skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is a recently published paper by Cliff Mass that is the first attempt at forecast experiments with smartphone pressure data: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00188...

The early results are good. There will be an improvement [1]. How much of an improvement? We don't know yet. Cliff thinks it could be a revolution for some types of forecasts, but we don't have the density of sensors yet to know for sure.

For some comparisons, we sent cliff about 20,000 measurements per hour for his experiment in that paper. We're now delivering about 200,000 per hour to researchers, and that's not nearly enough. Our aim is for 2M per hour and I hope to reach that in the next 2-3 months. Around 1-2M per hour is probably sufficient to provide the "revolution" in accuracy that Cliff predicting.

I should also note that 1-2M per hour is small. We should be able to get closer to 1B per hour, but it'll take a while to ramp up to that kind of scale (that'll be like, every smartphone + watch + car that has a barometer).

The improvements will be slow and steady until we get massive scale and are able to run our models in real time. Until then, it's tough to guess how good the improvements will be.

[1] In the linked paper above, I believe the results were a reduction in root mean square error of about 1deg C for a 3-hour temperature forecast in the Pacific Northwest.
Please don't omit the "when compared to" clause.

Driving is mundane when compared to flying a fighter jet in combat. But driving is not mundane.

And I don't understand why you're still saying the candy bar melting in Spencer's pocket isn't surprising. It's his story. Spencer himself said it was surprising. Can't you take his word for it?
At the company I work for, Wool and the Gang (http://woolandthegang.com/), they are trying to realize the same idea for the niche market of hand made clothes. Basically, a `hat` will be hand-knitted by a person who is part of the `gang` and sold through the web site as a platform. However, in practice, a not so significant percent of sales come through this practice, in comparison to the traditional retail goods (such as yarn).

We use the Spree Ecommerce system for the purpose.

I know of another idea of the same sort, which is for the establishment of an online marketplace for brewery ingredients.

I guess such marketplaces are in need, for that a good alternative to the awful ebay should exist.
What makes a great software developer?
Stanford will teach you Apple's Swift for free
Lockitron Bolt is BLE-only (although we require an intermittent connection through your handset to transmit encrypted key & log data) unless paired with Bridge. We've thought a lot about an option to use Lockitron entirely offline - is this what you're looking for?
Go where your adversaries are weakest. The reason your SP sucks and doesn't care is that they bought your elected and unelected officials.
Sounds like they just had a solid product management plan, even if it might have been informal.
Advice to all the folks in the new cities: Google deploys per-neighborhood, once signups reach a critical level. So get your apartment manager, your HOA, your neighbors to sign up, even if they don't have any immediate plans to switch. Post tear-off-tag signs in your community with the url: google.com/fiber
> This bit seems like SE owns the content

Nope, they own a perpetual and irrevocable license. That's distinct from owning the content, because you still own the content, still can use it yourself, and still can issue any license you want to others to use it.

Were the perpetual and irrevocable license also exclusive, this analysis would be different.
What VCs and Tech Writers Have in Common
in the meantime, here in baltimore, comcast still has it's monopoly which was initiated in 2004.
> So what if it missed NYC?

There is a very significant economic impact during high-impact weather-related decision making. The city of NY is missing out on a huge amount of money due to the "poor planning" - additionally, so is the rest of the world if flights were cancelled that did not need to be cancelled. Decision making is important in NYC, and providing the best possible information to the decision makers is a critical aspect of modern meteorology.

Maybe you don't care that it missed NYC, but Delta cares. Minimum wage workers who couldn't get to work and missed a shift care. The Mayor cares. etc.
> Science rarely wins especially if there is uncertainty.

I agree 100%. One of the most interesting books I've read lately has been The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, which deals with this at length (ostensibly it is about unpredictability in financial markets, but the implications are far broader than that).
Divorce and online voting
I'd pay $8 to see it.
'A sea of pretenders piling on to get rich quick' is exactly how I would have described the dotcom bubble.
Lockitron wasn't funded on Kickstarter. They built their own self-hosted solution, called selfstarter: http://www.selfstarter.us/
Agree with 10/12.

> Schedule any meetings that really require 1 hour over lunch.

For the love of God no. This almost always ends up turning into an excuse for managers to make your lunchtime into work time.

> If our meeting is scheduled for 10:00 and you're not there by 10:01, I lock the door.

I get that it's important to be punctual, but isn't this a bit extreme?
I completely forgot about that. I remember having some POS 100Mb account with hotmail and upgrading to Gmail was a godsend. I think I bought an invite on ebay.
Why Browser Dominance Matters
If it makes no difference who is robbing or extorting you, I'd go with the ones I have a better chance of defending myself from: my neighbors.
I tried running the Ubiquiti controller software on the pfSense box for a while, but it was a pain - it took 5-10 minutes to start up, and it was lost whenever I did a pfSense upgrade. I've found it much easier to just point the access points at a general-purpose server (on-site if available, or on a remote VPS that I have already).
The one-liner I posted is really meant to be just understandable enough to someone who's taken a solid first year computer science course with C and is looking for more. At least that's where I was approximately when I first found it. So yes, it's mean to be tame, more of a brainteaser than indecipherable.

Also, I wrote a program to generate these. So here's one for you:

main(O){10<putchar(5^--O?77-(31&2278424678>>5*O):10)&&main(2+O);}

In fact, I originally found this style of tiny C program on Hacker News nearly two years ago. Here's the link to the original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5524428
> But the idea that they might have created something that is now being used by nongovernmental parties is the scary thing

Who has that idea? I don't see anyone saying that.

also: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/world/middleeast/cia-said-...
I don't see why that's such a surprise. I thought the same for a split-second.
Yeah, my Nexus 5 has given me nothing but trouble with various bluetooth connections, and it's impossible to troubleshoot.
New Powerful Browser “Vivaldi” Announced by Ex-Opera CEO
I've been playing around with getting Mori[0] more js-like, from more idiomatic function names and argument order (fn as the last argument, released) to playing around with a chaining API. Ideally we should be able to wrap javascript values, manipulate via idiomatic chaining (similar to Lodash), while getting most of the benefits from highly-tuned persistent data structures, lazy sequences, etc.

e.g.

expect(_([1,1,1,1,2,2,3,4,5,6,6]).distinct().conj(7).out()).toEqual([1,2,3,4,5,6,7]);

Here's a small set of specs showing early ideas https://github.com/swannodette/mori/blob/8e82b15b35b2989d4a2...

[0] https://github.com/swannodette/mori
> But the user no-longer owns the content.

Yes, they do.

> The user can't control what SE does with the content.

To the extent that is true (because they have granted a generous license) that doesn't change the fact that the user still owns the content, can use it themselves without permission from SE, and further can license it to others without permission from SE.

The original owner having granted a generous but non-exclusive license to one party does not make the party benefitting the license the owner of the content or stop the original owner from being the owner of the content with all the privileges and rights that go with that.
OEMs only care about the external interfaces on the chips, and only if they're doing a custom PCB rather than using NVidia's reference design. It's not like they're advertising it as their own GPU - they put NVidia's name and logo all over their products.
Building WebKit for iOS Simulator
This article classifies blunders by their material value. I'd be interested to see similar analysis classifying blunders based on their depth and the player's rating. For example, failing to see a simple capture would be a depth 1 blunder. Failing to see an opponents capture response would be a depth 2 blunder. Failing to see a knight fork opportunity would be a depth 3 blunder. Failing to see your opponents knight fork opportunity would be a depth 4 blunder.... etc.
We're prepping something special for existing members of the developer program, details will follow shortly :) Unfortunately the timing didn't align perfectly with the TC article, but we definitely haven't forgotten you.
I have to admit to a certain confusion about your point. I guess what you're saying is that anyone who thought to help Greece should have expected to be jerked around and told to pound sand?

I feel like this is some form of victim blaming.
It's not just you, it's pretty much the standard semi-official shorthand for it.
yes, its a pokemon - a Wynaut
Tiny $26 WiFi-ready IoT SBC Runs OpenWRT Linux
She's the exception that proves the rule. Her rise was made possible by the turmoil caused by the reunification that opened up that career path for highly educated people who kept their distance to the regime. [1] is another example with ... comparable ... charisma. But again, they are rare exceptions. [2] says that there are 27 members of parliament with a doctorate in engineering, 8 with a doctorate in biology, 7 in math, 2 chemistry, one in geology, and one in computer science. And I doubt that many of them have been working in science after the doctorate.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Platzeck
[2] http://scienceblogs.de/frischer-wind/2011/03/21/wissenschaft...
I'm not quite sure why I'm being downvoted here ? I'm not criticizing but pointing out the obvious.

Or do you think the smaller/newer players aren't supposed to be the ones bringing new ideas and executions but are meant to merely follow the giants from a distance and copy them ? In search or in other fields ... Because that's what downvoting what I said implies.
There is also a book [1] about Blizzard that I really enjoyed.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G8UL474
It looks definitely out of place on Ubuntu (a Gnome fallback desktop here.) It looks like something ported from a Windows 8 desktop and it ignores the system setting for the color of the title bar.

I also wonder why they are implementing an integrated mail client. It seems a waste of developer time which could be spent on something more important.

That said, the browser is pretty fast. Chances that I'll use it: maybe, but not as primary browser. I'm using FF with some vital addons as my primary browser (Firebug, NoScript, AdBlock, SelfDestructingCookies) and Opera/Blink as wordprocessor and spreadsheet on Google Drive, to separate concerns (customer mandated docs). I can't see me leaving FF for this (I didn't for Chrome) but it could end up replacing Opera if they keep it minimal.
Does anyone have any insight into when we'll see CentOS packages start hitting the mirrors?
That is not them being haughty; it is them being busy. And it's me being respectful of that.

Sure it's not but it doesn't relate to what I was saying was Haughty - specifically sending someone a tip sheet on how to meet with you or expecting them to Google how to have a meeting with you.

To extend your example, it would be more akin to going to the Soup Nazi's restaurant [1] - albeit likely without the hostility.

[1]http://youtu.be/uVqBzP0xdKk?t=23s
There is one practical uncertainty action that can be taken:

I mostly get my forecast from a bookmark on weather.gov, and the "area forecast discussion" is one more click away. The technical discussion isn't any more complicated than sportscasting news once you get used to it, but that stuff doesn't matter, the important part is to read for "FORECAST CONFIDENCE IS HIGH." and "MODELS ARE IN GOOD AGREEMENT WITH" at which point you can pretty much trust the forecast for that time period, and if the textual commentary is all what wikipedia calls weasel word phrases like "SHOWING SOME DIFFERENCES" or "BUT MAY NEED TO BE RAISED IN LATER FORECASTS IF MODELS REMAIN CONSISTENT" means you need to check back in half a day or so, till they firm up a bit.

The only verbal commentary you'll get in mass media reporting is how great lasagna recipes sound and how weather will impact the local ball team, which sucks.

If AFDs could be a little more formalized by date, you could do automated textual analysis pretty trivially and produce an honest forecast. Sometimes weather guys can give you an accurate forecast for next thursday and sometimes they can't, but the monkey in the street DEMANDS some answer for next thursday, even if there really isn't one, even if it makes the weather guy look dumb. An interesting startup-ish idea would be a mostly automated honest weather report app where days when the best scientific minds output a question mark, are displayed as a question mark instead of just makin stuff up. It would be a nice difficult problem, sounds all startup-py to me.
If you use a CDN (or use the public CDNs that many of these libraries have) it's not 130 kb, it's a network request + 304
The "play up the fear" stuff around weather reporting in recent years is why I've given up even attempting to use weather forecasts from anywhere but weather.gov which is sourced directly from The National Weather Service and NOAA. It's just a straight up information dump, no annoying ads or fear mongering for clicks. When I heard they were naming blizzards last year, and this year now, I was only momentarily shocked because it was the next logical step.

This has far more severe consequences then just clickbaiting though. When Hurricane Irene was moving up the coast a few years ago they did the typical "storm of the century, omg a billion people might die!!!" routine and we got light wind and rain. The following year they did it again with Hurricane Sandy (I really hate when people call it Superstorm Sandy ... it was a small hurricane! We were just ill-prepared for it) and a whole lot of people didn't buy into it and paid the price. I'm only 27 but I have trouble remembering a time where every thunderstorm we got wasn't played up to be an extinction level event. At this point I have my small cache of supplies and otherwise completely ignore storm predictions for the most part.
That was one of the tidbits buried in the article:

The big lesson here: Don't underestimate the power of traditional media when you launch. It must be your primary concern, starting months beforehand and continuing for weeks afterward. Pull the strings you have. Work closely with your PR firm to find your hook. It can be personalities on your team, impressive customers you already have in the bag, prestigious investors, etc. But don't leave it to two weeks beforehand and throw something together.

Sounds like they don't spend that much money on advertising, but a bunch on PR and social media. And later they also point out how they use customer service as another marketing opportunity.
Not the OP, but I've found OpenVPN easier to configure, and performance to be adequate. In what ways have you found IPsec to be superior?
I do agree with your sentiment.

I'm coming at this from a perspective of one doctor who advocated for long term use, only to meet with (several) other doctors years later who highly disagreed with the approach. In other words, there's lot of contradicting information out there and not every doctor is an expert.

This is me as a data point saying - if you're being lead down a path of long term benzo use - be aware that its a possibly dangerous trajectory and in some places its not even really allowed (UK).

Benzodiazepine withdrawal is hell at best, and at worst it can kill you. This is not something you often hear in a doctor's office.
> At the risk of being cynical, perhaps the problem lies more with the people themselves. Perhaps most people aren't that driven; perhaps they aren't that skeptical; perhaps they don't really care about doing deep dives on topics.

It is partially the fault of the average person, but from a stoic perspective, that's not something we can do much about, so we shouldn't waste time thinking about it.

What we can do is refuse to write socially irresponsible software. The internet is what mindless people make it, but it's also what software developers make it.

EDIT: Also, I'm not really down on cat pictures, I just don't care about them. If the worst people did online was view cat pictures, I'd be less frustrated by the current state of the internet. My frustration comes from the fact that the internet has become a better tool for predatory corporations and authoritarian governments than it has become for the average person.
I was curious about what kind of bump weather sites get in ad revenue as a result of storm hype.

That's an interesting angle when wondering where the hype is driven from ... if you find the mental image of Murdoch twirling his mustache (this is my imagination, so why not add a mustache?) while making quiet phone calls from a back room a correct version of reality.
I love the idea, but I don't love forcing non-technical users to learn Markdown.

Hmmm, actually, it occurs to me that formatted comments are in general, annoying and ugly, so perhaps hiding the fact that formatting is even possible by not providing formatting buttons, is just fine.
Yep, I had to do exactly this here in Austin. I literally went door to door, met many of my neighbors for the first time, and mentioned that we were only a few signatures away from fiber in our neighborhood. Even after getting all of the signatures we have to wait until June for our install, which kind of sucks, but it's better than continuing to deal with Time Warner.
There's something much deeper going on here, and I don't think Butterfield or the media understands it.

What I'm reading is that Slack underwent a critical period of user-focused product design. This is the story of a product development process, not a launch.

The other factor is hidden behind some of the headings: “When key users told us something wasn't working, we fixed it — immediately.” That's nice to say, but you don't just say that, you have to achieve it, and that's the hard part.

Both of these point to critical internal systems that are set up extremely well. Someone or several people inside Slack know the importance of systems even at their small size, maybe even learned from Deming and TQM, and it's clearly greatly amplified their ability to take all of the user input, product feedback, and vision and distill it into something that's actually cohesive. This probably also applies to their UX process, product design process, and feedback cycle, as revealed by the article. All of this has to be driven by a management style that enables it, understands the organizational psychology behind accomplishing a quality product, and leadership that knows the whole is important. It doesn't happen often.

What you're seeing is the surface analysis of a reverence for systemic quality and the culture, systems, and management style needed to sustain it. It's very clear because of the results. It's like seeing just the light spectra of a star and being able to determine its size and age and chemical makeup; the unmistakeable signature of the inner core.

This would simply not be possible without the ongoing product process that they've set up, and the article is just the tip of an iceberg that lies mostly beneath the surface, large and cumbersome and meticulously designed. Read between the lines and think about why all these efforts have been successful. Take that deeper analysis and learn from it.
Can any Google fiber user tell us how the TV offerings differ from Comcast/Uverse/TWC/Direct TV? Do they include local channels and other channels I've come to expect?

What is missing from Google TV?
pretty much any failed startup used the same launch strategy
Agreed: weather forecasting was not the only thing at play. (I live in Fairfax, and it was also worse than forecasted.) This just illustrates what happens when you get it wrong (whether you are a school administrator, meteorologist, reporter, or policy maker).
If you go to the Google homepage in a browser that isn't Chrome it shows up.
Thank you. As long as it works, I don't care which rendering engine my browser uses, just as I don't care which libc implementation it uses. The browser is the UI, not the libraries it links to.
On the contrary, 'providing the greatest possible benefit to the greatest number of people' is a central focus in economics. Start with Pareto efficiency and go from there if you want to see various ways in which economists actually define and study efficiency.
Chrome to Show Warning for Non-Secure Websites
I disagree. When forecasters know with certainty that there will be 14 inches, that's what they should say. It's definitely more accurate. However, when they only know that it might go either way, they should say "2-16 inches", which is more useful and accurate in the face of real uncertainty. Even better would be "2-16 inches, probably 14".

A school administrator who sees a forecast of "14 inches" may simply cancel class the evening before, giving people time to prepare with certainty. That's nice, but not at the cost of a lost school day and calendar disruptions.

A forecast of "2-16 inches, probably 14" might cause that same administrator to wait and see. TV and radio would broadcast the news about possible school closings the evening before, so parents could prepare. They might have a bit more difficulty planning, but that's worth it if the school day can be saved.
Nashville, at least, has an insane amount of healthcare tech jobs at the moment. I don't know about the other cities, though.
Friendly local government is a big factor.

For example: Google looked at Seattle's NIMBY laws regarding utility boxes on sidewalks (each requiring a lengthy community approval process) and said, "Nope!"

Seattle's new mayor is now looking how to streamline the process to make the city more Google friendly, should the opportunity arise again.
I'm a fan of [superagent] for AJAX. The React lib is big, but its declarative nature has lead to fewer and easier-to-diagnose bugs for us, which is ultimately a win for the end user. I've been using it exclusively on new projects for months now and I'm a Backbone.js core contributor ;)

superagent: https://github.com/visionmedia/superagent
Show HN: 2100 signups and counting for being “site of the day” on design website
Ask HN: How can get a software job without a degree while being a foreigner?
There's a lot of talk about how, particularly/only in software, degrees are obsolete and you could join a company or successfully make your own without one.

Unfortunately (for my case) these seem (obviously with good reason) focused on people with US residence or citizenship. Are there any post/guide/tips/something for a foreigner?
The RTP area has a large tech industry for the size of the area. SAS, epic games, redhat hq, cisco, ibm, netapp, emc, blah blah blah are all there.

They also have incredibly shitty ISPs, and lots of land to build out other ISPs.
https://www.kickstarter.com/terms-of-use#section4

There's a bunch of soft language, but it ends with If they’re unable to satisfy the terms of this agreement, they may be subject to legal action by backers.

But as davefp already pointed out, Kickstarter isn't relevant here.
Exploring the Doorways of 1970s New York