skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No matter how good the software is, it's a short-term advantage. It gets you a ticket to the game but confers no sustainable advantage because the good bits will get copied. What matters is what you do on top of that software to build sustainable advantage.

(To be clear: I'm not referring to something like Windows here. SE is obviously complex but it isn't as complex as Windows. Much easier to copy and innovate around.)

I see it as a race now. You have to get that question and answer up before the other platforms do, to lock-in the Google advantage. You'll be leveraging your existing expert network in a sideways drift. Those experts already answer questions madly (and there are very few on the web) and now they have to battle to get their idea off the ground. Good plan. :)

You are missing out those snowflake sites (sorry Patrick) where the expert has zero SE cred but is the world expert on model trains just as model trains become the next bing thing. Still, over time you should have a reasonable monopoly on people who desire karma.

Unless someone comes up with a mechanism that can a) leverage karma whores better and b) discover and resolve hard topics faster.
Well, yeah, of course certain languages and skills are in much higher demand in corporate world, hence pay a lot higher.

But my personal criteria for now is more about whether I will enjoy working somewhere and learn useful things, rather than the amount of money I can make. I could get a dead-boring programming job and make probably 50% more than I do now, but right now I feel like I am learning a lot more, and like people I'm working with a lot more than I would in that situation.
I believe there's a direct correlation between the number of new objects NASA has filmed astronauts landing on, and the number of people wishing to go into the astronomical sciences and the aerospace industry.
Good points - except that under iPhone OS 4.0 the OS and apps already have to handle these situations.

Apps compiled for 4.0 are "frozen" when backgrounded. When they are brought to the front, either from the new task pane or their icon, they are unfrozen and restored to a running state. If the iPhone becomes low on memory it terminates frozen apps from least to most recently used.

So since these apps are already suspended, and must deal with a degree of state change when restored, I'm curious why the OS doesn't/can't page their backing store out to flash memory.
In our business Intellectual capital is more valuable than real money. To me that is the real barrier to building great businesses (and not money as in traditional business context)
Article seems well written, and I can forgive the defensiveness given how much bile was spat in their direction.

When I saw the cpedia article on here I also thought it was stupid. With the explanation it makes a lot more sense what it's trying to accomplish. A little blurb on each cpedia page with a summary of that explanation would probably do wonders.

He's right though, often when I google something, there might be 20000 results, but only 3 with unique info. Solving that problem is a reasonable goal, and it's a bit ridiculous to all point and say 'look, they didn't solve it perfectly, hahaha'.
reproduces functionality of apple's products?
I'm pretty sure it shows Fahrenheit everywhere by default.
I don't personally recall seeing anything to support this. Can you expand on who/what gave you that impression, in case I just missed it?

The article suggests that this is both a hardware and software solution, so that it would be impossible to add to older hardware not specifically designed with these new techniques in mind:

"...because Apple is unique among PC vendors in that it controls both the hardware and software."

"NVIDIA's Optimus is another solution to this problem. It uses a combination of hardware and software to enable automatic switching between integrated graphics and a discrete GPU."

More on Optimus:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/02/nvidias-optimus-is...
(indicating that it was a hardware-level workaround required by NVIDIA's legal battle with Intel.)
Happiness and the "expensive-gym-membership effect"
If your site is called -pedia, guess what - users expect a wikipedia like encyclopedia that is useful.

It doesn't matter how incredibly sophisticated your algorithms are or how smart you are.

It doesn't matter how hard the problems are or even if they are solvable.

It doesn't matter that you know much more about linguistics than anyone else.

If the end result shown to the user is utter rubbish for _their_ purposes, then you can expect the users to complain and not come back.

If this was supposed to be a tech demo called c-dredger or info-frankenstein then it certainly is an accomplishment. But as a useful tool, it needed more work before being shown.
Managing Gems with Rails 3
No, in fact you can autopost to a self-hosted Wordpress installation. I'm doing that on one of my sites.

First make sure that the following setting is checked in your Wordpress control panel Settings>Writing:

Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.

Then you go into the Posterous settings for autoposting, provide the url of your wordpress site, admin username and password and that's it.
Eric Schmidt Is the Nicest Guy in Tech
Metaignorance
I'm siding with spolsky here. The ultimate goal you have in mind is defining. Since building a community is hard and is the hurdle that kills most attempts, people will often see it as the goal. In many cases, it might be the goal.

Take Wikipedia as an example. Community is necessary but it is not the goal. The goal is encyclopaedia making. Most online communities do not produce a wikipedia.

What this adds up to, in theory, is sacrificing some community building ability (more sites will dies from under participation)for more Q&A ability. While more of the remaining will produce a good archive of useful answers.

*This doesn't directly answer your original claim that the software is good for SO specifically but cannot be widely applied. But, if what I suggest is true, then you would expect it to appear that way.
Now you have no reason not to have a cool UI
Hi. I am a freelance designer. I mostly did website designs (see my portfolio at www.mediarosh.com), but would love to move on to doing interface designs.

To start off, I would love to design a cool new interface for your app.

I see that most startups have ugly interfaces because they dont want to waste resources on design which can be better spent on building the app.

So, I am going to make a very special offer. I will design an interface for you at any budget. Doesnt matter if it is $100 or $10,000, whatever is affordable for your startup.

And best of all, if you dont like the design I make, you dont pay. So you have no reason not to try it out.

Just email me at mediarosh@gmail.com if you are interested.
It seems he is.

Let's grant that 'digging deep' means a certain number of gems -- like the fact your next meeting is with someone who drinks too much.

But as Tom Costello admits, this approach also "ensure[s] that we will have mistakes". If those mistakes are similar to the gems -- like erroneously associating a report of drinking too much with the wrong person -- I'm not sure that makes the case that the "bottom-feeding" was worth it.
It's tough to question Neil Armstrong but to me $50M/seat for launch seems like a bargain compared to the alternative. Just based on the $10B we've spent on Constellation so far that's 200 seats. I don't know how much Constellation is supposed to cost in the end but let's say it's another $20B for the sake of argument. Do we have a pressing need to send 400 people into LEO over the next 5-10 years? Over the next 20 years? Maybe we should just consider dusting off the Apollo.
Right. One written in Objective-C, likely using the native iPhone UIWebView container and thus able to run Javascript, all supported languages.
cpr and swernli are correct: Skype can "listen" for incoming calls.

This is demoed by Skype's head of product development, David Ponsford around 00:22:20 in the video of the iPhone OS 4 Event: http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1004fk8d5gt/event/
(I personally found most of the event rather interesting, if you have about an hour to spare.)
Nitobi, who's post we are discussing, are the people behind phonegap.
Sorry, they deserve all the criticism they are getting. The problem is not that they have few mistakes here and there, it is that every single article I have tried has been composed of a bunch of mostly incomprehensible unrelated sentences randomly ordered and placed next to each other with no connection.

If you evoke an encyclopaedia in the mind of your user, the user will expect what they are getting is an at least somewhat encyclopaedia-like thing. I.e., that it is understandable, that sentences follow each other to make coherent paragraphs, etc. In this respect, Cpedia completely falls on their faces.
I hope Appcelerator's Titanium gets this approval too. Superficially it seems similar enough to PhoneGap in how it works, with the added advantage of native UI widgets on mobiles.
Graceful degradation. People would absolutely suggest that, and charge dearly for implementing it. Companies would pay for some of it, and in 5 years, it would either die out or there would be some sort of "cgi on rails"-framework that automates some minimal version of that, that looks horrendous and sorta-kinda works. Probably ASP.net. Then we'd have hobbyists and ux professionals hand-crafting everything on a lamp-like stack, and everyone else would get along with upgrading backends.

ECMAScript may be google's horse in the race, but it's still just an add-on.
How would you make money from an SE site?
I'm totally with Obama on this. I'm crazy about space and although I'll almost certainly never go I'd love to see us on Mars or with orbital colonies before I die. Open sourcing NASA and treating commercial space ventures on an equal footing would be a great step towards that.
Maybe there is something to this...

If I was trying to get funding for cpedia, I'd want to know which VCs get drunk easily...
"Insightful and Not Negative"

(A reference to Steve Job's supposed appraisal of John Gruber's article about the iPhone TOS Section 3.3.1. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255858)
Don't you see any advantage in lowering the bar for having a blog, forum or SE site?
3 people were killed in the Mojave desert after an explosion at a Virgin Galactic facility.
His closing thought on the matter:

"You know what iPhone OS is missing that Mac OS X has? The SPOD."

("Spinning pinwheel of death", "rainbow beachball of death", etc.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wait_cursor)

I'm nearly ashamed to admit I have never noticed it's absence until now.
So, does this imply that without mass/gravity there is no speed of light limit?
I am admittedly pro-palindrome.
Term Paper Cover Makes Your Document Properly Organized
Each type of writing paper requires a term paper cover page. It is advisable to have a cover page because it makes a project to be fully valid and properly organized. It is created to introduce a term paper and indicate writer’s name, surname, group, course, etc.
Home Affordability and Stability Program
On paper the Obama Administration's Home Affordability and Stability Program appears to be well modeled to suit the current financial crises faced by many Americans today. However, it is a fact the plan has not been as effective as initially thought of, and a large number of Americans are yet to benefit from the modification advantages offered by the program, since they are facing foreclosure problems - something that the plan was originally intended for.
Try the countries full name.

For instance there is some garbage about China under: http://cpedia.com/search?q=Peoples%20Republic%20of%20China

Of course it seems to be something about contract law for China... but that's another matter.

Actually try "of china": It's got some relevance, so does "peoples republic".
Cpedia seems to have trouble with terms that frequently appear in other phrases. For example, they don't have an article on Nokia, but do have Nokia 6300, Nokia N70 and so on.
The more I look at cpedia, the more I'm convinced it's just a Markov bot.
Look Mom No Home Page
I haven't read much on these kinds of books, but these things that I've picked up have helped and seem like common sense:
1) Don't anything big on credit unless you have the cash to back it up.
2) Stick your paycheck in the savings (or some prudent recurring investment vehicle to have at least 6*monthly wages at any time in your bank account - aka rainy day fund).
3) Income ≠ disposable spending
4) That "utility" (internet, cable, phone, etc) which can be shared can be money saved.
5) Take financial advice (including this one :-) with extreme prudence!
I stay logged into gtalk on my Nexus One continuously. I don't notice any significant battery drain because of it, and I often have longish conversations with people while waiting for the train via gtalk. The gtalk app doesn't even show up as a significant user of battery power in the "Battery Use" list.
Going commercial for land-to-orbit ferrying makes sense: it's a proven concept that's been done plenty of times and just needs to become more efficient.

Building land-to-deep space vessels makes little sense. It unnecessarily reinvents the land-to-orbit step. The launch rockets are one more thing to invent and maintain. Every space mission needs to get into orbit: don't "roll your own", factor it out and let industry tackle it.

NASA should go commercial for ferrying and focus on robots and proof of concept projects. Manned deep space missions should be launched starting in orbit from starports, and are unnecessary before then. They can be assembled modularly in space.

As far as pragmatic and profitable reasons to go into space, mining is probably the biggest. Asteroids often contain rare metals in abundance and are worth trillions. Space mining will only develop if we first invest in:
1) Making orbital ferrying as cheap as possible
2) Orbital facilities to serve as launch platforms for research and ventures.
3) Advanced Robotics

I think NASA's new plan is doing everything right and heading in this direction.
Frozen Pensioners Fight On For British Fair Play
Given that people can drive down the road in two directions, station #1 is also #5 and #2 is also #4. This changes your analysis slightly, but the result remains that you should go to station #3.
I wouldn't write Cuil off just yet. What the do have is a functional, if not stellar, web scale search engine and a web scale crawler. They've also probably got enough money to keep the lights on for another 2-3 years (perhaps with some cuts) while they figure out where to steer that.

That's why I was somewhat surprised with this play. I don't connect the dots. If they'd spun into say, domain specific searches (a la Kayak, Indeed) or some sort of data mining for business (a la Rapleaf) that'd have clicked more with me.
Although that may appear to be the case, the reality is that censorship has remain unchanged in Australia for a quite a long time.

If you're referring to video game censorship, that's not a recent problem, but something that's existed for a couple of decades now.

If you're talking about the internet filter, that's just the pet project of the Minister for Communications. He has yet to receive the support of the Government to introduce the legislation into parliament, so it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next six months or so (if he manages to introduce legislation into parliament, and if he does, how the opposing parties will react).
They are succeeding. They have no meaningful content on any topic at all.
This belongs here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262467
This is not running your own server. Your own server should be at your own home, under your own control. That way, if the Police want to have a look at your server it has to subpoena you, directly. That way, data you want remotely accessible won't be in the hand of any third party. That way, mail you send is actually send by you. Eben Moglen said it best: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/feb/01/freedom-clou...
I'm not so sure abstracting away document open is a good idea in the long run. You lose the ability to separate your valuable data from the application, and it encourages lock-in within each app.

Abstracting away document save is also probably not a good idea unless there's automatic versioning (at least up to a few versions) built in.

Also 1-dimensional lists (like the coverflow of docs in iPad's iWork) don't scale well. These problems are dealt with more effectively by hierarchical folder systems of today's desktop OSes than by the iPhone OS. They're not as foolproof, but there's real benefit in exchange for the complexity.

I agree with you about application start/stop though. Also, IMO infinitely adjustable/overlappable windows in desktop OSes don't add much value either. A simpler windowing model (maybe a little like webOS's cards; the iPad's is too extreme) would probably be better.
This is because exercise science is doing experiments that were proven effective by practitioners years ago. In the same way you wouldn't expect to learn bleeding-edge hacking techniques taking classes at the undergraduate college level.. you'd expect to learn them from people who've used them effectively and are re-using them often.
I'm surprised there's so much discussion about this topic. This seems a very straightforward and logical UI improvement.

I suspect commentary on this has become basically a bike shed color argument at this point.
"The metaignorant are blissfully ignorant of their own lack of knowledge, and consequently are capable of wreaking far more havoc (or at least annoyance) than the merely ignorant."

This reminds me of this one Alaskan lady who dresses up like Tina Fey...
Shouldn't we continue to invest in long-term infrastructure development (education, research) before shedding cash for hyperexpensive space trips? I'm just about efficiency
One unexpected effect of Cpedia aggregating articles about things to build pages is that the page for the software I write and sell contains both it's description and links to where to get a cracked version :(

http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=GhostTrails&disambig=Andreas%20...
Tell/Ask HN: Sell right from the start./?
This is maybe a bit pretentious, but I wanted to tell that long ago. Something coming here on a regular basis is how hard it is to get momentum, to keep the motivation and going ahead when you are tired etc.

I found that the best solution is to sell. It does not mean that you need to sell a lot, even if it is just $50 a month. Do it. Offer a paid option of your webapp and sell.

The days you will be down, the serendipity will be there and you will get an email from your payment processing gateway: "$50 for you". And this is the best thing you can get, it means:

"Me, the customer, trust you, you have a good product and I am ready to pay for it. You are good."

When you are offering both "totally free" and "paid options" the effect on the moral of getting a sale is higher than the inverse of your conversion rate. It is like drug, you want more of it, you start to make crosses on your year calendar on the wall, you feel good.

Go sell and enjoy accumulating these little red crosses.

And you, what is keeping you rolling? Do you think that in your case you cannot sell right from the start?
Long ago at Smalltalk vendor ParcPlace, Booz-Allen was a sometimes customer/partner on big accounts. One of our consultants had a little sign in his office, roughly:

Corporate Philosophies

ParcPlace: "Everything is an object"

Booz-Allen: "Money is no object"
On the bright side, we have launched probes out of the solar system. New Horizons will reach Pluto in 5 years.

The problem with human spaceflight is that humans are hard to keep alive in space. We need air, food, water, constant exercise (or artificial gravity), and protection from cosmic rays. All of this support equipment has mass. More mass means bigger rockets full of more fuel. The Saturn V only launched three guys to the Moon and it was 110 meters tall. It was practically a skyscraper built to explode in just the right way so that the top floor ended up on the Moon.

On the other hand, probes just need a radioisotope thermal generator or solar panels. Not to mention that probes don't mind one-way tickets. And family members don't cry when a probe is lost in an accident.

Barring new propulsion technologies (NERVA? Unlikely in this political climate.), humans won't be going anywhere.

A pie-in-the-sky solution would be to put a brain in a vat and shoot that into space. (A simulation of a brain would be even better, but's probably farther off.) A brain doesn't have bones that weaken in microgravity. 3lbs of brain needs fewer resources than 170lbs of meat. Also, I'd bet on brain-machine interfaces advancing before space propulsion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_australi... reports that the Government has been supporting and implementing degrees of Internet censorship for some time now. While the latest effort by Conroy has yet to get Government support it is hard to imagine the opposition Liberal Party (the conservative party - they have attempted to introduce the same thing in the past) opposing it.
Extensible Metadata in LLVM IR
Peeking Inside the iPad - Interactive Feature
I think you're on the right track, but replace "astronomical sciences" with "science", and I think it's more accurate. Of every 100 third graders who wanted to become a scientist because of something cool NASA did, I'd guess you get 10 who become scientists, maybe another 15 engineers, but maybe only one of those 25 will have something to do with space. The rest are doing cool things that have nothing to do with space, but they got started on that path because of it.
I was expection a metaphor about Sun Microsystems' decline.
You are right that googles' results can be repetitive. But I am not expecting cpedia to be perfect. I am just expecting their solution to be better than the problem. And that's not the case right now.
I read somewhere that the only reason the Soyuz is cheaper than the Space Shuttle is the fact that Russian engineers are just paid a lot less.
To summarize Google's fight against Apple:
"When Eric Schmidt slumps his shoulders and says that Steve Jobs is 'the best CEO in the world,' it's not because he's shaking with fear. He's just being nice."

Google may do no evil, but they definitely don't pull their punches.If Apple has iAds, Google has GAds in their hands :p
"Blas, for those of you not from the West of Ireland, is the polish a hurley gets from the sliothar when used by a player of unusual skill, a patina on the surface of the wood testifying to the depth of talent of the player that had used the stick."

I'm from Ireland, have played hurling for about 21 years, this is the first time I have ever heard of this! Cuil finally taught me something, it only took them 2 years! Granted I never use their service...and there are many things I don't know.
The Hanoi based tour operator Lotussia Travel launches French site version
The Hanoi based tour operator “Lotussia Travel” is proud to announce the launch of a state-of-the-art website in French language allowing French-speaking people to get more information about the country of Vietnam and its people.
The bit about math problems causing more anxiety when presented horizontally: wow.

Perhaps those math ed "word problems" that try to make calculations more grounded in real situations are blocking student math success more than they're helping.
All this twitter and facebook nonsense must be explainable using cuils.
Redesigning Scala's Collections A Case Study in Abstraction and Modularity
That would be funny. Maybe it'd be The Departed: Gosling Edition
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