skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a lot of people using unlocked iphones with a load of different apps and some people have been quite creative. I think looking for an app that people really want would be a good move
haha my bad, you created a spammy, built for adsense site, not an affiliate site. Sorry, my mistake.
The article also mentions Apple began filing patents for these things in 2004, and they acquired FingerWorks, which may have been working on such technology for even longer.

I believe Apple's implementation of the multitouch hardware/software is unique (very different than Jeff Han's FTIR method) which certainly is patentable, though that's a different issue than the gestures.
Why is this post dated 1999 with a May 2001 reference?
What is wrong with it?
Do whatever would make users love you so much that they spontaneously recommend you to their friends.
It doesn't matter if it's unique now or not, if Apple filed a patent first (note: possibly before the iPhone was even announced) and there was no prior art, then as far as I know they're entitled to it.
I'm about half-way through it. I put it down for awhile and just started reading it again. There are nice sections on Lisp and Gödel in it. It's a good book.
We actually juse use Google Spreadsheets, and it's simple enough that I use it for personal stuff sometimes, too. It sounds far more complicated than it is.

Here's an example sheet that you should be able to copy via Google's menu:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pvOwoUYoNUFTmGZhwyjK4...

Having used this specific approach on many projects, there's considerations that should be kept in mind that I haven't solved 100%:

It's difficult to track dependencies between tasks and have those sort efficiently. As a human you have to realize the sheet is a tool and that you have to look to catch these things from time-to-time.

If you're not careful, you can defer 'infrastructure' tasks that have no obvious/direct BV. I work around this by temporarily having infrastructure tasks inherit the combined BV of all things that they'll help and for all tasks to add the infrastructure item's cost to theirs.

There's probably a more accurate formula for dependents and dependencies to use, but I find that if you have 99 tasks dependent on an infrastructure task, it's not unreasonable to say that task is pretty durned important to open 'doors' for the company.

For example, refactoring tasks often fall into this category. Changing from an Access database backend to a MySQL backend might not give you immediate ROI, but the sheer number of things that open up to you as possibilities after that need to be considered somehow. The conventional naive approach might not get you there without the item inheriting some of the value.
They said it's to keep the price of movie tickets down? You gotta be kidding me! I think they're a rip-off as it is, which is why I subscribe to Netflix instead.
It's not like Apple is patenting the "pinch" per se, they're patenting the method of using a pinch gesture for a very specific purpose: zooming in and out. It obviously doesn't apply to people making pinching gestures in any other context.
If you are at a fairly early stage in your start-up (< 1 year), I would suggest you focus on your product and ONLY on your product. Forget marketing, addictiveness, virality. Figure out what is the core value you want to provide to users and just focus on that the hardest. Make your product the absolute best that can be.

Within your product, do the most important thing your users need or you think your users need. (The former is better if you have a significant user base.) If that thing is billing, do it, else postpone it. Don't think about what will cause a media splash, or what is "cool". Stay focused on what people want.

If you have been live / launched for quite some time, marketing, addictiveness and virality become somewhat more important, but from your question, I suspect that isn't yet the case.
But science is so much fun! It's kind of like going to college for free--I get to take interesting classes. And work on startups on the side.
He could have made the text a little bigger, but he has a point about guys our age having trouble sticking to things. Of course, the implication is to make less ambitious projects that will get completed within attention span.
Lower your shields and surrender your vessel. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile!
From my previous paragraph:

'The kids can now say, "I don't have to assign more value to green legos just because your game assigns more points to them." Some things still do have a certain degree of intrinsic value, so this won't always work. But they have been empowered to the extent allowed by the value assignments of which that they have control.'

By understanding when value is more subjective versus intrinsic, founders can choose to work on something where the value is more intrinsic. And if there's nothing with true intrinsic value, then they at least look for things where more people are likely assign value. Founders probably don't really think about it like this, they just look for something that people want. But it can't hurt to understand the characteristics of value at this lower level. If you can consistently find, create, or buy value, getting rich isn't too hard.
Goolag Tool Lets Google Aid Hackers
I've been tempted to attempt some form of polyphasic sleep. Currently it seems I'm practicing sort of free-running sleep... going to bed between 4am and 8am, waking up between 11am and 2pm...

Polyphasic sleep seems well suited for people in early stages of a startup, with very little external commitments... though that may change if it gets to the point of hiring additional employees, seeking funding, etc.

Pure polyphasic sleeping seems a little extreme to me since the days would end up blending together I think I might go crazy. But the everyman schedule is appealing because you still get a few solid hours of sleep to clearly delineate days.
And they tell us we dont need toric reform!
Japan successfully launches high-speed Internet satellite
Oh, and of course there's the 28 Hour Week: http://xkcd.org/320/
I disagree. Hackers prefer to have coding parties.
"I use tools for that (either generators or O/RM)."

As long as you know what your tools are doing.

"If you don't trust your devs and applications against the DB, you've already lost."

No distrust is necessary. Consider developer error: mandating and restricting access to databases through SPs assures certain mistakes cannot happen (and makes clear where responsibility lies should they happen). This actually protects the developer.

And many serious security attacks occur from inside an organization. Some corporations are criminally liable for violations of access: see the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

"SP security is just mainframe-thinking and a lost cause."

"Mainframe-thinking" is increasingly relevant as data centers continue to centralize.

You ignored what I said about efficiency. Indeed you ignored most of what I said. I sense you have an axe to grind but it's missing a head. Another developer error? Perhaps you can ask your DBA for a proper weapon?
what's the point of this post? why is any of this interesting????? what am I missing?

why would anyone care to read "fictions" about sexual inclinations of big minds (Hardy and undoubtedly huge mind of Ramanujan) when we don't even know/understand completely the works of these great minds?
WatARat - New webcomic
English's Bleak Future as a Lingua Franca
Apple Human Interface Guidelines
Unless you get a faculty position at a stellar university (highly unlikely nowadays), the teaching will be depressing. And your research will suffer as a result since you will be in no mood to do it.

Also, unless you plan to do everything yourself for research, you will need to get some funding. But whether you get that funding depends on whether your peers -- competitors actually -- like what you plan to do.

Finally, the fact that computer science tries to be a science severely limits your creativity -- at least if you want to publish in respectable conferences and journals.
I submitted this because it is an interesting thought experiment involving the popularity of a real (non-machine) language. How many things do real linguas franca have in common with dominant programming languages?
Classic text about social networks: The Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold
Fractal Tic-Tac-Toe
What's a "religiosity scale"?
Philip Greenspun had a great article about this as well: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
Bijoy Goswami, the prime mover behind the Bootstrap Network http://www.bootstrapnetwork.com/ has an approach he calls "Demo Sell Build" that recognizes that most of the risk in a startup is not technology but market. I agree with "figure out the core value you want to provide users" but I would give short presentations or briefings (e.g. one page handout, one slide, one HTML mockup page) to make sure you've nailed it before developing the full app. Bijoy goes into more detail on his model in the "Bootstrap Bootcamp Fall 2007" DVD here http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrap-Bootcamp-Fall-Bijoy-Goswami/...
Awesome. Not only does this guy disprove the rule that all tenured profs are hopeless optimists about becoming a prof, but he's even more of a pessimist than I am! I mean:

I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs.

Um, no. Really, no. Spoken like a guy who hasn't really known many people whose lives have been ruined by drugs.

The situation is bad -- everything this guy says is true, basically -- but I don't think it's that bad. In particular, if you have Ph.D.-level skills in a technical field you can step off the academic treadmill at any point and get a job. It may not be the kind of job you get to brag about, but you probably won't starve.

There are people I know who have endured years of continuing depression because they were unable to become tenured professors. But there are also people I know who are depressed because they aren't bestselling novelists, professional musicians, lottery winners, or Bill Gates.

The secret is to be realistic. Study science as an undergrad, then switch to engineering (this is now my standard advice to young techies.) Get a Ph.D. only if you really love doing research so badly that you're willing to endure indentured servitude. Do not plan to become a professor. Make sure to spend your Ph.D. years drinking as much beer as possible with the smartest people you know, and enjoy yourself!
The moire effect in the background is distracting.
Don Reinertsen http://www.reinertsenassociates.com/ author of "Developing Products in Half the Time" and "Managing the Design Factory" has a great quote about managing product priorities that bears on this.

"Priorities: Last Refuge of the Innumerate

What is our highest product development priority, cycle time or unit manufacturing cost? To even ask this question, suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of product development economics. If cycle time takes priority over unit cost, then it follows that we would prefer the smallest improvement in cycle time to the largest improvement in unit cost. If unit cost takes priority, then we would prefer the smallest improvement in unit cost to the largest improvement in cycle time. Does this make any sense? Of course not. When we prioritize we give strict precedence to one objective over another. Such strict precedence leads to bad economic choices.

The value of cycle time and the value of unit cost must be expressed in the same unit of measure: life cycle profit impact. It is only with this quantification that we can make good economic decisions to trade one for the other. Setting priorities for individual measures of performance is simply avoiding the important job of understanding how performance influences economics."

It sounds like you need a simple model for what the site will look like when it's profitable (e.g. number of customers, how often they visit and how many times in total do they visit (customer lifetime), what does it cost to acquire them, what and how much do you charge for, how often do they refer other customers...). Once you have some numbers on your model you can then build a plan to evolve toward it.

I am inferring that you are going to be a subscription site ("haven't implemented billing") I would get that done right away and see if you've built something that even a small number of folks will pay for. There can be a world of difference between what people like and what they will pay for. Focus on what they will pay for in a subscription site.
I would gently disagree, if he is running a subscription site he needs to get billing working to determine what folks will actually pay for. Having a billing system communicates a serious intent to your prospective customers that you want to provide value and are in it for the long haul.
I believe that the challenge is not "how to prioritize given the relative business values" but "what is the most important thing to be working on." Getting a business moving can be a little like opening a combination lock: you can be working on the right things, but if you don't focus on them in the right sequence they may not have any impact.
No, it had the illustrious name of "Stumpworld," which I think originally had something to do with amputee porn. By the late nineties, they'd moved on to ecommerce like everybody else. No porn.
At the very least, this guy is eccentric.

He'd have to be. Nobody gets anywhere in academia by rocking the boat. It's an intensely political business; even after you have tenure, you can still lose your research funding (which kills your "summer salary", lowering your take-home pay by 25% or more), your lab space, your future publications in prestigious journals (which can be anonymously torpedoed by your peers) and, most important of all, the services of the talented grad students and postdocs who actually do all your work for you.

Meanwhile, once you have a PhD, you're untouchable by most employers -- considered too theoretical and expensive for "practical" work.

This depends a great deal on what your Ph.D. is in and how you treat it. I've never had this problem, but I got my Ph.D. in EE, with a focus on semiconductor device fabrication. Nobody ever accused me of being "too theoretical" and there are actually quite a few industry employers that specifically look for such Ph.D.s.

A very smart friend of mine studied theoretical solid state physics, but then got a job right out of school as a process development guy at Intel. Voila, his "theoretical" reputation was instantly laundered away!

Of course, if you spend the five years after getting your Ph.D. "teaching courses on contract, or jumping between dead-end, low-paying jobs" people will begin to conclude that you're hopelessly in love with the academic lifestyle. And that's too bad. The academic lifestyle is fun in many ways -- for example, your ambitious and hard-working colleagues from China and India are often really nice, really smart people! -- but it's a terribly one-sided romance.
i vote for paul graham to take the torch and replace elisp with arc

on a more serious note, my main problem with elisp was that why would i spend any time at all learning a non-general purpose language (and elisp is not sql)

learning a language really is a big investement of time and effort, why waste it on elisp

scite uses lua, but at least lua can be used in many other different places,

it really goes against lisp minimalist approach for doing things

what i liked most about lisp, is that, you learn few basics, with which you can build anything!

so you focus more on doing, and less on learning
kinda the opposite of perl where you spend too much time learning the language

so elisp is just excess baggage!
elisp is a bit more attractive than vimscript for example, but still a lot less attractive than ...lua
Fuck Yeah! Well said all of them.
On demand audio  for any feed
You're the first to mention that one. Thanks for the feedback.
I agree, but these ideas come to fruit, mainly b/c there are a lot of smart people working at google and keep the mediocre factor low.

In any big company, as soon you get few idiots as managers, they will start hiring even bigger idiots, lowering productivity, increasing political b.s and chronyism -which tends to kill inovation from below. Most decissions are done in upper management level, from people with fancy titles as VPs of something, who often are disascotiated from reality and the user base, or favorise poor ideas and products b/c it suits better their career. In these companies, where Top down level approach of management exists, the engnieers take a back seat.

At google, despite its large size, it still manages to have a bottom up aproach to new products and ideas.
Hans Reiser's Attorneys Rely on 'Geek Defense'
When I was doing a 1 year web consulting project in Toronto around 2000, I did all my work from home and went into the office only for meetings. I'd get up in the morning, jog to the gym, pump some iron, jog back home, make a nutritious meal, shower, grab a quick nap if I felt tired, and then I was ready to hammer out some serious code (ASP/SQL Server 2000, Javascript, VB6 (eeew!)). I was so effective at churning out well-organized code because I already saw solutions to problems - perhaps while jogging to/from the gym, or maybe just doing a set of this or that execise and just THINKING subconsciously to the next machine or the water fountain. My roommate was at work (office job) so the apartment was QUIET and I never got distracted. It was never ever a problem for me to get into the ZONE. Heck, I also remember times when I'd get up at 2AM because ideas/solutions were just running through my head and I felt re-energized so I'd code for about 2 or 3 hours and go back to sleep feeling that I ACCOMPLISHED something.
Those were the good ole days. LOL!!
My point? A strong body provides fuel to the mind so that it can solve problems effectively. Doing something outside of programming that provides solace will allow your unconscious mind to find solutions. Thirdly, SILENCE is GOLDEN. Try to avoid distractions at all costs.
Hackers turn Google into vulnerability scanner
Remember that some labs are more dysfunctional than others. Yours sounds pretty bad. My own experience at the same big crimson-colored university was considerably less bureaucratic -- we lost only about half a day per week to meetings, although there was still plenty of paper to be shuffled, between the grants and the articles and the manuscripts and the review manuscripts and the insane procurement process. And morale was rather higher, though perhaps not an order of magnitude higher.

The "wasting time on the Internet" factor should not be underestimated. Remember, the only reason we're all here is that Tim Berners-Lee spent a lot of his time fiddling around with the Internet instead of doing his physics research.
I didnt have much luck with everyman taking naps spaced 5hrs apart. At 4 hrs I always got very drowsy and concentration would suffer. It turns out there are physiological reasons for this, with every 4 hours the body experiencing a small cyclical change in body temperature (See Why We Nap by Dr. Stampi for more info). But, YMMV obviously.

The nice thing about everyman is you can make it work at a day job, IF you can take a nap during your lunch break. Its very ideal for moonlighters as you still feel fresh after work and can code late into the night without suffering the consequences the next day.
I've been practicing various forms of sleep deprivation for a few years now. It's not to be taken lightly! The one lasting effect that I've been totally unable to eliminate is really poor memory. I have to take lots of notes now, and I really miss being able to keep track of everything in my head.

That said, I've pretty much settled on "sleeping like a warrior (Raa!)": Wake up when you have to. Work for as long as you're productive. Sleep when your body says "please". Get up, rinse, repeat.

This results in my usually having about one "dead day" a month, where I sleep 10 to 12 hours in one day, and an awful lot of days where I only get an hour and a half or 3, and make up for it by getting 6 the next night...
> This should be a very attractive market to target for a small startup.

Don't call it "a small startup". A "small startup" in Mac software terms is some guy, or two guys, or three guys ("indie developers") who apply for an LLC online and then publish the app. I'm pretty sure this will also apply to the iPhone.

A startup in the sense of YCombinator is overkill for this type of stuff. It's arguably necessary for a web app to be backed by seed funding, due to the large numbers of things that need to be kept track of and pulled off. It's definitely necessary for some app that relies on corporate deals to be a startup backed by funding. Why would indie developers working on an app waste time moving to Cambridge/Silicon Valley and doing demos to get bought out by Google / have excessive amounts of money get pumped into them by later stage investors? Sure, dinner with the other founders is nice, but is it all worth the resulting obligations (keep running the startup and doing nothing else, accept investments, get big or get bought out, etc..)

If there's something I'm missing, can someone weigh in on what the point would be?

That said, I can't wait to get my hands on the SDK, and am using nothing else in the meantime. I want to get my foot in the door as soon as possible.
YC Logo
... make way for return of The Look And Feel Lawsuits ...

Remember when the GUI was copyrighted?
"Switching editors is just as hard as switching languages:" http://codeulate.com/?p=12
Reddit infrastructure revealed
(Pylons, Paste, Beaker, flup and more)
I'm 17, and I agree wholeheartedly. I think I've started at least 7 or 8 projects but have yet to follow through with any of them. I also believe that another reason for that is that when you're young, you dream a lot about many things. Yeaaah.

Then theres the "life" factor... (geek = no life? not necessarily true) but really there isn't an unlimited quantity of daylight hours to code. Rather, there is an unlimited quantity of nighttime hours.
Ironically the site itself is a usability disaster, with the text chopped up into small bits that require lots of clicking to get around, insufficiently large margins, and frames.

It would be interesting to see how it would look redesigned by John Gruber.
Scientific Web Page Design
I'm not sure if you've read 37Signal's book on Application Development "Get Real" (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/) but you can accomplish a lot of things when developing applications by knowing not how to prioritize, but what to prioritize. The one thing that I appreciated the most from the book was this one principle:

"A great way to build software is to start out by solving your own problems. You'll be the target audience and you'll know what's important and what's not. That gives you a great head start on delivering a breakout product."

Start off by figuring out what you need to progress, and once you get to that point, build on it and make it better, and before you know it you're trucking along on the next great web app.