According to the Kickstarter page, the Ouya was due out in March 2013:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-...

I'm pretty sure I was one of the many naysayers who said the Ouya would never make that launch date. Hell, I once ordered underwear from a Kickstarter clothing outfit and that came at least three months late. I've supported several Kickstarters and none of them have delivered the physical goods within two months of their promise (I've even had one delayed by a year). The Ouya is late by a couple of weeks, if even that.

Congrats to Ouya for meeting their goal, here's hoping that their system is a success.

Its not a mystery, its the pesticides. Bayer's been leading the "search for the real killer" in an effort that would make OJ Simpson proud.

My step-dad is an avid beekeeper, and an organic urban farmer. Its been "known" for years amongst that community that the collapse is caused by pesticides. Bayer has done an amazing job keeping this labeled a "mystery".

Why are all of you commenting out of complete ignorance and near absolute lack of domain knowledge? Taking sides and making accusations from this frame of reference is just plain wrong.

It's like watching a bunch of bee-keepers engage in a heated debate about a memory leak in your iOS app after reading an article and a Wikipedia page --not one of them being a programmer.

I'd love to hear from bee biologists or someone otherwise scientifically qualified in the domain. Everything else is just noise.

As an aside, I pass through Bakersfield a few times a year on our way to one of our camping destinations. It's interesting to learn that all those beehives are rented and trucked in.

So, while the EPA, USDA, European Food Safety Authority, and leagues of scientists have studied the issue and have not found a single obvious contributing factor -- and actually instead have found evidence to suggest that colony collapse may be caused by a conjunction of many different causes -- you are here announcing to all of us that Its not a mystery, its the pesticides?

Do you have any scientific backing for your claims aside from... your step-dad "knowing" things?

When I was in my early 20s I found myself married to a wife who was a full-time student who couldn't work (due to brain dead immigration law), a $900 a month apartment, a car, an almost full-time job and a full-time class load doing my undergrad. I made, in my best year during that time, $16000. To say that we were poor was an understatement. An extravagant meal for us might be ordering the deluxe tacos at taco bell, or for an anniversary splitting an all you can eat pasta dinner at Olive Garden.

But we managed to just squeak by every month with about $5-10 in the bank at the end of the month.

We arrived at a point where we had to make a choice, have health insurance (the cheap one through the school) or pay rent and buy groceries. We chose food and shelter.

It was the wrong choice.

I came down with a mystery pain in my abdomen after recovering from a bad bout with the flu (which I had to work through or we couldn't eat). A night in the ER and a $10k bill later, it was looking like both my wife and I were going to have to drop out of school, we were going to have to break the lease on our apartment and move in with relatives, sell one of our cars and I was going to have to take on a second job sanding decks for $7 an hour.

It was too much to bear, my marriage went on the rocks, the relationship with my family and friends went to shit, I mentally shut down. All those years of effort, of dragging myself up the socioeconomic ladder. I became severely depressed.

Aggressive negotiation with the hospital saw the bills lowered to a still bankrupting but better $5k and a payment plan. It was the difference between dropping out of school entirely or dropping out for a semester.

Then the stars aligned. The bill finally showed up right before the summer break, meaning I could ramp up my work hours and work weekends and nights on a second job. My wife got her work permit which let her take on a part-time job. I got a dollar an hour raise.

We crunched the numbers and with aggressive belt tightening we were going to be able to pay off the bill and not drop out of school or leave our apartment. We worked like crazy, fevered, insane people. And then it happened.

We didn't know at the time, but the ER bill was not the final bill, some of the specialists also charged their own bill, and they wouldn't negotiate. Two 10 minute consultations with a surgeon turned into $500. An x-ray here and a couple lab tests and we were still out $1000.

We were broken people when those bills came. It was the last straw.

Then the next day, out of nowhere, a check from my uncle showed up in the mail for $1000. No strings attached. Pure charity. He had passed the collection plate at his church and asked for help, and those kind people each pitched in a few dollars to help people they'd never met before. And it was that church check that popped out of that envelope.

Everything turned around after that. Freed of the crushing medical bills, but now with two people working and one less car payment, we finished off our last year of school at a sprint, both got full-time jobs and never looked back. A year out of college we were making enough to buy a house and a second car again. Two years after that we moved up to a nicer house and a better neighborhood and have had amazing careers since then.

That $1000 kept my marriage together, got me a degree, kept me from possible suicide, it meant no turning back or crushing dreams, it was the difference between weathering the storm or being blown away by it.

Another job wouldn't have helped, I was working over a hundred hours a week. A loan just meant more debt I couldn't pay off. It was pure charity that saved the day and I'll never forget that life lesson.

Reply from a beekeeper friend of mine in Atlanta, in response to the above. He's been keeping bees for about 5 years as a hobby.

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So, IMO this is about half true and a lot of it is conjecture or outright tin-foil-hatism….

What he/she says about the screwing around in the hive is at least partly true. But most experienced beekeepers don't go in the hives more than they need to (I've been in mine [I lost one over the winter] twice since like October). This is typically a new-beekeeper phenomenon (and more new beekeepers are not the problem).

The Langstroth hive does allow for more easily managed beekeeping. Top bar hives are en vogue among the hippie beekeeping crowd - they are more common in third world beekeeping. There are even some advantages to them (they are much easier to build, e.g.). Without the Langstroth, there would probably be very very few backyard beekeepers.

Copious fucking with the bees is definitely part of the problem. The largest issue, which the author points out, is all of the bee migration: going out to pollinate almonds in CA, and then blueberries in MI, etc. This is, as they point out, a MUCH bigger business than honey. Honey is a by-product of pollination business. This is only news to non-beekeepers.

Most of the pesticide issues with bees is from bee contact with things NOT used directly by the beekeeper. Bees are extremely sensitive to pesticides. If you are carrying bees all over the place, especially to farmland, you have a higher chance of them interacting with pesticides. But I have a similar risk if one of my neighbors within, say, a mile, decides to pesticide up a plant that is flowering and my bees happen to be using it for food.

Yes, the chemicals used on bees are much like the chemicals used in, say, poultry or beef production. Preventative and abused by overuse. FWIW, I have all the chemicals, but have never treated mine. Treating when it's appropriate is better than letting the bees get sick or overrun by parasites. There is something called IPM (Integrated Pest Management) advocating this kind of appropriate treatment when necessary, along with other non-chemical preventative management. Beekeeper certifications are based on these methods.

There are guidelines to when chemical treatments can occur to keep it out of the honey flow. I'm pretty sure no matter how poorly these treatments are done, any "poisoned" honey is much healthier than any produce you'd get that's ever had pesticides applied to it (or, say, spraying yourself with DEET). Remember bees are _extremely_ sensitive to toxins.

Varroa are the biggest bee pest since they came to the US in the 80s. Again this would only be news to non-beekeepers. They are here to stay and we're now in the business of managing them…there's no getting rid of them entirely and the statement about how humans are spreading them around is a bit disingenuous -- bees are spreading them around just as well. This is the same story as throughout the biological world where an invasive species is introduced via this new thing we call "global travel".

Cell size might be a contributing factor to some things (like mite populations), so I'll let the author have that one.

The hive I lost this winter was FULL of honey (> 10gal). The bees still froze/starved. They were just too weak eventually to maintain temperature and to get to the honey they did have. Bees, given the proper conditions will produce WAY WAY more honey than they need and in fact, leaving it all on there increases the size of the hive they have to maintain, and can weaken their ability to fight off cold, disease, and intruders. Sometimes nature gets the best of the bees. The long warm fall/winter we had left the bees in a more active mode for longer with less incoming food and then the erratic winter didn't help.

I do feed my bees syrup or pollen patties or a combination of the two maybe twice a year. Usually this is just pre-winter to keep them from eating into the valuable honey right next to the hive body before winter or to give them an easier/quick source of food coming out of winter. This is only a supplemental source of food, the bees are almost entirely eating pollen and honey.

The bit about store honey is fairly accurate. I would hesitate to buy honey from a store if I had a better source. I'm not sure about the whole "benefit" thing -- I tend to believe that honey is mostly a simple sugar that isn't all that good for us and I don't buy into the whole eating honey with pollen will stave off allergies claim. I eat it because I like how it tastes, not because it's a health food. So some of that is also granola/hippie handwringing IMO.

BUT HERE'S WHERE THE BIGGEST BS COMES IN: The author's pontification on the cause of CCD. Even if you know nothing about bees, just reading that paragraph sounds like conspiracy paranoia. There are a lot of stressors on bees: parasites, disease, pesticides, commercial migration, etc. CCD, however, is a very specific condition: In simplest terms, the colony just disappears entirely. The latest findings I read about were pointing to a combination of a fungal infection common in bees called Nosema with a secondary cause, perhaps a bacterial infection like Foulbrood or a viral one like Deformed Wing virus. But the truth is we don't know. It's not a conspiracy of government and big business. Newsflash: Also, the moon landing wasn't faked.

My $0.02. Or well this is long enough to be more like $0.10.

I was a carpenter for the better part of my 20s. Definitely many stories like this that came up. The one that bothered me the most was how many times they looked at me silly for making a "bad" cut, when of course, I was making said cut because the area wasn't square. I had one guy get angry at me for making a frame that was visibly crooked, so I told him he should probably make it square and hang it up himself. When he put the piece up and saw it didn't fit flush, he apologized and said I was right after all. I then told him that was the last piece of wood. Sometimes the respect is hard-earned.

I just chalked it up to the amount of times they got screwed over by people of lower ability, so in general, there was a lot of defensiveness. The male-role thing was apparent, but after earning respect and trust, they pretty much always got out of my way.

I've had, quite often, jobs where I was more or less helping the home owner build and those were the most enjoyable and memorable moments. Contrary to what this story suggests, it was usually the rich folk who got on their hands and knees beside me and pounded nails. I think it was about perspective. The rich folk seemed more willing to learn it, try it, and logic out the problem. The middle class folk didn't seem to willing to learn or want to get their hands dirty, so usually they weren't present and were more prone to complaining.

Construction is super easy if you can think about the problem from multiple perspectives. I find it surprising how few people have the capacity to view the world in this way.

Well, the submitter of this article has a 5 year old account. They frequently submit news articles from a variety of sources, and are also an active commenter. (Though, they do seem to like posting quotes.)

The other two atlantic articles on the front page are from 2-3 year old accounts that likewise post a lot of pieces from various newspapers.

You're welcome to dig through their posting history for a conspiracy, but it's not jumping out at me.

Comment #7 in that thread says it all:

“So you trusted a small tax haven island with your money. The plan failed. Your next step: trusting even smaller tax haven island with your money. Pure logic.”

Stallman has been viewed as "radical" his whole career. Certainly there was nothing more "pragmatic" about him in 2001.

The important distinction is that the things (you don't list specifics, so I'm just assuming) that Stallman finds "important" seem like senseless distractions to his audience. It's hard to remember now, but in 2001 the idea of patent-encumbered algorithms being a threat to free software was not nearly as well-understood as it is now. Most people in the community were happy to download and build LAME (or whatever), and just shrugged when the Linux distros turned out not to be able to ship it.

Stallman was right (and to be clear: he'd been screaming about patents for a decade already in 2001). We were wrong. This has been a pattern his whole career.

So, again without actual evidence, I'm just going to guess that within a decade that stuff you heard in 2009 that sounded so "radical" is going to seem a lot more clear in hindsight.

Yes, emphatically agreed. I co-founded Fishworks, the group within Sun that shipped a ZFS-based appliance. The product was (and, I add with mixed emotion, still is) very commercially successful, and we shipped hundreds of thousands of spindles running ZFS in production, enterprise environments. And today I'm at Joyent, where we run ZFS in production on tens of thousands of spindles and support software customers running many tens of thousands more. Across all of that experience -- which has (naturally) included plenty of pain -- I have never needed or wanted anything resembling a traditional "fsck" for ZFS. Those that decry ZFS's lack of a fsck simply don't understand (1) the semantics of ZFS and specifically of pool import, (2) the ability to rollback transactions and/or (3) the presence of zdb (which we've taken pains to document in illumos[1], the repository of record for ZFS). So please, take it from someone with a decade of production experience with ZFS: it does not need fsck.

[1] http://illumos.org/man/1m/zdb

Taking the time to isolate the problem and repair the crystal on a 30-year-old computer, when you could as easily have used an emulator or picked up another one on eBay, just because it's more fun to fix it yourself - that's pretty much the definition of a hacker, right there.

As usual on HN, any submission about Bitcoin is met with concerned comments about its high volatility, present impracticality as a currency, disadvantages versus precious metals, current concentration of transactions in a single exchange (MtGox), potential for market manipulation by governments and/or speculators, etc.

This is analogous to being present at the creation of the World Wide Web, but instead of getting excited about its obvious potential, one decides to stay on the sidelines because it's still unproven technology, almost no content has been made available online, commercial opportunities are virtually non-existent, etc.

As hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky said, "a good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be." Judging Bitcoin based on where it is today, instead of where one thinks it will be in the future, is shortsighted.

--

PS. My full thoughts on Bitcoin's potential: http://cs702.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/on-the-potential-adopt... -- I wrote this almost two years ago, but my views haven't changed since then.

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Edit: In hindsight, I see how my quoting Gretzky could come across as arrogant, which was not at all my intention. The only point I was trying to make is that new technologies like Bitcoin should not be judged based on what they look like today, but rather on how one thinks they will look in the future.

If someone were to make something like this a step-by-step tutorial/template appropriate for a classroom setting it would be huge. Imagine a class at High School where you start off learning the basics of Python for the first few weeks and the rest of the semester is spent writing the chunks of code into a template that has lots of notes for guidance.

I'd image something like :

def setDefaultBlockColor(color): # recall that this is a function that takes in a variable called 'color' as its argument, write the code that will set the current game files configuration file to either 'red', 'blue' or 'green' (p.s. DONT FORGET TO INDENT YOUR CODE!)

Just writing this function and seeing it work once you load up the game is enough to hook almost anyone that has the potential to enjoy programming but just doesn't know it yet.

Uhh.. India buys so many tanks, aircrafts, etc. because politicians here take a healthy cut on those deals. There's no strategy involved, it's pure business. Also, pointing at Pakistan as the enemy works because of long term cultural issues. The one time that the navy chief mentioned China's a worry - everyone scoffed at him and he was almost fired.

Source: My father was a senior air force pilot and was being coerced into buying obsolete airplanes from a dealer since the home minister's son was involved in making the deal.