skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have to confess that I've checked my phone about 100 times today :-)

Ah well. It shall come at some point. Maybe not for weeks, but it will come.
He appears to "care deeply" about whatever he does. That itself is worthy of respect in my book. Props to him.
Ruby on Rails isnt a programming language. Its a framework for web applications written in Ruby.
I know very little of autism or iPhone apps, but the first two things that popped into my mind upon reading the headline of this post were:
http://projects.gnome.org/tomboy/
and:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding
That last one can be taught!
Also, don't forget Chrome OS: Diet Linux on the Desktop (okay well, desktop as positioned vs. Linux for servers)
I pretty much gave up on it, the only thing I still enjoy is teaching kids to play and one guy from Amsterdam I occasionally play, we're fairly evenly matched so it's almost always interesting.

I learned to play when I was about 6 years old, my neighbour was a very good player (I believe master class, but not sure, it is very long ago), he gave me Max Euwe's books and I dutifully worked through them, we would play for days on end, and I loved it, the guy must have had amazing patience (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370499 ).

In school I was pretty much unbeatable until I met Arno Bezemer, a kid living about 4 houses down the road, he taught me a definite lesson in humility, I didn't win a single game for the first year and half and even when I did win it was usually only because he was distracted or had a really bad day, he taught me a tremendous amount about chess.

He enticed me to join the club and I lost almost all interest very shortly after that, I think I only played in that club for about 6 months, and it killed any interest I might have had in competitive chess.

Eventually Arno became the strongest player in Amsterdam, he's in the top 100 players for the Netherlands, ranks 3637 for the world.

But he's dedicated his life to it, I don't think I could do that.

http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=1001396

edit: corrected the author of the books I learned to play with.
You are right; much of the python community dislikes the GPL (myself included) but I don't know of widespread "how the hell do we get around it" disease. Most of us just see GPLed code, shrug, and move on.

You seem to be making it out like people within the community are hell bent on screwing people who release software into the wild as open source, which bothers me a bit.
Google's Pacman Source Code
Ruby is a programing language. Ruby on Rails is a web framework. That is not a pointy-headed distinction, because the reason Rails is vastly superior to regular ol' PHP for certain types of prototyping tasks is because of all the stuff it has built on top of Ruby. For example, ActiveRecord, which will save you from having hard-coded SQL calls in the middle of your prototype.

There is a certain amount of conceptual overhead which happens with Rails projects that doesn't happen with PHP. Deploying Rails apps is still an order of magnitude or more harder than doing PHP apps -- even with Passenger, which supposedly fixed deployment. There will almost certainly be more configuration in a Rails app.

On the plus side, the Rails and Ruby communities have wide and deep amounts of OSS code for you to use to accomplish typical web dev tasks. The PHP community is, ahem, well, I'm sure they're wonderful people and if you're working on Wordpress they have huge amounts of well-packaged code available for you to use to accomplish your tasks.

You don't mention if you're a programmer already. PHP is well-suited to folks with minimal programming ability. I would think doing Rails without having strong object oriented programming skills would be a recipe for disaster.
Honestly there is not enough information to provide you good advice.

There is no ONE approach to sell whatever website / company / solution.
The strategy will depend on the nature of the assets you want to "sell" (your expertise, employees, code, customers, etc.), your potential customers (an entrepreneur, a medium company, a Fortune 500 company, ...), your balance sheet, etc.

So my advice would be to analyze your situation and try to identify someone who already sold his company with a similare situation and contact him. For sure (s)he will be happy to share his/her experience.
Also, you could find some VC or investor and just invite him/her for a lunch and have a productive talk (it worked amazingly well for me).
I'm happy with Android. All the applications I want or need are in the marketplace and app quality seems to be steadily increasing. The official Twitter app is a great example, it's gorgeous and highly functional. The integration with Google's services is excellent as you might expect, and I have a lot of data stored in that world.

Everyone I've shown the EVO to -- including half a dozen Googlers who use Nexus Ones -- have been struck by the size of the screen and feel of using the phone. It's strong competition for the iPhone.
The wm 7 ui is typography based with minimal visual flourishes and virtually no icons.

Its very different than any mobile ui out there. I really enjoy the experience on my zune hd and that's a preview of what wm 7 will be based around. From what I've experienced (people who have never seen this type of ui before), people seem to be intrigued and curious by it. If the mobile team at microsoft is paying attention to details in the way the zune team did leading up to the launch of the zune hd, then a lot of doubts people have about this platform will be gone.
> > They already allow you change your preferences to see 100 results per search instead of the default. How does this fit with your logic?

> That nobody except for a few geeks do it. Just like the 'I feel lucky' button.

Why don't they offer this as an option then, by the same logic?
I know Apple doesn't want to support a flash plugin and was burned by Adobe in the past, but with Android supporting flash now Steve Jobs has less excuses to tell users why they can't view flash on websites. Most users won't understand why they're Android friends can access flash sites, but they can't. Apple could work with Adobe to get a flash plugin on the iPhone, they just don't want to.

Also, people can make flash apps in the browser and that's fine. It wouldn't hurt AppStore sales, cause native apps would be better.
what about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem? That is a mindbreaker

Why? If I had to guess, I would say you are uncomfortable with intrinsic uncertainty. Or is it something else?
I don't actually have much experience working with these apps, but on a second reading of the problem, I realized I was thinking of a different problem(an external generator sending stuff from a serial port into the computer). The key to solving this one is just to get the MIDI data into the Windows MIDI mapper system.

If you have access to the app source you should be able to rewrite the code to use DirectSound or FluidSynth to play MIDI rather than touch the serial port.

If not, two dirty-hack options come to mind: you can loop the serial line's output back into the computer with a USB MIDI device(classically, MIDI goes over a 9-pin connection, presumably you already have a solution for serial-to-9-pin with the original setup) or you might be able to poll outgoing serial traffic and remap it with some code.
i liked it better when it was called "github"
Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution
Thanks. Yeah flash isn't the future, but it's difficult to ignore so many sites with it, especially now that Android can view them.
I just can't wait until vanilla 2.2 is available for the Evo 4G. I find the general usability of Sense UI to be quite poor.
Hold a second here, when you're from Europe you may not know this, but in the United States and in Canada 'baseboard' electrical heating systems are very common and natural gas systems (like you see all over Europe) much less so.

Other heating systems common in the States are based on fuel oil ('red' diesel) that is atomized in a central burner and then used to either heat water (like in most European central heating systems) or air.

Elecrical forced air heating systems combined with air conditioning for the summer are also pretty common.

In Europe electrical heating is a rarity, unless for additional heat (small 1KW space heaters and such).
Darn! Missed the second one!
How to best get the word out thanks Joseph
Easy fix--will do tomorrow as it's getting late :)
Not just your regular Dollar Store
Anecdotally, so, not my own start-ups but friends that have tried to start out, if they kept it simple (consultancy, contract work) they were mostly successful, if they went for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow they mostly failed.

Well hopefully that holds true for me, I was planning on taking the simple route. The simple route seems to be a little more sustainable: if you can find customers to do consultancy or contract work for, perhaps those can be your initial customers for your start-up.
I must not understand monads. I thought I knew the basics of how to use them, and have used them in the little bit of Haskell I have written, but that makes no sense at all to me.

What are the apples and oranges supposed to represent? Why would anyone want to put oranges in the spacesuit? When "you just take what you need", who is the "you", and are they swimming around in the ocean? Is the ocean significant at all?

I might be wasting my time trying to understand this analogy. I'm not up to speed on terms Haskellers throw around such as fields, rings, category theory, etc. Haskellers are welcoming of newbies and eager to teach, but are on a vastly different level than the average developer causing some of us to feel we're not smart enough to wield Haskell. Unfortunately even some basic concepts are so abstract that trying to explain them in concrete terms often leads to gibberish such as dons' analogy there.

I realize dons probably wrote that for the monad-savvy crowd as kind of an inside joke, perhaps I'd do well to just move on.
So here is a question for HN. What is a good boardgame which has

(1) rich tactics
(2) does not need "memorizing openings" type efforts to be good at or where such strategies don't work.
(3) is easy to set up and play (4) has some online community

I don't pay chess these days for much the same reasons as jacquesm. Miniature wargames are fun but a bear to setup and tear down. Most popular boardgames aren't very rich tactically, mostly dependent on luck/die rolls etc.

I guess Go would be a good choice but I can't get anyone to play with here and/or teach me some interesting tactics :-|. I know the rules but don't quite "get" it yet.
They've talked about that at some length, it is a relic from the early days and even if it costs them money (60 million bucks annually iirc) they feel they should keep it not to upset the users that have gotten used to it being there and occasionally using it.

edit: so much for my memory, it costs them almost twice that, 110 million per year, source:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Im-feeling-lucky-button-costs-Google...
Is the new JIT compiler a listed feature of Froyo?

Does the iPhone run non-native compiled software?
Is this the solution to the oil spill cleanup?
A friend of mine from sent this video. Interesting idea. I can think of many reasons why this surprising idea to clean up the oil slick could possibly not work but:
1- I did test the principle of oil sticking on dried grass this afternoon with motor oil at home in my garage and it does the job very well.
2- Ideas like this seem no better than the other chemical or mechanical solutions in use today when they first appeared.
I say this needs to be developed. Any comments?
I think cap and trade has at least one major flaw:
Unless every country is participating equally, activities that create a lot of CO2 will simply be outsourced to countries without the regulations. With CO2 emissions being a global problem, it may not help solve the problem very much at all (except maybe for things not worth outsourcing, or things that can't be outsourced like travel), while shifting revenue and jobs to different countries, which will then have a severe disincentive to ever considering joining the cap and trade game later.
I'd recommend avoiding PHP. For quick prototyping, I'd recommend Rails, though (in my opinion) Ruby/Sinatra or Python/Tornado would be better overall.
Frustration with that was what led Bobby Fischer to propose Fischer Random Chess, which randomizes the starting positions of pieces (within some parameters) to make memorizing opening books infeasible. But it never really caught on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess
Starkfist, You can't just flag for ridiculousness and not explain yourself. This is a place for slightly deeper thinking I hope...
From the article:

A lot of people think we get thousands of applications for each funding cycle. In fact we usually only get several hundred.

I wonder how many applications YC is getting these days, and if the number is now in the thousands.
Cool, thanks! Exciting times.
Ask HN: What this fact means about Twitter (and web-startups in general)
Twitter is a successful web service. Perhaps, I can say it is amazingly successful, this is nothing to be argued about.

Yet, it seems to be the only popular web service which require installation of third parties and sometimes desktop applications to power-use it. That is, using gmail within your native mail client (via POP/SMTP) is nothing comparing to the gmail client itself. Same applies to youtube, facebook, friendfeed, and any other one you can think of.

Those services are all shipped with a well invested web client that evolves and renew itself once in a while. Twitter.com on the other hand, is becoming a mass, or perhaps useless, if you want to follow more than 25 people. tweetdeck seems to be far better client than twitter.com

This support PG's claim that twitter is a protocol, not just a web application or a web service. As such, we can treat it as torrent or any other protocol/hub.

But the point I am trying to make is that we might should look at web startups from different angle. In an era which everyone is willing to move into the cloud, perhaps one should focus about infrastructures and APIs and not on a rich client development, leaving the clients and apps to the echo-system which would built around the core service.

I refer to twitter.com as a demo application for the twitter capabilities, and not the the "twitter". this distinguish between twitter and twitter.com is astonishing to me, and I would be glad to hear more opinions about this.

love you all,

Tzury
It's getting close to a thousand lately.
Not sure if kd-trees are lesser known, but they are neat. I only learned about them recently so to me they were "lesser known".

"In computer science, a kd-tree (short for k-dimensional tree) is a space-partitioning data structure for organizing points in a k-dimensional space. kd-trees are a useful data structure for several applications, such as searches involving a multidimensional search key (e.g. range searches and nearest neighbor searches). kd-trees are a special case of BSP trees." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kd-tree
Web Trend Map (Infographic)
Thanks - I am from Europe. So why is electrical heating so common in the US? Or is it really a legacy from the days of SUVs and cheap energy?
You might want to try Python instead of Ruby or PHP. If you are willing and have the time, do give Smalltalk a shot too.
No, but why would you say "not without my lawyer" if you weren't actually willing to get a lawyer and talk? If you make the offer with the intent to rescind it if they take you up on it, why make the offer in the first place?
I don't know that "You'll be in the office from early to late because you'll love it so much you don't want to leave" is that wonderful of an improvement on this, incidentally.

Even worse: You'll be in the office from early to late because even though you don't love it, there's a corporate culture of "isn't this place great?" and you're worried that if you don't stay late people will discover your secret dislike for the work environment.

Never been at such a company, don't plan to ever be at such a company... but I've heard quite a few friends describe their silicon valley jobs that way.
It installed fine on my Nexus One from bought from Google directly. Froyo is a lot smoother than Eclair. The most noticeable thing is that all transitions (opening apps, closing apps, opening up app list, sliding between home screen pages) have a higher frame rate.

Flash Beta is on the android store. Thankfully, the equivalent of FlashBlock is built into Android's browser - change the plugin settings to on demand, and you have to tap to enable Flash boxes. Flash ads etc. on pages generally murder scrolling performance.
Is the growth of the number of accepted companies roughly parallelling the growth of the number of applicants? (I suspect it is, but you've only mentioned numbers very sporadically so I'm not at all certain.)
Yes, used to work somewhere. She got laid off but I can see why that would seem funny from a random post on the internet.

The point I was trying to make is: you really don't ever truly know what's in your car and that's reason enough for me to not consent to any searches.

Since we're telling stories: I've been pulled over for a headlight being out and the cop was asking me routine questions for a stop.

Cop: "Where are you going?"

Me: "To the grocery store."

Cop: "Did you know one of your head lights was out?"

Me: "Are you serious?" (I actually didn't know my headlight was out)

Cop: grin

Me: "Yeah, I guess you're not just pulling me over for to be funny. No I didn't know it was out."

Cop: "Are you carrying any drugs?"

Me: "None that I'm aware of."

Cop: "Can I search your car?"

Me: "I do not consent to any searches."

Then he goes back to his car for a couple of minutes, comes back, and tells me I'm free to go and to get the headlight fixed. I didn't get the feeling he really wanted to search my car, just that he was doing it to do it. Did I have anything in the car that was illegal? No. Why did I refuse? There was no point. There's no connection between a headlight and what ever might have been in the car. Cops sometimes have more respect for you when you exercise your rights. At least this one did.
I mostly agree with you, except for two points:

For prototyping purposes, deploying to heroku is as easy as

git push heroku master

Also, I learned Ruby as my first language... learning OO was no harder than learning other programming concepts.
La Otra Mitad de las Verdades a Medias
I think that varies by area. I've lived in Indiana, Texas, Georgia, and California, and I've had natural-gas heating in three of those (all but Georgia). I think pretty much every house in a populated area in the midwest has natural-gas heating, though I hear fuel oil is more common in the northeast, and electric heating is more common in areas where heating isn't very often necessary (like Georgia).
Wyzo Start
iirc, hackety hack came out for Windows only. Is it available for OS X too now ? If not, are you working towards that?
I haven't heard of Chrome Apps before. Does it step in the toes of cloudomatic?
Would this be your first programming language?
Original discussion, in case anyone's interested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6668
The iPhone was not only a revolution in hardware and experience, the concept of regular software updates that made the phone significantly faster and better was a great feat too.

But there's no reason this should only happen every year. Google is a capable dev house and far less cautious releasing new software. We all like google and the web and open source because it allows extremely fast and transparent iterative updates.

I don't think google will or should slow down improving android. I'd hope the hardware manufacturers experiment with shipping their own vanilla android devices and learn exactly what customers and the market flock to.

Don't forget a Moto Droid is still a badass phone despite what iPhone 4 or froyo offer. If you want the cutting edge you can install hacked firmware. Or buy a nexus one. Or wait until your carrier will help subsidize a whole new phone just like we've always done. There's no problem here as a consumer or for google as a os vendor.
Yes, that makes sense. In Western Europe domestic heat is almost exclusively natural gas.
I wouldn't, personally. Even if you get a lawyer, the lawyer says not to talk. I already know that for free.
Australia Can Search your Laptops, Phones for Porn
Longest forced win: Chess endgame
At least the UK will always be ahead of the world in TV Detector Van innovation.
Selling a company is a full-time job that's a lot like raising money, except unlike raising money there's not a ton of blogs out there giving free advice on how to do it. If you try to do it yourself, you will suck at it.

If your company could actually be worth something, where 'something' has seven digits in it, find someone with experience who's successfully shopped companies before. They will want a retainer plus a percentage of the total. Assuming they know what they are doing, they will be well worth it.

If your company has no chance of being worth a large sum to anyone, put together a list of parties who might potentially be interested, e-mail their CEOs or 'corporate development' executives (if they're large enough to have such things), and just be open with them. They will take you to the cleaners, but if your company isn't worth enough to hire a professional this is hard to avoid.

Ultimately your startup is worth what the market will pay. Lines of code don't mean much and time spent on it means nothing. Let another party make the first offer if you manage to get any nibbles.
I'm pretty sure that we could kill off the human race with plenty of other weapons. Conventional explosives are not too nice to the human body. Neither are swords or pointy sticks, for that matter.

(The problem is not nuclear weapons, the problem is people that want to kill other people.)
Why do you want to sell it is one of the first questions a buyer should ask, or at least find out an answer for.

After all there are lots of reasons to get out:
- Patent lawsuit incoming
- google/apple just entered the market
- Future law change

'My heart's not in it' is a reason to think it is safe to buy.

Of course due diligence for the above is also needed.
This could be bad news for me since I've been one of the people involved in working on the "lite" version of IsoHunt. At the same time though, I'm pretty excited, since I could be coming into a lot of free time to work on my startups.

For other people, may I recommend:
http://btjunkie.org
http://piratebay.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960
Why? If you are going to give a position, at least back it up.

@jonjonjon - I'd suggest finding a quick mini-project tutorial for both languages and do them. Afterwards, see how both languages feel and judge it yourself. For Ruby on Rails, there is the Rails Tutorial by Hartl

http://www.railstutorial.org/

I don't know of an equivalent for PHP.
Do read it. Martin Gardner's notes are so
enlightning and funny.
Alas, sad news indeed.
We have this problem without any DNA manipulation. Ever heard of MRSA?