skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Invest in New-Space, or "Space 2.0". There's a private space travel revolution happening in Mojave, and Texas.

Look up:

XCOR Aerospace

Scaled Composites

Armadillo Aerospace

Masten Space Systems

Unreasonable Rocket

Blue Origin

SpaceX

Check out the arocket-list mailing list for detailed engineering discussions on amateur rocketry, including comments by some of the people involved in the companies I mentioned.

It's not clear who the winners will be here, but some of them will be billion dollar companies.
New glasses allow blind soldier to 'see' with his tongue
Anyone excited about going to the meetup or the panel? I don't know that i've seen a story stay on the front page with zero comments for two hours before!
"As long as customers understand that their low-end phone won't be able to run the sexiest games out there, I don't see too much of a problem."

INT. WHITE ROOM

We see two men -- (pudgy but adorable comedian, wearing a robot costume) and (douchey hipsterish guy) -- standing side by side.

DOUCHEY HIPSTER

Hi, I'm an iPhone.

ADORABLE COMEDIAN

And I'm an Android.

DOUCHEY HIPSTER

Hey, Android, have you played this great new game?

You can fill in the rest of the script from here, and perhaps in so doing you'll realize how quickly this could become a major marketing problem for Android...
Previous discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1017363
On the other hand, I resented that I was basically forced to pay up and upgrade in order to continue getting updated versions for applications I had already purchased, as well as buy new apps. I held out until an easy jailbreak was released for 3.1.2.

Needless to say, I'm now using a Nexus One.
This stuff is getting a little tiresome.

Sometimes you have to support old junk and no one likes doing that. As long as you get paid, that's part of the job.
Ask HN: do your votes get reversed?
I just discovered that if I reload the page my votes for comments get rolled back. I guess the HN’s software decided that there is something wrong with the way I have voted. Secret laws + secret enforcement = very disturbing.
Which did happen once with AOL searches. I see your point.
The second part is a citation of a 15-year old popular joke on Gorbachev, about his incompetence combined with wishful thinking combined with unwillingness to admit his own mistakes.

A world I was referring to is a so called Second World, that was a Soviet block. Being second here does not mean to be somewhere between the first and the third, it means standing on par with (self-proclaimed) First World. And Soviet Union really was a developed, technologically and culturally advanced world. Now we see degradation everywhere, we are on a clear path to the Third World, and we need this modernization. Well, Russia has undergone some successful modernizations in the past, all of them were quite painful. Last one was led by Stalin so you can get an idea of what I mean by "painful", and failed modernizations were even worse. So, it is arguable that Gorbachev made more evil for his people than Stalin did.
So do I. I think one of the biggest problems with the financial industry is limits on short selling.
I'll be going to the meetup(no badge).
Except that it's wrapped up in a nice Ruby library, so you can benefit from someone else's masochism to get runtime memory stats on your own programs.
Immediate gut reaction: I don't get it... and it's ugly.

I wouldn't work on the design if I were you. Honest opinion, it'd be a bit like lipstick on a pig at the moment. I think the fundamental premise is flawed - I cannot imagine in any stretch of my imagination why I or any normal person would visit this page, much less withstand the friction of the service in order to interact with it.

My elevator pitch re-imagining of what you're doing: "Quotes can serve as great summaries, excerpts, or lead-ins of a larger story. They also humanize stories or events by putting a face or voice on them. Quotestory.com brings you each day's biggest news and events one quote at a time, presented in a beautiful and simple interface that lets users get a quick read on what's happening in the world."

Essentially, the site would scrape the news to pull out candidate quotes, as well as allowing user submissions. Weighting system incorporates crowed voting as well as "page rank" of scraped quotes. The quotes are pegged to a specific point in time, and the front page displays a sort a chronological arrangement of quotes, chunked into days (maybe something hierarchical to summarize entire weeks/months in the past). You get a unique view of each's days events via direct quotes rather than editorialized headline. Quotes click through to an article. If you can extract a attribution, perhaps a small image of the quotee. If you get smart enough, perhaps you can have some sort of point-counterpoint dueling quotes to show both sides of an issue.

I'm not saying this is insanely compelling either, but I can at least see a small value add in that some people may prefer to graze on news this way.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation does it to browsers pretty easily.

http://panopticlick.eff.org/

And according to another article by them, all you need is zip code, gender and birthday to identify someone with a high degree of certainty.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/what-information-person...
http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I applaud Drysdale's initiative, and I'm sure the $17K she spent will reap rewards for her in her industry for a long time. But... it was probably a wasted effort. At least as far as preserving the generic use of the term "SEO," and certainly for Drysdale personally, except for the attendant acclaim she'll gain.

To be clear, registering a mark with the USPTO does give a business tons of advantages. Most obviously, it gives notice to others that the business considers the mark part of their identity, and it makes enforcing the their exclusivity to the mark easier. But registration isn't a slam dunk, and in this case I would wager a case of nice Scotch that the mark "SEO," even if registered, would basically be unenforceable. Here's why.

Without getting bogged down in too much detail, above all else, trademarks must be DISTINCTIVE. There's a whole framework setup the creates four categories of distinctiveness (from least to most): Generic, Descriptive, Suggestive, and Arbitrary/Fanciful. The framework comes from this case: http://bit.ly/bNw3pp

Generic marks are never valid as marks because they aren't distinctive enough to ever serve as part of a business's identity. If they were valid, we'd eventually cede the exclusive use of our entire language to mark owners. "Piano" is the textbook example of a generic term.

Descriptive marks are only valid once they've acquired an association with a particular company in the marketplace. "Red Piano" would be a descriptive term as applied to red pianos, and if a company came to be known at THE supplier of red pianos in the marketplace, the mark would probably be valid.

Suggestive marks are immediately valid assuming no one else has already established a confusingly similar mark. "Lovely Ivory" would be a suggestive term as applied to Pianos. Suggestive marks require some flight of the imagination to relate them to the goods they are fixed to.

Arbitrary/Fanciful marks are also immediately valid subject to the same limitations as suggestive terms. "Crap Sandwich" would be an arbitrary term as applied to Pianos. There is no connection between the mark and the goods.

[I've laid out a more in depth description of this framework here: http://bit.ly/bVxbv1 ]

Applying the framework to the acronym "SEO" and the phrase "SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION" as it applies to the SEO services, both are generic terms because they are the label for an entire genre of services. Without some modifier that makes the term descriptive, SEO could never carry the distinctiveness necessary to describe an SEO firm. If the mark holder ever tried to enforce the mark "SEO", it would be at their own peril because it would never pass this test.

I will say that the $17K spent now probably saved the SEO industry some nuisance cease and desist letters and probably saved some cash for the first person that Jason Gambert opted to sue over use of the mark (it would have also been the last). In that regard Drysdale kinda fell on her sword for the greater good, however certain a favorable outcome may have been.

Either way, glad it's settled. :)
The one thing a company should never outsource is customer service. That's where you meet your customers directly, where you have a chance to make a customer for life, and you put it in someone else's hands? Only someone schooled in mismanagement in some MBA program would think that is a nice place to save some money.
Oh for sure, most of the support is great, but .NET CF 1.1 was a total crap-fest. .NET CF 2.00 sorted that but since then (2005) there have been no great changes, improvements nor openness about the future road plan (e.g. WinMo 7).
So, nearly limitless freedom gives everyone the option of looking the same.
I think this is true to the degree that updates disable the holes that jailbreaks use.
You were forced to pay who to upgrade what?
Very awesome that you side project become your real life project. Keep it going!
There's a (very sad) saying in México that goes like these: "El que no tranza no avanza".

That phrase could be loosely translated as "That who doesn't do dishonest deeds in prejudice of other people cannot advance in life".

If that's a philosophy that the you want to learn, then please take Carlos Slim as a role model because he is the poster child of that ideology.

Whenever I hear the news that Carlos Slim is the richest man in the world I cringe. Bill Gates? I think the guy somewhat deserves his millions, Microsoft business practices may be morally-gray, but they have helped shape the world the way it is now. Bill Gates had change the world.

Carlos Slim has done nothing, absolutely nothing, good for the world, not even for Mexico. He is the product of a corrupt system whose only merit is being the best exploiter of his people.

If this looks like a good role-model, you are going to love Joaquin Guzman Loera. I'm waiting his letter to the young people.
As luck would have it, I'm sitting here writing a fuzzer for a trading protocol in EventMachine as we speak.

Ruby and async network programming go together like gin and vermouth. It's one of the reasons I'm so happy with Ruby's block/lambda support, and so irritated with Python's: many of the basic programming idioms for evented network code have direct support in the Ruby language.

I've done a fair bit of Twisted Python programming in the past, and I find EventMachine to be far more intuitive and flexible. On the other hand, EventMachine will crash on me once in a blue moon, and it swallows exceptions, which is extremely frustrating. They're both great packages.

The big problem that still needs solving for EventMachine is evented adapters for an ORM (any ORM). You've always been able to talk to MySQL over an evented socket, but that's clumsy compared to DataMapper.

I am still totally not sold that Ruby threads are tenable, so a lot of the "advanced" stuff in EventMachine does nothing for me. It's great even without it.
Their pain your gain? Lawyers in doldrums over decline in key metric
Look more closely at Ruby. It's Japanese [incr tcl].
I will miss seeing everyone there!! Baby George and I will have a "milk" toast in celebration. Have a fabulous time.
It's interesting that the vast majority of us would have seen all those films and never noticed... I get the feeling that now every time I watch a recent movie I'm going to be thinking of this post.
This looks awesome. I love apps that go after markets that would typically be thought of as "unsexy".

From the looks of it you get the game like elements of a Rockband, but a longer term benefit of learning to read music. I imagine it will be kind of lame on the phone due to size, but with an iPad or keyboard accessory it will be amazing.

I'm not sure how big the market for sheet music is. However, consider the kind of people who learn to play instruments: children of well educated, affluent parents. The addressable market could be bigger than a lot of markets that seem large on PowerPoint slides, but are unaddressable because of market limitations (e.g. iLike).

If you can pay for a kid's piano lesson, a few dollars for sheet music will be nothing.

I'm really looking forward to this!
Showcase of Chinese Web Design
Interesting piece on Chinese web design market and how many of western assumptions are challenged or not applicable.

'Chinese is rooted in hieroglyphic characters. Typing in Chinese on an alphabet-based keyboard can be slow, especially for middle-aged and older users. So, you will see that some website user interfaces are extremely busy: text and image links everywhere—”the more, the merrier,” as Rex Song points out. These websites are designed for clicking, as opposed to searching...'
PayPal to Introduce Cheaper Way to Process Small Transactions
My experience has been mixed. I used an Apple machine for a 3 years, then when I picked up a serveresque power box, ubuntu for a year, now I'm using a win7 on the same box. I briefly tried the hackintosh route, but it was unsatisfactory.

Now I have a strange arrangement: "home" stuff like address books and calendars and music are in the mac world. Applications that require CPU like document creation, web browsing (e.g. with a working version of flash), movie viewing (netflix), games, etc are done on win7. And development/hacking are done on ubuntu (in a vm).

That pretty much characterizes my opinion of the platforms. Linux just completely lacks polish -- even with the latest and greatest ubuntu release, most of the apps you use outside of the web browser are... substandard, sometimes compared to even the same app running on windows -- and not well integrated. When I was running ubuntu, I would have to play sysadmin at least once a month to get some odd thing working.

OS X is great, but if you want a server box you have to pay 3x more than you really want to get it. Sure, you might get equivalent value, but I don't want an 8-core xeon machine in a fancy case, I just want a cheap reliable machine without a monitor built into a chassis.

Win7 is also great, but is similar to Linux with more application and hardware support. I don't have to play sysadmin as often or at all, but the integration is still fair to middling. Consider how contacts are managed on linux and windows compared to OS X, and the difference becomes striking.
I'm in a very similar situation - I don't have any great advice, but I'd love to discuss "offline" and hear whatever conclusions you come to.
So... having private info stolen == bad company, releasing private info == good company.
I'm going to try to paraphrase your concerns that the privacy fears are overblown and we're just losing something valuable, I hope you don't mind, please tell me if I got it wrong:

>> It's not ideal, but basing hiring decisions on real information (even if 'private') strikes me as better than using uninformed prejudice. In the example you give, is it better or worse to have the HR person say "Homoiconic? Sounds gay to me!"? I don't see much increased risk in offering a deeper pool of inherently unverifiable information, even if this information might be used badly.

Paraphrased: "They have poor information sources for their prejudice now, I don't see what harm better information sources driving their prejudice could do."

>> This is a good debate, but for me it's a secondary one. Even if a privacy-safe solution is theoretically possible, I fear the only likely outcome will be that Netflix buries a 'release authorization' somewhere deep within their terms of service and is dissuaded from offering similar data sets in the future.

Paraphrased: "The debate on privacy dangers is secondary, if Netflix refuses to release useful data in the future then that's the primary danger"

>> I also think that for my needs 'anonymize and release' is the only feasible solution. While online systems might be better than nothing, the approaches I'm interested in (kNN on GPU's, massively parallel cross-validations) really require local data and full control over data layout. But perhaps there is indeed a solution that works for everyone.

Paraphrased: "I was working on a project with the data, and the FTC ruling appears to have put a stop to that."
Having few comments doesn't make a story rank lower.
What always bugged me about Twisted, or similar design is that you have to really flex your brain to get proper error handling (or maybe I'm just not experienced enough with them? :) please correct me if I'm wrong) It seems that you need a lot of shared state to kill some other process that is connected to your action in some way... You need to set a flag that will stop the other code path in some place. Then you need to know how to resolve the conflict (is one process providing resources for the other one? how do you synchronise closing down?)

In Erlang (or a similar multiprocess / actor-based system) you just kill the computation you want to stop. It's up to the killed side (or their supervisor) to know how to handle it - but it doesn't happen during the next computation loop, or when it's convenient - it handles the condition now.
Every time I see Apple, hardware, and praise together I sort of reflect on my own experience of having to drive out a number of times over the course of a 6 week period, bringing out my wifes laptop and then bringing it back. Each time we brought it back, the problem hadn't been fixed, and by the time we were done, it had developed several new problems.

It was annoying. Granted, she did have AppleCare, and because of the countless problems, they did replace her old MacBook Pro with a new one.

Which has been experiencing problems with the keyboard and wireless connection for the past several months. >_< Of course, we are out of the original AppleCare now. Oh well. =)
I disagree and think it is, potentially, a big problem for android. For example I was all set to buy a (yet to be released) Xperia X10 series phone, but I'm holding back for fear of being stuck with a 1.X phone while the rest of the android world moves on to 2.X.

Generalizing from this if too many vendors start to arbitrarily decide to only run certain versions, then android as a platform could be in jeopardy since developers will have to decided between targeting some lowest common denominator, only developing for a subset of android phones or developing several versions of their app. Once users experience that they can't run certain android apps on their new android phone then they'll lose faith in android as a concept.
Von Neumann machines, set to disperse and report back, could search the galaxy in a fairly short amount of time - well, a few tens of thousands of years, but that's not inconceivably long for a civilization that would undertake this project.
So I'm going to add you in the "unsure" category. (grin)

Thanks for the feedback. You made my day! I love negative feedback. So much of running a startup is getting any attention at all. If they hate you, at least they're listening.

Appreciate your time, and I'll work as hard as I can on the value proposition.
Mobile outdoor augmented reality
Ruby's OO is nicer than Tcl's in some ways. Incr Tcl is sort of an ugly attempt to make Tcl look a bit like C++. Indeed, the Tcl core team came up with their own OO thing recently, that actually looks a bit more like Tcl:

http://wiki.tcl.tk/18152
can someone explain this without the useless buzzwords?
Really cool, but I'd love to see the code you use to monitor your gmail account as well.
Hey, I don't hate. Just trying to help! :) I deeply admire anyone trying to do their own thing.
Taxonomy vs. Metadata
The Dropout Economy
> It isn't so much that the manufacturers don't "allow" people to, it's that they need to update their drivers to support the new versions. (For instance, for a long time the custom Android 2.1 ROM for the Sprint HTC Hero did not support the camera). Carriers are also pretty terrible at approving upgrades.

This reminds me of a sort of retort to linux on the desktop not being so great, that "Linux is the kernel, it has nothing to do with GNOME usability issues".

The details don't matter to the end user, what matters is brand Foo doing what they expect brand Foo to do. The real question is, are they expecting their Google Android phone to behave a certain way, or are they expecting their Motorola Droid to behave a certain way?
Totally missing any sort of reference for Partial Differential Equations (except in one section of the mathematical methods book), Dynamical Systems (incl. Chaos Theory), Calculus of Variations, and pretty much the entire Applied side of the mathematics spectrum.
And I appreciate it. I should have said "if you confuse them and they call your app ugly"

I'm learning today that there's too much of a cognitive load in coming to the app fresh and seeing so much text from everywhere with so little context. There's too much inertia in the average reader to spend any time at all signing up. The site is ugly. People confuse the featureset with tumblr.

This is all tremendously good stuff, and you can believe me that I am taking notes. You've been a great help.
Not sure what parent meant exactly, but I'd say that requiring a consumer to know what a "Snapdragon CPU" is is a bit of a non-starter.
They appear to have made a javascript widget that lets you put twitter on a page.
The best reason to keep identity in your logs is spam prevention. It may not be a big deal now, but it will be if this works out.
Parallel Programming With OpenMP (from Beej)
This happened to me as well.
http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/software-update.html
I am still totally not sold that Ruby threads are tenable, so a lot of the "advanced" stuff in EventMachine does nothing for me.

FWIW, threads based on an event backend are a solved problem in Perl. The Coro library is what EM is trying to be; they should really take a look. ("Oh but it's PERL!!!!" Yeah, and it actually works.)
> Apple barely.

Citation.
A Java Simulation of the ENIAC
I'll be at the meetup.
A more interesting control would be to have two groups: one which had no direct experience in proving a statement, and another that had empirically proven a statement. You could ask a group of normal folks whether equilateral triangles always have internal angles of 60˚ and then you could ask some mathematics grad students the same question.

The key distinction I'm going after here is whether a fact believed on authority or believed because of empirical proof. I believe that the earth rotates around the Sun and that gravity accelerates things at 9.8m/s^2 and that there once existed a fellow named Kublai Khan (who in Xanadu did a stately pleasure dome decree). But I believe all of these things because I read about them in books written by experts, not because I made observations with a telescope and did the orbital calculations, or because I've timed dropping objects from various heights, or because I've examined the historical record of the Yuan Dynasty.

Presumably an expert who has done the empirical work will not accept these facts on the basis of belief, but on the basis of real-world observed evidence/proof. That ought to trigger a different part of the brain than in someone who believes a scientific fact based on the authority of scientists and the scientific method.
Specifically, I think it uses the visitor's current Twitter session, assuming they're already logged in. This is opposed to sending them to twitter.com with an icon link. Should get people tweeting about sites faster.
Robert Geroch's _Mathematical Physics_ (despite the title it's really just a broad, shallow overview of graduate-level math and covers virtually none of the traditional "mathematical physics" curriculum). Best math book I have ever read (the emphasis on motivation by example and visual, intuitive presentation of concepts, theorems, and proofs is second to none). This is really just a bunch of lecture notes and reads like one - except Geroch is likely the best teacher you will ever have.