skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that's very interesting:

(smart/area) / (population/area) = (smart/population)

I don't really care if the population is more educated if they're really spread out. Assuming I have some way of selecting people who are smart—which I definitely do in NYC—I'm going to get to see a lot more of them in a place with a higher smart density.
No it isn't. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose Phobos isn't a natural phenomenon.

On the Phobos blog, you can find a recent post (http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/7/1085), which says:

[..] provide meaningful new constraints on the
corresponding range of the body's porosity (30% ± 5%),
provide a basis for improved interpretation of the
internal structure. We conclude that the interior of
Phobos likely contains large voids. When applied to
various hypotheses bearing on the origin of Phobos, these
results are inconsistent with the proposition that Phobos
is a captured asteroid.

In other words, the moon is pretty porous and asteroids aren't, so it isn't a captured asteroid. However, that is only one of three hypotheses. In a previous post (http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/7/989) they state:

The origin of Phobos is a mystery, in fact three scenarios
are considered possible. The first is that the moon is a
captured asteroid; the second is that it formed in-situ as
Mars formed below it, and the third is that Phobos formed
later than Mars, from debris flung into martian orbit when
a large meteorite struck the Red Planet. Among other
objectives, the Phobos flybys are designed to provide
clues towards answering this question.

So one of the three hypotheses has been ruled out. The other two are still candidates. There is no mention of any internal voids with inexplicably 'geometric' shapes
Agreed this like arguing how if you could only pick one tool to use why it should be a wrench.
When science clashes with beliefs? Make science impotent
yes, make it a mobile app. todo lists require pervasiveness!

I'd make it an app with two main buttons "add todo item" and "I have time for something". Optionally, you could be fancy and add a push notify to remind someone to get a todo item done during lunch or before they leave work.
In the tradition of news.yc, I'd be glad to get your feedback on these ideas. I'm not pursuing any of them right now, so I'd just like to find out if there is any value in them, if they already exist, or are impossible, etc.
Clearly it does. 30,000 people went there to check to see what this product can do for them, some even stayed. Think back on Yahoo(Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle). Put it this way, there is always more space for products that scratch consumers' itch.
We're not currently considering it. We do stuff between cycles too. E.g. that's when we put on events like Startup School.
If you have to learn only one programming language, likely you are not a programmer, or someone who programs for a living. If I were to recommend only a single programming language for a non-programmer, it would probably be bash, on the basis that plenty of mundane user activities can be automated or more efficiently done with a shell scripting mindset.
“With Lisp I've found this rarely the case. I've also found this with many Perl programs as well, and I've actually worked professionally with Perl.”

Why not? You can understand haskell programs but not lisp programs?
Mozilla Firefox - 10 yers olds bug fixed
Project to research effects on brain of bilingualism
http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc
Simply moving to Linux isn't liable to significantly help or hinder your programming. These days Linux, provided you choose a distribution with a GUI, is pretty well as comfortable to use as Windows - not quite as refined, but the differences are slight.

There are two real advantages - more command prompt access to applications, which allows you to avoid the mouse and GUI interaction in general, and a better selection of code editors.

vi, one of the more popular text editors, in particular I find speeds up my work, but I strongly advise against asking for the relative merits of different editors - it's a sore point and is liable to start a flame war. The other editor with a significant following is Emacs.

Both of these do have a very steep learning curve, but with the amount of software available these days on linux, if you're having trouble, you can always find something a bit closer to home. For a while while getting used to the system I used Geany, which is more of an IDE than a text editor, and largely defeated the purpose of moving to Ubuntu, but it nevertheless eased the transition.

As indicated, I do suggest Ubuntu, which I think is the best developed and most usable system, not to mention having the largest userbase and hence array of help and software.

You'll find it a bit off-putting for a minute, a number of aspects, particularly installing software, aren't exactly designed for ease of use, but push through. In a week or so you'll be comfortable enough to live with it, and in a month or two you'll be familiar enough to make a sound judgement between the two.

One note - one of the killers which kept me from using Linux for years was the lack of driver support. In particular I could never get my wireless card working, which rendered it a non-starter. This seems to have been cleared up as of ubuntu 9.10, but I'm finding some of the trouble over again with 10.04, the latest release. I don't know if it's hardware-specfic or just an issue with the operating system, since it's still in early days, but try 9.10 if 10.04 doesn't work.
How Craig McCaw Built a 4G Network on the Cheap
Well, I'd say my picture of "what libertarians are proponents of" boils down to 3 categories or "levels of advocacy":

1) The "if we could remake the world", fully libertarian state -- I can see some libertarians agreeing with you about knocking corporations down a peg here, but many other "libertarians" that are basically supply-siders or mainline republicans with affectations that wouldn't.

2) The things libertarians actually advocate for as far as real-world policy, as in people lobby for these things and vote for candidates that espouse them.

3) The subset of those things that actually get traction

Out of those, 3) winds up being an unabashedly pro-corporate set of policies advanced by the republican party and 2) actually seems to lean more pro-corporate than anti. YMMV. But I can see your point in regards to 1).
That's just regular density (smart/total). The article says that's what most economists use, but it's not automatically better - and density is a bit loose of a concept anyway.

I'd say it comes down to whether you're interested in a bounded product (infrastructure) or an unbounded one (innovation). A good argument could be made for spreading degrees around geographically, focusing on area instead of population, but it couldn't be stated with any accuracy without a good model of the likely nonlinear effects of degree densities on both types of goals.
Couldn't the right-angles detected be crystalline in origin, rather than from Home Depot?
Skype lies, breaks "Skype-to-Skype"calls are free promise
> I am pretty amazed by your use of scare quotes around the words "rights" and "own". It's almost like you are mocking people who expect to be able to buy things, and then own them.

This is the thing that concerns me the most about the current battle between pirates and Big Media.

The pirate side likes to point out that copyright infringement is not theft. A ripped copy does not imply a lost sale, they say, and of course there is some truth in that.

However, these arguments are based on the fact that we are now dealing with pure information products rather than physical products that happen to contain the information. The other side of that distinction is if you no longer buy a physical product, you no longer have something you can keep and use as you see fit. Instead, you are only paying for a service, which provides information with certain controls and under certain conditions.

It is natural that people who put a lot of money into developing this information will react in this way, and clearly for now a lot of people are willing to sign up to on-line music services, games services, etc. But we are drifting into a world where the industry Powers That Be are going to hide everything behind rental models, and it will no longer be possible to buy an open-ended, use-it-as-you-like version of information products. When they switch the servers off, it's gone. If you move account, it's gone, and you have to pay again on your new service, just like when they went from LPs to tapes to CDs.

I'm not sure that is a healthy direction to move in, but as long as significant numbers insist on breaking the law and ripping off others' hard work, that's the direction that market forces will push. If, as some artists believe, there is more upside than downside to allowing open sharing of works, then they will be free to continue releasing things on that basis, and time will tell whether they are right. But for an article that keeps talking about having no evidence for illegal downloads causing a reduction in sales, it is assuming a lot about a culture that shares freely that is also not really supported by evidence yet.
I have a feeling that most of this article is outright sensationalism. Sadly I don't have a subscription to the scientific site so I can't read the whole paper, but so far I haven't found any other source talking about the "geometric rooms" inside Phobos.

Phobos looks fairly normal on the outside, other than a few strange lines:

http://dad2059.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/phobos-41410.jpg

The article is probably link bait.
Like all benchmarks, the simplification afforded by the benchmark distorts the results. We really should use a weighting function between (smart/area) and (smart/population) to identify both where smart people congregate and where there is a minimum "smartness" density.
Seems go would only fail the mature requirement. Go's future is incredibly bright. Soon people will realize how trivial channels make some of the tremendously complicated plumbing that all weg/server/enterprise software eventually needs.
It's pretty similar to D, which the author dismisses as not being sufficiently widely used yet.
Early Stage Enterprise Software Lessons: Pricing
There are really very few rules or useful generalizations, at least yet. The game is still very new. And much depends not on the properties of a class, which are still _very_ fuzzy, but on the specifics of a particular implementation.

For example, the Facebook app for the iphone is in many ways a better experience compared to the web site. This is more of an indictment against the website, which is simply, and unutterably horrible, no matter how useful or fun it might be to many people. (The lesson here would seem to be that killer content/functionality trumps nearly any other consideration.)

And for reading the web I often use NetNewsWire, an app that is an RSS reader with its own built in browser. Does that count as an app or as a browser? This is much better than any of the browsers with built in RSS readers. Again, how does that count.

edit: When I examine my own usage, I consume books, comics, manga, music, and video in special purpose apps. For mainstream news I usually use a web based aggregator (Google News.) An exception is The New York Times which has a very nice iPhone/iPod Touch app that is great and as a bonus buffers a days content so that I can read when I'm offline. If magazine publishers were looking for a model that app would be a nice place to start. For NewZ (blogs, aggregators, etc.) I use an RSS reader and then a web browser to pick up stuff like Hacker News, Reddit, or Slashdot that would simply bloat an RSS reader. I have tried apps to follow Reddit and Hack News, and on the iPhone/iPod Touch they rock. On the iPad the experience is a mixed bag.
I built a service that followed a similar trajectory (memiary.com) a couple years ago. Here are a few things I learnt which I might help:

- Some services aren't meant to be taken to 'the next level'. You should weigh its opportunity and make the appropriate decision. For me, it was to realize that I'd built something 'timeless' that didn't need next-levelling and re-iteration, so I chose to leave it like it is and be content with its 2,000+ daily users. I figured I'd spend my time on other things that had a bigger inherent opportunity than beat a horse that just fundamentally isn't inclined to go far enough.

- When it comes to making money, there are 2 basic options services like ours have: donations and iPhone app. I was lucky to have built a fantastic userbase from the get-go, so the same people who purchased my iPhone app also have given around $600 - $700 in donations when I've requested for it. Sure, it's no major money, but it's enough to support my time and energy and hosting costs, and I'm content with it.

- Appreciate your trickled traffic. I noticed today that 2,000 people have been using my service EVERY DAY for the last 2 years. That means something to me. Not every service is supposed to be a pageview-generating machine. What's important to me is that 2,000 people take the time to go to my website and write down their private thoughts every day. I'd rather have this than 10,000 meaningless pageviews from Google.
The Gear That Won the Race to the South Pole in 1910
4) i don't like the various different user interfaces i have to get to know. i am used to the web browser interface. i know where everything is. if there was one standard magazine app UI and one standard newspaper app UI, i might feel differently. but for now, i can't be bothered learning a new UI for every piece of content i want to consume.

I know it's been said many times, but if you agree with this statement about the uniform interface of the browser, you understand the appeal of the one-interface-to-rule-them-all of Emacs.
Someone has been reading "Mostly Harmless" again I think.
Have a read of the "source" material:

http://www.enterprisemission.com/Phobos.html

It is even more bizarre than the original article. Of course, by Poe's law, either of these could be subtle parodies. (Although I suspect not).
The front page is your primary problem, I have no interest in reading that much text when I visit a website I haven't visited before (and will leave pretty quickly). You need big text, screenshots, videos, demos, short precise bullet points. Look at things like http://basecamphq.com or even http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ for good product home pages.
For God's sake, if you want to help someone to improve his English, then privately email the guy. Keep HN for discussion of the contents of the article. Your distracting comment on the top annoys me much more than those few language errors. The only thing you achieve is that you publically draw attention to the fact that you noted the error and know the correct answer. Well, we just don't care. The guy probably isn't even a native English speaker.
The Resurgence of Parallelism : Communications of the ACM
How often do you get to suggest how something should be done only to find out it's already in progress? :-)

I think that LLVM might become the universal web bytecode that Java was supposed to be. There is still the issue of a standard library and browser interop that could allow something else to win in the long term, but this is a huge step in the right direction.

[the canonical url for your link: http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/pnacl.pdf]
How to get funding outside of Y Combinator
any ideas
I actually love the concept! I think this approach could be a very powerful tool for the usual procrastinator. I'll give it a spin for a few days and let you know.

Any email I can contact you?
Where? I've been on Usenet for well over a decade, and I was lurking on Reddit within months of its birth. The main reddit has always been overrun with a whole bunch of stuff of varying quality, and the best material and most interesting discussions have been in the specialist subreddits for several years.
This seems to be written for professional programmers, who really should know more than one language. I'd be more interested in an article which discusses which single language should people who aren't professional programmers but can still benefit from programming skill in their job should learn.
I guess I don't think it's that big of a deal. When Skype promised "free Skype-to-Skype", I don't think they considered that they would eventually be used on smartphones. It'd probably be smarter if they'd just charged a few bucks from the app first place, though.

This may also be a condition imposed by Apple, because people with unlimited data plans would use Skype instead of their (limited) included airtime, which I'm sure doesn't make cellular partners too happy.
I don't have the tests on hand, but I did some benchmarks back in 2005 or 2006 and the difference was about 100ms for tens-of-thousands of nested tables and divs and what-not.

So, yeah, doing any of this stuff is just a giant waste of time.
I'm intensely curious who's pulling the strings behind this, is Skype really to blame or is it the mobile carriers putting pressure on them to collect more ARPU by creating yet another fee to collect from subscribers.
Skype will break its freemium promise to Skype users in three months. Skype for iPhone will require a subscription to make Skype-to-Skype calls over 3G/Edge starting in September 2010 according to Skype. This changes things from "Skype-to-Skype calls are free", which they've been saying since launch, to "Skype-to-Skype calls are free over landlines and Wi-Fi unless your Verizon or Three mobile operator subsidizes your service."

Skype has no marginal cost if I make that iPhone 3G call. Why are they charging separately?

Presumably subscriptions will apply to future use of Skype-to-Skype on Blackberry, Nokia, and Android phones.
From the article:

So yes, what you are staring at (probably, in shock at this point ...) is, in fact ... nothing less than what we've been saying all along ... since trying to educate the first Bush Administration on this data, in 1989 (see below):

That Phobos is, in fact--

An "ancient ... ex terrestrial ... very battered ... 15-mile-long"--

Spaceship.

That definitely isn't a scientific article. It sounds more like a conspiracy theory website.
Yes, typical journalist hype by this hack Steven Salzberg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Salzberg). Ah, "the Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park"? Well nevermind.

And while yes, RNAi has been around for a while, nothing like this has been done with the technology. This is a breakthrough.
Inox Tech Heavy Wall Welded Pipes
Inox Tech has established itself as a leader in international markets as a company producing corrosion resistant alloy welded pipes.
"The amazing thing is that Apple has made the app install process so seamless that apps have better usability than browser bookmarks."

Exactly my sentiments. So much so, I decided to start a better navigational tool for browsers at favetop.com. Right now, browser navigation is really a turn-off for some users and I think offering them an easier and more stream-lined process will help them dramatically. Like you stated, this is one of the major reasons native apps have become so appealing to casual users. The ease of the experience is a powerful thing.
"I can’t think of any advantage of dynamic typing except that it allows the programmer to be lazy and not specify the type."

I think he needs to think some more. :-)
I agree, especially with regards to the headings. Helvetica Neue Light is pretty but hard to read.
Yow.

Although I wonder about this being the reason for that many people downloading the Copy Plain Text add-on (I use it to avoid copying formatting info (e.g. font size, style, etc.)).
>>> 4. Support for Scripting:You shouldn’t have to learn one language for writing scripts and another for applications. This allows for rapid development in script-mode which can then can be compiled into an application, if required. <<<

This is indeed a very limited worldview. (I wanted to write something more harsh, but then I told myself to stay polite).

In my opinion, if the constraint is to learn only one language (without specifying why), it should be general purpose language, which allows to produce both scripts and full gui programms, maybe something along the lines of C, C++, C# etc.
Sun's recent odd behavior
It is. Richard Hoagland believes there is a secret space program interacting with/covering up an alien presence in our solar system. He's on Coast to Coast AM on a regular basis as their special space advisor.
I don't believe that geometric shapes and structures existed before Home Depot but you know how dodgy aliens are always messing with time portals to bring lumber back to the future.
But does Skype via 3G actually cost them more than a WiFi call? Assuming their calls still use the data network, it's not like they have to buy and maintain gateway equipment. I don't see how the smartphone issue is relevant.

I agree though, that this move may be more political than anything else w.r.t cellular partners.
But by his metric, manned flights as a whole are meaningless.

Manned flights as a whole are meaningless. They accomplish no purpose but to generate PR for billion dollar handouts to defense contractors.

There is nothing -- nothing -- humans can do in space that systems cannot do better, with the exceptions of "mug for the camera" and "perish". What passes for "science experiments" in space bears more resemblance to a high school fair in microgravity than to actual science.

(Here's a spider spinning its web... in microgravity! With four highly trained military officers and a few hundred million in hardware along for the ride!)
Apparently, the collective unconscious is crying for 20 million web-based todo lists, rather than the 10 million we have already. I say this because I'm working on one too. :)

> It's by design uncomplicated, not a ton of features for you to get lost in,

There may not be a ton of features, but there is an awful lot of "talking" involved before the user gets down to business. I agree with others that you need to minimize this or get rid of it completely. Get to the action ASAP. See Joshwa's comment.

> I really just don't know what to do with it, and wonder if what I built is just inherently ungrowable

I'm sure you can grow it if you really want, but how much do you want to? It seems like your enthusiasm is already waning. Nothing wrong with letting it coast and seeing what happens. Maybe you'll get excited about it again later.

Or, you can dig in and try to market it. Here's an idea I had for my app which you're welcome to use. Let users link their todo list to Facebook, and then automatically post a huzzah to their wall when they complete something. In general, I think your idea that todo lists must be inherently private is wrong, and making privacy the exception rather than the rule might open up some "viral" possibilities.

Anyway, good luck. :)
http://twitter.com/TheOilDrum
Skype has no marginal cost if I make that iPhone 3G call.

If I were AT&T and I could start charging Skype for 3G calls, I would do it.
My first impulse, if I'm told I have to pick 'one' language, is to fall back to my desert island languages, C and C++.

I'm incredibly productive in Python, but if I have to pick 'one', I'd rather work from first principles.

It's not like I couldn't make a node.js clone in C/C++ from scratch, if I had to.
The Age of the Mobile Mash-Up
Facebook needs to fade into the background as infrastructure. If they can become the middleman, they can outsource risk and being the target of ire. That would also enable others to experiment as you suggest.