund another war.
Also - try viewing this page from a mobile browser.
Kevin seems full of ideas. It's always fun to see what he produces.
we've talked about this before. we fund founders of all ages above 18 (though i think the oldest founder in the current batch is 66). we haven't calculated it yet but the median age for this batch is probably in the late 20s, with most founders in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. the last time i looked, we'd funded many more founders in their 40s than in their teens.

there are a lot of promising 16 and 17 year olds that apply that we can't fund, though i think it's probably a good thing for them that we can't.

as we have also discussed before, the majority of the most valuable companies we have funded have been started by founders in their 20s (with exceptions like stripe on the lower side and zenefits on higher side).
The only GoFundMe campaign's I've truly been exposed to are scammy or digital panhandling. I know real people are using it legitimately, but that's my experience. I remember distinctly there being virtually nowhere to report abuse, whereas on Kickstarter it's pretty easy.
I work construction and would love this, but our issue would be customers thinking we're "slacking" because in a month long job we're taking three day weekends every week.

Compound this with employers who don't value productivity over "time put in", and I genuinely think this won't happen until it's either forced or the current generation of senior management are ousted via retirement/death (as most seem to work until very close to the latter).

I think the older generation is so stuck in its mindset that it's going to take a cataclysmic shift for them to realise they've been stupid for decades, and it's the younger generations that are dragged along with it because they're yet to be the ones in control.
What are the implications of this? What would it cost to build out fiber to even 10 or 15 % of homes and businesses that don't currently have it?

What kind of insane cyberattacks could you get from 10% of the consumer market having gigabit connections? How much backbone upgrades would there be required?
Finally, San Francisco Is Dealing with Its Poop Epidemic
Our present, but their past--right? :-)
But then our gasoline prices would go up.
How could YC even be able to calculate that?
Or Joplin, Missouri, USA in the early '80s when my family was making C band LNBs for the home satellite reception market prior to today's K band Direct TV and Dish Network.

It's really not that difficult; I'm not sure they even had a pick and place machine when they got started, the LNBs didn't have all that many components.
Sleet, snow, rain and even clouds of insects can reduce or confuse the signal.
Virginia lawmaker doing jail time re-elected to State Legislature
Yeah - I think the point was that if the pipes are owned by the same government that's already in the pocket of hollywood, then the laws (more likely regulations written by bureaucrats, not laws passed by elected officials, but..) against torrenting/pirating/distributing would be easier to get written and enforced.
The question is, would this post still be made publicly, in the same manner, if the data actually found serious discrimination happening?

Who knows, maybe YC is actually divinely meritocratic and there are no biases. Maybe they are transparent enough to make their biases public if they were discovered, and I absolutely admire that YC takes the initiative to check.

But if we were to be scientific about it, having YC take a look at discrimination within YC wouldn't be considered a reliable experiment that you could draw any conclusions from.
>Evolution doesn't care for survival of an individual as long as that individual manages to reproduce before it does.

Evolution doesn't care ever, regardless of whether you reproduce or not. You can evolve to the point of extinction just fine.
An app makes sense to me. Lots more people are "aficionados" than actually own watches. And you could potentially pay for tons of free users with just a few sales referrals per month.
It may sound dumb, but I'm absolutely fascinated looking at the desert in Google Maps. It's just so... empty. Mysterious little dirt roads, unexplained (but very square) patches of cleared area, and every once in a while, boom, a missile silo.
At least the bug is able to be diagnosed and traced along where it started from all the way until the accident where it caused a problem.

Try diagnosing someone suddenly getting pissed off and cutting off another driver which sets off a chain reaction of the events leading up to a multi-vehicle collision. The driver may attempt to cover-up, deny or lie about what happened to protect themselves whereas the software would not have such self-preservation and would report things as they occurred without being concerned with assigning blame or establishing guilt.

Software is not going to turn its head and rubberneck at an accident and in turn, rear end the car in front of it.
looking back on some of the photos from rural markets in Cambodia I have, everything looks like anodized aluminum.

Cheap, Light, Last a long time.
I had not heard of gofundme prior to this. I think this is because the places where I would naturally see news about such crowdfunding sites are heavily biased towards the kinds of projects that Kickstarter specializes in, namely games. As duskwuff wrote here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8889346), gofundme is "explicitly aimed at personal fundraising (e.g, "medical expenses, education costs, volunteer programs, youth sports, funerals & memorials" [1]), whereas Kickstarter is aimed at projects with a well-defined goal and a tangible result."
Look, it's sexy to complain about energy costs, but you are really underestimating the massive inefficiencies involved in the legacy payment system. Because even if bitcoin is less energy efficient in some technical sense, there are enormous efficiency gains it provides by inverting the structure of risk in the payments industry.

One of the first things you realize when you try to setup payment processing is that middlemen would not actually exist in the payment processing industry if it was an efficient market. But these companies do exist because the entire industry structure has developed to pass risk from credit card companies to intermediary businesses whose sole function is basically to manage risk and enforce policy compliance. It is a bit like if Google didn't give email addresses to individuals because it couldn't be bothered policing spam, so you got your email through a third party.

Anyway, even if we ignore the deadweight losses imposed on the economic system by all of the businesses which cannot get credit accounts (merchant accounts), the costs of supporting this credit-centric system are enormous. PCI compliance costs alone are staggering, and serve no purpose except to lower the risk held by credit card companies. And even with this, the inefficiency of central risk management is so great that VISA doesn't even bother to investigate fraudulent purchases of less than 500 USD. And why should they when costs can simply be pushed back to merchants and turned into a profit center by issuing chargebacks.

And this is where bitcoin gets interesting -- by inverting the risk structure and letting anyone accept payments without the need for a payment processor to issue credit, Bitcoin eliminates entire horizontal swathes of the payments industry, while placing competitive pressure on legacy payment providers. If the technology scales to the point you are concerned about, it will decimate the number of people required to be employed managing risk in everyday transactions.

Put more succinctly, you need to shift from thinking about the energy costs of bitcoin as a wasted ongoing expense and start considering them the price of eliminating an otherwise intractable trust problem in finance. It is like paying for a standing firefighting force. Expensive in one way, but a lot cheaper than the alternative.
The reality of tech legislation
Programming is more about getting it right than typing faster than everyone else. Quality takes time, you have to watch your syntax. You have to follow your design, make sure the code all fits together.

You aren't typing a letter, you are typing source code. You make a mistake in a letter, nobody cares and few notice it. You make a mistake in your source code, and compile, you have to go hunting for that bug.

Sure I worked with programmers that did 60wpms, I always had to help them find the errors in their source code. I always had to take time away from what I do to help them. I type with just two fingers like Scotty from Star Trek, but I debug better and write a better quality code.
What about someone who's mixed?
Postgres 9.5 feature highlight: New WAL format
27 Years Later the Max Headroom Hackers Still Remain a Mystery
I can't disagree that it looked wrong, expecially since this wasn't the only thread that commented on this.

However, if you were to change the needle, then it would be wrong. So, I'm not sure that there is a way out of this. Without just dropping the compass.
Do we not need some way of certifying skill sets?

College is a HORRIBLE way to "certify skill sets." It's the most anti-liberal certification I can imagine: it measures how long you can afford to go without an income. One big result of giving college educations to a bunch of people that didn't need them is the credentialism race. Why does an office manager need a college degree when it didn't 40 years ago? Because now there are enough job candidates out there with a college degree that it becomes an easy (and legal[1]) way to filter out people who aren't smart enough for college. If you are one of those who are smart enough for college, this sounds great, but it leaves the people who can't cut college material up a creek.

[1] Griggs banned degree requirements, but no one pays attention to that
I think he is using the word more like a way of saying "the group of factors that ultimately led to this change" and not as if there was actually a change waiting for a trigger so that then "it can happen".

At least that's how I read it.
Well... sort of. But it's probably more aptly a bicycle versus car analogy.

Like, suppose that originally there were 1,000,000 people who all owned PCs. There are a few ways that could change:

a. All of those people, or 950,000 of them or some other gigantic number of them, could give up their PCs and start to use a phone and/or tablet instead. This is what you might call the naive death-of-the-PC scenario, in which the PC either disappears or becomes an unusual tool for specialists.

b. 500,000 of those people or somewhere in that vicinity give up their PCs and start to use a phone and/or tablet instead. This is what you might call the realistic death-of-the-PC scenario -- the PC doesn't disappear in any way disappear, but demand for it is permanently massively lower.

c. Few people give up their PCs at all. Instead, large numbers of them get phones/tablets in ADDITION to their PCs, and move some of the work they used to do on their PCs to their phones/tablets, but everyone or a large majority of everyone keeps their PCs and still do some work on them. This is the rise of the smartphone without a corresponding fall of a PC.

I think that scenario C has turned out to be the reality. Smartphones and tablets have replaced the PC heavily for some use cases, but have not replaced the actual device very commonly at all. It's somewhat unlike a car/truck tradeoff -- while some people need trucks, most people don't, and have cars instead. It's more like a car/bicycle tradeoff -- most people who have bicycles, even ones who use their bicycles regularly, also have cars.
I wonder if Bitcoin's recent adoption by some big sites is actually what is bringing the price down as people with stored up BTC are sending them to merchants, who are instantly converting them to their preferred currency?
Agreed, I just did it yesterday and all I had to do was put my phone up and let it read my thumb.
Container wars
That is more badly done than it could have been.

However the articles primary complaints (that the pin is retrievable, and that the password database is recoverable) is always true no matter how well implemented it was. The entire concept of the application depends on Android's file permissions to stop other apps looking at the database. Once apps bypass that security, recovering the passwords is an eventual inevitability.

The pin is likely just there to stop friends & family from accessing it. The same way Android's pins and patterns aren't really "security features" as much as to stop friends and family (and casual thieves).

So overall the article isn't wrong, but even if the author fixes all of their complaints (and replaces DES with something actually secure), the app wouldn't actually be much better because the same concepts are the backbone of the security.

This all boils down to the author's decision to use a pin. If a four digit pin is the entire basis for security then it can never be made secure, even if it is hashed, even if it is encrypted, and so on. There's no number of BCrypt factors you can set to make a four digit combination secure.

So for the author to make the app more secure they would have to require the user enters a long password, but I get the sense that isn't their USP looking at their app page. Their USP is the fact it only requires a four digit pin, so therefore that is that.

The author could store the pin in a decent hash, and then encrypt the password database using e.g. AES256 but ultimately a four digit pin is a four digit pin. You cannot really fix that unless there is an actual hardware interlock (e.g. chip that checks the number and burns out after too many bad tries).
This guy is fantastic for being so proactive in his approach while being careful to (what appears to) run the system in such a way that it does not interfere with the way the truck operates. Not to mention the saved seconds or minutes which add up after a while.
Bigger Settlement Said to Be Reached in Silicon Valley Antitrust Case
Are you just asking about macroevolution? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroevolution
> Though, as we all have to do once or twice a month (ridiculous) I had to get a new debit card and since I havent bothered taking a pic of my newest card for Passbook.

ApplePay allows banks to update your saved card automatically when they need to give you a new card number.

CapitalOne did this, and it meant that I could still use my credit card recently when it got closed without waiting for them to mail me a new one.

(CapitalOne's own customer support don't know this, though, and said I'd have to delete the card and add it again myself.)

Also, if you're using a debit card to pay at places that are getting their card transactions hacked I think you really need tokenization!
Is "Colombia", not "Columbia".
No, not really. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irregardless
I just launched a company and our first product is exactly what you described:

http://www.voxel8.co

We don't have the resolution to get what most board houses can do, but we can reliably hit pitches (pin to pin spacing) of 800 microns. This allows us to build fully embedded fully 3d circuits using many of the surface mount chips on the market today.

As we make our machine more accurate we will eventually be able to hit 500 micron pitch and then we will be able to integrate BGA packages. We'll be there soon!
I get the impression that 296 is meant to be 2^96, which is exactly the same as your figure.
I am very intrigued by BSD as it comes highly recommended here. I just need an excuse to dip my toes.

I need to set up a nginx -> nodejs server for a project soon. Given I have set up a number of linux servers without trouble, how much of a struggle would it be to just use BSD for this new project? Would it be worth holding off and just messing about in a VM, or would my linux experience just transfer directly to setting up on FreeBSD?
My father was a math professor at a community college. He was proud of his teaching and his students. Those students --- largely people looking to become nurses, firemen, or other professionals --- benefited from his love of teaching. He got his PhD in education during his teaching career, and even developed a game to help teach math. The game sucked, frankly, and was never released anywhere but it shows how much he cared about teaching.
حفلة محمد منير علي CBC
"The good news is that there is no disadvantage to applying to YC as a female or minority founder."

I don't understand why that's good news.

It'd be good news if YC were actively preferring female and minority founders. Everyone acknowledges the glaring diversity problem in tech, but apparently YC is happy standing on the sidelines.
Write unit tests for your WatchKit apps
Those numbers are dollars per student, if we start sending a lot of new people to community colleges our rank on that list might drop since community college is much cheaper than univeristy where many costs go towards things not directly tied to education: dorms, meal plans, sports equipment, stadiums, etc.
This one uses the rudig.co URL shortener. Shorteners are blocked on HN but I guess this one isn't on the blacklist (yet).
Linode doesn't (last i checked anyway) officially support FreeBSD but people were doing it years ago in the irc channel when I used to hang out there
Facebook Finally Unveils a Way to Spend All Day on Facebook at Work
Food meshes well with the market while some other servives are market failures.
It also depends on your definitions.

If the bottleneck to learning is nutrition or lead exposure, then one should advocate directly for policies that would fix nutrition or mitigate lead exposure, rather than generically advocating for more school funding.
I do most of my surfing on a tablet or phone. Everything usually works well for me. Is there something in particular to which you are referring?
Lots of companies tried putting keyboards & trackballs on phones. People bought phones with big screens instead.
Show HN: Viola (from LibCello) Adds Smart Pointer Support
Libraries already have to use internet filtering/blocking software under CIPA (though adult users are supposed to be able to get the filter disabled).