screwt

That's simply not true for a manufacturing start-up.

To develop a physical product takes a long time, with a lot of (costly[1]) trial and error. You'll start with single items, then move on to batch production (10s-100s) on a few versions to test proof of concept. Depending on the size of the market, you may move on to mass production. For each scale increase, the start-up cost is higher, and the unit cost is lower.

If I develop a product, and in doing so show it has great potential, I've done most of the hard work. It's then easy for someone to go straight in at the top end with relatively little investment, because I've already proved the concept and sucked up the risk.

It's fair that people are able to protect their investment for something like this, otherwise it's not possible to compete against larger players.

Physical manufacturing is not the same as software.

[1] Relative to developing software, that is.

I have account with both HSBC and smile (online branch of the Cooperative Bank).

HSBC is as you describe - seems pretty secure, but enormously frustrating that you need the dongle just to check balances etc. They'll only provide a single dongle, which is annoying as I want to access my bank from both work and home. The dongle is small enough that you could fit it in a wallet if you wanted to avoid that, but then you're more at risk of losing it.

For Smile, to login you just need your numbers, including 2 digits from a 4-digit PIN selected via drop-down. I guess this is to avoid keylogging but seems a bit odd as a shoulder-surfer could see quite easily. For any new/ unusual payments, the card-reader is needed. They were happy to provide me with a second reader so I can bank from home and work. The reader is too bulky to carry around though, so this is necessary.

The other thing Smile do is heavily plug "Trusteer" software on every login. Fortunately this is not yet mandatory.

On the whole I prefer Smile's approach, though I'd be happier if they could provide a smaller dongle that would be easier to travel with.

That's why it's normal these days, for clinical studies, for the control group to receive current best available treatment, rather than a placebo.

After all, what you're generally trying to find out is whether the new treatment is better than what you already have - just being better than a placebo isn't very informative.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, I strongly recommend reading Ben Goldacre's work[1].

[1] Start at badscience.net.

I also thought this is an almost impossible problem to solve, until a friend pointed out that on the Jubilee line extension (London Underground), it is solved.

The edge of the platform at the newer stations is walled off from the track by glass. The platform doors line up with the train's, and open/close at the same time. So there's no access to the track at any point, hence no opportunity for "person under train".

Could you explain a little more why you didn't go for responsible disclosure to Onity?

In the article you suggest that you don't think they could fix it. Maybe true but shouldn't you (a) give them the oppurtunity to try (just cos you can't spot the fix doesn't mean it's impossible), and (b) give them the chance to say "yep, it's broken - give us 3 months to ship out new locks to all our customers" (yes, highly unlikely I know!).

Given that you sat on this for a year before publishing, there was ample oppurtunity to inform Onity before you publish.

I often see the following in the UK that appears to work around this.

Fruit items in a pack (e.g. 6 oranges) - price per unit is shown.

Fruit items loose - price per weight shown.

So you can't compare which is cheaper. I assume loose...

This.

If you have any interest in manufacturing, IMO the turbine blades in a jet engine are incredible.

Without going into loads of detail, 2 points that blow my mind:

1) Due to compression in the intake (and as per the ideal gas law D_Alex mentions above), the temperature of the air when it reaches the turbine is higher than the melting point of the turbine blades. The workaround for this is the blades are made with hollow channels through which cold air is blown, keeping them just cool enough.

2) You may be familiar with 'creep' - where materials under stress gradually relax to relieve that stress, even when the stress is lower than the yield stress of the material. Creep is made worse by (i) repeated stress cycles and (ii) high temperatures. In a typical jet turbine engine, you have blades spinning at 10000 rpm, at high tempratures, with a few microns clearance to the edge of the turbine housing. If they were to elongate and rake the edge of the housing at that speed ...

I'm surprised it takes more than 1 email each to pick a time.

Offer: Let's have a call. I'll suggest 2pm Tue. If that doesn't work, please let me know any time between 1pm-6pm Tue or 9am-11am Wed.

Response: 9am Wed.

I do think the gmail calendar approach is neater; the only downside being it requires the other party to use google calendar already.

Well if you read one of the original articles, you'll find out why.

For all the people expressing doubt, please:

- read the original story [1], in full. Google translate is your friend if you can't read French.

- find out a bit more about the 2CV car before commenting. It really is a very simple vehicle.

Ovi256's explanation [2] also gives a bit more context.

This story is emminently believable. And an impressive hack!

[1] http://chameaudacier.free.fr/moto2.html

[2] http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4007857

A Dutch friend of mine said watching English-language TV was a great help learning english. Just hearing the language a lot does wonders for recognising the sounds of words. Plus she said a lot of shows would have Dutch subtitles, so you get the link between sound & meaning.

I was disappointed - surely a live web version would be easy to mock up, and give a good feel for how things work?

This wouldn't need to give away any details - if need be, just have 10 example calcs with the tolerance hard-coded.

I second this. Compare this 'basic':

    ... and we will develop more features and services in the future

to the actual TOS:

    ... 500px reserves the right to suspend or discontinue
    the availability ... or remove any Content ... without 
    prior notice. 500px may also ... restrict your access to 
    parts of or all of the Site and the Services without notice

(multiple ellipses for brevity)

To my mind that's a pretty big omission, and makes me distrustful of hte rest of the "basic" terms.

Re "the inherent joy in playing music" - isn't that the whole point of the article? When it's not reduced to mindless rote learning, there can be an inherent joy in doing math.

The MS Paint ad was much more readable, IMO. Too many adds try to cram too much into their restricted screen real estate, with the result that they're much less clear.

Factor in that most ads are competing with others alongside (and they all look the same); also as others have mentioned, we've adapted to filter out 'obvious' ads.

I think you underestimate the necessity for reliable support, especially in some sectors.

E.g. for Telcos, where any outages must be fixed within specified (short) timescales in order to be allowed to sell telco service. It's less risk for a business to say we pay X per year, and if the shit hits the fan we can just pick up the phone.

The other thing offered by RH is to say: here is a distro, we've tested it and can sign off on it being stable. That is also worth a lot in some sectors.

I have seen the non-EU line at Heathrow. For those that haven't, it's >3 hrs long, stood up, with nothing but a single garish vending machine for company.

It makes me ashamed to be British. We can do better.

A friend of mine used to where a suit for exams. He said it helped him get in the right mindset.

I tried a similar thing in high school to stop saying 'like' as a filler word. For me, it completely backfired though - I found myself saying 'like' twice whenever I would have said it once!

I guess doing this as a group (as others have suggested) might work better.

Years later, and the habit went away by itself.

I don't know why the above comment has been down-voted - it's completely fair and valid.

HN works best when downvoting is not used as disagreement. If you don't like McDonalds, fine. But it's clearly true that many people do.

I'd say it's more like, having a betting shop in Canada, but the only entrance is via an underground tunnel whose entrance is in the US. The US have said "the only use of this tunnel is to disobey US law, and so we're closing down the tunnel."

That analogy leaves me with a few questions: (1) is a "tunnel to Canada" a good analogy for "a .com domain hosted in Canada"? (2) Is it true/ a good thing that .coms come under US jurisdiction? (I think this is the case, but shouldn't be).

The problem arises because, unfortunately, .com domains are based under US jurisdiction. Given that, there's an option for US-local lawmakers to apply for a takedown.

To be fair, the post does say they'll provide the technical explanation when they have more info:

    We will post an update on this situation, including details on the root cause analysis at the end of this incident.

I think that's fair enough (assuming they don't just quietly forget about this last part).

There's an alternate strategy that relies on time moving in discrete chunks, and both players moving simultaneously. But it's completely dependent on how the space is modelled, which indicates (to me) that this isn't a satisfying / robust / realistic solution.

Assuming both players react instantaneously, and space is modelled as continuous (not discrete), I think the following strategy always wins for the lion.

    1. Lion runs to centre of ring
    2. Lion moves toward tamer, but always staying directly between tamer and centre.

(2) is always possible, as the arc the lion has to move around to keep between tamer and centre is always shorter than any arc the tamer can move along since the lion is closer in. As a corollory, the lion can always get closer to the tamer unless the tamer moves direclty away from the centre.

Eventually the tamer reaches the edge of the ring and can no longer move directly away. Then the lion can continue to move outward, always between the tamer and centre, until they meet, and the lion eats.

Ramps aren't actually accessible to everyone - especially for older folks, short steps and flat sections are easier to navigate than a continuous gradient.

/pedant (sorry)

All the drink at an event like this will certainly be on sale or return[1] so everything he drinks comes direct from the charity's pocket.

[1] i.e. the charity brings in X bottles of champagne and lets it flow freely all night. At the end they return all unopened bottles, and only pay for what was drunk.

NYT's target audience is not HN. I think many people who use FB don't realise there are any privacy issues under consideration, and I think it's good that the NYT is pointing them out.

While I'd expect most HNers to have made a conscious choice whether to trade their data for FB service or not, that's not something I expect regular users to do (I think they should, but that's another matter).

tl;dr: Building waste is mostly rubble (not really necessary to recycle); these stats are by weight (density of rubble >> density of household waste). Treat these stats & suggestions of "no point doing any household recycling" with caution.

I think these statistics are somewhat misleading.

Waste from building tends to be rubble and dirt. Some of this can be re-used (eg filler for roads), but also the environmental impact of disposing of dirt is not much.

More importantly, the stats on the link above give waste measured by weight. A skip full of rubble (densely-packed stone) weighs far more than a skip full of general trash (loose-packed plastic bottles). A comparison by volume would be more informative[1].

That doesn't go for all building waste, and I don't know what comprises most industrial waste. All in all, I suspect cutting everyone's household waste to zero would make a significant impact on reducing the volume of waste produced nationwide; I don't know though whether it would make as much as a 50% impact.

[1] Obviously there are difficulties comparing by volume since household waste can be compacted to a great degree - my point is that comparison by weight skews heavily to the side of building waste.

You need to take into account that test scores don't tell you enough. Currently roughly 8% get the top grade (A star) at A level, per subject [1]. I can't find a number for what %age of students achieve all-A star grades, but I expect it's still greater than the number who apply to Oxford or Cambridge.

It's the job of the interview to distinguish between those who have the potential to go beyond what's needed for A levels. For the most part, if someone has had to work extremely hard to achieve the top A-level grades, they're going to struggle at Oxbridge where the level is that much higher.

I'm not saying the current interview process is perfect, but test scores alone don't tell you enough to distinguish the best students.

Disclaimer: I went to Cambridge.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11012369

(edit: asterisk -> "star" to avoid italicising)

I'm not from the US. Is there anything I can do to help oppose SOPA/PIPA?

So far I've assumed I'm not eligible to call US senators/ congressmen, or sign the whitehouse.gov petition. Am I wrong about this? Is there anything else I can do instead?

All the blackout messages I've seen today don't appear to have much info for the rest of the English-speaking world about what we can do to help.