skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whether others seem interested in the idea. I have only recently started projects that random strangers have sought me out over, and it is encouraging. Also, the feeling of a whether the idea can be achieved. I also shy away from things that feel too mundane (although those things are sometimes great businesses to be in).

I'll keep it going, what else influences how HN members have decided what type of companies to build?
The absence of light killed your eyes? Windmills do not work that way.
Good thing none of the modern browsers or web servers are written in anything like C.
If Theora gets sued over a patent that H.264 also violates wouldn't MPEG LA want to back up Theora as to not give credibility to the patent? If they didn't the suit against Theora would just strengthen the patent against H.264. I guess, H.264 can counter-sue to protect themselves, maybe.
Plausible deniability?
Anybody hiring in India? Or willing to take in an Indian developer?
Somewhat off topic, but has anyone seen this?

http://www.xgamestation.com/
"The XGameStation is the world's first build-it-yourself video game console kit."

.. cool stuff.
Why Facebook deserves to be a real Country (yes, people think like this)
Safari 4 didn't like it either. It looks like a self-signed to me.
Selling your company only makes sense if you think they can do a better job than you can.

There's nothing wrong with that. The person who's consistently able to spot talent may not be good at nurturing said talent. That's why some people are headhunters and others are coaches. It has nothing to do with meekness.
Yes. From <http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/>:

Input and output
* Dock connector port
* 3.5-mm stereo headphone jack
* Built-in speaker
* Microphone
* Micro SIM card tray (Wi-Fi + 3G model only)

It's likely the headphone jack is even iPhone-compatible (accepts headsets with inline microphones), though the wording above isn't clear.
Watch the Mexico vs Iceland Live
Of some interest in this statement is that wikileaks managed to crack the encryption. No matter if they release the crack, the way they did it, or the actual footage, the US DoD should take very careful note that it has been cracked.

This in itself is probably leak-worthy, in that quite realistically, other organisations with more at stake and more resources will likely have done the same without broadcasting the fact. And the chances are that these others will use this ability with more serious consequences [than posting the footage online].
I agree with the point that aarghh made. I also believe it stems from the idea that "that site isn't that complicated; I could do that myself--why would I pay someone $X per month for something I could do myself?" Unfortunately, if you're a software developer, that covers most everything on the Internet.
Not so much hijacked as it was downloaded to the server...
I'd heard airbnb mentioned a few times but never really caught what they did before. Awesome site, can't wait to try it out :)
some of the comments about rdiff-backup (below) might also apply to duplicity, since it seems to share much of the same internals (duplicity seems to be the encrypted version of rdiff-backup).
Email and Focus
I think a lot of people don't understand, and never will understand, what's so trauamtic about combat. It's not that you could die at any moment over extended periods...I came to grips with my own mortality on the flight to my first combat deployment. It's not seeing people die, most times we weren't sure if the lack of shooting was because they were dead, out of bullets, or trying to draw us out. It's not the sickening, overwhelming, stomach churning smell of the pools of blood. It's not that you are taking another life. For me, the biggest impact was the realization that I had to do my job, perfectly, or someone else would needlessly die. And my own life relied upon another person doing their job perfectly. You don't pull the trigger to stay alive, you pull the trigger so that the people keeping you alive stay alive. You don't question if the fight needs to happen...it just is happening, and your options is you and your squad dies or the enemy and their squad dies. There's no higher purpose, no moral agenda, no feelings, no dreaming of home. Eventually, the adrenaline wears off, but you can't even tell because you're basically numb to its affects.

And when you get back, even years later, people ask you about it. And you think up a couple of cheeky stories, but don't even try to tell most people what it's like because words can't accurately communicate the experience. You just continue on enjoying things in life everyone else discards as annoyances or commonplace.

Note: It's been a few years since I got out and I'm perfectly fine, well adjusted, no related problems, no PTSD, no nightmares, minor paranoia occassionally. However, the mental experience of each person is different, and many do not come out ok.
Yes, because without Empires, there would be no need for Jedi and then where would we be?
Firefox didn't either. I assumed it was a deliberate joke.
Learning About the Oreck XL Air Purifier and Purification Technology
Because of technologies, every year new ideas and innovations are returning up which are able to create our lives simpler.
Computer Science vs. Software Development
Anything by Beagle Bros.
Ask HN: Viable business behind single, better-mousetrap product?
I see little problems everywhere that could be solved by a single, more well-designed product (ex: airplane neck pillow that doesn't suck).

Any examples or thoughts on a successful model for selling such a product on the web? I'd rather sell it directly to consumers than distribute it to online retailers. I'd consider >10k units a big success.

Is direct response the only way to go for this type of product? At least some of my ideas are more sophisticated than the snuggie.
Any confirmation on this?
I think more of these types of Internet me-me pictures should appear at the top of the search results(maybe not so huge, but very prevalent). It gives personality to the business that is search. Why use Google when there is a search engine that provides the results you seek but does so with humor.
Top Free Wordpress themes
See Section 926 per http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-litan/proposed-protec...

1. Under existing law, startup companies can raise money easily and quickly from "accredited investors." There is no need for the companies or the investors to gain approval from any state or regulatory official.

2. This would change if Section 926 of the Dodd bill is included in any final reform legislation. That section would require, for the first time, companies seeking angel investment to make a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which would have 120 days to review it. This would both raise the cost of seeking angels and delay the ability of companies to benefit from their funding.
Google Voice was rejected in July of 2009. In October of 2009 AT&T unilaterally (maybe after seeing how the FCC was thinking) amended their customer agreements to allow VOIP over the cellular network. Once that camel nose came under the tent the difference between VOIP phones and the builtin phone started to go away. Now in March of 2010 Line2 has been altered and accepted to deliver VOIP on the cellular network.

As submitted, Google Voice had several problems, including a massive privacy violation that would have held up any app. It is reasonable to think that they could have worked through those. The "duplicates the dialer, voicemail, and SMS" seems to be the key objection that Google could not, or chose not, to work around, but at least for voice calls that is changing as evidenced by Line2. I never saw SMS come up explicitly, but surely AT&T would not be happy to see that cash cow vanish. The question is if they had enough foresight and clout to get it protected in their agreement with Apple.
I used to work for a company that was looking at making an SSL splicer. That was done in the context of a transparent pass-thru network device that scans and filters traffic.

The idea was that the client would install this device on their perimeter, generate a CA certificate for the device (on the device itself) and then install this CA cert on all internal clients. In other words the clients were assumed to be cooperating.

From the technical perspective it was a piece of cake. The project got shelved still, but only because they have failed to close the sale of the product.
Robotic fish powered by fuel cell consumes ~10mW
The founder is my college senior. Hold on for a while and I am sure he will address your issues.
A bit of digging found an article saying that, even as the number of women who go into the backcountry has grown considerably, the ratio of their fatalities has dropped -- from around 8% in the decade up to 2004, to 5:128 since (as of late 2008). It attributes the change to their taking avy courses in increasing numbers.
Well the decision on Google Maps was made when the iPhone first came out right? Before Android even existed, so before Apple even had any reason to fear Google. That doesn't explain why Apple hasn't now switched to something else though. Maybe cause Google Maps is just too good to leave out? I don't know.

What I do know is that Google Maps isn't attempting to commoditize smart phones like Google Voice is. So Apple has more reason to spite Google by rejecting Voice than Maps.
$45
This is exactly what I said a few weeks ago about Google pulling out. They are the Yahoo of China. Nobody gives a crap about them. People in the US are so ignorant of other countries that they believe whatever narrow-minded nonsense the media tells them. When I went to China 10 years ago, all I heard before going was how tightly censored the web was. Instead, I was able to go to CNN, WashingtonPost, and all my other normal news sites. Facebook is supposed to be banned in China, and yet somehow I'm able to communicate with my Facebook friends in China regularly. And I've never, ever been blocked from them.
My Erlang Religious Moment
This is also an important states' rights issue. The federal government technically says that California can't actually legalize marijuana. But they're going to do it anyway.

I hope this works out for them, if only because it will show the diminishing power of the federal government... which is the way it should be.
it'd be cool if you could keep the keyboard physically attached, maybe with a hinge mechanism of sorts.
They are, and that's why they're not safe to expose to the Internet.
James Fallows: One potential reason Google couldn't win in China
Try writing something that runs on the desktop, or perhaps a program that has no user interface at all. Sometimes it's fun to branch out from things that run in a browser.
One reason why Android is beginning to scare Apple is because the cell-phone carriers that aren't AT&T are marketing their Android-based phones against the iPhone with the good-old feature checklist. The iPhone gets one check "can receive phone calls", while the Android phone gets checks for things like "can play Pandora streams while you browse the web" or whatever.

People paying money for things like features.
Secrets of the Nexus One's screen: science, color, and hacks
Sure, this arm pillow (http://www.armadillow.com/) is a good example. They did an interview thingy on reddit here (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/axp6v/ive_used_the_int...).
It's from CACert (http://www.cacert.org/). In Chrome, click on the caution symbol on the right of the address bar to see the cert info.

Since his point is that you shouldn't trust the browser to decide whether to trust the CA, it sort of makes sense that he's on CACert...
But Line2 was originally accepted, with all it's iPhone-duplicating functionality, in September 2009: http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/02/google-voice-alternative-li...

And, at least if you believe the statements to the FCC, AT&T has never had anything to do with the acceptance or rejection of the Google Voice app. So Apple ends up looking rather hypocritical here, when all of it's stated reasons for rejecting Google Voice also apply to Line2's app and yet that app was accepted.
From what I read of the Digg article, it seemed they were hitting situations where doing some work in PHP rather than the DB was the most efficient solution. I don't find anything unreasonable about that; I occasionally run into situations where it's just not possible to get the performance needed while only using the DB, as does probably anyone who's worked enough with databases.

The specific case -- IIRC -- Digg mentioned was a query which required MySQL to generate a temporary table too large to sit in memory, so it ended up being done on disk. Moving some of the processing out of the DB query and into PHP avoided that, understandably resulting in a huge performance difference (in-memory versus on-disk has a way of doing that...).
Write android apps / websites in plt scheme.
Airbnb (YC S09) links travelers, hosts
Dominique Strauss-Kahn is the managing director of the IMF, not Ben Bernanke, he is the Federal Reserve Chairman and alternate governor to the IMF.

Bernanke has nothing whatsoever to do with the internal affairs of the EU.
It seems that a patent holder has more incentive to take a wait-and-see approach.

This runs the risk of allowing a laches defense, which patent holders probably would like to avoid.
Well he does probably determine long-term strategy with respect to competitors like Google, so he can set the tone under which the Google Voice rejection took place. And you never know, he might have been personally involved in a decision like that.
That would be an ideal outcome but oil rich nations don't traditionally pass the wealth down to the population. We haven't fundamentally solved any of the religious or sectarian conflicts however have improved security to stop the most obvious evidence of these conflicts. It's also very unclear what happens in a post-Malki Iraq or how the Iranian influence plays out -- or what happens when extremists rise to power via the democratic process. So ultimately I think we can reach a clean point in the near future to declare victory and leave the country in a better state than we found it but personally I don't see a future where significant US military forces aren't back in Iraq within the next decade. Politically I cannot imagine any situation short of spontaneous middle east peace that would justify this war even if the nation building project ends up being successful. A good parallel would probably be Vietnam. Public opinion has actually gotten worse about the Vietnam war over time even as Vietnam itself reconciled and prospered and the Soviet Union collapsed.
Well, one of the original goals of the Fields medal was to help entice young mathematicians to stay in academia and do research, in an attempt to counteract the lure of high-paying jobs in the outside world.
You had me at 'inadequately rockative'. I'm going to find a way to work that into a story if it kills me.
chipsy covers a good number of concerns, and I unfortunately don't have time to enumerate the full list of issues seen in both, so I'll quickly cover some of the higher level issues:

1. (asteroids) Tracking state in a series of global variables and then relying on that state in timer callbacks to implement your gameloop leads to unpredictable gamerate and framerates.

2. Embedding the core game logic in mxml file is "bad form". I would suggest creating a game class that is instantiated and called from within that initial mxml file, but it's basically to get the launcher.

3. (symptom) You have entirely too many, pointless loops. You iterate over the same list of objects numerous times in multiple locations. A good example would be in the most recent Level.as update() function. You iterate over the GameObjects 3 different times (not counting the inner loop for collision detection) when this can be reduced to 1 loop.

4. Variable names...they're poor. An example is:

for each (var object:GameObject in O) {

What is O? Scroll to the top of the function. O is the result of getObjects(). Well, getObjects obviously gets some objects, but which ones? What type of collection does it use? Go to getObjects() definition and it uses a Vector, but you use the name O to build the vector internal to getObjects as well. The variable name should, at a minimum, provide a hint as to what purpose it serves. game_objects would be good, or gameObjects, or activeObjects. And, I can only guess what RBC and WBC even mean. I'm guessing maybe it's red blood cell and white blood cell? Even the associated class files don't provide any information, so from the point of view of someone reading the code, RBC and WBC are random letter strings representing a "something"
And, if it was distributed computing, presumably we'd have heard about it and wouldn't be having this conversation.
New species of human ancestor found in Siberia
have you ever tried to fix a modern car? it's really not that hard. sure, you need a manual, and yeah, there are parts you can't fabricate with a good machine shop now, but it's still pretty accessible.
I've been using notifo to notify myself of the completion long-running computing tasks.

Growl could probably do the same thing, but I already have notifo working and I'm a cheapskate. (Plus, IIRC if I want to use Prowl I need to have Growl running on a PC somewhere).
The Iraqi war price tag is very likely going to exceed $1T so arguably they already got their payout. Unlike the private sector bailouts, which are being paid back and in fact turning a profit in some cases, tax payers probably won't be seeing much in return from the money spent in Iraq.
Some of the biggest companies with the most social impact were started to solve problems everyone (sometimes even the founders) thought were trivial first world problems.

Microsoft was started to write software for the Altair.

Apple was started to make personal computers when personal computers were considered less useful and marketable than calculators.

Google was started to make a minor improvement to search technology.

IBM was founded to tabulate census data.

Sony started as a radio repair shop.

Oracle was started out of a failed CIA contracting gig.

My point being, it's hard to tell beforehand what a "worthwhile" startup is. Often the founders end up solving a problem they didn't know they were working on. Sometimes, even when they solve a problem they thought was trivial and only interesting to themselves, they open up vast new frontiers of human knowledge through sheer serendipity.
The last time a state really pushed hard on states rights' and on counteracting federal law, it didn't turn out well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullification_Crisis
Creating Flash games with FlashPunk - Integrating the Flint Particle System
the nokia n900 is essentially a full-scale Linux box; hell, it's a lot more powerful than the computer I had when I started learning Linux myself. the only handycap is the small monitor and keyboard; but it does have TV-out and bluetooth, so you can fix those parts yourself, if you like.
All the API stuff on the front I'd pay for. However, I'm already paying for "maintaining servers, keeping them running, and worrying about the backend" -- so I don't want to pay for it again.

This might just be MY preference, and others might beg to differ.
Congratulations. Seriously. Go Duck Duck Go. I think this is a pretty good example of a guy taking his product along through iterations until it got good enough to garner some well-deserved coverage.
Sex toy startup raises $2 million funding
>I don't believe any amount of technology will ever remove a human out of a creative task. Technology can offer tools and speed and power, but it is worth nothing without a creative mind to make use of it.

This might not be quite what you meant, but if creativity is not a computable function, what do you think it is?
That's an amazing video, how does it change it's vertical angle, I can't seem to catch how that works, but it is very pronounced, especially near the end of the video?
Nice try, Google.
Ask HN: Tokyo, Japan meetup in late March / early April
I'll be traveling to Japan next week and wondering if any HNers would be interested in getting together for dinner and talk tech/startup/life in Japan etc. I'll be in Tokyo from March 29-31 and April 3/4. Drop a comment if interested or an email in my profile.

Thanks.
Web Development Company India, PHP Web Development
Blog with information about PHP Web Development, ASP.NET Development, Ruby on Rails Development, AJAX Programming, ColdFusion Application Development, Web Application Development and Ecommerce Solutions by HiddernBrains Infotech to worldwide clients.
You seem to imply that Chinese culture is incompatible with freedoms as understood in a liberal democracy. I am very, very curious--what part of Chinese culture could you be talking about?
And if bringing those kinds of acts to light will reduce the chance they happen again, then it's the right thing to do.

Bombing civilians shouldn't just be a mistake you sweep under the carpet, because if it were your own civilians you'd move heaven and earth to have them honored.
Care to elaborate on what you are talking about here for non-Mandarin readers ?
that was... odd. what just happened?
A list can be defined using square-brackets, '[' and ']'.

I thought it was funny to do this in Lisp and not represent lists with parens, but I guess it's only syntatic sugar anyway.
Ask HN: Took your advice, successfully! Let's try it again.
My start-up is www.talkburst.com - review anyone by name and location. Categories such as "Professors & Teachers" and "Lawyers & Attorneys" allow easy reviewing of professionals - but reviewing your neighbor or co-worker is okay too!

In the last thread, the most valuable advice I was given was that you didn't want to sort through categories with hundreds of thousand reviews, sorted by last name.

I created a "custom feed" or "custom homepage" thing. Once you customize one, which consists of choosing the locations you care about and categories you care about, the homepage will display the latest reviews in your areas of interest.

What do you think of it?

Let's hear what you think it needs next.
Olivia Munn sexy for Complex Magazine April May 2010
Olivia Munn stands tall and sexy on the cover page of Complex Magazine April/May 2010 issue. Complex Magazine is one of the Men Magazine in US covers Olivia Munn.
Clickable link: http://www.talkburst.com
English sites that are blocked in China
Stop the Heat from Sun Rays
As tristan_juricek commented elsewhere:

Uh, using language like "bottom-feeder RDBMS" and saying that an engineering team is using it "horribly incorrectly on clearly comically deficient hardware" makes this article highly biased, and trollish.
It's pretty clear that this guy things Digg is a bunch of idiot engineers - I mean, why else allude to "rudimentary comp. sci. knowledge"?
These articles might have a central point, but when it's surrounded by a bunch of opinion, it like watching TV news (e.g., Fox News). The real information gets drowned out.

That's a pretty good reason to flag a story. The entire argument is based on the premise that others are idiots: hubris of which we are often guilty. After you've been in the trenches for a while, you should realize that there is usually a pretty reasonable explanation for seemingly stupid problems.
Interesting. I wonder how this compares to writing such applications in Arc (also on plt scheme). Looks like the main difference would be all the side effects for phone hardware given here, plus DOM-oriented HTML/JS.
A list is represented with parens. [] is a vector. There are behavior and performance differences between lists and vectors.
And still uses those same worthless benchmarks to try to prove the point of sqldbs ability to scale.
Electric Vehicles Startup BetterPlace, by the numbers
How is this different, besides its completely unnecessary use of cat?
Not bad at all. Just think: all the military equipment that California used to use to harass the pot-smoking hippies can be put to use fighting another civil war.

All over a mildly-psychoactive plant.