skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is anybody solving really cool problems anymore?
For the record, Nothing "web 2.0" is cool to me. I'm too old and jaded. Now here's what is cool:

- Domestic Robots (I just spent 3 hours doing 2 weeks worth of laundry. Automation please)

- Flying cars

- Efficient weight loss technology (if we can put a man on the moon and split up twins, why can't we just put a hose in my stomach and make it so that I can buy clothes off the shelf?)

- Accelerated learning

- Augmented reality .. for dating. Wouldn't it be great to walk into a club with a pair of glasses that double as a HUD and tell you a girl's OKCupid profile name, what her favorite band is, and what personality flags are set? Or even better, glasses that double as a HUD and can use AdBlockPro HUD Version in order to block out billboards and

- TV Killer for car stereos. I'd happily buy a keyfob that turns off the stereo of some kid parked below my window with 3x JL Audio 10" speakers wired up to 0 ohms playing the latest souljaboy hit at 160 bass-thumping decibles .. at 3am when I'm trying to sleep.

- Embedded GPS tracking chips so I never have to worry about becoming a stealth commando to get my daughter back after she's been kidnapped by russian slave traders.

- Self-driving cars .. I really, really hate driving, but even in San Francisco, public transportation sucks.

- Video conference that doesn't suck but doesn't require paying $200k to Cisco for the tech?

- 3D, immersive VR (whatever happened to the VR buzzword? I know it's sooo 1998) video games that hide reality for a while and make gaming fun again!

Seriously, someone must be doing something fun? The last two truly exciting technologies I've heard of were Dean Kamen's robotic arms, and FusionIO's storage devices .. And that's about it since Web 2.0 became a buzzword.
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Just change the name. Not a big deal.
But, can they do my laundry?
2 possibilities 1) less command and control 2) more command and control

1) less command and control

Fund a whole bunch of branch new products to be built by people not currently employed by MS. Start ups essentially although they may or may not be 100% owned by MS.

Make sure they are all separated from the rest of the company by an impermeable barrier featuring a moat, crocodiles and boiling oil.

Let them work on whatever they think is best without concern for where it fits into MS's broader strategy.

Some of them will be profitable. Some won't and will have to be shut down. Some will compete with the rest of MS. Some will compete with each other. So be it. That just increases the odds that one of MS's many arms will be successful.

Kind of like a VC firm but they don't necessarily need to be separate companies.

2) more command and control
MS has so much going on that it must be impossible to keep track of everything. Shut down "me to" or otherwise failed products. Concentrate on a smaller set of things and do them better.

Whittle down the product offerings to a small set of strategically aligned products which can be carefully managed.

Be more like Apple I suppose.
Dan's apology: http://www.danielbru.com/2010/02/the-line-was-crossed/

I haven't ever met the guy, but much worse things are done by 17-year-olds all the time. The punishment he is receiving seems adequate to me. Hopefully he learns from it, this post is a good first step.
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The Line Was Crossed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-jwj-Bqfe8
No offence intended, but this whole post reads like you are really dissatisfied with the world.
If you're curious what he's apoligizing for, apparently TechCrunch has outed him here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/02/04/an-apology-to-our-reade...
The web was built on top of such technologies (Java, Flash, ActiveX)

Must be some different web you ar talking about…
There's so much goodness in this release it's hard to digest in one setting. They've fixed just about everything I've found frustrating, added some really brilliant new work and elegantly set the framework up for expansion.

A long list of just some of the new goodness is listed here:

http://guides.rails.info/3_0_release_notes.html
Wait, what? I would be just as happy as the next guy to see MS go down in flames, but "Linux is much nicer to program for"? In what way exactly? GUI? Nope, the opposite. [1] The server? Not so much. I mean, if you were actually writing to sockets and things then easy use of epoll, etc. might be an issue but in business you're mostly doing REST or web services or something in which case programming the server on Windows is much easier. The environment provides so much for you here. Scripting? Maybe, but who cares?

Right now I really find Visual Studio the best IDE. I would like to see that change (and VS has lots of problems) but it's currently head and shoulders above the rest.

[1] Further, the Linux GUI has to be one of the worst cases of optimizing for the nearly nonexistent use case ever. If you look at all users of computers today how many of them need X? A number so small as to be statistically irrelevant.
I have no complains about SmartCVS/SmartSVN. They have SmartGit now, but I did not try that command line/GitX is fine for me.
Slight problem with #1: Internet Explorer 6, due to being part of Windows XP, is supported through 2014. It IS still patched, and will continue to be for another 4 years.
Well not entirely dissatisfied with the world.

I really, really like cheese, seitan, and my Canon 5d MK2. The rest, however, is leaving a lot to be desired.

I spend far too much time online hoping that something is really going to WOW me and make me go "omgomgomg I'm going to go into debt to buy this/do this/see this/experience this" .. But that moment still hasn't happened .. So maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places?
403 Forbidden. Needed to copy & paste the URL.
Installing and Setting Up Smooth Streaming and Silverlight
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In my opinion, I believe llvm-g++ is a more promising approach to supporting C++. C++ is an incredibly difficult language to parse, so why not re-use work that has already been done?
You can do this and there are some guidelines to follow to make sure the IRS doesn't classify the contractor as an employee. Some things to consider, how often are they in an office? How much do they control their daily activity? Are they their own boss or do you look over their shoulder? How do you pay them? Hourly? Salary? Per Project? Commission. You need to talk to an accountant, but the contractor relationship works for my company with zero employees. Everyone is 1099.
"In some way or another, a line was crossed that should have never been."

I dislike him, imho, for not being able to own up to what he did. Passive voice is not admitting anything. I mean- he might as well say "They crossed a line and I got fired," for he isn't actually admitting any fault.
I'm fairly sure this problem of traditional inputs has nothing to do with Apple's exclusion of Flash.
Many web-sites also use ui interactions like mouseovers and there are many bad designers that fail to make their sites degrade gracefully.
Following your logic, Apple would ban web sites as well because they might not just work.

Now let me check-off 'Dead horse thoroughly kicked' from my list of things to do today.
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Good, the fixed-position bottom bar with obscure icons is gone!
The real sad thing about this is that if they're asking you to post, it implies that what you post is much more likely to make the top page than it is for regular users, which defeats the whole purpose of this site. Let's hope HN isn't becoming a new kind of Digg...
1) Maid.

2) They exist, you can go out and buy one now. Might need a pilot license.

3) Gastric bypass surgery.

4) Not quite there yet, but once you get her name you can look her up on Facebook and Twitter.

5) Dunno about that one. Out here on the east coast, our stereos don't have any kind of remote control receivers to zap from your window.

6) Ask Applied Digital Solutions, they made implantable GPS's in 2003.

7) Look at the Darpa Urban Challenge. We have self driving cars, the only reason you can't buy it at your local car lot is that consumers don't trust computers to drive them yet. Toyota's said as much.

8) Look at the front page right now, we've got remote control robots that ride around the office with video of your head as their head.
Whichever lawyer you will hire, should start the response letter with the following statement:

"Do Not Do Evil"

What kind of a rubbish is that
That again sounds like you have trouble defining achievement or satisfaction. Looking at the current state of technology compared to 5, 10, 50 or 500 years ago it is apparent that we are advancing at what could only be labelled as an exponential rate. Moore's law et al.
Not to rant, but doesn't it feel weird to read such a perfectly crafted press statement written by a teenager about his personal matters?

Of course he's been writing for TC and I won't doubt its the right thing to write such a blog post in his situation, but this could just as well be written for a politician or a manager.
Sorry for the shameless plug, but we like to think we're solving really cool problems: http://www.rethinkdb.com

EDIT: I don't have the time right now to make a list of really cool startups, but I could probably come up with a list of at least ten. Here's one that immediately comes to mind: http://www.directededge.com/
And he forgot sexbots.
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7) We even have commercial applications of "self driving" cars. I can't believe I am about to use Top Gear as a reference but it really demonstrates how amazing this technology is, and how Mercedes has been the innovator of the majority of technology in your car in the last decade or more.

http://videos.streetfire.net/video/Mercedes-Sclass_162443.ht...
"In some way or another, a line was crossed that should have never been"

The "in some way or another" part I dont like, the rest is heartfelt.

But maybe there's another side of the story.
Pratik Naik does a pretty good round up of the new AR here http://m.onkey.org/2010/1/22/active-record-query-interface
It's a shame to hear this about Dan; I'd read about him before this incident in regards to his involvement with Teens in Tech. He's a very impressive individual and hopefully this is just a minor incident of letting his success get the better of him.
You might want to add http://singularityhub.com/ to your feed reader ;)
Considering he is just 1 year shy of being an adult, I don't buy the 'kids make mistakes' argument. The intern really must be devoid of ethics if he wants to extort laptops out of start ups that are hoping for press. The fact that it had also occurred one other time is more disturbing, it means that this was not some momentary ethical lapse but a real attempt to receive bribes.

I don't really understand how anyone can defend that kind of behavior here. With any luck, his reputation will be ruined and no one will do business with him again. He'll issue an apology - and why not, he has nothing to lose right?

From my experience, people with poor ethics tend to be serial offenders. There was a kid at my high school that was caught doctoring his transcript in hopes of getting into an ivy league school. He was caught and apologized. Earlier this year, as a senior in college, he was caught again -- this time forging e-mails from recruiters to create leverage for a better job opportunity on Wall Street.
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Message-IDs are already stable, though.
I think MS follows the model because they won in the past.
Rethink looks useful, but nothing I'm going to blow a gasket over .. As for directededge? I don't know, I'm looking to be inspired by something inspirational, not just another web startup coming up with new ways to sell me shit. No offense to the directededge guys & gals, I'm sure their work is interesting and they're solving hard problems .. But if it doesn't include a jetpack or a robotic maid, then what's the point?
"Windows today is so much more secure than OS X"

That's a pretty bold statement. The security model might be theoretically better but since most applications force you to run as administrator anyway I don't think it's currently buying you that much.
That sounds really cool. Where can I get one of those?
Sure, the integration of dev tools is pretty slick and appealing. But I wasn't talking about VS at all, but about all the various servers and how they are typically deployed in the Enterprise.

You're right about the "anecdotal evidence", but I just experience that anecdotal evidence every other day and there's a lot more of that anecdotal evidence to be found in most IT depts and MS shops.
i've contributed bits & pieces to mongoengine, and plan on using it in production next month. its a very well-designed, well-implemented, and actively growing ORM for mongodb, and definitely worth checking out.

and when i say "actively growing", i don't mean it in a derogatory way.

if you're using python and mongo, mongoengine is worth your attention.
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Many tech companies succeed by maximizing their highs, making the most of their successes. This takes a substantial amount of risk, especially in the tech industry, but it's a very sensible business model that applies across several industries. Microsoft is unusual in that its pattern for success is not in maximizing highs (few MS products are considered best in class, let alone examples of exemplary execution and design) but rather in turning around and avoiding failures.

MS was headed for a crisis in the early 90s because their 16-bit consumer OS (Win 3.1/DOS) was a technological dead-end while their 32-bit next gen OS (Win NT) was not suitable for consumers due to excessive hardware requirements (namely a 4mb per process overhead for every 16-bit app, or a $150 premium for each 16-bit app running simultaneously). Instead, MS pursued an unusual hybrid approach (windows 95) that allowed a significant amount of the benefits of a 32-bit pre-emptive multi-tasking OS with more reasonable hardware requirements than OS/2 or NT. A solution that lasted another 6 years before finally being supplanted by their fully 32-bit Windows XP consumer OS. Similarly, MS recovered from the underwhelming Vista release with Windows 7. They turned around their shameful Live search efforts with Bing. They avoided disaster with the v1 XBOX, which was a reasonably popular system but a serious financial debacle, by halting production and putting out the XBOX 360, resulting in runaway popularity and financial success.

This ability to make such dramatic saving rolls against failure is a defining characteristic for MS. There are a few other tech companies that have shown some degree of this capability (Intel and Apple, for example) but it is far more characteristic of MS (and far more responsible for their success). In an industry with a rich history of fast rising superstars that later flare out in catastrophic failure (Sun, Excite, geocities, myspace, Digital Research, Netscape, DEC, countless more) MS's three decade history of turning potential catastrophes into successes is at the core of what makes the company tick. It may not be as glamorous as other companies who reach Olympian heights of excellence, trail-blaze new markets, or revolutionize old ones but it's been an enormously successful strategy for MS.

Perhaps MS has lost the mojo and the guts to make these sorts of major saving moves any more (from my time at MS I fear this may be becoming true). Perhaps this sort of strategy is no longer relevant in an era of even faster technological change. Only time will tell.
First: it's not "propriertary CSS" it is called "vendor extensions" and are allowed in CSS.

Second, and more important:

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-background/

http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-images/#gradients-

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-2d-transforms/

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-3d-transforms/

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-transitions/

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-animations/

Third: IE is pretty much the only browser showing now signs of support for some of the above.
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Useful error messages. Even in C gcc is lacking, let alone C++, and I'd imagine that fixing this in gcc wouldn't be/have been much easier than writing clang.
Because g++ has its own problems that won't be solved by switching backends, like unclear diagnostics. Then there's the license issue, which can be important for some. Clang is also built as a library, so you can link to it and JIT c-code at runtime.
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Personally, I enjoyed this article and loved its simplicity. It's a nice change of scenery from the technical articles which seem to make up the majority of HN. Sometimes, it's good not to overthink.
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First off, thanks for taking this well. It was a bit of a rant, even if it was toned down from the first version. Sorry.

We agree SMTP will be around forever; but how do you plan on abolishing MIME then? Your system will have to handle it, no matter what. Do you want to push MIME handling to the server? IMAP already does that, there's nothing revolutionary about that.

Due to the special structure, it's usually possible to distinguish UTF-8 from other 8-bit text. The tricky part is what to do with unmarked non-UTF-8 8-bit text - it could be pretty much anything. Mutt, for instance, allows the user to configure this according to what the user expects to see. Quoting the manual,

For example, Japanese users might prefer this:
set assumed_charset="iso-2022-jp:euc-jp:shift_jis:utf-8"

There is a lot more information about such things on the Mutt site. Basically, Mutt tries to parse the headers/message according to a specific character set and falls back to the next one if that fails.

I probably wouldn't trust my e-mail to a protocol that was only a few years old. I don't anticipate any new security protocols with significant uptake either; "serious" stuff already uses SSL/TLS plus an authentication method (passwords/certificates/SASL), and the web crowd is unlikely to replace that (OAuth is about weakening security in a controlled way, not replacing SSL.)

And yeah, parts of IMAP are clunky. But that's not enough reason to rip-and-replace it.
1) A maid is not rosy the robot.. I have a maid, she comes every other week. It's not feasible to have her do things like the laundry at any affordable frequency.

2) I've got the license, I still don't see a street-legal flying plane .. preferably one that is 100% auto-pilot that can let me surf the web while I commute .. if I commuted further than a walk to bart.

3) Gastic Bypass surgery == starving yourself and throwing up if you eat more than 3oz of food in a sitting. No thank you. There should be a pill, or a suction hose. This would be a trillion dollar market.

4) I have hopes for augmented reality dating. It would just be awesome to have that much extra knowledge .. Imagine you're about to hit on some beautiful redhead in a "Science, it works bitches" shirt when you do a facial recognition and find out through OKCupid that she's a strong christian and a member of the jonesboro baptist church, whereas you're looking for a kinky atheist .. Crisis avoided!

5) I spoke with the TV-B-Gone guys about this a while back. They gave it some thought and found that the car-stereo options were just too varied to be feasible .. I guess every souped up car stereo with remotes uses a different tech, often proprietary. Still, it would be nice.. I'd also accept a directional EMP gun.

6) oooh!

7) Definitely neat .. That being said, as a pedestrian, I don't trust my local consumers to drive a car, maybe a computer could do a better job.

8) That's kind of neat.. I have a rather specific application for video chat. My daughter lives in Seattle, and we use Google Video to chat right now .. It's pretty sub-par. 900 miles as the bird flies should be enough for us to have at least 1024x768 chat with minimal latency .. This is actually a startup I'm thinking about pursuing, but one specifically towards making it so divorced dads can chat with their toddlers without their toddlers having the ability to accidentally close the window .. But I digress.
No, he said he's using python, so it's False
No, we (at least I) don't hate IE because it has proprietary extensions. I prefer standards to be made of things that have been done successfully first (usually as proprietary extensions). You can see by inspection which parts aren't standard, so it's nice and clean. If you aren't on IE, just ignore them.

No, I hate IE because so often when it implements standards, it implements them wrong. There's no clean way around that!
McDonalds does not own Chipotle, they sold their entire stake in 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipotle_Mexican_Grill
Companies tend to make NDAs that are much more restrictive than what they could actually enforce.
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What I'd like to know is: what kind of an intersection is the Shoreline/101/85/Moffett/Old Middlefield Way beast in Mountain View:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.40942,-122.072332&z=16

Shoreline/101 is a ParClo, and Moffett/101 is a Butt, but what's the 101/85 interchange, let alone the whole configuration where the offramp for Moffett becomes the onramp for Shoreline and merges with the offramp for 85, while another branch of the 85 offramp merges into the feeder for Old Middlefield Way and weaves across to merge into 101. Never mind the opposite direction from Shoreline, where you need to be in left lane to get on 85 (which is a hard right turn), while you need to be in the right lane to get on 101 (which is immediately to your left).
Ah, such a classic device for someone so young: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made
ORM-like

I'm trying to understand why there would be any ORM connotation since one of the big points of NoSQL is that there are no object to relation mappings as such in the first place.

Perhaps I am missing something.

[edited] Nothing against the project. I actually think its great.