skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's how I went about it and it was absolutely awesome. Look at it this way:

What are the odds that someone steals the exact idea you choose out of the many you have, sticks with it long enough to matter, AND executes past the first iteration? You're more likely to get struck by lightning. Let's say the roles were reversed with Facebook and those two twins supposedly took the idea from Zuck. Do you really believe they would have had the vision to iterate beyond a social network for college kids?

On the other hand, you can tell as many people as much as possible. You'll get a ton of feedback, find flaws, meet new people, and have opportunities present themselves you would have never had happen otherwise. The odds of that? Very very likely.
Ask HN: How to get into car engineering/making
Hello,

I'm an EE undergrad at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. As much as I love EE, I'd love to work in the field of car engineering (not necessarily as an EE though). I'd like to build cars with new technology, but I have no clue how and where to start. The only way I knew was to get a good degree and work at Tesla or other similiar companies. However I love the idea of being an entrepreneur and I can see myself creating something like that in this field.

Can I get the necessary knowledge about car engineering from books, or would I have to intern / work in this area a period of time before actually building something myself.

I thought that I could get into R&D through the university but I don't want to stay in academia for the rest of my life.

Where should I start?

Thanks.
The point curiously missing from the C&D article is that a car driving a full throttle will also be generating only a tiny amount of manifold vacuum. In most cars, more vacuum is necessary to provide the power-assist to the brakes, once any stored vacuum is used up. (The brakes will work, but losing power brakes for the average driver will be an upsetting event, especially with a stuck throttle.) They mention "don't turn off the ignition because that will cause you to lose brake assist", but fail to connect the no vacuum at wide open throttle to the same end result.

I'm sure the C&D test drivers were willing to mash the pedal and generate the best braking force the car was capable of. The average person, confronted with a stuck throttle, lost power brakes and the resulting "hard" brake pedal may very well not be able to summon the force required to generate full brake pressure. (It's an amazing amount of force compared to what you're used to using. If you're also the type to worry about flipping the car from putting the car in neutral, you're probably not going to bend the seatback applying enough brake pressure to get the job done.) I think I'd have expected better than the average driver from a trained highway patrol officer, though.
Tell HN: Jason Calicanis just launched "ThisWeekIn"
Can we get a [video] marker?
The most helpful book I've read about procrastination (and I've read many) is The Now Habit. It explains why people procrastinate, what they think when they procrastinate, why even simple tasks stress them out, how they can reduce this stress, why they feel they don't have a life, and specific chapters on how to deal with procrastinators.
Just to cite one of its dozens of ideas, advice like "just buckle down" and "tough it out" is part of the problem, because it creates resistance. Your natural response is thinking "that's true, I just have to finish it", which is wrong for two reasons.
First, if you "have to" do something, then it means you don't want to, so you fight yourself. You become your most severe taskmaster, you deny yourself guilt-free play time, you resent "having to" do that task even more, and procrastinate even more.
Second, when you think about finishing a project, you make it look overwhelming. As others here said, the right approach is choosing a point, starting from it for a few minutes, and see where it takes you.
My friends started a debate site a while ago, and I'll tell you what I told them.

For an part-time and fun project this is a very cool web app. I like the simplicity and it seems like a fun way to talk about various issues.

As a startup idea, you would do better finding an idea that doesn't revolve strictly on creating a web community from scratch.
Spicy Pi Bacon Squared: the ultimate Pi Day dessert! http://scienceblogs.com/pontiff/2009/03/spicy_pi_bacon_squar...
Interesting read. Curious to see what will emerge
Yes, the glucose idea is pretty implausible.

Better might be: available reserves of neurotransmitters.
I agree, and it is a part-time project I made for fun. Now I just want to get some users, and eventually make a few cents off of ads.
With the up vote and down vote arrows, have one or the other light up when you mouse over a specific one, instead of having both light up. It will make it clearer which arrow you are about to click.

I like the layout of the two sided debates over the debates with more than two sides. The two sided debates have the sides and results right in the middle at the top of the page. On debates with more than two sides, having the sides and results off to the right makes them easy to miss at first. The first debate I looked at was a more than two sided debate and because of the layout, I was a bit confused on what the sides of the debate were. It seemed like the comments were the sides because of their placement and the up/down vote arrows.
I think it's a widely accepted fact that, as a guy with an idea and a laptop you are worth zero without proper execution. So you have everything to gain by sharing your idea.

Things get trickier as you build value. There's still plenty of information you'll benefit from sharing, but it starts mixing with stuff you definitely don't want to share.

I see a common trait in a lot of successful companies: they found a healthy balance between too open and too closed.
New, But Not So Obvious, Features in .NET 4.0
Texas conservatives screw history
Thanks for the input, I just made the quick css change. You're right about the multi-side layout, but I couldn't really think of any other way to do it. Actually, I think if I put all the sides above the arguments horizontally they would be easier to compare and more visible. I'll test something like that out.
Allow pictures to be uploaded with your debate thesis.
Sometimes a picture or video can say more than words can.
Well, there are problems for which regular expressions are a perfect solution.

The problem is when you try to do something like use regular expressions to match HTML. If you know the least bit of formal grammar theory, you'll know how maladapted that is.
met% file ./bin/pypy
./bin/pypy: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.15, stripped
Venezuela's Chavez calls for Internet controls
Straw man. I was responding to the claim in the parent that it's speedy.

Don't know what you mean by artificial; it was the first test I tried.
Good idea, do you mean like a picture for each side of a debate?
I find that I procrastinate the most in the early stages of a project.

First, it takes time to decide what to do first.

There's also the spoon effect. I just made that up. The first steps you take still leave you so far away from your goal. But as you progress, say to the half-way point, every action has a proportionately higher effect on your progress. That's because I'm always focused on what's left. That last spoonful takes care of 100% of what's left.
> I'm surprised that it apparently fits people who complain to Apple's vision more than women in bikinis do.

FTFY.

Seriously, this is just another manifestation of how USA mores are more permissive towards violence than sexuality. Apple's an American corporation under US laws and community standards; what did you expect?
This is BS in terms of engineering, but it says a lot about the problem Intel has to solve to stay in business.

According to Hennessy & Patterson, 90% of performance gains come from better architecture. That's the tock. The other 10% came from clock speed [1], which was a side effect of better fab, the tick. But you mostly want better fab to get more transistors so you can build a better architecture.

So here's Intel's problem. They sink a huge amount of money (costs also follow Moore's Law) to upgrade their fabs before they release a new chip. Then they have nothing new to sell for a year or more while they fit it to the fab.

In the nineties they smoothed out demand by selling up-clocked versions of old chips, training consumers to think that more MHz = more faster. That's less effective now that clock speeds have stabilized, so they've been pitching lower power consumption instead. It's not really the same, because "faster CPU" in the 1990s really meant "it can run new software."

It will be interesting to see how this model will fare in the cloud era. If most CPUs live in data centers, most purchasers will choose based on power consumption and pay less attention to architecture.

[1] Until clock speed stopped changing. Clock speeds may even drop for a while to make parallel engineering easier. cf. http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Quantitative-App...
If Apple tries to make Bing the search provider, or takes away my Google service synching, I'll switch to an Android phone the next day.
How to start a PC HW business
screen border - POKE 53280, <color> screen background - POKE 53281, <color> (i could have those backwards but that's from memory...)
they are probably testing out how people use their tools.
if having the name of a city at one point influences where people are clicking, or if people are looking for one place instead of another, etc...
I think he is spot on.

BUT, the fact that he won't share his idea spreadsheet is very disappointing. My comment on his blog:

"While I agree completely with your thesis, this response makes the whole thing a wash in my opinion. Do you really think someone reading your blog is going to steal your idea, build a product, execute and deliver? I'd say the chances are almost non-existent.

Love the fact that you're telling people to share ideas and get feedback and be open, but loathe the fact that you won't eat your own dogfood. Saying it only applies when you show ideas to individuals is weak. But that's just my opinion."
Neat article. Reminds me of back in the day when the high-level language and the metal were very close. Fun times.
An optional picture so users can see what the division is about.
Now that Chrome Mac has extensions and bookmark synch, it's not just fast, it's awesome beyond words. I haven't even considered going back to Safari.
Interesting, if you skip the startup content, which content do you prefer? (Not being snarky, honest question).
It depends on what your goal is. If you just want to make money, there are a lot of boring (IMO) ways to do that.

On the other hand, I (and I'm sure many other HNers as well) like to make cool stuff. It would be nice if it turned into cash, but I would prefer to enjoy the stuff I code instead of hacking some small corner of the Internet for cash... that certainly takes innovative thinking, which I really respect, but it's just not interesting to me.
Here's the thing about that though: it would devastate Apple's profits. At&t hands over a hefty portion of the contract (where the real money is in wireless). Why would any carrier consider that with a nonexclusive phone?
Virtual Users/Domains With Postfix, MySQL, SquirrelMail (Mandriva 2010.0)
You sure that isn't just a backronym? It seems highly unlikely given its peers (/etc, /lib, /bin, none of which are acronyms) and given the system it lives in, which I don't think used the word "resources" anywhere else.

When I google I mainly find drive-by assertions that it means "UNIX System Resources" (and sometimes "User Specific Resources"). The closest I can find to something real is:

http://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/usr.html
I could not agree more. I work daily with xml encoded apis and it's never a simple task to parse and normalize data. JSON on the other hand gives you normalized types out of the box. Very handy.
You can try pisa (xhtml2pdf) here: http://www.xhtml2pdf.com/
Pretty robust. I am having some trouble with bidirectional support, but otherwise looks good - it's an all-python solution.
What problems did you have with fink?
ok, consider this quote "An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of the old inputs" (don't remember exactly who said it), so, when you share your idea to others and receive feedback, meaning you'll gather more inputs, and therefore you'll can have more ideas by combining them and you can also develop your initial idea into a better one (again, by combining your initial idea with the new inputs)
Can you elaborate? What is the difference? Is it that an issue tracker is more general than a bug tracker?
So I have this site, where I ask users/customers for input and after I evaluate it, I don't reply to the no winners because I don't have time; I get like 300 responses. Hmmm doesn't sounds like the right approach for any business. Yes, it is "standard" industry behavior, but IMHO not the right one. I could change the qualifying criteria to get fewer and more qaulity inputs that I have more time for etc.
Reminds me a lot of doodle from the screenshot. Will check it out - maybe I'll start using this instead of Google tasks for my own personal to-dos since that usually is such a long list sitting on top of my google calendar that I can't see my calendar -_-
+1 for FlySpray. It's PHP-based, and pretty easy to install and set up. It does take a few minutes to set it up to add your desired Task Types (TODO, Bug, Feature Request, etc.) and Categories. But once you've done that, it's quite easy to use, and looks pretty good too.
I don't have any more time for side projects, but lots of students in one of my HCI classes have built software to do stuff like this in a relatively short timespan (~4 weeks):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s5EvhHy7eQ
> BUT, the fact that he won't share his idea spreadsheet is very disappointing

I think you've fallen for the fallacy associated with "Ideas are worthless".

A lot of people assume that means "share it with everyone" - which is definitely not what this article is suggesting.

Share it with people you know, people you respect, people who you think will give input - but share it personally

If you are going to attempt to execute an idea throwing it onto HN (for example) does potentially devalue you it for you. The amount of extra input is potentially useful (though I doubt by much) but the chance of it being implemented by another shoots right up too :)

(of course; if you dont plan to execute now, or dont see yourself executing then sharing publicly is a good idea)
Nice! A well thought out reference. One thing: I wish that people would add RDF data stores to NoSQL discussions.
Send a Big-Ass Message
I hadn't seen Doodle before - it's quite interesting! A similar layout, but a different objective.

Maybe it's me, but I found it's quite hard to figure out what on earth Doodle is based on its homepage. That's why I like having an in-action screenshot on the homepage, and a "sign up with one click" button. Hopefully Speckle is a little more obvious.
Allende sought to to nationalise banking and redistribute land. That's not what people think of as centre-left.

European socialists (outside of Italy where everyone is mad) are generally solid on constitutional matters, including separation of powers. Whereas Allende created the crisis by trying to steamroll the supreme court on separation of powers.
Graphical timeline from Big Bang to Heat Death
That's exactly what it is (Sci-fi). It was never operational, just a mockup for propaganda reasons.

There is a very interesting video about the entire project here: http://vimeo.com/8000921
Note the double-logarithmic scale.
They cut out freaking Thomas Jefferson.

I can't even begin to express how disgusted I am at this.
The Economist has great coverage of what is taking place in Venezuela. There's almost not a week that passes without Chavez closing down a TV station or taking over some private businesses because, f.ex., they raised prices after he devaluated the country's currency by half.
This works for me in Firefox 2 and Opera 9.64... should it?

I guess basically my question is, what HTML5 features are used in this that they would be supported in Firefox 2 and Opera 9.64?
Microsoft Standard for Progress Bar Display
Wow I actually LOVE this hosted solution - minimal setup, easy to customize (can create versions/comps/severities with minimal effort. What really puts it over the top for me is the widget. I'm pretty sure that's going to 1.2x my productivity in terms of knocking out bugs =)
Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion [PDF]
I want to dig into Fossil as well. And I'm impressed that SQLite moved to Fossil in September 2009:

"Version 3.6.18 - Beginning with this release, the SQLite source code is tracked and managed using the Fossil distributed configuration management system. SQLite was previously versioned using CVS. --http://www.sqlite.org/news.html

And this page on the design of Fossil is interesting:

http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/tip/www/theory1.wik...
Saying it only applies when you show ideas to individuals is weak.

The problem with showing your entire idea spreadsheet to the mob isn't that someone is going to steal one of the ideas. The problem is the signal-to-noise of the responses.

When you sit with one person, in person, and go through the list, you get to focus on one idea at a time, you both get to control the agenda, you can both react directly to each other's social signals, and you've got a rapid-fire exchange of sentences. If the exercise proves to be a waste of time for either of you, you can cut it short.

None of this applies when you post a list of N things on the net and ask for "feedback". An arbitrary number of people will respond to an arbitrary number of the things, in arbitrary order, with arbitrary levels of engagement. Most of your visitors will, at best, be drive-bys: They might type out their thoughts on one of the points, but they're unlikely to stick around for ten posts' worth of back-and-forth, unless they're already your friends. (And, if they're your friends, why not run the ideas by them in person, over drinks?) And there's a good chance that the ensuing thread will be dominated by critiques of your spelling, cheap jokes about the funniest idea on your list ("Blog posts with a 140-character limit? Don't you know how to type? lol."), or an exhaustive discussion of one of your points -- whichever one happens to be the best at generating free-form conversation, which is a metric completely unrelated to how good an idea it is.

And, of course, the responses will probably be largely context-free. You won't necessarily know if that insightful-sounding response is from a potential customer, a VC, an employee at a big company, an entrepreneur, a con artist, or the Vice President. As the original article takes pains to point out, knowing who is critiquing your idea is really helpful.

Free-format brainstorming meetings do not scale well at all, even in person. On the web they're even worse.
The sponsors could be unrelated to the topics covered. People who read tech news still drink soda and drive cars.
Mantis is great. Easy to install and use. Definitely go with that if you're on PHP/MySQL. No need to fuddle with the rest.
I don't think the parent of your post was out of context.

Wikipedia is poor resource for recent political history, because people defend their history there. Heavily contested events like this, or The Dismissal in Australia end up with summaries that are sympathetic to the left-wing view of history. That doesn't make it right, it just means that people of that inclination are more interested in contesting the history than their opponents.

You do Miterrand a disservice by comparing his to Allende. Miterrand is an example of a socialist leader who worked within the bounds of his constitution.
Has anyone here tried pkgsrc on OS X?
Try Lighthouse, http://lighthouseapp.com/
Been using it and it's great
Fair point, but I dont think ideas are worthless at all. Given that he is not building startups to execute on these ideas (and alludes he probably won't be in the future), I thought it would make his case much more compelling if he did share. Maybe a few ideas... or just the headline idea without the detail.

I got into a bit of back-and-forth with him on the blog, but I did agree with his general thesis. FWIW, I think throwing out an idea on HN is not a terrible idea. The feedback and useful suggestions probably outweigh the risk, especially if you are already working on building the business (i.e. past the 'idea' stage).
I've found that useful too, at times. http://www.focusboosterapp.com/ is a nifty timer made just for this.
I like to think of an idea as a seed or germ of the real idea. It's from the most important part - the founders, their execution, market & product positioning are all much more important, but this also doesn't mean that every idea is a good one. I think that a really great founding team will eventually pivot and morph an initially not-so-great idea into something decent and viable, but really great startups must also come from pretty good initial ideas, or at least the initial idea has to quickly lead to a relatively good idea.
Dreaded Favors Asked of Web Designers
Innovators get Linux to boot in 1 second
I'm glad this his happening again--I heard about it after the fact last year and it looks like it could be fun.

I do wish that there was more information on the site though. It's very light on actual details.

A google groups thread (http://groups.google.com/group/mariocompetition/browse_threa...) has some more information, but not much more.
Suboptimal CSS Optimising (CSS pre-processing algorithms)
http://productiveblog.tumblr.com/
Just because you're outraged it doesn't mean you have to post this to every place you can reach.

How exactly is this hacker news?
So long as educating children is in the hands of the State, it will be subject to politicization from all sides. How can it not be in a democracy? Everyone hates it when a side they oppose gains the upper hand, and calls it "main stream" when their side prevails.
If a groups definition of working is just writing code it seems likely they will hit a wall where they are no longer improving. They might know their languages APIs better but they lose out on much of the larger communities gained knowledge.
It's the classic socialist play carrying itself out -- the ultimate end is death and destruction. Hopefully the Venezuelans will recognize what's going on and be able to stop it.
We could turn it into Hacker News. (When all textbooks are electronic and Creative-Commons licensed, will the problem of textbook censorship be less common... or more common? Discuss!)

However, I wouldn't bother, because this HN submission is not long for this world.

EDIT: See? I didn't even get this comment off. ;) Which is a good thing: This is not, in fact, Hacker News.
I'm not familiar with some of the solutions, but some of them got me wondering:

- Why is Tokyo Cabinet on the AP line? It's not distributed in any way by itself. It's protected by a single write lock, so it's definitely consistent. If they mean Tokyo Tyrant which provides a simple way of replication (even master-master replication), then...

- Why is MySQL only on AC line? If you do master-master setup with it, it could be on the AP line too. (and probably any relational db that does replication / clustering)
I could be wrong but it seems like MongoDB isn't really partition tolerant since it relies on replication or sharding (just like an RDMS). I think it is more of an AC (with a caveat on the C)
Someone please post a link to a video showing good AI playing Mario.
Agreed. Not only that, but they have an awesome API. I've used it to write automation tools for our build/deploy process. Never underestimate the usefulness of a good API.
Slither: Did you feel your spine chilling