skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fair enough. The point I put poorly there was that many people who like the movie are drawn in/back by the emotive landscape; usually one of the main things they have to say about it. Obviously that's supported by the 3-D, but I have a hunch that it has much more to do w/ my first point re: making the strange familiar. But you're right; that remains to be seen.
Point taken, but who asked for your money ?
Here's why I don't like MacPort. If I compile a much needed new library by hand, installing a program that depends on it shouldn't cause MacPort to download and recompile EVERYTHING by itself again instead of using what's already there in Apple or compiled. And why does MacPort have 20 times more dependencies than the same program in Fink? And since it's MACPort and there are only so many types of Macs, why aren't programs in binaries yet?
I do think the share links are too prominent on the site, but I have used them and statistics show that in general people do use them. Just find a way to make the stand out more than the share links.
Danah Boyd: How Technology Makes A Mess Of Privacy and Publicity
>We've also got to face the fact that human spaceflight is a prestige project with no scientific value. It's time to force NASA to focus on science.

What about the scientific value and long-term species survival value of trying to make it so humans can survive in space long term? Learning how to colonize the moon and other planets?

Getting anything sizeable past low Earth orbit is still something that takes an amount of investment well outside the abilities of all but the largest companies. Governments make up a very large percentage of the few entities that have the capital and long-term vision to get us over the first hurdles.
You think there's no difference between Western and Eastern Europe? Really? You insult both regions, and your pomposity is making me a little nauseated.
> I want to be able to tell others in the future, that I was one of the first to partake on the shift from laptops to tablets.

You'd be partaking in the shift from laptops to tablets (assuming that will happen as radically as that) if you worked on developing a tablet or something like that.

Ordering a consumer device is nothing to tell your grandchildren about.

Personal achievement is.
Getting stuff out of the atmosphere with chemical rockets will always be extremely expensive. The only way it's going to get significantly cheaper is with alternative lifting methods, such as an electric powered space elevator.
> You earn more money and spend more money, but on average it's the same proportion.

Proportions of spending are not a good comparison of wealth between countries, only within them. People tend to live approximately at what they can afford, perhaps borrow or save a bit. Most people will spend 30-50% on housing and 10-30% on food, just because they will adjust their tastes to their means.

What you can afford with the X% however differs greatly between countries.

In most of Eastern Europe, spending 30% of your income on housing will get you a 30-year loan for a 600 sq. foot apartment in a "soviet projects" style high-rise apartment block. Only middle class can afford a car, and only the upper middle class or wealthy have more than one car per family and a house in the suburbia. It is common for three generations to live together to save on housing and childcare.

Also, while the prices of services are adjusted to the local labor rates, import goods are not. A new laptop is a significant purchase - similar to how you buy a car in the US.
Processing 1.1 Released
From the change log:

-----------------------
PROCESSING 1.1 (REV 0179) - 11 March 2010

This is the first general-purpose release since 1.0.9. The text below merges
all of the changes from all the interim revisions, with the exception of the
changes for the upcoming Android tools, which are not enabled in this release.

Lots of bug fixes over 1.0.9, and several changes that improve how fonts are
handled. Because of the large number of changes (and that some functionality
actually changes, if that's actually a word), this is release 1.1 instead
of release 1.0.10. Which is nice, because release 1.0.10 sounds baffling.
-----------------------

Briefly, lots of bug fixes, android stuff, and font handling improvements.

Download here : http://processing.org/download/
Google gets much of their data from Tele Atlas (now TomTom): www.teleatlas.com. The other big player in geo data is NavTeq: www.navteq.com. I think there are some crowd-sourced public geo databases as well.
Free copy of Stroustrup
Doing some house cleaning and came across an extra copy of Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language" that I don't need. Free to the first person who sends me their mailing address. ron@flownet.com
I recognize Mixergy, but don't recall what they do.
There's also http://www.mylifeisg.com/ which I think is related to MLIA because MLIA links to them. But people don't seem to care about it much given that it currently just says:

Error. The g_config table is empty or does not exist
Not yet, maybe not ever. Until I come across a really compelling use case for one I probably won't buy one.

I also think that with stuff like this it is much better to let other people find out that first releases of pieces of hardware can have all kinds of issues.

If at all, then by the time the hype has worn off and I have had a chance to play with one for a bit, and after I've seen what the use is of a device like that.

I've never owned a PDA because I thought I didn't need one, use my cell phone to make voice calls with and as a camera, very rarely to browse the web.

I love technology but I can't get excited because of hype alone, I need to see it, play with it, think of stuff I can do with it that I can't do in another way.

I have a little 3G netbook that gives me as much or more functionality than what I can imagine I could do with an ipad.
"No scientific value", eh? If you contemplate the implications of that statement for the briefest of moments you will be staggered by how wrong you are.

Exploration leads to discovery. Medical discoveries of the effects of radiation and low gravity on the crew, previously unobserved properties of things great and small, things that men may notice that instruments are not designed to notice, and unknown unknowns that we can't yet imagine.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Men in space necessitate certain things: filtration systems, radiation protection, extracting water from Mars and the Moon economically, advanced materials, robotics. Terraforming Mars is one of the end-goals of human space exploration. Humans in space are an incentive to do so. Earth has finite resources, and an expanding population. This is science that we ought to contribute to.

Manned space exploration also causes people to be interested in space, to pursue degrees in science, and to contribute to research here on Earth.

That being said, you must surely admit that contributions to science can be indirect as well as direct, and that manned exploration of space provides both.

I am not in any way an expert on space exploration, but there are a great number of highly knowledgeable people who would love to elucidate the situation for you. ##astronomy on freenode has a bunch of bright people in it. Talk to them, or maybe #space, or take a trip to your local planetarium, museum, or university; get an opinion from someone who has some specific knowledge so that you can engage in debate from an informed perspective, rather than, say, rigidly adhering to things you thought up on the toilet while listening to political talk radio.
Robert Wright: Toyotas Are Safe (Enough)
Or dark energy.
I don't know about anybody else, but it's definitely not my kind of thing.
Real, free form speech recognition coupled with enough nlp that would allow a dialogue between a computer and a person.
... then why are businesses in Western Europe outsourcing to Ukraine, Romania and Estonia? There's still a divide.
Haha, awesome! I already posted.
You're right that the lawsuit itself was not Jobs's personal doing, but the acrimonious personal dispute between Jobs and Gates certainly was about 'look and feel' and the perception that Gates knocked off Jobs's innovation. Gates was brought in by Jobs and shown his project in order to get Microsoft on board for Mac software. Then Gates came out with what Jobs thought was an imitation of the Mac UI, an imitation he believed that Gates could only have done by copying what Jobs had shown him.

Jobs's perceptions in that case or in the current case with Schmidt may not be accurate or just, but that doesn't mean they don't play an important psychological role in Apple's current strategy toward HTC, Google, and Microsoft.
Make the chumby into a sleek, passively charged thinclient and you could have something that might compete in the ipad space as a home internet appliance. Make sure you have stuff like a camera, mic, touch screen, accelerometer, decent speakers and you have a lot of possibilities (it sits somewhere and displays a slideshow/clock/widgets, you pick it up and you could take skype calls or video chat directly with another networked device, record something and have it saved on the main pc, etc) The key though would be to make it cheap enough so that you could buy several and network them together in a household/office environment.
Suppose I have a real company, and I want to expense or capitalize this. Does anyone have experience with IRS rules on this? What if the guy is in the U.S.? Do I have to send a 1099 to every coder I rent in this fashion to protect myself and my company?
Who will write an android/iphone app for passengers to double check this?

Edit: Looks like they already exist:

http://www.google.com/search?q=iphone+taxi+meter+app
"For C++ and more complex projects, you can pick from the U.S and Europe." – I never thought programming languages where area-dependent.
It's interested that you look at it this way because I don't. I've always looked for product ideas like his that can bring in some nice cash but aren't going to make you rich. They are everywhere.

Before the wife, kids and mortgage show up, this seems to me to be the way to do it. Don't shoot for the fences. Look for the ideas that can get you enough cash in your pocket to move on to the next idea where you can shoot for the fences. You'll have the stability of the first income and the experience it brought.

(Hopefully this doesn't seem like I'm taking away from what Patrick has done but I think it's clear that this idea isn't making him a millionaire.)
Embrace Life - Always Wear Your Seat Belt
I'm sure your search terms had nothing to do with it. Thanks for sharing.
Or the LED Icon Set: http://led24.de/iconset/

(Though they look a lot like the Silk icons.)
Green Eggs and Ham uses only 50 words, 49 of which were monosyllabic.
I think that is it.

Sometimes you just get in the zone and get a ton of work done in a short period of time. Like when vision, knowledge, and desire converge with free time. It feels awesome.

Also, for these little side projects it is nice to be able to see __ hours / days as a sunk cost and see what happens.
relatively high ? $950 ?? That's not relatively high, that's simply overpriced.

and a recurring ???

I would not pre-order that until the price came down to what consumer electronics with this much functionality should cost, probably around the $40 mark or so. And that recurring billing bit for a feature that you could easily throw in for free is simply grafted on to make a spreadsheet look good somewhere.

Why on earth did you decide to complicate matters so much ? Your average consumer is not going to order these in quantities large enough to make it happen. A scaled down version that would cost $40 to $50 and that would simply monitor your electricity usage and report to a website (for free) so you can do your sampling using the simplest of pic chips would do wonders for energy savings and would be earned back in a foreseeable time.

Rule 1: keep it simple.

Don't break rule one.

Multiple hundreds of dollars are a completely different decision point than < 50, and as your volume goes up your costs go down further so your profits will rise. People visiting the site to see their stats and to compare their stats with other people in their neighbourhood (who gets to have the lowest electricity bill) would be a great way to create a community of energy conscious people.

There must be a better way to monetize that than to charge them for the privilege of supplying you with valuable data...

So, not 'more features' to sway people, less features at a much better price and a smarter plan to monetize your users in the longer term.
The problem for Google is that they're wholly dependent on their near-monopoly on Internet advertising, possibly the world's least rare commodity. (Can you imagine what a company that controlled a similar share of TV or print advertising would be worth?) It's easy to imagine a left-field competitor, like Google itself ten years ago, stealing a substantial chunk of their revenue. They're also vulnerable to a platform owner like Apple, RIM, or Microsoft choking off access to its customers. Either scenario would be apocalyptic for Google.
The punchy guy is an asshole. I've encountered the type many times; most often they have a burning compulsion to show me outrageous porn videos as some sort of weirdo masculinity test. There's not much you can do other than roll your eyes. And watch your back...I personally think this kind of behaviour is a sign of incipient sociopathy. If he screws up and is at risk of losing his job he'll cheerfully say you put him up to it.

Happily these types are a minority. Get a newer phone and before long you'll think of something fun and useful to do with it. Don't let episodes like this send you into a depression - I understand your frustration but people who are amused by meanness or fart jokes usually have sad shrivelled inner lives.

Of course, you could ask to try it out using him as a subject. Then keep 'punching' him way longer than appropriate. After which he's likely to avoid you for a while.
I don't know: dozens of new key combinations to learn even if you already know emacs.
I used to be a big fan of this book, but every time I tried applying the principles, I only did it in the 1-2 "insipired" weeks, right after reading or re-reading the book. Then, as time passed, I gradually shifted into my old habits.

I used to blame my weak willpower for a while for that - but now I think the problem could be with the book itself. I feel the problem is that this book focuses too much on the 'outside', the presentation layer, instead of the 'inside'. It's how to act like you're a successful, popular person with lots of friends, even if you're far from it on the inside.

Of course, many have noted that acting "as if" will eventually turn you into that person, I think that's true only if you actively focus on that goal. The book does not. It only occasionally pays lip service to "inner character" (ten pages about smiling a lot... and in the end "oh by the way, you actually have to be nice for this to work").

Having said that, I still think it's a very good book for many geeks who have no idea about social norms at all, to provide as sort of tutorial on this topic.
How on earth did that comment end up here ? it was supposed to go below a completely different one...
Example of Micro-studio Surviving off the App Store
You can choose any collection of digits and multiply them together. Then you can choose any digit of the answer as your secret, and you can list the remaining digits in any order you like. Trust me, there are lots of possibilities.

No, that's not the trick.
Nokia N70 Themes - N70 Theme Downloads
If you think it's not a lame mathematical trick, would you care to say how you think it's done? Or at least, say something that makes it clear to those who know how it's done that you also know the answer? Like, for example, tell us how it can go wrong.

Although I'm not actually involved in this event, it is the sort of thing that I follow closely, and on other occasions am involved in. I am especially interested to discover what people already know so I can avoid well-known, obvious or boring stuff, and produce things that are more challenging.
Anyone have this frame?

It looks like a good solution
I'll be honest. I stopped listening at "ADD society". It really took me from "listen to this guy give advice" mode into "grandpa's ranting again" mode.
That works as long as your example is visible. However, with voting the problem is that bad examples are much more visible than good ones.
The article left a lot unsaid (granted, readability would've been sacrificed to cover everything sufficiently). Here are some thoughts on a few of those missing things...

In real terms, the investments quoted actually had a negative return during 2009 (nominal interest rates mean little outside of an apples-to-apples comparison). With the unadjusted CPI rising 2.7%, those dollars can now buy less than they could one year ago.

The negative return actually suggests a lot about the economy (see Japan's lost decade -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_%28Japan%29). Here are a few of the conclusions one might draw:

- There is considerable fear remaining among investors.

- The government is encouraging risk taking and investment, while discouraging savings.

- US treasuries represent the risk-free rate in many traditional financial models; the traditional models are either changing OR returns that seem sub-optimal when compared with yields from 3 years ago actually have significant amounts of risk embedded in them.

- Banks & local governments can borrow at very low rates, thereby strengthening their balance sheets, making for a potentially attractive investment opportunity (this is, of course, dependent on how wisely you expect them to allocate the capital they borrow).

- The implications are far reaching. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

Take away: Look for inefficiencies and exploit them.
Tanzil : Quran Navigator
Kulli Nafsin Za'yi katul Mau't
I have to say I was thinking more along the lines of 'match me against criteria x and y'.
Needless to say, the trust part is the most difficult part I suspect..
Google and Apple used to be bound together in a common goal: break the Microsoft hegemony.

However, they had two fundamentally different reasons for doing so. Google wanted a free and open web, where they could develop awesome server-based applications. Apple simply wanted to replace Windows computers with Apple computers. Those two goals are increasingly incompatible.

Now that they've managed to make Microsoft widely irrelevant, these vicious fights look inevitable. I think it's healthy, actually. Hopefully they'll keep each other honest.
I used oDesk and found that because it is a corporation, I don't need to send them a 1099. And, because all the people work for you through the company, you don't have to do anything special.
I might put a tracking device on it. If someone steals it, I'll find him/her and try to recruit as a cofounder.
Shouldn't it be C++xx?
Responses for Summer 2010 Applications Delayed
Well, as others have pointed out you're wrong on it having no scientific value. But you're also wrong in a more significant way.

Remember two things. First, the Bush administration was all about privatization. It was practically a mantra for them. Second President Bush announced the plan right after the Columbia disaster. When you put things in that context you realize the Bush administration was actually using the moon mission as marketing for other private space endeavors. It's primary purpose was to inspire the public not necessarily to send people to the moon.

If successful the end result of the program should be to create a whole new industry of space entrepreneurs spending all kinds of private capital to service the space fascination that the moon mission inspired.

Also keep in mind NASA was spending $4 billion on manned space flight. That's $4 billion out of $3.55 trillion in expenditures or around 1/6th of 1% of the U.S. budget. It's still a lot of money but not that much in the scheme of things and I can think of things that I'd cut first (http://www.cagw.org/newsroom/releases/2009/earmarks-rise-to-...).

I was no fan of President Bush but on this he did the right thing.
Should I license a copyright for a remake of an Abandonware title?
I debated it, but instead I'm going to use the same money to buy a sony ereader and get an iphone when my contract runs up in a little bit here.
(I made a similar comment regarding a previous article along these lines. The same point applies.)

Even though the "United States gives up on space" narrative is temptingly simple, it's also (in my opinion) simply wrong, and substance-free commentary like this is disappointing. (If you base your opinions on the unsupported statements of old astronauts, you can look at Buzz Aldrin's comments for a different perspective, but I'd recommend doing your own research instead.)

Much of the gloomy commentary on this announcement is uninformed. Canceling the Constellation program is a forward step and an essential step---it makes possible the very dream, bold human spaceflight, that this article mourns. At the very least, read the Augustine Commission's summary report; it's only 12 pages. Note their statement of the goal of space exploration: "human expansion into the solar system". That's cause for excitement, not mourning.
I like to see how long it takes people to build things. (I do think everything the OP said is legitimate though)
Yeah, I realize that if litigation starts, it means, I lose, no matter what the outcome. I would need to make sure to avoid this at all costs... either by avioding the issue of the contract altogether or by hoping that they wouldn't find the site and put 2 + 2 together. (I think that no matter what this seems likely -it won't be a google killer or anything, if the company found out about it at all it would probably be random)
Apple already did differentiation, that's how they became a leader in smartphone products and sales. It took how long for the competition to "copy" Apple? How much has Apple's market share, and market cap, increased since the original iPhone differentiating point? Maybe it's time Apple start differentiating their products again, now that the tech that made them different to begin with is commodity.
FWIW, I hadn't heard about Duck Duck Go until this article. And I think I spend a fair amount of time on HN...
I did a live version of this kind of site. Very simplistic and anonymous. Haven't done much with it because I've moved on to other projects. http://lovingthat.com and http://complainaboutthat.com
While I agree that it's usually a disclaimer, I don't think it's always done with such nefarious intent. "I made X in a weekend" indicates that's the thing you made is probably a relatively basic application, not necessarily out of fear that someone won't like it, but more to inform people not to expect a ton of polish or complain about a lot of missing features. I think it's legitimate and informative in these cases.
Shafqat here from NewsCred, one of the startups included in the poll. Interesting results - I'm not surprised only 8% had heard of us. Our consumer site (www.newscred.com) has gotten decent traction and press, but nothing out of this world.

Our main business (http://platform.newscred.com) has no publicity or marketing attached to it. We've just been heads down, working away on the product and iterating with customers using typical customer development strategies. With that said, it's a sizeable business and growing. And some stage, we need to turn the marketing machine on.

But the real question I debate internally is "how important is brand recognition." Obviously it's priceless for the Cokes or Nikes of the world. But for a startup that has a clear path to customer acquisition, has figured out its ARPU and is having success with sales, how much focus should be spent on 'brand-building?'

Thoughts?
C++0B