skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is your opinion (on the concepts) of David Gelenter's Lifestreams project?

http://www.cs.yale.edu/~freeman/lifestreams.html

One can imagine it's Time Machine'sque metaphor being extended to archive your online life (twitter, Facebook) as well (assuming the data could be retrieved)
I'm doing that as we speak. A semi-social site for poetry writers with revisions, diff, textile markup, blah blah.

Poetry and monetize don't go in the same sentence.
They advocate a split between the resources for users and people/profiles. I've tried it both ways, and my current thinking is that the split isn't worth the trouble. Being paranoid with attr_accessible and writing good tests are probably enough. (But I might be wrong.)
Another related movie (was on Sundance this past weekend): http://www.we-feed-the-world.at/en/film.htm
I always just thought you'd index the tags and search on them.
Should I interview for a full time position and then surprise them with my intentions after I get accepted?

You should learn more about basic ethics.
Exactly what I already did. All of the things I've created that have ended up making me lots of money weren't created out of a need to monetize them. I make things I want or need and then monetize them later when I need to, if they take off. Starting something JUST to make money is a mug's game.
What "special sauce" does Facebook have that couldn't be implemented as a self-installed "plugin" on a personal web site?

- It'd be nice to be able to plug my favorite artist/author/etc. So I'd vote for whatever ads the profile owner wants to put on his/her profile.

- Why not have each person's data held under the watchful eye of the hosting provider they're already with?

- Last I checked you can delete your 1and1/dreamhost/whatever account any time you want by no longer paying them.

- And it could be a GPLed project.
Lazy Internet Troll Looking for Better Internet Job (nob hill)
Could you direct your friends to my site? Many of the people we would like as users are not computer savvy. Just type my name into Google..
Only 1/3 of US ag is subsidized, but its a disgrace. The programs damage the environment, cheat consumers, and pay the wealthy. Off the top of my head, the major program crops are corn, wheat, soy beans, cotton (!), milk, peanuts, and sugar.

More here: http://www.freetrade.org/node/609

"in 2005, farms with average household incomes of $200,000 per year accounted for 9 percent of all farms but received 54 percent of government payments."
That's a beautiful thing. Thank you. It's shrewd to get traditional libraries involved -- they pay for subscriptions and Lexis already, and they are much harder politically to sue down.
Google released something for non-profits today...

http://www.google.com/nonprofits/

Not sure if it does all they need, but ironic timing.
One day I'd like to start one or more schools based on the Monitorial (not Montessori) approach (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitorial_schools).

It takes a good amount of capital and respect to start a school and have people trust you to apply an uncommon (though potentially very beneficial) approach to schooling on their kids, so in the mean time I'm trying to earn that respect/capital.
Starting a company in a recession is also a good idea because your industry is less likely to be filled with professional BSers and "wave riders" and your natural talents can shine through a lot better with the lack of competition.
"It's not important to get it right; it's important to get it going."

I believe this encapsulates the dangers of perfectionism, the importance of iterating, and the reason we should risk failure. And I find the concept difficult to apply in some aspects of my life.
I believe as you progress down a particular route in life your mind's pattern recognition will find meaning in particular quotes, books because you are trying to. And by extension, you will meet like-minded people the more committed you are. Like buying a new car and suddenly seeing it everywhere. Until we have immersive VR, I believe that some experiences must be learned first-hand - and emotionally.
A way to tell where my friends are, and direct them as to where to go and what to do. Kinda like remote control your friends when you're stuck at the office, or if you were the only one that didn't get to go on the vacation.

A "keyboard" that changes is form and texture to be different interfaces.
Space ships.
The video mentions that it removes salt, arsenic, and heavy metals. I don't see boiling helping there either.
Oh if we're really fantasizing: A swarm of micro-aerial vehicles for house surveillance--or speed trap detection.

I'd also like to build a missile pack to shoot missile plumes from, like on the MechWarrior Vulture or Gundam.
At my work, some people organize documents on the shared drive by date and others by location of the client. So, if you want to look for the pitch we did for a certain Virginia client in January 2006 you first have to check the /Virginia/ folder and then check the /2006/Jan/ folder. If it's not in either one of those, it may be in /smith/companies/name_of_company/, where "smith" is the name of the guy that originally authored the documents. It's a mess.
De-cheezify my weight-sensing electric skateboard:

http://3wdm.blogspot.com/2006/01/faq.html

Actually I need to re-build it because some crackhead stole the first one on the way back from the Maker Faire last year.
Developing Practical Quantum Computers
An enlightening article with equally interesting comments.
I am in Belfast - Don't really want to move, I have a lot of friends here that would suck to leave behind!

Lots of American investment is hitting Belfast these days, so there are a reasonable number of IT jobs, but they tend to be big companies or bigish companies outsourcing to here, so the work isn't the best.

Don't get me wrong, the company I work for is good despite its size, but like many here I wanna start my own thing - I will keep mulling/hacking on my ideas until I get something that seems good enough to release ...
A quote for me:

"It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ Yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ Of what is found there." - William Carlos Williams
Ask HN: Is there some data-mining startup guys?
Please post some links ...
A nonprofit society to study and develop geoengineering solutions to global warming so that humanity has an emergency safety device in case of a runaway global temperature feedback effect.
Local Social Software - chat rooms, bulletin boards, and other programs that are meant to facilitate realspace interactions rather than replace them. An example is Craigslist, another is a chat room that only works for people currently inside a certain coffeehouse or living in a certain neighborhood.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142469
Google Docs is organized this way.
Lucifer Principle -- Howard Bloom.
My aunt and uncle opened a private bakery where they bake bread mainly for friends. It's really good stuff. I, for one, appreciate freshly baked bread.
Some books:

"The Fountainhead" - gave me the gift of self-confidence

"The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution" - helps me understand where I come from and where I fit in the Biosphere

"The Use of Knowledge in Society" - This, along with other pieces on economics and capitalist anarchism, gave me an appreciation for distributed non-hierarchical systems. (http://www.econlib.org/Library/Essays/hykKnw1.html)

Paul Graham's stuff - Got me to the point where I'm quitting my job in two weeks.

I read a ton of fantasy, sci fi, and historical fiction growing up. I'm sure that has something to do with my grand imagination, distaste for authority, and idealism.
I never said anything like that.
I think these are interesting points, and the dream project would have to be syndicatable so hackers could roll their own pages as you suggest.

The issue is that facebook is great because so many people are on it. So for the dream project to work, it has to be really easy to set up. I am guessing that the average user does not want to grab a dreamhost account, install software, etc.
You may be interested in Textfyre, a company started by an acquaintance of mine which actually hopes to monetize these again.

http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Textfyre
Yes, but it gets protected automatically if you use the mentioned attr_protected or the accessible version.

Basic Rails code to update your own details on the 'view my details' screen is something like

def update_details
@logged_in_user = User.find_by_id(session[:userid])
@logged_in_user.update_attrs(params[:user])
@logged_in_user.save
end

Obviously you would never expose the :is_admin flag on the update_details screen, but a not even very cunning user could guess its there and manufacture up a post request containing the is_admin flag, setting it using the bulk assignment above.

Sticking in attr_protected :is_admin in your model means that ActiveRecord will just ignore that attribute if it is bulk assigned securing it with a single line of code.

Attr_accessible was new in Rails 2 (I think) - its says deny all BUT the ones listed - best way by far.
I wasn't saying big companies don't work, just that it's bad for one's brain to work for them.
;) My advice was to get advice. I think I am on safe ground there even though I don't have a disclaimer.
Sequoia Voting Systems site hacked
Due to the invisible hand of the market, the oil majors are constantly fighting each other. If they were colluding instead of fighting then profit margins would be even higher than they are. But at current prices, customers are buying all the gasoline and diesel available so there is no pressure to cut prices.

The impact on poor people who live in suburban and rural areas is one of the problems with a carbon tax. But unfortunately in the long run those people are screwed anyway. Fossil fuels can't stay cheap forever, tax or no tax. Probably some of the tax revenues would have to go to subsidizing them through buying back inefficient vehicles, additional mass transit, housing vouchers near urban areas, etc.
My friend and I want to create a roguelike. We hacked stone soup a little, then ran out of time.

I'm interested in EAs like ericb, and want to see, if combined with human creativity, they can produce interesting creatures.

Also, once I have time, I've thought of implementing a MUD in scheme so that it is reprogrammable by the players. I'd use kawa so they also have the power of the java libraries.
Apple Takes the Spyware-Style Low Road, Pushing Safari on Windows
Startup Office Fun- Halo 3 Plasma Rifle Laser Tag
Latest Blu-ray copy protection cracked
What I'm doing now.
Is it really? I thought it was just search for your documents by keywords found in them. There is no way to look at all the tags or navigate through them. That's actually one of my issues with GDocs. You don't have many organizational tools for the documents. They would actually be a good candidate for an overhaul similar to what we're discussing.
I despise it when people use the term rehabilitation with regards to criminals. They are not generally sick or disabled people. They are individuals who have made choices about their lives and others. True, criminals can reform, but it is up to them to demonstrate that they have done so. We should be seeking out the best and the brightest of the criminal population and rewarding their behavior with cushy white collar jobs.
Shouldn't it be O(N)? I mean, the time taken to pack and send your products will still scale linearly with the number of customers, right?
The Erlang one:-) It's all about concurrency, but doesn't do threads.
Diigo Releases Version 3 - Beyond Bookmarks
Diigo is one innovation that comes to mind when we think of actual utility and practical function. Diigo has continually adapted and developed into what is effectively the Web’s best research tool. Now, with their launch of Version 3, Diigo has refined a social annotation and collaboration service into an even more effective “personal and group oriented tool”.
Tsumobi was doing a platform for mobile apps last I talked to them (which was close to a year ago). Is the programming language + P2P network part of that project, or have they switched directions?
I don't really condone Apple's sneakiness. However...I've had a real problem with Microsoft's ability to rake in market share for IE, for years, for no good reason: IE benefits from the tech-unsavviness of most people who can't replace it, it does not compete by adding real value.

IE's shell desperately needs to be broken; and as sneaky as Apple's solution is, Apple has a real chance of cracking the shell wider than anyone else has. And this isn't replacing Crap A with Crap B...Safari is a real standards-compliant browser, convincing people to move to Safari over IE is a step forward for the industry by any measure.

Yes, it would be much better if Apple opened up their magic update scheme to allow a choice of Firefox, etc., but one step at a time.
A play, with the accompanied score.
Are you advocating fist fights literally or metaphorically? And if it's a metaphor, I'm not sure what the literal suggestion is.
"True, criminals can reform, but it is up to them to demonstrate that they have done so."

And it seems you're in favour of denying them the opportunity to demonstrate this.
I would watch movies, eat cheese and drink wine.
An open source search engine written in Erlang.
Rick Segal announces tour dates [lessons for VCs]
Bah, stop pandering to the Microsoft haters.
Windows has had the ability to categorize files for awhile. If you look in a file's properties, you can add custom properties to any file. I don't know if there is a way to use these properties in the file system, though.
What is the purpose in combining the two? A way of creating a distributed system like Inferno? Or because you happen to like both ideas?
Opera already has that as the default way of handling torrents
How long did your U.S. green card take?
The U.S. green card process seems to take an astonishingly long time (assuming you aren't taking advantage of corrupt government employees). A feeling of lock-in with your current job adds to the frustration, because quitting can jeopardize or reset a permanent residency application that has been going on for months.

U.S. immigrants, how long did your card take? Did it seem to benefit from theoretically-irrelevant factors like which company you worked for? And, does it seem like the high tech industry is any faster for acquiring a green card (compared to, say, these people who seem to get cards after crossing the border under questionable circumstances)?
+1 on the surprising people with yr intentions not being ethical.

I'm dealing with this whole thing. A while back I got one company interested, blogged about it, and got expressions from interest from two other companies as well. Unfortunately I had already signed on to start a 40-hr contract so the companies, all three, said we're interested, contact us as soon as yr contract closes. I told them I have to do at least three months, they said fine. Then I get back in touch as scheduled, one company doesn't respond at all, one company goes from obsequious to condescending for no obvious reason, and the third has gone from gung-ho to tentative. So where I had three companies to choose from I now have one company which may or may not extend the offer they were previously aggressive about, and if they do, it'll be for less money.

Obviously part of the issue here is that the tech culture often assumes 50 to 60 hr work weeks in exchange for 40 hr pay. But there are plenty of organizations without that particular dysfunction and they're still not recruiting for part-time. People I work with want me to come on permanently but they don't have the ability to overcome the pointy-haired bosses on this.

Many programmers I've talked to have said they would love this kind of work arrangement. This is the weird part of it all. It's a field where competition for talent is intense, yet this is an easy way for a company to scoop other companies, and it takes a lot of work to find it.

In practical terms I've had it all my working life, just by job-hopping contracts, but it's such a tiresome way to do it, it really flakes my fucking biscuit. I've literally never once had less than two months vacation per year. It's fantastic, and if I had to deal without it, I'd deal by entering a different industry and only programming at home in my spare time. Any employer who seriously thinks they're entitled to a full year of my time for ANY amount of money is smoking such incredible crack that it boggles the mind.

Which is the other reason this is so frustrating to me. I absolutely need time for my art, my writing, my acting, my music, and my personal code projects. I am absolutely going to get that time. I get e-mail from recruiters all the freaking time. So it's going to happen either way, companies are looking to hire me, and every programmer I mention this to tells me they think this kind of arrangement would be cool to have. If it's such an allegedly competitive hiring market, you'd think companies would be like, dude, this is a no-brainer, let's scoop the other companies and pick up brainpower at below market value! But they're not. The problem is that the technology industry is managed by idiot muppets why STILL haven't figured out that programmers are not cogs in machines and do their best when rested.

So this whole part-time thing is STILL hard to swing. Which means I'm going to have to stick with the erosive job-hopping, to the detriment of my career and the missed opportunity of all these companies that say they want to hire me, because these fucking numbskull butt-trumpet ass-brained fuck-farmers are stuck in the fucking past.
Two Startups Battle Over Who Invented Risk-Like War Game First
An absolutely huge fort/jungle gym built over a enormous pool and trampoline. Also a really wide, long, steep water slide with ramps.
Does you or anyone have links for articles about that research?
Friends: The RTS
Kamen talked at TED about why he invented the Segway. Towards the end of the talk, he talks about his water distiller as well. The distiller was apparently an afterthought on the road to providing the Segway with a portable power generator.

Here's the talk
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/9
Ask News.YC: Pricing Social Network Site Built Costs
If one wanted to have a 10k-60k userbase capable social network built from scratch (video, music, comments for media (not for members), groups but not "friends and friends of friends", internal message client simpler than gmail/yahoo mail, calendar, with private and public permissions set by users), blogs, individual user file archive with permissions.

what might something like that cost if built pretty much from ground up?

thank you in advance for your input for all those that know, might know, and care to share.
Although the examples are not the epitome of what I think he's trying to get across, I would describe the overall thesis as "great startups are those that engage in creative destruction" (to quote Schumpeter).
Syntax error...you have an odd number of pluses :P
A nice review to a promising service.
guys, you need to just build this shit, and then figure out a way to monetize it. finding out what people pay for and then building it is doing it backwards. I mean you have to do it when you have to, but start with this page and build what you want, then find a way to sell it, that's how to do it.
But just because a quarter of the student body signed up doesn't mean it was a huge hit. I created an account, deployed a few troops, then got bored and never came back. I'd like to see some stats on how sticky the app is.
Holy shit this is inspiring.
As Wubi is running as a native Linux it's definitely faster than VMWare and it's also free.
1) Music (writing and performing).

2) Writing fiction.

3) Create a programming language.

4) Audio "visualization" of complex data. It's an idea I've had for a long time: turn multi-dimensional data into sound (not necessarily musical) using pitch, rhythm, overtones, beats, and many other parameters. I figure our brains might be able to parse sounds easier than images for certain kinds of data.
Monkey-patching is Part of the DIY Culture
Exactly what I would make if I _did_ have to. First priority is to build something you're going to love working on.
What Happens To Bounced Donotreply.com E-Mails
More than any books or articles, I've been influenced directly by the people in my life, especially friends, mentors, family, and girls I wanted to impress.

PG & Joel Spolsky, the Alchemist, the Little Prince.
I had the almost exact same idea, I also wanted to automatically convert any website into a torrent. It would be P2P browsing and the end of slashdotting small websites. Spikes in hits would not bring anyone down. But then I got a job at a biotech startup.
Threads may be the most confusing way in existence to take advantage of multiple cores. Berkeley's Edward A. Lee has a lot to say about it in his paper "The Problem with Threads" ( http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-1.... ).
Mozilla CEO Blasts Apple's Safari Ploy
A jump to conclusions mat. There'd be this mat, with various conclusions on it, and you could jump to them.
A better wikipedia. One where every article is cryptographically signed by the author and there is only ONE author. Articles are then user moderated up or down like here.

I also wouldn't exclude anything and would allow articles of any length and detail.

I imagine the end result would be something very much like wikipedia as the community would vote wikipedia-like articles to the top.

But vandalism would be impossible and every encyclopedia style article could link into a much longer article on the same subject. Known authors could sign their articles. So Linus could write something about Git, but the community could still vote some git's article higher then Linus.
Ask YC:  Why does the web 2.0 community act as if software were not infinitely malleable?
It's really bizarre. Bloggers in particular write about startups as if they were physical objects that are hard to change. They make a big deal out of the launch date and whether the service has left beta as if these notions had much meaning. They make predictions about whether a service is doomed without thinking too much about how it might evolve.

I suppose one can argue that bloggers simply reflect the views of users. Since users don't think of a service as infinitely malleable (or perhaps don't want it to be since change requires learning), then bloggers just do the same so that their posts make sense to users.
What I'm doing now is pretty much recreational:

http://lunchmapr.com/

The thing I'd build if I really had nothing else to do would be a shift-swap webapp for my food coop ( http://foodcoop.com/ ).
"The Kingdom of God is Within You" - Leo Tolstoy
"Atlas Shrugged" - Ayn Rand
Product design. Cool widgets. For example, I would love to design a widget that can show me meaning of a word, in different languages, once placed over book, road-signs, billboards, LCDs and etc. Ultra-portable dictionary. So, it's going to be product design, just for fun. We're not talking about any moolah ;)
Ask YC:  How scientific is the YC selection process?
Since YC is all about seed funding, I wonder how they make predictions as to whether a startup will succeed. Is it mostly a gut feeling about whether users will want the service or do they actually look at real-world data?

If a startup already has growing traffic, then that could be promising. But what if it is not at that stage yet? Does YC consider the traffic growth of the most closely related startups?

On a related note, check out this blog post about how to identify promising web app ideas:

http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/11/mindrosia-app-ideas-generated-through-horseplay/