skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Computational Aesthetics & Adobe's Creative Technologies Lab
I love people trying to innovate, but this is going to run into the brick-wall reality of conversion math.

My site, where 6 cents gets me a guaranteed visitor: ~20% download or sign up, ~2.5% pay, cost per conversion thus about $12. I charge $30 and smile.

The iPhone app will have three different gates in the funnel: percentage of people who visit website (or search on AppStore by name -- can you even do that?), percentage who download, percentage who purchase. I can tell you that gate #1 is not going to be anywhere near 100%. I'd be pleasantly surprised if it were in the two digits. The math just gets more depressing from there.

Don't charge $2 if you're going to have marginal advertising expenditures, folks. It is not sustainable.
At my university, the SE degree was much more about how to handle projects to help improve requirements gathering, combat schedule slippage, and other sorts of topics to improve project success rates, rather than spending time on overdesigning applications. I feel like it was a better use of time and tuition compared to focusing on design patterns, or programming languages and frameworks.
If you're interested in HTML canvas, and want to get started quickly, you should look into processing.js: http://processingjs.org/

Otherwise, this "cheat sheet" helped me the most: http://blog.nihilogic.dk/2009/02/html5-canvas-cheat-sheet.ht...
Ugh, the lines are off between the "Recent News" and "Links and Elsewhere" columns. web typography: care about it!
Which one is the new logo?
That's because Engineering isn't Art. It's not Craftsmanship either. If you're really practicing Engineering, then you're using a lot of math and a lot of well-understood design principles to design whatever it is you're creating before you create it. You're able to prove, based solely on the design, that when you get around to actually building it the thing is going to meet all applicable requirements. The PE signs off on that design as a guarantee that it's going to be good. And /then/ you build it.

Artists and Craftsmen just forge ahead into creating with little more than a general idea of what they're making. The design evolves as they go. Programming is almost always like this, because it's just too damn hard, time-consuming, and expensive to document the design in sufficient detail ahead of time. No requirements documentation is as detailed as the final source code, when it comes to describing precisely how the software must behave.

That, I think, is why software development will always be Art or Craftsmanship rather than a true Engineering discipline. If you're designing a bridge, it's much cheaper and faster to design it on paper than with steel, because paper drawings and specifications are able to capture all of the details that matter. If designing a bridge required specifying the exact position of every iron atom, no one would bother trying to do it on paper first. With software, there is no advantage to doing more than a high level design on paper first because every byte in the source code is significant. You get one wrong, and the software doesn't work. You can't capture that in the design without actually writing the source code, so we skip that level of design. We're craftsmen instead, designing as we go.
The New logo is basically images as the M.
FYI, the Mormon -> Twilight relationship is due to the fact that the author of the series is Mormon.
Yeah, some of the grammar in the post could've used some proofreading. There were a lot of places where the author used a comma when they should've used a period.
I wonder how long the no location will last. After all, hitting Alt-1 show current location in google maps in the browser.
They could use Smart Glass (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_glass) to make the bottom opaque when in balcony position.
Money making dreams and the reality
Facebook's approach to images seems broken security-wise all around. You can also get to non-public images if you know the URL of the jpg--- linking to the image page won't work, but a direct link to the JPG will happily serve itself up.
I've also seen maps where it's split into 9 nations:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=...
This may come across as some amount of fanboy-itis, apologies in advance for that.

But, I wonder if this is the kind of "lazy-ness" that Jobs was referring to with Flash. Not necessarily lazy in the sense of not doing anything, but lazy in the sense of inability to keep "control" and an eye on your major properties (Apple qualities.)
I'm hoping the Kindle will be the next gold mine!
Reminds me of the AOL logo redesign.
I've got the same question. Anyone with an idea of why the monthly expenses would be so high, and why so many ops guys for just 60 servers? I don't want to be so cynical as to assume it's because of bad management or something; I must be missing something.
Not completely, but any argument I have would be hand-waving. Hence the "probably". The number (a couple dozen) was totally out of nowhere, just making a point here.

I should've added the disclaimer that I haven't used Riak, and hence nobody should take what I say seriously at all. It was just my impression from looking through the site.
I have AS and I know from experience that it is not something that can be "cured". The thing to do is recognize that dealing with people and social situations is not something that is instinctual, but must be learned. This is probably why you feel more outgoing and social: you have had to work at it and eventually you became proficient.

For me, I can get along with people perfectly well, but it does take a lot of mental energy to do so, and I still have to form sentences in my head before I can say them; it does not happen automatically. I also have to pay close attention to body language and voice inflections, in order to know what people are really trying to say.

I would venture to say that there is no such thing as a cure for AS or other forms of Autism. It has more to do with how the brain is wired than it does with inner beings being trapped inside a metaphorical cage. You are doing the right thing by engaging with other people and learning how to deal with them. But you should also know that AS can be a strength too.
It is curious that for a community which theoretically worships peer review that increased scrutiny into their methods starts to come up with all sorts of low-hanging fruit like this.

I kind of feel sorry for them: humans make mistakes, and retrospective digging into any human endeavor is going to uncover them. That wouldn't be a problem if their marketing hadn't been "This is the infallible Voice of Science: the only people capable of understanding it all have already signed off on it. Implement our recommendations or be cast into a fiery pit." Mr. Wizard always looks less impressive from behind the curtain.

I have half a mind to take a week or two this summer, grab one of the old papers in the field and the associated data sets, and just try to reproduce the math. The reason I have only half a mind is that I know I'm likely to discover that the process is not covered in sufficient detail publicly to reproduce it.
Possibly all the folks actually capable of fixing the bugs quickly have quit or were laid off. If Adobe has only second tier developers left that would explain this kind of situation.
the problem with spotify is that storage and bandwidth costs are nothing compared what they will have to pay labels for not suing them.
in places with long winters, makes sense. Eg. In boston, october - may the weather is crappy, and there is not a need for a balcony. You will have to deal with cleaning it, snow, etc.

Just lock it, and when the good weather comes, open it.
Plus it seems that it will be easy to retrofit to existing apt. buildings.

If it is cheap enough, why not.
So true. Let's hope Adobe's fear motivates investment in improving (and possibly open sourcing) Flash.
Let's be clear about one thing: all businesses, even startups, are supposed to generate profits. That competition already exists.

So, on it's face, this is a terrible idea. But not hopeless. Maybe it can be turned into a serviceable one if we turn the premise on it's head. Let's instead consider the question: What business activity would benefit from an intense competition conducted over a short duration?

Of the top of my head, what comes to mind is something like a product/service launch marketing campaign. Or perhaps something that has a defined expiration date, like event promotion.

Hmm... the way it could work is that the company whose business it is to adjudicate would solicit Customers requiring the marketing/promotion services. A Customer would be able to specify the rules, duration, judgement criteria and awards. Then the Adjudicator would open the solicitation to the public, and manage the resulting competition on behalf of the Customer.

Marketing/PR/promo companies would come to the Adjudicator's site to view the various Customers solicitations. They can then choose to respond to a solicitation as a Competitor.

That's kind of interesting, at least to me. Similar to another startup I worked on a few years back. So, what would the entrepreneurs setting up the Adjudicator need to do? Setting up a site to enable Customers to enter the actual competition criteria is trivial. There would be two big challenges.

One relates to verifying results. How would one accurately measure the key criteria of the competitions as specified by the Customer (eyeball views/tickets sold/etc), and corresponds them to the correct Competitor? Tricky, but solvable. I have some notions about that. You can probably think of a few ways.

The second has to do with creating lightweight, but binding, legal frameworks to protect the Customers', Competitors', and Adjudicator's interests. Non-trivial, but also solvable.

So, not necessarily a great idea, but definitely better than the original premise.

Thoughts? Ways to improve this idea? Or create a competition out of some other outsource-able business activity that customers would pay for?
I've had decent returns in the past few months, but reinvesting it keeps me breaking even for the most part. Its one hell of a ride though.
I think you got two good answers. They aren't even conflicting, just presenting the two sides of the coin.
I don't get it either. I'm doing contracting on the side (here in New Zealand), and two weeks worth of work is around US$3000, if I'm doing 8 hours a day at my contract rates.

I guess if they need the experience, but there really should be better ways to get it.

You can earn more flipping burgers.
This is pretty fun, I especially liked the iPhone graph.
No way man. The iPad is the next gold mine!
He seems to be referring to this article: http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2010/02/01/daily27-MHT-E...
This mirrors the average money-making-misadventures in the online space so well it's scary, nice job to the author.
The iPad just seems like most of the apps will get converted to a larger, 'friendly' UI and keep on making revenue.

The Kindle is an open book!
Oh I'm all for HTML5, on the other hand I'm still having to support IE6 for my work and even then IE7 and IE8, it will be many years before I can fully move to HTML5 and by then I'm sure I'll use whatever tool is best for the job of making web applications for use across browsers and platforms.

I don't see why we won't see Flash and HTML5 and Silverlight and Java applets for games still going forward. It isn't a either or situation as I'll still be able to contain Flash/Silverlight/Java inside a HTML5 compliant page.
Did you know Flash doesn't work on 64-bit browsers?
I think that if they moved in the direction of supporting ASE (android scripting engine)?
Well, in engineer's/scientist's terms, 7 times approaches the bar of significance, 10 times :)
DirectX vs OpenGL revisited... revisited
Thanks! I know it's a bit risky to have the homepage "writable" to everyone, but I think it's a good demo.

Though, if you want to draw on your own or with just people you know, you can create a new picture and share the URL with just the people you want.
None of them. The blog says:

"Well, that flexibility will be on display on Monday, February 8th when MTV is going to re-furbish and change its logo for the first time since 1981."

Those images show the flexibility of the current logo without losing the identity.
Haven't heard of it. Thank you. This one's in Flash again, though.
I've been able to display UTF-8 in screen without problems. It's stable, feature rich, bug-free (in my personal experience), and standard.

I'm not sure what tmux could offer that would make me switch. But I might check it out some time.
Let us not forget their inability to write a flash plugin that doesn't freeze / stutter while playing video in current firefox and safari on a new macbook pro with tons of available ram and cpu. Their ceo is a liar -- if he actually used a macbook pro as his daily machine as he claimed on tech crunch, he'd be screaming at people on his engineering team until they fixed this.
This is notoriously hard problem to solve if you still want a traditional web server serving out static assets (which is the fastest way to do so). The only way I've seen to serve static content in an authenticated fashion is to serve it out of the application itself using the appropriate headers. I'm curious how others have solved this though...
ASE: http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

From the ASE wiki:
"ASE lets you develop on the device itself using high-level scripting languages to try out your idea..."

What would prevent ASE from being used to develop a full Android app?
This & similar response time from Adobe for bug fixes = great excuse for Apple to block Flash from iPhone / iPad
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
I have a PC/Mac/Linux I want cross portability I use trolltech and C++ or something similar. What's wrong with installation? Installation gives me access to a nice operating system with a rich set of API's, threads, memory, file system. I fit's something I want to use I install it. Installation can cause problems with older software that isn't internet aware and can't automatically update itself. That is no longer an issue.

These thing's are cute toys, but really. Let's say I want to make something that can manipulate a raw image (around 100MB) for printing, would I use a browser - well the answer is pretty obvious.

So what is this browser stuff for??? It's cute and fun I agree. But it's not really practical as an image manipulation program. It's a cute distraction for hobbyists. If you want to do real work then fire up your compiler.

Using the browser and trying to get html to do something which is easy to do with a compiler is a distraction. The internet is the powerful thing, forget about the browser and html 5, but use the internet and web standards to enable your software to use web based data stores for collabaration and publishing then you're onto a winner.

...oh and this doesn't run on 99% of machines either :-)
I really sucked at market size estimation back in the day:

http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/reality-b...
Also, a family (two adults, 2 children) earning $40K per year will pay next to nothing in taxes. This is why such people tend to support our oil wars, they are costless to them. Both political parties like to keep it this way.
While I do suppose a brand commercial would benefit them, I'd actually suspect they might do a Chrome commercial. If you're using Chrome (and knowing it's Google), it's going to increase the likelihood you use Google as a search engine (imo) and also make you like them more if it works well. Just my two cents, but we'll see. (Plus they have a decent marketing campaign on Hulu for Chrome... I even saw a commercial on the Sleuth channel once for the browser.)
Must be fun to clean the inside of the window
30 years to change the logo but only 5 years to stop playing music...
It's a sad story and very well written.
Is there an order form somewhere where I can pay someone $1,000 and get a kW installed on my apartment this week?

(This somewhat cynical view of new technology announcements has generally served me in good stead... with the exception of the HAL exoskeleton suit from Cyberdyne, and yes, that is really what it is called. When I asked them about commercial availability they asked if I had my credit card on me.)
That is absolutely creepy that we used the same colors and all. I was in mspaint trying to choose between green and purple as a 'dream color,' and green just seemed more like a 'start it' color.

I wish my reality charts were more like that. I scooped up a few iPad/Kindle dev/app sites and hope to find enough time to make something out of them!
"Even if the solar cell market were to grow at 56 percent a year for the next 10 years ... photovoltaics would still only account for about 2.5 percent of global electricity"

Ray Kurzweil claims a similar doubling time, but thinks that solar will approach 100% in ~16 years. I wonder who has better data.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_announces_singularity_... (He talks about solar around 5:45)

Edit: Ah, fooled again by exponential grow. I did the math, and if 56% growth held for for an additional 6 years, 2.5% would turn into 72%. Which is surprisingly close to Kurzweil's predictions.
IObit Security 360 Pro 1.40.20 Multilanguage + Keygen[IAMTHEBEST][H33T]
This actually makes them look even worse if they're honest. "We haven't been able to fix this bug because we're bad programmers"--understandable but shitty. "We have fixed this bug, but no one knows that because of our byzantine release policies--oh, but for all you know we're lying through our teeth and using vaporware to cover ourselves"--now that pisses me off.
That is absolutely creepy that we used the same colors and all.

Oh, my bad, I suppose without context that post might look like I was commenting about a pre-existing thingee. I created that image about ten minutes ago in response to yours and so used the same colors. Then a quick commit, svn update ..., and a new URL popped up on my website so I could copy/paste into HN.
It's difficult to know what to make of this. There seems to also be such a massive disconnect between other media voices over what the impact of revelations like this are to the overall global warming / climate change thesis.

There has been a stunning lack of intellectual curiosity/skepticism by journalists on the issue and if anything, much of the media seems outright hostile to the possibility that the overriding thesis could possibly be wrong.

This wouldn't be such a big issue if it weren't for the policy recommendations that would have us greatly change our way of life by people who by and large are insulated from proving their work has intrinsic value/subject to markets/or even the costs if they're wrong. It is to the Telegraph's credit that they've stayed on this story but I'm not sure if I'm more surprised or worried that these revelations have not caused a greater level of introspection or reached a wider mainstream audience.

That said, it would seem at least the news is trickling out: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8500443.stm. It does make me wonder even more about the news industry before internet use became pervasive.
No need to downvote this guy into oblivion for asking a question guys.
On the handwriting note; some of the lectures at UW in bifurcation, chaos and some others were part of the 'UW Engineering Extension' program ( or something similarly named. ) It was really great because only the best professors with the best handwriting got to be on TV. Enrolling in the class on campus was a double bonus because we got access to the video recordings of the classes, the teachers lecture notes, and, of course, got to sit in the room with the professor ( if a matriculated student at the main Seattle campus ) and ask questions to our hearts content. The downside was that if we asked a stupid question, it was beamed to the rest of the world.
What causes the seasonal spikes around October?
indiejade,

Do you really think startups should make it a priority to hire a business person over engineers in the early stages?

The article is about hiring the first 5 engineers but do not take is as do not hire a business person. Eventually, a startup would definitely need one but in the early stages, a startup can survive without a business person.

Can you name a startup that was founded without an engineer? I can name you numerous startups that were founded without a business person easily though.
i couldn't submit a comment online. it was:
where would the startup hub for biotech/pharma be? i'm sure there's a bunch in silicon valley, but nyc has the research centers and the big companies such as pfizer and bristolmyers, and more right across in NJ.
also, are there any essays on how biotech startups differ?
> Additionally, having to write out content in longhand slows down the amount of info you can cram into a lecture.

I'm not sure if you meant that as a positive or a negative, but that was the biggest advantage for me when I had chalk board classes. If you can't write down everything you want to say, your students can't either.
So in http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2358815,00.asp the Adobe CTO says:

"Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs"

and here the Flash Product Manager says:

"The team is actively reviewing all unresolved crash bugs in JIRA and will reach out to the submitter if we need their help."

That gives me a _great_ deal of confidence they're not lying to me...
I don't understand why he didn't take proper console screenshots.

IIRC mplayer is capable of taking snapshots of console. fbgrab can do this, too.
I abandoned pure standards-respecting HTML5/canvas while working on a similar tool (for pixel art, not general drawing), for reasons which will readily become apparent when you try to save a file... then load one.

Flash is still quite useful because desktoppy apps have legitimate needs which are thwarted by the browser's rather uptight security model, but are mostly satisfiable with Flash's controlled way of enabling them.
Neither does pretty much any other plugin.

In fact, 32-bit Quicktime in 32-bit Firefox on x86-64 WinXP or Win7 doesn't even work properly; the control bar is rendered as just a solid black bar.
I was about to say the same thing.
Halloween.

1) There is no day off from school, but it is traditionally a kid's holiday anyway, and the week of Halloween a huge number of elementary schoolteachers try to do a Halloween lesson plan.

2) It isn't religious (well, in contemporary America). If you've been around K-12 education in the US you can probably anticipate the sort of issues which come up if you want to play e.g. Easter bingo. (I generally try to provide customers with a "traditional" and "seasonal" variation on the religious holidays, which is my best attempt at phrasing the difference such that it doesn't sound like I'm talking down to either group.)

3) In years prior to 2009, the gigantic tidal wave of searches for [halloween bingo] and [halloween bingo cards] (see: http://www.google.com/trends?q=halloween+bingo+cards) landed on pages at About.com and Mes-english which both a) fail to satisfy searcher demand and b) run AdWords ads. Guess who was right next to those articles saying "I've got your Halloween bingo cards right here." (In 2009, the #1 ranking site for those queries was halloweenbingocards.net . I did not put AdWords on it, for the obvious reason.)
I was wondering, "Oh, did they finally drop the 'M'?"
Nice find. However, I don't see where it says anything about MongoDB failing, though it is mentioned as a NoSQL database. Also:

Another customer, Electronic Arts, uses Basho infrastructure for a system that supports 7 million daily users of Warhammer Online on Facebook, saving each player’s status every half-minute, Falco said.

That's an impressive number of daily users, but it's just saving a status every half-minute? I don't see why MongoDB couldn't handle that just fine, assuming enough nodes (auto-sharding is basically working now right?).