skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks decent, though obviously it puts the onus on whoever is doing the score-keeping to get notes and stats the the coach who would then put them up there.

What would be incredibly cool is if you created player accounts (for free) where they could sign in, look at their schedule and their stats.

Then the players who want accounts/stats would jump all over their coach to make sure he signed up.

The league view could use a redesign but overall I'd say this was a beyond decent app. Way to go!
Running JBoss on iPhone
The department of energy routinely gives low-interest loans to interesting energy startups because there's a compelling national interest in renewable energy.

So, yeah, we're on the hook for 500m. But we just spent a trillion in Iraq. And when we hit peak oil and hit a point of total supply inelasticity for energy, we're really gonna be up a creek.

There are literally thousands of companies that get these loans. I invested in one called Beacon Power, they build electrical grid stabilizers based on flywheels -- suck in excess power during supply peaks, then spit it back out if everyone turns on their AC units at once. Great idea. Helps the whole economy if they succeed, not just them. So the dept of energy took the long view and threw them a few million dollars as a loan.

All in all, this stuff adds up to way less than 1% of domestic federal spending -- which itself is less than 1/6 of the total federal budget. If a few of them pan out and we reduce our dependence on foreign oil, then it's a win.
In addition to their deeds, I respect people for kind and humble souls. I can understand being upset about the situation (and I agree with you that his point is rock solid, the 60 day expiration is ridiculous), but the fact that he 1) made the claim that he was famous, and 2) having had the time to calm down and reread the conversation, thought there was nothing wrong with what he said and posted it to his blog, makes me lose repect for him.
"There is no compelling evidence that the mind can create healing simply through will or belief."

IIRC Daniel Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence cites studies showing that if you swap out a person's medicine with a placebo, their body will actually keep producing the same antibodies or whatever.

I think the same book also cites studies showing that how many calories a person's body absorbs depends as much on the taste of the food as it does on the caloric content. So, for example, if you put steak and mashed potatoes in a blender then the person drinking that will gain less weight than they would if they ate the same caloric amount in normal form.

What's more, just recently there was an article showing that hotel maids actually start losing weight if you tell them that their jobs count as exercise, even though they weren't actually exercising any more than they were before:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1779251...
Not that it contributes much to the conversation, or has anything to do with your article, but I AM in favor of neon strippers.
For future reference, a good way to handle this would be:

"The #bittorrent channel on Freenode has been getting trolled hard lately and I no longer have access to it due to the following policies that I think suck: <insert policies>. After talking to a Freenode support member, they refuse to budge on these so I have moved #bittorrent to irc.bittorrent.com, please join us there!"

Wrong way to handle it:

Paste the transcript of you smacking a Freenode volunteer around with your 10 foot long e-peen.
>>it's a bit strange to sell a bit of sugar with a very small quantity of active substance for 1000 times the production cost.

Hey, it works for Coca Cola.

:)
SUPER SPRING GPS Official Website
Thanks for pointing out firequery, as I hadn't seen that before. Looks pretty neat
Are you saying you think the policy of expiring nicks after 60 days is a great idea? And the # channels are not to be used unless you fill out a form and wait 6 months?

I'm kinda biased, but I think some of the policies are borderline insane.

We're sort of used to registering something, and it being there a few months later if we need it. I don't see why you need to delete peoples registrations if they have been on holiday for a couple months. That's just really irritating - I'm not surprised he was pissed.

There's a ton of other great networks out there, so if you're setting up a new channel, don't just default to putting it on freenode (IMHO).
I can't believe he thinks it's a good idea to post this conversation. Apparently he's not aware that several of his lines are straight parodies of the Bad Guy in popular entertainment.
SUPER SPRING GPS Official Website

Sell Super Spring GPS order in http://www.superspringgps.com
This a very insightful piece, as I learned from experience when I began a while back to add useful content for startups to my firm's website. We are a smaller, boutique firm but have been doing startups for a long time in Silicon Valley. The giving away of "a little bit of your brain power" (as the author puts it) has done nothing but pay dividends.

The only quibble I would have is with the author's emphasis on this being an ideal way for young, unestablished lawyers to make a mark. This is a field in which much is gained by experience, and the expertise to be shared by a brand new or relatively inexperienced lawyer in this field is likely to be somewhat abstract and academic (e.g., what are stock options?) versus strategic and practical (e.g., what are optimum uses of stock options for startups in different stages?). Founders get sleepy-eyed reading abstract discussions of law but are very alert to practical discussions affecting their vital interests (e.g., on this site, I once posted a simple piece on "what it means to own x% of a company" and got thousands of visitors to my site).

For lawyers with some years of big firm experience, though, this is an excellent way to promote any new practices they might establish.

It would also be great if large firms used this method as well but the key to it all is being open and approachable and such firms tend to be somewhat closed. Maybe they will open up with time and a changing environment. Moreover, it is perceived to be inherently risky to "give away" your valuable techniques as a law firm and lawyers acting in large groups (such as are found in the large-firm partnerships), being cautious by nature, tend to set up lots of obstacles for any individual lawyer in the firm trying to share expertise in this way - in essence, everything goes through committees, which usually stifle such attempts.

In any event, this piece offers prescient insights about this subject.
Saturdam AM google fu not so good, here's what i came up with

http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Network_Dia...

found here:

http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/best-business-intellig...
I've heard good things about Formtastic, though never used it myself: http://github.com/justinfrench/formtastic

Forms in Rails aren't absolutely coupled to models - you can use the '_tag' form helpers to build a form that doesn't have an underlying model, or to add fields that aren't attributes on the model.
Right now players can be added to be able to do exactly what you said. Once team captains have been assigned to the teams they are able to add as many players as they choose.

In the demo.leaguesmart.com account if you check out the "Frogs" team, you will be able to see a list of players and their season stats.

demo.leaguesmart.com/teams/1

I have "redesign" on the list of things to do, although the design side of things has never been my strength.

BTW I had to create a new account since I have the noprocrast setting turned on my other account
I second that. I'd also recommend downloading the source code to Beast (the discussion forum) and just reading over it.
You know that saying "everyone knows everybody over 6 other people", maybe something about that. Or: who of your friend's friend's friend's has the same hobby / whatever.
And for a good Ruby book, David Black's Well-Grounded Rubyist is pretty good: http://www.manning.com/black2/
And for looking at code of a full app, Jetpack Web posted a list of some great examples (including the gems, testing framework, etc that they use): http://jetpackweb.com/blog/2009/10/14/high-quality-ruby-on-r...
Im still thinking of my own thoughts on this topic.

Whilst I try and grapple with this notion and potential implications I would like to ask a question of my fellow HN'ers. ( especially those who have posted so far )

Have you been to university?

Do you have a degree or something else from a university?

I ask these questions as I think its important to get a little background of the person who is posting there views.

I do have a degree in "Information Technology no less Majoring in Data communications".

My gut feeling is, there will always be a place for universities. I further believe there will be a huge growth market in self paced study via the internet which will not be linked primarily to universities. Further more, I want to believe that universities will be geared more towards those who are able to "do it for themselves".

"do it for themselves" - I believe will get taught / inspired at school ( high school etc ) via social networks and via social / console games to a point.

I think the future is bright for learning.
Actually, it's 60 days.
Why the First Round Capital Entrepreneur's Exchange fund is good
What aspect of your blog "does much" for anybody? Is it the pictures of balding blobs playing with sock monkeys in their underwear or the groundbreaking Farmville addiction studies?
PDFMunge: Improve the display of technical PDFs on eBook readers
Well, there's different ways to calculate those numbers. If I had to guess, Tesla was referring to EBITA and the WSJ is calling them unprofitable after interest and taxes.

At any rate, it's ridiculous to try and claim that they don't have a business model. If they're selling the cars for more money than the incremental unit cost, then they do indeed have a profitable business model.

They may not be selling enough of them yet to have a profitable company but claiming that they don't have a business model is just being obtuse.

Are you claiming that in 2001, Amazon had no business model? Because that would be the same thing.
If it keeps people from abusing antibiotics then I'd say it's money well spent. Unless you'd prefer getting MRSA.

The only people getting these 'drugs' are the ones who seek them out. And if it makes them feel better, then why give them real medicine with real side effects? Side effects which, in aggregate, would cost billions to deal with.

Dollar for dollar homeopathic medicine is probably the single best use of NHS money.
I specifically made zero comments on freenode's policy. My comment was specifically about Bram's demeanor and his interactions with the admin. I realize that he's good at what he does and contributed a lot, but it's like seeing someone being awfully rude to a waiter, it just gives you a sense of who they are as a person. You can tell a lot about a person at how they handle the inanity of everyday life, like for instance, unreasonable nickname retention policies.
Found a way to break it:

Uncheck the "Public Search Results" box in your Search settings. It's pulling from info you make public by checking the box.

That said, that box DOES NOT imply it's making your entire friends list public. It seems to say that only what's on the preview page is visible, but that's entirely wrong.
According to the article:

The restaurant chains insist they have not downsized their portions, and will make up for cheaper prices by raising efficiency.

This may also be simple captitalism at work. Restaurants are being forced to become more efficient and competitive to attract customers.

People save money on food and therefore have more disposable income to spend in other areas of the economy. So it's not necessarily a lose-lose situation.
I'm not sure what your definition of "odd times" is, but automatic transmissions' decisions of when to shift constantly annoy me. (Most of my automatic experience is in a Honda CRV. Never driven a Toyota.)
They are called rules for a reason, he should've read them if he relied so much on the channel for communication. He should (and did) get the same treatment as anyone else.

"acts like a bit of a douche" is a huge understatement; trying to use your popularity like that is just downright ridiculous...
Someone needs to write a MongoDB book already
Simple: bluetooth headsets. If you think about it, the current way of using a phone -- i.e. holding up a device to your ear and keeping it there for the duration of the conversation -- is quite clumsy. Making a call on the tablet and talking through a light headset is much more elegant.
On the contrary, I find stuff like this highly interesting and consider myself a hacker. I found the comments between Calacanis and Aaron Wall the most awesome stuff I read on Hacker News in the past week, to be honest, and the way I found those was by looking at the HN top rated comments.

It would be interesting to hear other hacker's feelings before we decide what is best for the community.
Save the date. Open Source Bridge takes place June 1-4, 2010. Portland, OR
Bram Cohen's Aspergers is well-publicized (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_43/b41050468...) and essential context for anything you read about/by him.
>"There are many examples of very precious resources being squandered because of profit motives"

Ah, yes, the Tragedy of the Commons:

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

You are right that people have damaged the environment for personal gain in the past, but I still think that you are missing the point on what economics is about. In environmental economics researchers study why people use resources the way they do, how to design environmental regulation so that people will actually stick to it, and what resource use is likely to be in the future. "How to rape the environment more efficiently" is not a common topic of study.

Sorry, environmental economics was probably the wrong field to bring up. What we really want to know is whether or not these macroeconomic modelers take into account the value of ecological resources in their models. Tell you what, I'll scribble off a note to William Nordhaus and ask him. In my experience most academic economists have been very approachable.

Here's my letter:

"
Hello Dr. Nordhaus,

I have a question about the economic modeling of climate change. Do economists take into account the cost of ecological damage in their models?

I ask because this question came up in conversation a few days ago. A friend of mine claimed economic models were invalid because they only took into effect the monetary profit-and-loss effects of climate change and not the value of nature itself, but I wasn't sure if that was true. How does a resource like the Brazilian Rainforest enter into the model?

Thanks,

Jacob"
Invoices seem like a pretty good candidate for a document DB to me. It's much, much easier to store a list of "line items" in a single document than it is to extract those out into a properly normalized structure. What advantage does having that data across multiple tables give you?

Blog comments, on the other hand, might benefit from more normalization. Cramming a bunch of comments into a post document could result in contention problems, depending on the engine and how you're handling them. In CouchDB, you'd end up having to update the entire post document for each new/changed comment. Mongo handles it better, since you can atomically push new comments into your doc. Still, I think I'd rather have them in their own documents on a busy site.
So, I'm not "one of the most well known and respected people in the whole open source community" and I'm not as socially inept as Bram, but I, too, had some issues getting things done on FreeNode, and I sympathize with his frustration.

The #webmin channel had been claimed by someone unrelated to the project, and who we had no prior contact with; it wasn't a hostile thing, but they hadn't logged in for months, weren't dealing with trolls and had opened access to the topic to everyone (so the topic was being abused for all sorts of ridiculous stuff). We were unable to contact the person directly, so I tried taking over ownership of the channel through the official means. After a year of just waiting (because I'd been warned it was a very slow process, and I don't spend a lot of time in IRC these days), I chimed in on the operators channel, and spoke with a couple of folks. All were nice, friendly folks, but weren't able or willing to do anything about solving our problems with the channel. I believe in the end I was told that our application would be brought to the front of the queue because of the ongoing problems, and how long we'd been waiting. I don't know what, if anything, happened with that; it was at least 8 months ago. I never heard anything about it, anyway, and the last time I logged in, I don't think we had ops on #webmin.

So, Bram is a bit of a douche. This is pretty well-known; anyone that has ever met him or interacted with him knows that socially he is inept (and Asperger's gets bandied about as the reason, though I don't think that really accounts for lack of online social graces). I look past it because intellectually he's brilliant, and ethically he seems solid, so two out of three aint bad; in short, he means well, but he can be mean about it. Even in terms of helping people, within the limits of his social graces, he is generous with his time in helping folks use and understand his code. We all have our flaws, and the FreeNode processes and policies and lack of staff to deal appropriately with those process and policies can frustrate someone with the patience of Job. Bram definitely does not have the patience of Job.

So, to sum up: A 60 day expiry on accounts is idiotic. The official channel registration process, while well-meaning, is baroque and seems to leave a lot of channels in a lurch of having no operator or an abusive operator for months or years. Bram is kind of an asshole. But we still like FreeNode and we still like Bram.
Your statement about VCs needs a citation. Maybe they think the IPO will raise more money for less equity. Maybe they want to do the IPO for other reasons.

Given that they just got a big loan, I doubt they're down to their last 9 million. Unless they spent it all in a week.

If you read the articles about them, they want to introduce another car model which will be a much higher volume business, involving a lot of capital expenditure up front to create the plant. That's a good reason to go IPO rather than another venture round. Higher dollars.

And if you don't buy it? Fine, don't buy the stock. But what's your ax to grind here? Every capital intensive business, including a lot of valley darlings, went through a long money-losing period at the beginning while they ramped up design and production. This is standard. Why the long face?
Disclosure: I'm a volunteer at this event.

Details still getting worked out, but the date has been chosen for the second Open Source Bridge.

For those who didn't attend last year: This is a very reasonably priced event, with lots of space and care given to after-session hacking and talking.

Also a big emphasis on being super friendly.

More info as it happens...
That sounds like a variant of the broken window fallacy. Stuff getting cheaper isn't bad for the economy; see technology in the last 100 years.
The policy to not allow electronic devices, and expanding what this means to ludicrous levels might not be the smartest policy, but the point of this article is basically "I get bored without my toys".

I try to go on a longer vacation every year, and I never bring my laptop or go online when I'm gone. There are a lot of people I interact with over the internet on a daily basis, but it really is ok to let go for a while. If you stay off the internet for two weeks, they sky won't fall down, you won't have missed anything, and you really don't need to update your facebook status or twitter some crap every day. The author of this article should try it sometime, unless the extreme hardship of being disconnected for a few hours has scarred him for good...
There are Anti-Apple/Google Cults and Pro-Apple/Google Cults. It's absolutely nuts.
My question about this is: Why is Toyota so anxious to avoid identifying electronic control issues as the culprit, as opposed to sticking pedals and floor mats? Is it because they can't blame a supplier, or it's more complex/costly to fix? Or something else?
I agree with others that this problem skinks of an electrical/software issue.

Drive-by-wire can be made safe. All fighter jets made since the 70s have been fly-by-wire. Their airfoils are inherently unstable (unstable airframes are more maneuverable) and computers keep the plane from flopping out of the sky. The yolk is a glorified joystick talking to a computer which controls the flight control surfaces. Some aircraft even have programs for recovering from various emergencies (stall, flat-spin, etc).

I believe most comercial aircraft are fly-by-wire too, and I know all the Airbus planes are.

Doing fly-by-wire safely is done with a lot of very expensive QA, correctness proofs and redundancy. If I remember right, all or most planes with fly-by-wire have 3 computers that all vote on how to move the control surfaces. Those 3 computers' software is created in 3 completely separate groups in hopes that 2 groups won't have the same bug. The voting system means a software single glitch or hardware failure doesn't result in a crash.

I really doubt Toyota (or any other car manufacturer) is putting that much effort into their embedded computers. Hopefully this recall forces manufacturers to think more critically of these systems.
Admit It, Microsoft: You Suck at the Web
If anything, this just goes to show the quality support you get from Freenode volunteer admins.

You act like a douche, you should be treated like a douche; "essential context" of suffering from Asperger syndrome or otherwise.
This is just a normal effect of their macroeconomic woes. Their money supply is contracting because despite building every bridge to nowhere they could no one wants to take out loans. They have a crushing burden of debt now having followed all the advice of those who argue for massive stimulus (though even though their stimulus programs have been massive the economists insist it isn't enough).

The only upside to a depression is that prices fall for those who still have jobs and this is just that coming home for people. If that means that prices everywhere have to fall then all the better. The market is trying to heal itself and correct the imbalances and the government really needs to start letting it.

It's not like anything they've done has done much good for anyone-outside the bridge to nowhere supported industries that is. I'm pretty sure we're going to see falling prices here for years to come too as the money supply continues to shrink.
I think it's quite unfair to promote a piece of software with such a surreal video and comforting soundtrack. All of my attention was drawn to the video instead of looking for more info. There doesn't seem to be any relevant information for developers in links on the site or a faq.
I had forgotten about this and it changes my feelings about his encounter with the admins. Everyone on the autism spectrum that I've known in my daily life was very rude. If he truly has a mild form of autism then publicly flogging his actions is insensitive and overkill. There's a real difference between the stereotypical rude entitled college student, and someone with a real medical problem. The real question to ask is should he have known better. It's reasonable to suggest that perhaps he did not.