skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well yes - clearly they should have an article. I'm not sure I suggested they shouldn't. (if you note I was mostly talking about commons)
Oh come on. Many people I know don't vote because they think (correctly) the time they spend will be much better spent doing something else.

That doesn't mean the freedom to elect a democratic government is not valuable to those people.
Your email provider would need to support WebFinger and/or LRDD.
ClamCase turns Ipad into a netbook
I read a lot of books on foreign policy, war and politics. I also do a lot of boxing. I believe in being challenged intellectually and physically. Also, I love human competition in terms of doing it and the history of it.
$ curl -I www.reddit.com
Thanks for posting this for review. Like the concept a lot.

If you have some beta customers, I would recommend you post quotes from them on the site. Nothing will help win over small business owners better than their fellow business owners. If they are willing to share any specific numbers with the outside world, that would help even more. For example, "loyaltyspace has increased my customer frequency rate by 10%". Other people validating your product makes sales SO MUCH easier.

One thing I was hoping to see under the "how it works" section was a qualitative/emotive story that would demonstrate the ROI to the business. This should help sell the product by showing a use case that the business owner would understand and quickly be able to attach numbers to and CLEARLY see how loyalty will make them money.

Each business owner will have different numbers, but each uses the same levers to get those numbers. Identify those key levers and continually emphasize how you help them maximize those levers. For example, key levers could be customer acquisition, customer retention, avg. order size, avg. order margin, etc

Yes, you do need to explain the technical piece as well but my guess is the owner first needs to be convinced that they "need" the product before they dive into the more technical "How do I set this up?"
Architecture and user experience. They can afford some consultation time with the best in the business on both fronts right now, and both will be critical to their success.
The original request was for $10,000 to cover their living expenses for 3 months. Now they have $170k, they really have no obligation to do anything with it other than support themselves for 3 months. So anything else is just gravy. Which is why it is so COMPLETELY ridiculous that they have been given so much money, especially given that they don't have a product or even a detailed design of a product. They just have a lot of good intentions.
searyc.com doesn't exist. Whats the domain? I'd be interested in reading the story.

What if you already have a company that has has enough revenue to support you from US customers?
I am well schooled in foreign policy, political and economic strategy. People have to realize that at this point in time China can't have completely free informational channels, as we enjoy here in America.

You have millions of rural uneducated people in china that if give the right motivation can destabalize the country. To prevent that destabalization from happening you have to control informational channels and the information being delivered on it, especially when China is going through a transitional period.

At the macro level on of the biggest threats to globalization is the integration of China into the global system.
But he was being observant, not prescient.

There's no difference.
Yes. Oops.
Gore: I agree! Some pictures of gore remove more value than they add.

Educational reach into the Muslim world: I don't care.

Your suggestion about an encyclopedia project that produces content to build other encyclopedias with --- a meta-encyclopedia? --- is sensible. You should start that project. I don't think it's Wikipedia.
Well, Wikipedia was intended to be that project from the start (I've been involved with it since 2003, and that was clearly the intent at the time). A lot of people have started using wikipedia.org as their primary encyclopedia, but I think that's just because nobody's built anything else out of it, so your only choice currently is to read the online snapshot of raw meta-encyclopedia, complete with obvious "work-in-progress" banners everywhere.

Admittedly, it's unclear where it currently lies. Since wikipedia.org's gotten so many viewers, there's a significant number of Wikipedians, and probably the majority of the official folks at the Foundation, who think a reader-centric encyclopedia ought to be a priority. I personally think readers should be secondary, and producing raw content should be Wikipedia's main mission, with some other organization (not Wikipedia or owned by Wikimedia) taking on a reader-centric project of forging that raw content into nicely curated final products. I'd guess most of the old-school (pre-2007 or so) Wikipedians think similarly, but it's quite possible we'll lose out. A bit on a related conflict here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conflicting_Wikipedia_philoso...

And sure, you might not care about educational outreach into the Muslim world. But other people don't care about educational outreach to kids or adults who're offended by nudity (I personally don't care much more about nudity than I care about Mohammed images, though I dislike gore and spider photos). People generally have lots of opinions on which kinds of cultural norms are more important to respect.
Why Everyone Should Get Funded (Once)
Wikipedia hosts depictions of Muhammad, with which it risks getting blocked in entire countries. Strictly speaking they are not necessary in the articles, not the least because they're probably not historically accurate. Do you think they remove them?
point 2) perhaps finding a local partner to ship stuff that is already in the country might be a decent way around this..
Should be. Is here in the UK.
Reading a bit more on it, it's starting to sound less practical to me. Almost more like a differential, in that you have to supply a variable speed to one shaft to change the ratio. Now that's easy enough with an electric motor, but if that auxiliary input requires significant torque, it's not so useful anymore.

Several people have commented that it sounds very much like some of the hydrostatic drives used in the Agri industries.

But hey, it's still a neat demonstration, if not entirely practical.
CSS3 Starbursts
My grandmother at one time in the 90s had NGs going back to the late 20s/early 30s, but by the time I was old enough to appreciate them, they were in terrible condition, having spent years in the attic over her garage. I'm glad they're archived online.
I can't wait for this quit Facebook meme to fizzle out into oblivion. They are like a bunch of religious fundies trying to push their view onto other people.

Facebook can do what they want with the data I give them. I don't give them anything I wouldn't mind anybody else seeing.
For what it's worth, I have the same sense as you describe -- that there's something consultanty and vaguely scammy about the Lean Startup movement (like there is about most software "movements") -- and for the same reason as you, namely pattern recognition from having observed these things in the agile space. The main lesson I learned from the latter is that the people selling consulting about how to build working software were, with some exceptions, not particularly able to build working software or run successful software projects themselves. They were like music teachers who couldn't play the instrument; their skill was in talking convincingly (and expensively) about how the instrument should be played. Their customers would frequently get very enthusiastic and shiny-eyed about what they'd heard, but it never seemed to lead in the end to better music being produced - only more talk about it. (Edit: and lots of ideological you're-doing-it-wrong thinking.)

I have seen no good answer as to what the leaders of this movement have actually done to justify authoritative stature on the subject of startups. (Steve Blank is an exception, but he also doesn't seem that directly involved.) The combination of that and the veneer of consultanty slickness is a real red flag.

I'm all in favor of people in the startup world trading great ideas and war stories. But the whole consulting thing, with its jargon and processes, its conferences, speaking engagements, and most of all its high fees... I think that model is broken and we'd be better off without it.
original article http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2010/5/13/what-diaspo...
I think Codingbat is a good place to begin/start with python, and it's also good for exercises. As they have an online interpreter, you get a definitive yes/no answer, with elaboration where things go wrong. http://codingbat.com/python
> and educated with full employment and no apparent pollution.

From the article: There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle - this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population ... They have all been successfully dumbed down
Very ambitious project, and very much in the Hacker Spirit, but I'm dubious- So far he has no code, and no solid plans for how to develop it.

I hope that he does release the project; It will be useful in and of itself, and it will also help push Mozilla's hand.
Latin. It's satisfying mental exercise, and there's no pressure to learn quickly, because it has no practical applications (except for general brain sharpening). And the structure of the language is almost custom made for a hacker.
I don't think it's quite that clear cut.

I suspect that product placement in moves is both effective and somewhat subliminal. The real issue is the limits on effect. Flashing messages is not going to get someone to kill some dictator but:

"Subconscious stimuli by single words is well known to be modestly effective in changing human behavior or emotions. This is evident by a pictorial advertisement that portrays four different types of rum.rocks The phrase "U Buy" was embedded somewhere, backwards in the picture. A study was done to test the effectiveness of the alcohol ad. Before the study, participants were able to try to identify any hidden message in the ad, none found any. In the end, the study showed 80% of the subjects unconsciously perceived the backward message, meaning they showed a preference for that particular rum.[2]" (From your link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli)
Well, no. He has a perfectly stable, high-population city, but it has none of those things except crime-free status

"There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle - this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time."

edit: I knew I should have refreshed...
Isn't the easy solution to require logins for particularly adult content (even if it only requires login for part of the content of an article) in the same way YouTube does? You could also enable "mouse-overs" for authenticated users so they don't see potentially "offensive" images straight away.
What about those of us who speak undead languages? 1000 year old Arabic reads like any other modern formal essay. It's really hard to let go of the past when it's so vividly present. We hold grudges against nations and tribes that no longer exist.
well, one thing I've learned in my business is that you don't need to make /everyone/ happy, you just need to make something /some/ people are willing to pay for, so don't listen too much to us naysayers.
Twitter's garbage problem
Because of its rich case system, Latin has fairly free word order. This makes it much easier to parse programmatically than, for example, English, which has to mostly rely on word order and prepositions to indicate subjects and objects. The lack of machine translation tools for Latin has more to do with lack of demand than the technical challenge.
I think he meant searchyc.com.
Arguably the Mohammed images are the most important part of educational outreach for Muslims though. Un-learning the religion into which you were born is probably more important than learning any given fact, since until you unlearn your religion you obviously have no idea how facts are attained and how they should be evaluated.
Depending on your friend and how he learns, he might find that solving real problems consolidates his knowledge faster than more exercises. Pick a library that does something that he's interested in, and which gives some immediate feedback, and let him at it. Pygame, pyglet and django spring to mind, or some sort of web scraper or GUI automater (eg. pywinauto) to interface with the real world. http://openbookproject.net/py4fun/ also has some simple (ish), but relatively real world problems.
You forgot the "brag about how you aren't affected because you do things The Right Way(tm)" part.
An homage if you will.
Interesting. I am working in Hong Kong, but I am from Seoul, Korea.
Amazing story of how to fool the military
I understand where you're coming from, but don't agree. The unstructured nature of "who's hiring" and the fact that it's entangled with the other conversations going on here are what makes it alive and different. Occasionally people who don't have any roots here try to make more traditional job posts, and those stand out like sore thumbs.

There are two rules to be respected. One, don't rush to systematize things, especially human things. Two, when communities spontaneously create new patterns, that's valuable and should be attended to delicately, as if one were discovering a new species.

Two companies that have done an amazing job of following spontaneous user trends are Twitter (e.g. hashtags) and Reddit (e.g. IAMA). The trick seems to be to wait a long time until the pattern is clear, then provide nonintrusive support to enhance what is already happening. The obvious temptation is to impose familiar structures (do it "right") that are foreign to the spontaneous life and end up killing what was interesting about it.
I think that's pretty common, no? I put a hidden message in my headers a few years back.
I love my iPad (I have the 32GB 3G model).

I use Keynote a lot (biochemistry slides), and other apps:
Epicurious is great (recipes on the fly - I bring my iPad with me to the grocery store, and check off the things I need on the ingredients list). I really love the built-in maps app and the directions/GPS features it has. The email app is great - I can go for a walk and send email in the middle of the woods.

The browser inside is great - I just used it to look up a rare battery that I needed inside Radio Shack.

I really like the books app, and I wish they would put the brightness slider in more apps. That would be great for late-night browsing.

I think everyone will have one sooner or later. It's just so practical for so many things.

When someone takes the trouble to make an app for something, it makes the experience much better than it is with a browser. I wish that someone would finally come up with a educational physics app (kind of like MasteringPhysics) for it.

I almost forgot - the $39 Apple case is definitely required - you can't take it anywhere without something to protect it.
I had no idea the state of psychiatry in the 1940's was good enough to, for instance, predict a leader's strategies. I'd love to read more about this.
Fwiw, Wales posted a comment on the CNET version of this story, alleging that the Fox News article that all these stories are based on (incl. VentureBeat's) is misleading: http://news.cnet.com/8618-1023_3-20005082.html?communityId=2...
In "Four Steps to the Epiphany" Steve Blank defines an earlyvangelist as "someone who has spent money to develop a solution to a problem but is still unhappy with the result." I would use this to model you to identify which professionals to have a further conversation with: "what problem(s) have spent time or money on in the last year to reduce or eliminate where you are still unhappy with your current solution?"

I would not worry about the "scaling characteristics" as much initially as finding a group of professionals who share the problem and would reference each other's decision to use your product. This does not mean that they have to know each other but that an endorsement, case study, or testimonial that describes their background and how they benefited would influence a buy decision. All innovations start in a niche, some go scale beyond that, but none scale without starting in a niche.

For an elaboration on sources of innovation see http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/02/15/paul-grahams-six-pri... which includes checklists from Paul Graham, Peter Drucker, Gary Hamel, and Bob Bemer the inventor of ASCII.
check this out: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1352829
talks more in depth about the number of similar applications on the market.
If you ever look at headers on a Wordpress.com hosted site you'll get a job ad, check it out: http://gist.github.com/346227
Reddit changes their server line every now and then. Its usually fun stuff like that, or the line of other servers that they clearly don't use. Its entertaining to check it occasionally.
Impossible Motion: Best Illusion 2010
Yeah, but they only had two outfits. Notice how beat up and formless everyone's boots are.
I believe, in those cases, you also need to have a business plan that says you are going to hire a lot of Americans relatively quickly.

You also need to look like a business in the eyes of the law -- this means getting real office space and whatnot. So you can't plan on a super-lean ramen-profitability period.
Reminds me of a line from a song "Freedom's just another word for 'nothing left to lose'".
The numbers are interesting and though they don't look pretty, I'd say that a selection-bias makes the average daily/sales number (from the sample of 94 paid apps) a lot higher than the real average-sales number for the 100K+ paid apps in the app-store.
If it works, it won't seem ridiculous at all. I like the pluralism of this experiment. The odds are nothing will come of it, but that's what the odds nearly always are.
Redirect loop
Strangely enough, they didn't name it anything. They don't really see it as a language, just a logic tool.

From what I've seen, they've included GPL notices in most of their code (something unheard of in this industry). I'm guessing the whole thing is GPL'd, but not published to the Internet.
>Also, unfortunately, current compilers are notoriously bad at generating code with special instructions (vectorized code).

Sounds like the downfall of the Itanium. They promised that the compilers would make it all usable, but the compilers never showed up.
Every Tree is a Quantum Mechanic
There are lots of tricks that big companies use to get their workers to wherever they want them to be. Some argue the entire H1-B program is such a trick.

However, as far as I can tell, there aren't any great loopholes for startup founders.

From the US government's perspective, lean web startups don't even make any sense. Why would you want to move to a foreign country to start a business that has no premises, makes no significant purchases, requires no investment, will likely have few employees for the first few years, and has a 9/10 chance of failing? I know that your reason is "Bay Area culture" and proximity to VC, but that is not acceptable to the US government, and they don't have a huge incentive to help you.

All the options I'm aware of involve a work-for-hire arrangement with an existing US concern or entrepreneur. Then they can use the H1-B, or other employment visas. You can't officially be self-employed, so you can't be an owner. Presumably you want something like stock options instead. You'd have to have an extraordinary degree of trust in your American partners.

The other option is to come in as a business entrepreneur. Likely you will need to prove you're spending at least tens of thousands of dollars and hiring lots of Americans. As I mentioned elsewhere, then the US government is going to want you to have normal business expenses, like for instance, an office.
E-Cigarettes - The Best Stop Smoking Aids
Implement (without looking) or re-implement (after looking) the examples and exercises from the following or similar books; the book's language doesn't matter:

The C Programming Language, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language

The Elements of Programming Style, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Programming_Sty...

Writing Efficient Programs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley

Programming Pearls, http://netlib.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/pearls/

The UNIX Programming Environment, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UNIX_Programming_Environmen...

And, er, Learning Python, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_Python
Ask HN: Publish in peer-review journal without affiliation?
I'm a retired physicist. I used to work in the industry. I have now time for theoretical research and have something to publish. Is it possible to publish in peer-review journal without affiliation?
I only have one point to make in this discussion, which is: Wikipedia doesn't have to host content for the sake of hosting content. It can make tradeoffs to achieve its mission, which is to build the best possible encyclopedia. It is reasonable to talk about cost/benefit for things like graphic sexual images.

That's all I've got here.

Maybe it's worth it to host graphic sexual images. I doubt it, but we'll see where the consensus develops.
I honestly don't see this as a problem. I don't read every Tweet that comes through my stream its kind of random access information, I look at twitter every now and then and if something interesting strikes me I look into it.

While filtering would be a good feature, I think saying its a killer feature is going a bit far. I don't think the reasoning that you could follow twice as many people would make much sense from a roi perspective. If your interested in roi, you wouldn't even worry about following people, you would create custom searches about topics you are interested in and deal with those. You would certainly get more info for your time spent on twitter that way and much more focused. You can do this with basic tools like Tweetdeck search columns or even or saved searches in the standard twitter web interface.
Email me and I'll send you an invite.
Seriously? What can this guy possibly share privately that he can't mention publicly? Is he really going to give some special insights that a reader can benefit from to his detriment? Or, does his altruism have some other, hidden agenda?

I, for one, think this guy is a master troll. I can't believe that many HNers are not cynical enough to call him out on his feigned success.

Specifically, Andrew Warner wants to interview him? For what? Why give him a platform if he has no apparent accomplishments worthy of such an audience?
The Future of Apple's Curated Computing
If you are interested in particular subject matter, as opposed to genuinely interested in the people you follow, just run a search or advanced search. Both auto-update and provide filtering functionality.
In all honesty, I always got the impression that the point of twitter was to tune into other people's noise, not to harvest useful information.
Jimmy Wales: Fox News Is Wrong, No Shake Up
Does God Answer Prayer?