skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I primarily make and commission activities for elementary school students, for pedagogical reasons.

Outside of low-level foreign language courses, I don't see much reason to do it in high school. The primary skill generic word bingo tests is word recognition, which one would hope high schoolers don't have issues with. You can do variants with using a clue (e.g. "the part of the cell studded with ribosomes") for vocabulary bingo, I suppose.

I haven't systematically looked into whether most of my customers are elementary school teachers (or teachers, for that matter). I do know that I have the full range from pre-literate pre-schoolers through senior citizens, just based on customers asking for advice on how to play a game with $DEMOGRAPHIC.
However, "Break the Internet" should not be an available option, especially not the default option.

This has been the default behavior of every ISP I've had in the past 4 years. The one that allowed you to "opt-out" merely forwarded you to MSN Search instead. You say "don't screw around with DNS", but it is already as much a mess as every other part of the internet, and it will never be pristine again as along as there is a buck to be made.
Speaking of, if you've got an app, client, tool, website, or something that uses the Twitter APIs in a meaningful way that you want to sell through oneforty, e-mail me: sachin@oneforty.com
Did I read right that you saw a ~10x improvement in conversion from visits-to-trials over last year due to A/B testing? If so, that's incredible. Has the conversation from trial-to-paid remained pretty constant? What plans do you have to improve that?

Thanks so much for releasing this...it's always motivating to see someone building a business system like this.
Firefox 3.6 Nearly Complete, Fifth Beta Available Now.
The Green Jobs Delusion
Spot on, I say. Mongo is usually filed in the K/V bin, while in reality it actually falls into a much more exciting middle ground between RDMBS, document store and K/V store.
For living in the Bay Area (San Francisco's that is), I was surprised (and pleased for you) to read that $18k was enough to live off of. Very cool!
Thats not a prediction, it happened in 2009.
What about a basic specialist company that represented people in these situations for a fee or percentage of the money being withheld? "Lawyer" sounds expensive and scary to many people, but if the pitch was very specific, people might go for it?
Simon & Schuster CEO slams "cheap" digital books
I was thinking the same thing (and doing the same math) when reading about an iPhone app directory recently getting $2M in funding.

Is it that I just have no idea how much this kind of things can be worth in the end? Or, as you say, is there more to it and if so, what?
> It's not much comfort to the people of California if the Earth remains habitable on average when the Sierra snowmelt disappears and the state faces a drought of unprecedented proportions.

It's a really long discussion, but our ability to locally adapt to climate change is actually quite good and improving regularly. Temperatures are rising really, really slowly - you can get the 2-3 degrees per 100 years back by planting trees and irrigating. Desalination has come along incredibly fast too. I can go into greater detail if you have specific questions, I know a fair bit about this stuff.

> Where do you get that CO2 is 0.3% of greenhouse gases?

"Carbon dioxide (chemical formula CO2) is a chemical compound composed of two oxygen atoms covalently bonded to a single carbon atom. It is a gas at standard temperature and pressure and exists in Earth's atmosphere in this state. CO2 is a trace gas being only 0.038% of the atmosphere."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide

I think a lot of people forget that CO2 is naturally occurring and necessary for life.

Also of note:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_list_of_greenhouse_gases

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Greenhouse_effec...

Wikipedia has CO2 accounting for between 9% and 26% of the greenhouse effect, the citation was from the American Meteorological Society.
How do you do daemonize and log?
> one of the main industries in Iceland due to

Iceland is a geologic freak which allows for geothermal energy generation. Even though it has this, the energy production isn't that great.

AFAIK, Iceland generates about 1336MW total capacity (calculated from CIA world factbook calculations). A modern nuclear power plant generates 1600MW.

A large aluminum smelter uses 1GW of power or even more (that is why they are often next to hydroelectric dams).

Also note that the EU emits about 70% of the Carbon dioxide that the US does.

Calculation:

Production per year kW hours	11710000000

Production per day (kWh)	32082191.78
Production per hour (kW)	1336757.991

MW:	1336.757991
Quite likely, yes.
Eclipse 3.5 has this feature.
Conditional Access caused this, not DRM
You might want request that the author links to your site. I couldn't easily jump from the article to check out oneforty.
Yeah, the three things I wanted to see in EtherPad was XMPP support, easy embed and email name association.
You've gotta be right. Anecdotal evidence (watching people on the train most days for the last year) suggests that pretty much nobody has an iphone here, despite it being very heavily promoted. Everybody's heard of them; I get comments on mine all the time. "iPhone? いい、ね！" (how great!) But I continue to be surprised whenever I see another person using one.
it reminds me of the default wordpress theme
Clever folds in a globe give new perspectives on Earth
>> ...where he is geographically sounds pretty good...

His current post is misleading because it sounds like he is currently in Seattle where the tech job market is fairly good relative to other places.

However, he was in Seattle but then moved to Charleston, SC where his story begins. http://shadowcoding.blogspot.com/2009/07/moving.html

Given that bit of info it explains a lot about his struggles to find work.
I think it's good to ask the question. I think it's an important indication of fit.

But, why is it considered professional to work towards something you're against? I'm not saying throw a tantrum or shout at people about your views, but you certainly shouldn't be applauded with professionalism for going against your own political views to make a buck.

I certainly understand that many of us have to suck it up at times in order to pay the rent. But I don't consider that a positive thing.
i use gowalla (prettier) mostly just to kill time while i wait in line or for the bill to arrive. and to stalk my friends. not much use beyond that, to me.
Personally, I think the term "vaporware" is best used when software is announced as the next great thing but no product actually ships.

Anyway... I don't think there is anything to worry about here. I just downloaded the source, built Lunettes under Snow Leopard and tried some of my favorite videos. There is no GUI to open some file types yet - but for those it can handle, everything seems to work and it does look great!
San Francisco's most walkable neighborhoods
"And the old privacy settings are still available."

So where is this setting: "Settings -> Privacy -> News Feed and Wall -> Facebook Ads -> Appearance in Facebook Ads" ?
Not really a fan. The W3C does so much that their past homepages have suffered from a mass of undifferentiated links. This design attempts to solve the problem by taking down the number of links, but the dearth of contrast and colour means it's still very hard to tell what's important, what's time-sensitive, and what's always there.
If so, that's incredible.

It sure would be. I'm not finding where you're reading that, though. Since any improvement at any stage of the funnel flows straight to the bottom line in my business, that would imply a 10x increase in revenue.

Last year, unique visitors to trials was about 20% (57k / 292k). This year, it looks like about 15.5%. This is primarily due to a change in the mix of traffic -- my highest performing traffic is invariably those coming from AdWords ads, but AdWords has not kept pace with the rest of my business growth this year. The big drivers of increased unique visitors were organic SEO and the seasonal promotions, which brought in folks who were less interested in signup up for a trial than someone who had just qualified themselves by clicking on a call to action to Sign Up For Your Free Trial Today!

Has the conversation from trial-to-paid remained pretty constant?

No, it increased markedly. Downloadable trial to paid was 1.4% last year, 1.17% this year. (I think that decline is mostly due to cannibalization of the best prospects by the web app.) The web app trial to paid (new way to access old product, essentially) conversion rate was 2.33%. I push the online version VERY heavily, for the obvious reason.

What plans do you have to improve that?

Improve app, improve experience of purchasing app, etc. I segment before worrying about conversion rate, which is a subtlety I think a lot of Analytics For Beginners articles miss: if your prospect mix is changing, changes in consolidated conversion rates might reflect the mix more than it does the desirability of the product or marketing.
Don't get me wrong. I would love the aircraft-carrier sized spacecraft and the sheer demonstration of power of it reaching orbit and leaving to deep space.

What I don't like is the huge EMP destroying electronics across half a planet and the fallout making three-eyed fish.

Orion is great, but we would have to find cleaner propellants if we really want to build a lot of them ;-)

It's also unclear how many we could propel with the amount of fissiles we have on Earth.
Brad actually attended the oral arguments for the Bilski case at the Supreme Court:

http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/11/my-field-trip-to-the...

I'll be very interested in the outcome of that too.
Thanks Patrick. Very cool of you to share this.

I'm curious about your stated plans/hopes to do BCC full-time. Do you think BCC could grow faster if you worked on it full-time? Do you want to add more products?
we have robo at Bilkent universtiy. it is again a very simple program that can draw shapes with is predefined syntax.
"All this has happened before, and all this will happen again."
"Somebody then does the obvious and ... gets one bunch of monkeys to write code and uses the second bunch to test it. A reasonably good clone of Windows 7 is banged out over 8 months with a budget of about $4,000" My favourite line.
I don't know, I sort of side with TechCrunch on this one. Yes, you can replicate a site (some easier than others, and a blog should be relatively easy), but that's still no excuse for datacenter downtime, and Rackspace has had a prolific amount of downtime.

Any datacenter downtime is serious business -- at a good datacenter, it's a small-ish incident every few years. Rackspace, on the other hand, seems to have a large incident every few months, meaning it's probably best to take your servers elsewhere.
There was a pretty good article I read a few years ago about the technical problems with Orion. It wasn't just politics which killed it:

http://www.alternatehistory.com/gateway/essays/OrionProblems...

The main problem is the fact that hydrogen bombs sans fission trigger turned out not to be possible [] which increases the amount of radiation released per launch from "modest" to "really quite excessive".

[] Or if they are possible then the folks who know how to build them certainly aren't interested in letting on. There'd be nothing worse for nonproliferation than hydrogen bombs without a U or Pu trigger.
Sure, human usability factors are important in designing applications, but Mr. Mathis sets up a false dichotomy between design and programming. You can do both - just recognize where you're weak and delegate responsibility where needed.
Virtualization, Clouds and Meta Orchestration
This already exists - it's called a SRV record. SRV records allow you to assign a priority and a weight for a lookup query, the same way you can with MX records (in SRV you can give different ports as well, very cool). It was proposed by Microsoft in 2000 and was first used in Win2k in ActiveDirectory and is now a standard (it was around before 2000, can't remember where exactly).

It has been widely adopted, it is used in zeroconf, SIP, XMPP and there are proposals to route WHOIS lookups using SRV. Everywhere but in browsers, for various reasons.

You can do MX in email, because the time it takes to do the multiple lookups is not an issue since email goes out in the background. A records were designed to be round-robin.

In theory, SRV records in browsers are a fantastic solution that would change the web and make it easy to have failover.

Here is the problem. Even if the first server is up all the time, you double the number of DNS queries on the web. SRV records dont store IP addresses, they store names. So the browser does a SRV req, orders by priority and weight, picks one, then does an A lookup and attempts connection. Then, if that connection were to fail (meaning 10-20 seconds). It would move to the next. This then raises issues of caching. If you have a high TTL, it defeats the purpose, so you lose all benefit of DNS caching. If you bring it down again the browser will just keep checking the failed A record each time it hits expiry. Multiply this out by the number of elements on a page and you start to see why SRV is implemented almost everywhere else except for web browsers. It reaches a point where having the record management on the server end makes more sense, because it is determined once which servers are healthy and all clients are informed, rather than each client checking for itself each time.
Tell HN: I posted the JooJoo/CrunchPad interview
It's up on the site now.

1) the audio is ready now.
2) the video should be done processing at 5:15pm Pacific.
3) the transcript should be done this weekend.

The video embed is up as vaksel asked (in the HN comments), but it will only work when the video finishes converting to Flash. (should be 5:15)
I'm curious about this too - why is mmap so bad?
Glad you found it interesting!
(cont)

Would still be nice though to have the support, since not all sites would take advantage of it and it could be made easier by allowing IP addresses within SRV records

Amusing moment - I recall a proposal to allow browser to report back on which records work or not, it was taken seriously for a few minutes before somebody pointed out the obvious implication of such a feature would be that it would become terribly easy to tear down the entire internet
The sea, Antarctica, the Moon -- all these places can technologically be colonized, but it won't happen until there's some compelling economic reason for it -- either an industry which can make money there (see colonization of South Africa, South America), or a bunch of colonists willing to pay their own way for long enough until the colony becomes self-sufficient (see colonization of North America).

Come to think of it, we already have colonies on the ocean floor, they're called oil rigs, and they're economically viable. I wouldn't want to live there, though.
Now facing ruin, rags brought riches to Guess co-founder Georges Marciano
TechCrunch ought to get a little green light image in their sidebar that goes red and displays the text "Rackspace is down" every time it is.
Could anybody explain to me why would we need to colonize Mars (or even Moon) if we still have virtually empty Antarctica and near-empty Siberia?
I just chatted Rackspace (the Sales Dept to see what they would say), they said to me that all new accounts will be in the VA-DC facility, and not in the Dallas facility.

They never seem to have these problems in the San Antonio HQ facility. I wonder what the problem is with this particular Dallas facility. What could be the difference between the Dallas and San Antonio facilities? San Antonio seems to run like a clock, and the Dallas center seems to be starting to look like the Corvair--unsafe at any speed.
The problem with your suggestion are all the things that you don't know you don't know.

>But, suggesting people need to talk with a wide range of people to grow as a person is simply untrue.

Learning how to get along with people that are not like you is a deeply transformative, and I think valuable, experience.
Perhaps we need Christianity for atheists.
MG Siegler, the author, isn't exactly the most technically astute person around, which isn't inherently bad except that he doesn't seem to recognize his own limitations around such matters.

MG has a bad tendency of breathlessly reporting and misreporting on issues that are far outside of his area of expertise. One of my favorite examples happened a month ago when MG misdiagnosed CSS files not loading on Twitter as 'BRAND NEW FEATURES THAT ARE UGLY, OMG!' (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/17/twitter-just-ui-puked-o...).
I don't know, but it simply seems weird to see prague for this point. While my old office is almost across street from my home, it looks incredibly far on this photo.
We have a backup. Guess where it was.

Now guess where it will be tonight.
Mongo's killer feature for me is the support. The team has been absolutely awesome about helping me track down bugs and sort out my issues.

By contrast I've spent a lot of time on Tokyo, but I'm actively trying to move away from it these days because there have just been too many mysterious problems. I've tracked down some of them and submitted patches, but it's cost me a lot of time I'd rather be spending working on my product. Don't get me wrong, Tokyo is chock-full of great code, but anything as general-purpose as a database is going to have all sorts of interface and configuration issues that require more time than your typical open-source project founder can put in.
This is reminiscent of the Dymaxion Map developed by Buckminster Fuller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map
As someone who's also sat on both sides of the fence, as a coder and a designer, I think there's a fair bit of truth in what the OP is saying. I can think of a number of times where I've restrained my UI ambitions in order to keep code elegant, and also a number of times where I've been presented with a UI, and been forced to implement it.

The latter case has always produced better designs, despite my whinging at the time ("Holy fuck, does this Photoshop-jockey even realise there's a difference between print and web design?" etc), because it forces me to produce code to make the UI, rather than leading me to a compromise between the code and the design.
Agreed, the comparison of Mongo to databases as Rails is to frameworks is appropriate. I recently started playing with Mongo in a Rails app and the Array type led to an a-ha moment followed by giddy handclapping and a fair amount of code deletion.

Working at a large company that's pretty invested in RDBMS, I'm curious to see where the downside of using something like MongoDB comes in. E.g. James Golick's creation of Friendly because they hit a scaling wall — how big do you have to get for it to become an issue?
I'm not a tremendous fan of multi-factor authentication yet. The idea is nice, but really it just adds a second password to the mix, and if the person can't get one password right...

My bank for example uses multi-factor authentication. Two of the three possible initial questions ask for a color. Let's see ... black, blue, yellow, green, red...
They're using PHP and Smarty, from looking at comments in the source code.

I find it highly ironic that the people in charge of web standards and consistency use the programming language with least consistent syntax.
If you could include math and chemical symbols, you may find some customers in high school chem, physics, etc.
This has been the default behavior of every ISP I've had in the past 4 years.

this is exactly why the google DNS is something worth cheering over.
Multi-Factor as I usually understand it is based, ideally, on "something you have" (e.g. an RSA token, your fingerprint, etc) and "something you know" (a password/passphrase).

Your example sounds like two "something you know" factors, which is really just a more complex password.
Totally agree about the array key. It's amazing how your code gets more simple with a simple tweak like that.
Cardboard + Smartphone = Sweet DIY Augmented Reality Goggles
Ask HN: what indie computer game to buy as gifts?
hi, i'm not much of a gamer myself, though i recently bought world of goo for someone and we ended up tag teaming with great fun. i like supporting small/indie business folks, too.

i'm looking to buy computer games for another gamer or two. any recommendations? i tried googling around, but recs are really much better.

through 'em out. even better if you made the game yourself :-)

more info for the help of it:

one of the gamers really liked starcraft--is there any modern game in the same genre? (he liked WoW, ok. he doesn't play the onlinen team stuff)

the other gamer played the secrets of monkey island and myst way back.

i just want to get them something fun. windows machines only.

thx!
Aren't Google's API's pretty straightforward? That's one of the reasons they're popular. It seems to me that the average competent IT shop who would even know about this directory would also have developers capable of quickly utilizing Google's APIs.
That's not multi-factor authentication.

True multi-factor authentication involves a combination of something you know (eg, your password), something you have (your phone, a fob, etc.) and something you are (generally biometric things, which for obvious reasons haven't picked up too much).

Multiple security questions are just additional things-you-know, and as such, aren't multifactor.
Fewer things bother me more than flippant replies to pseudo-intelectual jackasses. I'm just not bothered by very much.
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Doesn't the author contradict himself? He states that one should not both be a designer and know how to code because one is detrimental to the other.

Yet, he himself must both know how to code and design (which would mean he's not following his own advice). If not, then this article is just the ramblings of an uninformed individual, for he would be passing judgement about an art he has no first hand knowledge with.
sounds heavy.
<- Hard at work ;)
I believe he lives in Japan, not San Francisco.
Which, contrary to popular conception, is actually quite affordable. Trains are pricier but housing is pretty cheap these days and food is about the same if you buy local.
Screw ACM, glad I ignored all their spamming to get me to renew my membership. Never again.
Amazon just started looking a whole lot more attractive. They may not have such fanatical support, but they do know how to fix their stuff.
WordPress 2.9 launched
Look, the guy is running a business that is competing with Google. Moreover, his revenue model is perceptible (NXDomain redirects) while Google's revenue model is far from perceptible (silent aggregation of your entire internet experience: browsing, emailing, and search history).

I think some day when there is a massive privacy violation at Google we will understand what the costs of Google really are.

Until then, I don't think it's unreasonable to cut this guy some slack. His business is now directly in the crosshairs of the most powerful company in the world. I wish him good luck.
The sad fact is I'd actually buy an OS/2 Phone.

(It's true. More than a decade after the @#%$ that was Windows '95 beat us and I still can't let it go)
Will FTC's Intel Suit Hurt Silicon Valley?
Did you go?
My favorite part of the article was the final sentences:

Van Wijk attributes his success to being somewhat of an outsider. Cartographers typically seek single formulae that can be used to transform the entire globe, he says, while computer scientists look for algorithms that work in small steps and can be more adaptable.

Once again thinking in an innovative ways results in something useful and interesting.