skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"For such an important piece of Android, the Marketplace is remarkably shitty."

True, but OTOH, you don't need it. You can locate apps reviewed and recommended on Web sites, and install using a qrcode.

I'd still like to see the marketplace improved. Given that there are few restrictions on what gets in there, having some better search and filtering tools would be a big win.

Maybe Google needs to buy a search company ...
Isn't the problem format a teeny bit underspecified, as in shouldn't the input format also indicate who submitted the article?
I thought you were being sarcastic, but that is indeed gorgeous.
Trying to deal with hotel issues that come up at the 11th hour of negotiations for my 'Rails 3 on the Beach' event I am hosting in Jamaica in August.

Things never go as planned...I know computers can be difficult to deal with some times, but people are even more unpredictable.
I've heard it from my friends that are Art Directors that the people working on high-profile direct marketing are regarded as the best in the field and earn a lot of money because they are good at what they do.
This sounds very interesting. Will it be open source?
trying a programming puzzle on rosettacode
http://rosettacode.org/wiki/24_game/Solve
Metsikas Residence website - Thessaloniki
Working on my online game. Hopefully it will be more in a playable condition soon enough !
Remember The Milk is good, but not open source - http://www.rememberthemilk.com/. It is clean and gotta love the vim like shortcuts.I believe it has task sharing.
I'm going to see if I can make zlib a little faster with some SSE intrinsics.
I think you are right about the dreams being related to better sleep cycle.
"It takes more than the founders to build a successful company."

Not if you are looking for a 50 million payout. Which, the article seems to imply, is the average buyout amount these days. I believe pg and co managed to make around that much a decade ago. By the time you hire employees you'd better be shooting for a lot more and have some convincing reasons/data why you have a shot at succeeding if you want to get talented people to join you.
A Tale of Two Cities, Les Miserables, To Kill a Mockingbird, Hamlet -- all full of opinion and rank speculation. At best, educated guesses. :P
Cloud2db - Universal database for Cloud Computing
That's a fair point. Sanctions seem to be relatively useless against despotism (North Korea, Cuba, Iraq).

However, South Africa was an advanced democratic capitalist state, and its stability depended on links with the Western capitalist system. Italy is probably even more vulnerable to such pressure.
I'd love to understand your logic of apple being 'the only ones that could manage it at the scale they're shooting for'.

What about Blackberry (outsells iPhones I believe), Nokia, etc. This is not a mature market and there is still boatloads of innovation to happen. What advantage does apple have over anybody else, with the exception that they brought out a device which set a great standard to measure competitors against.

If webOS had been a year earlier, would those positions be reversed? If so, would you be saying Apple should give it up?
Sadly I think he's being too optimistic. Palm had a sliver of a chance back when android was in it's early stages. If they'd managed to get some traction back then they'd at least be able to compete. But now their stuck in between two companies with mountains of cash who will do whatever it takes to win. That's not a situation that a new marketing plan can fix.
Playing around with streaming video and Adobe Stratus, and contemplating making my own Chatroulette-like site.

Let me know how well it (doesn't) work:
http://cam-mash.appspot.com/listen
Thank you! Took a lot of time and work. And the landing page is pure art, serves no purpose whatsoever. Still a lot of fun.
I'm in the process of leaving my job to start my first company, so my time tonight is split between writing wiki articles for my soon-to-be-ex coworkers and creating a minimally viable product.
lipton green tea
http://emp.ly/ - a job posting and sharing tool for hiring via social networks.

P.S. Don't forget: It's the last few days to apply 4 many startup incubators: http://shrt.st/cs7 (NYC Seedstart, Openfund, i/o ventures, Sproutbox, YC). Great chance to learn from best of the best. Also let me know if I have missed any from the list.
Ask HN: How was the Seattle YC meetup?
Curious to know how it went, format, topics discussed, people you met, etc...
I know you meant it as a joke, and it is indeed clever. However, usage of 'gay' as a pejorative is kind of offensive to some of us. Please be careful with your puns.

Edit: Seriously, guys, I'm trying to be as civil as possible here. What's with the downvotes?
Howard and Leslie is a great example of what can be done in this exciting new medium.

http://howardandleslie.blogspot.com/ (slightly NSFW dialogue)
Nike Air Force 1 Supreme Hi Deep Burgundy Sail
Missed opportunities in Publishing
I totally agree. Symbian and Android are open sourced so there is no chance any other manufacturer would be interested in paying to use WebOS. They should have open sourced from the start.

Their problem is that unlike other companies, they don't want to give anything back (and this annoys consumers).

This strategy works for Apple only because there are many who are heavily biased towards Apple, and Steve Job's often deceives them (like during the iPhone launch, he strongly implied he invented Multitouch, and that no other manufacturer would support multitouch because Apple patented it).

Furthermore, nobody even seems to be selling Palm phones here in Australia. Since palm are the only manufacturer which makes WebOS phones, that means nobody in Australia uses WebOS. That being said though, Palm's phones aren't that great anyway
Finishing up a few homework assignments then keep on teaching myself Lisp. I probably should learn a bit more LaTeX at the rate i'm inserting equations in Google docs though.
Very, very cool app. Nice job.
Ask HN: How did you learn programming? How long did getting good take?
Go.
How do you hear about these grants? Are there any sites that specifically focus on available grants?
I suspected as much. Microsoft seems to have started from the GUI and worked their way down to an API.
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs) article is a good start. Most notably the /proc filesystem which represents the state of kernel was lifted straight from Plan 9 into Linux.

As for the success of Plan 9, this quote on wikipedia sums it up -

Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.
agreed. it's pretty clear to me now that basically if any reasonably intelligent engineer, with a reasonable understanding of what tools/patterns are available to him in devising a solution, sits down and devices what seems to him to be a pretty obvious solution, that, according to the USPTO, it's very likely patentable. So it becomes a race to see who is the first person (who are we kidding here: large company) to reach the USPTO with the right paperwork. Little guys lose. Mind-blowingly dumb.
If we're going to be using Adobe apps, I would have thought InDesign would be more suitable.
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Just finished plugging memory leaks.
Learning to use Joomla.
10 minutes longer!
I presume the downvoter thought I was being condescending, but I was commiserating! That's the exact pattern I've fallen into too many times : /
Thanks for this idea! My Thesis adviser helped a few professors at MIT review chapters of their textbooks before they were set for publication. I'm going to email him asking if any of his peers are still in the review process. Do you have any suggestions yourself for who I should contact? I sit behind support@crocodoc.com if you do.
Should we be worried that our cars are controlled by software?
How to Spot Suspicious VoIP Signals
Working on chapter two of a book I am writing on how to increase conversion
Here's the template version:

U.S. Appl. No. <somenumber>, <some guys>, System and Method for Doing This Really Pretty Obvious Solution To Some Problem That Thousands of Engineers Have Been & Would Otherise Continue To Be Independently Devising In Isolation For Quite Some Time Now Thanks, <date>. cited by <whatever> .
Dude, where’s my bookshelf?
Yes, it's quite arbitrary. The bar analogy sucks. (Most analogies suck.)

The only difference between YouTube and Amazon EC2 is flexibility of purpose. You can do many different things with an EC2 account because it was designed to let you do those things. You can upload videos to a YouTube account and not much more because YT was designed to do one thing well.

What they have in common is that they are both hosting services and apps platforms. They both host your data and applications. The fact that the "window" into EC2 from the outside is whatever the account holder wants it to be, whereas the window into YT is just YT's interface... is totally irrelevant.

The bottom line is that both Amazon and YouTube are hosting your data on their servers, and allowing you to present that data to the public at large. If one of them is responsible for legality of your content, then both of them must be.
Writing copy for webpages of a service that helps ecommerce sites with high chargeback rates reduce fraud.
Copy for my current project: http://readwarp.com. I'm trying to come up with three short sentences for the front page to describe a) What it is, b) What it can do for you, c) What you should do next.

If you can figure out what it does, you tell me :)
Sorry, I've already patented a "System and Method of Reading Websites To Come Up With Ideas On What Patent To Study and Write a Quick Report On for An IP Class One Might Be Taking"

my license rates are reasonable
I thought the ad campaign was pretty good. What I didn't get was why it was taking forever to get the developer network going ... the iPhone with its developer program and the iTunes apps store was already out there. Palm should've had that in the bag before launch.
Facebook Granted Patent on the News Feed
Congrats guys!

I met with the team a few hours after their launch on TC. Phone bleeped; they'd gotten their first paying customer! Exciting.
Coffee is not bad for you, as long as it is consumed in moderation. I have one cup a day, usually mid-morning, and experience no adverse symptoms. Granted, consuming any caffeine after 3-4PM can disrupt your sleep cycle (even if you easily fall asleep, it can cause you not to sleep well), but there is nothing harmful about 1-3 cups a day in the AM. There are several studies indicating coffee is even a preventative for a few diseases (diabetes and heart disease, among others), and it is a well-known fact coffee contains high levels of antioxidants.
Don't worry, the USPTO doesn't know how patents work either.
Tonight's projects included A/B testing, practicing piano, and making a delicious sausage pizza.

I'm currently considering jumping on the Feynman diagrams posted by dwwoelfel, because I kind of miss doing them.
Neural Nets Use Electronic Acid to Produce the Finest Displays
Full time. Building a programming language is no small task!
Excedrin is probably the most popular example in the US--it contains 60mg of caffeine.
It's not in any state for public use yet. The UI is very buggy, and the annotation system doesn't support more than the latin equivalent of "See Spot Run".
I started programming BASIC when I was 9 after finding some code in my school math text book. I had a VTech PreComputer1000 [1] which had a button labeled "BASIC" - so I put two and two together a figured out that I could type in the code from my math book into the computer and make it run.

From there I was hooked.

How long did getting good take? Well, that was 16 years ago, and I think I'm still working on improving everyday. But, how long before I felt proficient at it? Probably a few years or so...

[1] http://rasterweb.net/raster/computers/images/vtech.jpg
Best Technology Blog Profiles Which You Should Follow On Google Buzz
The 23-Year-Old Female Deputy Bureau Chief
This could be a great way to ask users for their feelings when an error occurs, like the Wufoos suggest -- "right now I'm feeling (adjective) about it":

http://particletree.com/features/on-asking-users-for-their-f...
Why did you need to create a new account to ask a question?

Anyway, it depends on how much you practise (in both senses of the word) and/or challenge yourself. If you're learning to build web sites, say, maybe by the 5th or so project you're beginning to feel like you know what you're doing. Maybe by the 10th you are confident enough of your skills that you feel like you can apply for a job, if that's what you want.

The key is to just start work on something ASAP.
I am working on a fantasy sports business. To be specific, this evening of work had to do not with building features but with actually mending relationships busted up by good ole email miscommunication. My advice is to say what you have to say on the phone or in person. Leave emotional discussions off of paper/email.
working on a similar idea.. :) maybe we should collaborate
Ask HN: Selling intangible goods (website) using Escrow, is it safe?
I'm about to sell a website on Flippa and the buyer wants to use Escrow. I have no experience with this payment service, can anyone advise if it's safe to use for intangible/digital goods?
I hope to finish the Rails Tutorial (http://www.railstutorial.org/) and then begin reading (and experimenting with) Agile Web Developing with Rails (http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Web-Development-Rails-Programmer...).
Reverse engineering a C++ game and patching it. The usual thing fans do to fix their favourite broken games :)
We're not talking about Italy's hatred of a lolcats video. We're talking about a video of 3 kids taunting an autistic kid. If someone put that video on their home server and showed it to the world, they'd (hopefully) be just as liable as if they put it on YouTube.

If Italy is fine with lolcats on YT, presumably they'd be fine with lolcats on my home server.
Timing and quantity matter. I get the best results (better then no caffeine at all) with a cup of black tea at my lowest point of the day, which for me is around mid-afternoon.
No offense to anyone involved, but someone with an undergraduate degree from 2006, no matter how bright or congenial, seems a bit young to be a director of BD. It seems to me that YC would have been better served by an individual with more practical business experience, especially for one who will be passing judgment on prospective candidates for funding.
Watching some cloudera videos. http://www.cloudera.com/videos
Google got us by the Profile
its most probably a scammer
Simply put: Happy Thanksgiving
I'll agree completely that marketing isn't the problem. The problem isn't product either. The problem is focus.

Palm's target market was 'the fat middle', which meant people who want a little calendaring, a little media, a little web browsing. The problem is that people don't want a middle-of-the-road device. People want things that are awesome.

Palm met their target. The Pre does everything, and does it pretty well. Multitasking, 3D gaming, calendaring, to-do lists, social networking, email, photos, and (as of tomorrow) video. It has more features than an iPhone, and is elegantly designed in a way that Android never will be.

However, there's nothing it does obviously better than the competition. Blackberries have better email. iPhones are better media players and game machines. Android has Google Nav, Google Voice, and phones with ginormous screens. Other than the (incredible) multitasking, there's no clear advantage to buying a Palm that'll fit in a 30-second sales pitch.

They need to pick a market segment, and go after it hard. Business people, young people, somebody. There's a saying in politics: "The only thing in the middle of the road is roadkill."
One day, I will be able to load my saved items...
Live jazz hip-hop at a local bar, no cover
Building a hotel site. Fixing some irritating join statements when searching by station name (it's for Tokyo).
My project: a "Foursquare meets Mafia Wars" game. You claim a real location, name it and defend it. Generate virtual currency over time and spend it on weapons. The code is complete and the family will be running some tests this weekend. Next, we will invite a few friends, get some feedback and figure out the next steps.
The serial interface for the MIPS microprocessor that I am going to be spending the rest of the semester implementing on an FPGA.
It's mainly dialog and speech based movie
What a sweet web app! Awesome monetisation options to do with extra props / characters / extra long movies.

Sweet.
That's great. Can't both co-exist?
Is this for CS164 at Berkeley? It sounds like the 164 project.
Writing a distributed control system in Io for my robot I'll take to the Sparkfun UAV competition.
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Patent office action response.
I've seen this used in the wild quite a few times. I'm pretty sure dome of the "universal share this button" widgets use history sniffing to put sites they know you use at the front if the list.
I dunno, I disagreed with your opinion so much I clicked your name, checked out your site and ended up watching the trailer for your game, just to see the kind of person I was dealing with that had an idea so contrary to my own. If you never made that comment, I would never of known about Overgrowth.
For me it wasn't like that, I used to drink coffee to wake up, after the caffeine wore off (usually after 4-5 hours) I would feel very tired and sleepy, so I have to drink more coffee to help me stay awake. And its a cycle. If I could just drink one cup in the morning, I would.

I know quite a few people who relates to this pattern and some don't. So I think its safe to say that it differs from person to person and not everyone deals with caffeine the same way.

One of my main reason to drink coffee is the caffeine I need to stay awake, so if I can replace that (which I did), there is really very little point of drinking coffee.

I know about the benefits of coffee, but its not the only source of high level of
antioxidants.
Not yet night here, but I'm just finishing writing up a heat-mapping multi-user system for work.

I should also be working on 10 other programming projects that are due by april 1st, and 2 other personal projects as well, but don't seem to have the time nor inclination.

I think I want to go with MikeMacMan's suggestion and drink. =)
I thought it was great. The format was very ad hoc, with people just standing around and talking. Definitely one of the better networking events I've been to. I talked to a number of YC alums and local entrepreneurs, got good feedback on a few startup ideas, and some advice on grad school. Not to mention free beer. I'll definitely have to start going to more startup/hacker events here in Seattle.
Winning National Novel Writing Month. I know that NaNoWriMo is in November, but I reserve the right to change February into another November in my personal timeline. I just have 618 words left. I've never written anything longer than about twenty pages before, and no fiction, so this was really a new and exciting experience for me. To my surprise, the book is actually pretty fun to read; I was expecting it to suck. I didn't know that any of this was even possible for me. This really has been an amazing month, and I look forward to doing it again when the official November comes around.

(On a more nerdy note, none of the existing word processors really felt right to me, so I'm using a text format of my own devising, a python script to convert it into TeX with the memoir document class, and emacs. And org-mode to handle the story notes. It's remarkably pleasant, and it was a fun way of procrastinating. Much like writing this post.)
Your freedom to swing your arms ends in front of my nose.
My DX seems to. I only ever switch the wireless on when I'm getting my weekly Economist or buying a book in the store.
http://speckleapp.com is good, but I doubt it's open source.
The Word API is really quite handy, and scripting it using Ruby (for example) is easy and effective. On win32.

Reading their binary format, though, is another matter.
Pretty sure you're not allowed to put caffeine in painkillers at all in Australia. I've certainly never seen it that I can recall. It sounds like an inherently dangerous idea to combine stimulants and depressants.

Also, you can get codeine over the counter here. You need a prescription for the higher strength stuff but you can get strong enough codeine without one. The pharmacist will ask you a few questions about why you want it but I've never been refused it. Costs 7 or 8 bucks for 20 tablets of the name brand stuff from memory.
Ask HN: What do you use for your site's FAQ?
I'm building a hosted FAQ application for companies and would love your feedback!
Wow, no kidding. And I'm certain items are missing from the beginning of the list. I know they're still saved somewhere, because I can't upmod those articles.
Mailing lists are worth a post or three. Short version: people opt-in like CRAZY. Greater than 50% off the top of my head. (This is one of those things that I didn't know that I didn't know. Everybody knows you're signing up to get annoyed with email, right? Oh no Mr. You Used To Be A Spam Researcher. Apparently some people like getting commercial email. I have users who will write me and complain if their newsletter does not arrive.)

What makes it worthwhile: I use it for seasonal promotions and lifecycle emails. Hey, you signed up for Bingo Card Creator last Halloween. You know what is right around the corner? St. Patrick's Day. You should play St. Patrick's Day bingo with your class. Repeat for Easter, etc.

Lifecycle emails are "You signed up yesterday. Here's instructions for how to use the software which I am mailing you mostly because I assume you have probably already forgotten I exist." and "You signed up seven days ago. Here's some advanced things you can do with the software which I am mailing you mostly because I assume you have probably already forgotten I exist."

All three of these emails result in enough people transitioning from "has account in database but hasn't logged in in last while" to "active user" enough to justify the penny an email it costs me. (I'll pay between a nickel and a dime to reactivate a user out of the Easter promotion. I pay upwards of a quarter to recruit a new user through Google AdWords. And the reactivated users convert better!)
Creating fixture data for an old project with no test coverage.
It's not that all direct marketers are good, just that it's a more mature industry which has done more conversion testing than us web folk have had hot dinners. When a failed conversion costs real money (in printing and postage), every increase counts.

The idea that direct marketers have something to teach us also probably spreads because it's counter-intuitive: you mean all those icky ads I grew up with were clever?
Can you elaborate on why you say that? Just so we can all learn something :)
About their sales strategy.

Pre were available in Europe very very late. 4th quarter 2009 I think and it still not available to some countries.

As a previous Palm user, I was really waiting to play woth the Pre, but the need of a new smartphone and the new android devices closed the deal.
Actually cooking for real is more leet fyi