skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author mentions that he used "A 2 metre bit of wire jammed in the screwhole at the base of the tiny antenna" to try and get better reception. While the signal he is receiving is in the 2-meter band, a monopole antenna works better if it is 1/4 the wavelength, so he might actually get better reception with a 0.5 meter length of wire. What he created is usually called a "random wire" antenna, and may deliver acceptable performance with a strong signal.

But the NOAA satellites (and quite a few other satellites) use a circularly polarized signal, and for just a tiny bit more money (perhaps the cost of the dongle) you can make a MUCH better antenna for circularly polarized signals. Some designs are just helixes made with coax cable, some are just a couple of wires in an x-shape.

Google is your friend, and building an antenna is a fun cheap weekend project and will greatly enhance your results when hunting for satellite signals.

P.S. if you make a circularly polarized antenna and you discover that you made a LH polarization instead of the RH that you wanted (or vice versa), just turn the antenna upside down. It may behoove you if you are planning on listening to signals with both polarities to construct one that is easily flipped over.
What differentiates your company's Neo Chip vs Adapteva's Epiphany co-processor?
The error most likely didn't stop converging - its just that n^{-1/2} is a very slow convergence rate.

If you want actual control of the error, and to know how many samples you need, you need to do some arithmetic with the central limit theorem or hoeffdings inequality.
I don't understand why a big company like Google can put some feature online if it's not thoroughly tested or thought. It is because it is a web product and it wants the users to be the testers?
That happens as well: http://m.animalnewyork.com/2015/i-went-undercover-as-a-nail-...
Wikipedia's summary of the case doesn't make it sound as positive for 3taps, especially as the status of the case (their motion to dismiss the case was denied) is not what they wanted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc.#...

Two significant problems for them: the Court sided with Craigslist's view that 3taps knew its authorization to access the website was revoked when it received Craigslist's cease-and-desist letter, so scraping past that date might constitute unauthorized access; and Craigslist's change to its ToS on July 16, 2012 to claim copyright on posts was valid, so reuse of their material after that date could constitute a copyright violation subject to statutory damages.
What you're describing is very similar to Ethereum, a platform for decentralized applications. Its blockchain is a public database for application data that all participants in a system need to agree on. Other data is either messaging to discussing parties, static data on a decentralized store, or private data on your own machine.

Users of software built with this architecture enjoy unlimited uptime: the software is run by the user and a decentralized computer that only stops running when no one wants to use it anymore.
In that case, yes, it would be interesting to make a system to verify such and probably doable in the short term (ignoring the UI issues which are separate). The problem still remains the same that your speech recognition is going to be very spotty on untrained processing, so you can at best (key word there) match maybe 500 words on one accent pool. This means you have a limited set of questions and it does make it a barrier to entry, but certainly not unbeatable and definitely much more in favor of the AI programmer.

This is also why your average big-company automated attendant is so bad at interpreting what you want outside of the 5 common things people want to talk about (most of which I can do online, so it's never what I'm there for) and again sadly only if you're in the more common US American English accent pool. Southern accents tend to get squelched pretty bad and that's just the beginning of accents common in the US.

One could conceivably target an individuals desired accent recognition so you could let the user say "Most of my callers speak in an X accent" and then get a little more accurate for that pool of callers, but this also means installing disparate systems for recognition, each of which are quite expensive computationally.

This is a deeply interesting problem space, though, and if you're interested there's quite a bit of discussion over it in the sphinx project and several research communities.
> The fact that he had just stolen something has absolutely no relevance to the question of whether Darren Wilson acted correctly when he fired his gun.

The fact that his physical description, the event of the strong-armed robbery, and the report of the stolen item, was brought-cast - which led to the events that followed - is not relevant?
Try framing it as interest payments:

When you get X customers, you'll have to commit Y resources to fix this one thing.

Taking on technical debt is a smart thing in early stages because it's essentially low-cost, non-dilutive financing. So you should recognize that very real benefit.

However, if they are young startups they might not even realize they are doing this smart thing. You can add value by telling them are smart and giving them the schedule of technical interest payments they will have to pay one way or the other if they are still in business.
The web server is not sentient, so you are not "communicating" with it. It is a piece of property that you are using by sending it requests.

And consumptive/rivalrous use is a red herring. Property is about exclusive use of and control of access to something. Whether a competing use is rival or not is irrelevant. Cutting across a yard or walking into a store is still trespass, even though it's only consumptive/rivalrous in a de minimis way.
I must say, it sounds like an interesting life, good job.

One other thing I'm curious about, considering your level of fitness, are you noticing any physical deterioration at 42? By that I mean you can't bench what you used to, I'm talking more intangible "feeling" that your body is breaking down a bit, like when getting up off the floor...lol
Judges, prosecutors and most of the media will always assume the cops side unless there is overwhelming video/audio evidence.

Add to that the fact that they have a gun and the right to use it with almost no consequences (some extra paperwork, maybe a paid vacation).

It has nothing to do with "lawful" it's about force, and force is completely on their side.
Great, just recently I became passionate about anything relating to radio theory and transmission and I had learnt about these dongles and was ready to get one.

But before that, I decided I wanted a proper "hardware radio", and bought myself a portable wide band radio receiver [1] (great value for the price, I advice it). Then when I was about to get one of these dongles, as usual and as for the above radio, I got sucked into the reviews suggesting this or that other model for better sensitivity or extra features. Now I understand the price range for these cheap sticks is just in the order of a few tenths at maximum, but maybe there is a chance anyone has investigated a bit more on the available choices already?

For example.. the one that has been written about in the article has 4 stars and 159 reviews while the first alternative in the "Amazon recommends" box has some 940 reviews and same 4 star score for just £ +2 (but I'm not even sure they do exactly the same things.. sorry). So, just wondering, maybe someone has already gone through this search and can recommend the best one to get?

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Tecsun-PL-660-Portable-Shortwave-Singl...
OS-9: real-time, multi-user, Unix-like OS developed in the 1980s
Come on. You rewrote the comment totally, to the point where earlier replies don't make any sense. You did this with your other posts to, though not as aggressively, adding points, fleshing them out. It's weird. The discussion gets ever weirder. Oh, now you did it again - to concede the fact.

Anyway, on topic: There is a photo of me holding a gun. I have been reported to the police. I have used medicine recreationally. I have had trouble with teachers, being something of an unruly kid to them at times. It's easy to paint most anyone in such a light.

Why should I get shot close to my home? What is it that you're arguing, in fact?
First of all, so what? Somebody with a lengthy and violent criminal history still has just as much of a right not to get killed by police as I do. Only if there is an imminent threat to life which lethal force is required to stop should the police use it.

Second, while true it can still be racist. For an example in a slightly different direction, take a look at Sandra Bland. The whole business started when she got pulled over while driving. One could say that it was totally legitimate to do so, because she did in fact commit a traffic infraction. I would say that it's still bad behavior by the policeman and most likely racist behavior, because it was a trivial infraction that tons of people commit every day, often in front of police, and almost never get pulled over for it.

In the case of victims of police shootings being violent criminals, that may be true for victims of all races, but the violent criminal history is emphasized much more for black people. So even if the histories are there for all races, if the histories are only brought up as justification when the victim is black, then the phrasing you object to is still accurate.
I see a lot of answers about how it's not technical debt that kills startups, it's failure to address customer needs. But I don't think these two are so different.

My definition of technical debt would be "problems in the code base that make it harder than it should be to do work," whether that work is adding new features, fixing bugs, scaling up, etc. The startup that can implement new features quickly because their code base isn't a disaster is more likely to succeed. They can try out new features quickly, seeing what customers respond to.

Customers need things like uptime, minimal bugginess, quick bug fixes, etc. Technical debt reduces uptime, increases bugginess, and makes it harder to fix bugs.

I think it would be hard to point at a startup and say "technical debt killed it". In most cases I imagine there are many inter-related causes of failure, but an inability to quickly add new features, fix bugs, and keep the system stable can't be a good thing!
"the policy of 3taps with regards to Craigslist data is that any sourcing of that data for insertion via our API be done without scraping or visiting Craigslist at all." (original emphasis)

Obviously, I don't know whether they followed that policy. However, the important point is that it sounds like Craigslist's argument applies regardless of whether 3taps was scraping directly from CL.

Here's the source: https://3taps.com/papers/response%20to%20%20c_n_d%20letter%2...
Chisel is not high level synthesis, which is one of the reasons why I love it. You are actually describing the circuit itself, with is what a hardware description language is supposed to do. While describing the function of a circuit like MyHDL and many other languages have tried to do it cute, they have never come close to a real engineer thinking of how to solve the problem with registers and combinational logic directly.
> It's a free service - what do you expect?

No reasonable person expects support for free, but relying heavily on a free service would be a lot less scary if there was an option to get customer support for $100, refundable if they can't solve your problem. At the moment there doesn't seem to be a middle ground between 'behave like a company and open a commercial account before you know there's going to be a problem' and 'if a problem does arise there's nothing you can do for any price'.
Don't they? I always thought that the current outrage was more along the lines of, "Look guys, we're supposed to be past this 'killing black people for being black' thing, and anyway we can all see you doing this stuff now, so why are you still doing it? Seriously, stop it already!"

I certainly could be wrong, that's just my vague impression.
Khandias: The Keepers of Doongerwadi
> Craigslist is like a shop open to shoppers.

Craigslist is a lot more like a free classifieds paper. The ads are received, typed up, and printed out by some office somewhere, and the resulting compilation is distributed in unattended and unlocked newspaper stands on the sidewalk.
"UNIX:
An operating system similar to OS-9, but with less functionality and
special features designed to soak up excess memory, disk space and CPU
time on large, expensive computers."
I mean "native" in terms of what's supported by the language itself, out of the box.

C and C++ offer -at a minimum- the following numeric types:

* signed and unsigned integers in a variety of widths

* 32 and 64-bit floating point numbers

JavaScript offers:

* 64-bit floating point numbers

When performing integer math, JavaScript's numeric type is only safe for arithmetic operations between -((2^53)-1) and +((2^53)-1).

Now that we have that out of the way, my original question remains unanswered. :)
I work with a developer who thinks extremely highly of himself, and he seems to have never heard of this approach for SPA's.
From nets to lasers, there’s a lot of new ways to take down drones
http://www.paulgraham.com/googles.html
The R9 Fury is AMD’s best card in years, but just who is it for?
Sorry. Not interested. Now you are just baiting me with b.s.
What would the testing plan look like?
Much the those issues are addressed in various boost libraries. There is one which wraps all the algorithms and containers in range classes so that all the f(c.begin(), c.end(), g) silliness gets replaced with f(c, g). There is another one which makes it easy to create streams of transforming and mapping functions with a F1 -> F2 -> F3 interface.
> People value cash differently than they value electronic money, even though the two have the exact same value.

Except when they don't. To a Greek, 100k EUR in the bank today is worth some percentage of 100k EUR. His account is illiquid. There are currency controls. There may or may not be a "deposit haircut", like in Cyprus, where the numbers in the databases were simply all reduced.

By the way, I'm very curious what the percentage is. The Greek guy certainly can't withdraw his 100k EUR retirement savings as cash, nor can he transfer them outside the country. He can still wire the money to another customer at the same Greek bank though, right? Say he finds someone on Craigslist who's willing to give him 90k EUR cash in return for that transfer. That would mean one Greek-bank-account-EUR is worth roughly 0.90 EUR. What's the actual rate right now?

--

Bank accounts of every kind share an important property: they have counterparties. Colloquially, money may be "in an account", but in reality, your account is on the bank's balance sheet as a liability. When you deposit, you are actually lending your counterparty money.

Some accounts have a reasonably trustworthy counterparty. Others, like a Cypriot savings account a few years ago, or an account at MtGox for that matter, did not.

The idea that $X in a bank account is always worth the same as $X cash is a reassuring fiction.

Counterparties are unavoidable in a centralized system. Counterparties vary in trustworthiness, and even a trustworthy counterparty today might not be tomorrow.

--

I think this is a fundamental advantage of decentralized stores of value, including paper cash.
CRUD apps are to programmers what walls are to carpenters. There may be an artistry to making good walls and there are lots of ways the task can be made challenging. But, 99% of the time, the customer doesn't care about the artistry that you put into the wall. They just want the damned thing up as fast and as cheaply as humanly possible. I think that might be where the root of the OP's boredom comes from. Doing the same (relatively) low skill task over and over for years would make anybody bored.
I think the question is a bit more along the lines of using people instead of working with people.

There's a clear distinction. Do you view your engineering hire as a tool for a means to an end, or do you consider a qualitative relationship? It's an interesting (albeit brutal way of looking at it)
Thanks, yes it's hard to point out one specific example of a startup, because it can be an inter-related cause as you mentioned.

Though someone else here mentioned how friendster lost their game due to technical debt:

I looked it up and it looks like that indeed it was an issue.

http://highscalability.com/friendster-lost-lead-because-fail...

> "Technical debt reduces uptime, increases bugginess, and makes it harder to fix bugs."

Yes, that is one of my concerns usually. It's good to go fast and build more, but not to an extend where it slows the process down on longer run.
Is it a thing to blog with github issues now?