skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Looking for an interesting project(s) to eat up some spare time
I'm looking for interesting ideas/problems that I could spend my spare time programming solutions for. Having been severely burnt out from a couple of start-up ventures that ate up 5 years of my time, I'm really just looking for something I can enjoy coding in the background of my life at a leisurely pace.

The ideal project would see me spending more time programming on the back-end rather than wasting a day fiddling with CSS, and having to spend lots time considering complex issues rather than doing lots of 'grunt work' coding, and ideally have no time pressures, as it's something I'd do for enjoyment, rather than trying to seek a monetary gain at the end.

Any ideas people care to share? Some interesting things I've thought of are:
- A TCP/IP scripting language: Basically an interpreter that enabled a user to work at the packet level quickly and easily using simple logical statements depending on what the receiver sends back.

- Apache syslog: An Apache module that sends access logs over syslog (I know there are ways to do this already, but you need to use a pipe to logger and that just seems like crud to me).

- Binary watermarker: Something that watermarks executables that makes discovery and tampering extremely difficult (may not be possible, but worth a shot)

- Subversion plug-in to automatically perform static code analysis (may exist, haven't looked very hard).

- Web-based tool for getting yourself or your website/network vulnerability scanned over the Internet.
I've seen both used. glass cups are probably more common but clay is still used in plenty of places.
I wrote about a few ideas on my blog - http://www.nilkanth.com/2010/05/21/6-ideas-off-my-chest/

Have a read and see if something interests you.
The whole concept of "truth" is a bit fishy in the first place. This is obviously an extreme case, but there are lots of edge cases, where something that is fact for one person may be ludicrous to another.

What makes Wikipedia different than Merriam-Webster, is that you don't know (easily at least) who the author is, and thus you can't verify the purposed facts. This makes the source less scientific.
My brother takes his own cups and receptacles to coffee shops and take-away joints. On more than one occasion the cardboard coffee cup / styrofoam tray was used as a measuring device, before then being thrown away, leading to much "you're missing the point" frustration.
Progressive enhancement.

When web applications are available on all devices, but work better on some devices than others, people have an incentive to switch -- and that puts pressure on Apple to keep their browser competitive.

Note the large number of people that make video game console purchasing choices based on how well their favorite cross-platform games perform on each of the respective consoles.
Well, your little quip adds indirectly to future conversations. Where does that put you?

Just kidding, now downvote please.
Fascinating stuff - I found this paper that tries to give geometrical/physical interpretations for fractional differentiation and integration:

http://people.tuke.sk/igor.podlubny/pspdf/pifcaa_r.pdf

Which might help.
Except that's not what happened. Despite being a multi-billion dollar company they didn't install an emergency shutoff that only cost $500k.

That's not just "drawing the short straw," that's criminal negligence.
Authority and it's limit
Feature request: Add the time that has elapsed since last update. For example:

"Last fetched 5/30/2010 8:23:51 AM PST (17 minutes ago)"
Totally off-topic, but re your binary watermarker I'm looking for a data watermarker. E.g I have an ascii data set (.csv) with say millions of rows and 10 columns. I want to either a) insert occasional "easter egg" records or b) adjust a handful of existing records such that the data is still good, but invisibly, yet provably, marked in some way.
Sustainable just means "more flattering to my sense of aesthetics than the alternatives." It is highly non-obvious to me that producing paper cups is more resource intensive than producing clay cups, or that waste produced by clay cups is easier to store than waste produced by paper cups.

Clay cups, for example, require dredging up a whole lot of water and river mud, which (despite the fact that it is done inefficiently by poor people, which is apparently the working definition for "environmentally conscious" for reasons I do not pretend to understand) is not an ecologically neutral action. Scale it to Starbucks level consumption and that is an awful lot of river mud. 11 million metric tonnes, by my back of the envelope math. Plus whatever energy you use in construction of the cups, which aren't exactly carving themselves out of the mud in a carbon-neutral fashion.

This could be averted, of course, if people would simply consume less coffee, but that might be a bridge too far for the latte liberals at Starbucks. I'm sure they'll find a cup which looks absolutely nothing like a paper cup, which will ostentatiously proclaim that consuming this cup of coffee makes you a better person than consuming that other cup of coffee, which is about 99% of the purpose of environmentalism: social signaling of moral worth among rich people for whom traditional religion holds little attraction.
what wrong with people carrying their own travel mug?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00015CMVE/

is what i carry everywhere
there's a detergent in the UK whose recent ad campaign made much of it's new "greenness" due to the fact that it now used 90% less packaging.

This is because they changed the packaging from glass to plastic, and were measuring by weight.
I was kind of thinking the same thing. Can we submit the no-cup design, where one simply does not supply disposable cups? People would get used to bringing their own mug pretty quickly, methinks.
If I remember the lecture I went to half a dozen years ago fractional calculus allows for some elegant solutions to cycloid curves and half infinite sheets of charge.
The common cold's actually a tough one. There are so many different viruses that cause "the common cold" and an anti-viral would probably only work on one of them.

Just putting together a clinical trial would be incredibly expensive because of the difficulties in picking out patients who have the virus your drug treats while they're still early enough on in their illness to be treatable. I may be wrong, but I thought that there actually were some early phase trials of a drug to treat rhinovirus, but they were stopped because of logistical difficult and expense.
I don't think any of these designs will help if they continue to give them away for free.
My design would be a giant coffee shaped recycle bin in the coffee shop and the 2 streets adjacent to it. Would lead to more effective recycling.
Jaron Lanier would disagree...
How We Improved Our Conversion Rate by 72%
Because of it, would you even consider making more than two cycles a year (possibly enabling this by hiring more people, besides Harj)?
This discussion could go on and on, and it strays from the subject at hand, but I'll just say this:

If you feel that there is too much noise in your Twitter stream, then you're following the wrong people. You have full control over who and what you follow, that's the beauty of it. I've found that in general, following any more than about 150 people will get overwhelming. Find the 150 people that are most relevant to your interests and your lifestyle and follow them.

If you're "following" 2000 people, you're actually following no one.
Indeed, I can see what looks like a rather more interesting castle (built on the glacier eroded plug of an ancient volcano) by turning round and looking out the window:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Castle
"An investigation reported in the journal Nature in 2005 suggested that for scientific articles Wikipedia came close to the level of accuracy in Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors"."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia

See especially the section on comparative studies. There have been more studies and more recent studies than just the 2005 study quoted above.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Compar...

Note that the references are provided. Your assignment is to read them and correct any errors you find in the article.
I don't think this article gives nearly enough credence to the amazing pool of information that Facebook is. It's brilliant for organising social events and keeping track of people, it doesn't have to be a great evil. Used responsibly it is on of the best things about the internet.

"Moderation in all things"
The Doctor Will See You Now. Please Log On.
I picture a kind of coffee fountain, where people would catch coffee with their palms, like they would from a well. Ouch.
In big systems like amazon's it's not uncommon to fudge something that's not critical. They probably lost data during a migration 8 years ago, or some similar disaster and decided to just rebuild a replica by generating plausible dates.

That kind of crap happens all the time.
"claim chowder" is right... If Apple's plan is to sell more hardware through Safari lock-in, it's time to short their stock because they're doing it allll wrong. Safari can't be "the next IE6" because it lacks proprietary features, and the bulk of its difficult to reproduce technology is open source and in fact, already in competitive use. Even if Safari were the best HTML5 platform, Chrome/Epiphany/(new WebKit browser) would provide an escape from lock-in.

And, they're going to do this by not supporting NaCl? Really? Let's call NaCl x86-Flash and be done with it. Running NaCl on an ARM processor is going to be way too slow. I get that people want to see performant web applications, but the way to do that is via a cleaner, more portable VM, like the LLVM project that Apple is funding.

So, shame on me for taking a bite of spam thinking it would be meaty.
Thanks I know about this rss. Just want the rss for the newest articles.
It would go around.
I'm absolutely flabbergasted at how effectively the supermarkets in my town changed behavior by charging for bags. Of course, it helps that they're a cartel: if any store in this neighborhood hadn't adopted the "5 yen per bag OR bring your own" on the same day, they would have done quite a bit of business.

I even bought myself a shopping bag, even though my math brain told me that I would likely have to live in Japan for at least another six years until I had recouped the $9 it cost me.
Maybe some other material could be found, that is less costly to produce than paper or clay. I think for paper a lot of chemicals have to be used?

Didn't McDonalds experiment with "eatable" packages? Some grain (sweetcorn?) might have the property of being easily molded into cups (think ice cream cones). Then add some wax to make it water proof? Except I suppose wax would melt from hot coffee? Also, growing corn requires water, too.

Just as an example - you don't have to treat sweetcorn with chemicals to make it moldable. Maybe a lot of properties of paper are not required for coffee cups, so a simpler material could be used.
Worth every penny to see the Red Arrows and Concorde in the opening ceremony.
Maybe that's why reddit is so damn slow most of the time.
The Kindle's weight is closer to that of a paperback book; it's size is also analogous. The iPad is closer in size and weight to a hardcover.

While I prefer the weight of a paperback to read, I don't think that the weight of the current iPad is a huge problem. I don't see the iPad getting much lighter because I don't see Apple switching from a glass screen.
For searching ease, this variant of Pie Menus is called Marking Menus. PDF of paper http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.93....
i agree with your technical points regarding clay cups, but your cynicism is really nasty. and your final sentence about the "purpose of environmentalism" (whatever that means) is pretty bogus.
You can't diffuse static pressure, but when you deal with fluid flowing through pipes, you need to take the Bernoulli effect into account. Narrowing a pipe with a fast flow can sometimes decrease side pressure.
From the article itself:

This is a breakthrough not only because it may give us a cure for an uncurable, incredibly nasty virus, but also because the same method might work for other viruses, and because we have woefully few effective antiviral treatments.

The exciting thing is not that we have a potential cure for a rare[1], exotic[2] virus. The exciting thing is the technique and its potential applicability to other viruses.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ebola_outbreaks

[2] Part of the reason they're probably using Ebola is to get DoD funding (ie in the anti-biowarfare space)
Having laid up carbon fiber . . . respect. And keeping the natural epoxy finish is good industrial design, not to mention opening a whole new au-natural style for tablets. I want this with <favorite-OS> on board.
exactly: encourage people to bring travel mugs by giving a small discount, have ceramic mugs for drinking in, and have bins for recycling or composting for people who have a left over cup in their car.
I love this quote:

No matter what your audience size, you ought to write as if your readership consisted of paid subscribers whose subscriptions were perpetually about to expire.
I use a mobile browser (Atomic) which has great support for tabs- therefore I liked icombinator because it would by default open artcle links in a new tab.

Is there a way that you could have an option stored in a cookie that would determine whether or not to open those links in a new tab?

Very excited that you are working on this project and nice work so far!
That was kind of my point in creating this thread. While there are some complex elements in play here and it is a problem with many technicalities to it, there aren't THAT many elements to worry about at I understand it.

People spend years just studying fluid dynamics alone. People spend years studying mechanical engineering by itself. People spend years studying chemistry by itself. People spend years coming to grips with the operational difficulties of undersea operations.

What those people would see in this thread is like what we'd see from a bunch of laypeople designing the back-end of a Web app.
Add to that that the oil companies were actively lobbying/bribing the regulators for minimal restrictions and that the platform was drilling below the depth they were permitted to drill at (which can't help the cleanup efforts). Short straw indeed.
Online Deals: Scams or Steals?
Imaginary Numbers are not Real - the Geometric Algebra of Spacetime
I have a hard time seeing how this is anything other than a feel-good distraction that provides little in the way of real benefits. Non-disposable coffee cups do not make up a meaningful proportion of our environmental footprint as a whole.

If there's a need to change something (such as environmental footprint) then use market mechanisms[1] to implement it.

[1] For example, if landfill needs to be reduced one could charge money based on volume/weight of rubbish collected.
Related reading on button color test: Red beats Green - http://blog.performable.com/post/631526233/button-color-test...
Dmix, I must congratulate you on your success! Plus your site design is very professional. Great job.

I noticed on your homepage you are still using 'Sign up for free' (at the bottom). Any specific reason for that?
Reducing global warming, but massively disrupting the plastics industry. Would ve economic disaster.
My layman's idea for stopping the leak:

Insert a drill pipe into the well with some sort of expandable yet sturdy bag tucked into the end. Once the pipe is fairly deep inside the well, pump a dense liquid into the pipe expanding the bag similar to an angioplasty procedure. Then cap the well from the top once the flow is stopped or reduced significantly.

Another similar solution would be to attach high explosives to the drill pipe and collapse the well from deep inside.

Have these approaches been considered?
You just have to train them!
http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/dear-vancouver-barristas
idk, what would be interesting would be actual figures and not percentages.

Maybe you could have 7 clicks before but now you have 12. Or maybe 14 clicks and now you have 24. The actual figures will help us to judge the significance of the result
Thanks for the info.

Question though, how do you get these measurements? Out of X people who visit the website who don't log on, how many will sign up vs not?
Ask HN: Start-up success as a non-technical?
Do you need the technical skills to succeed or are you better off gaining the complementary skills (marketing, pricing etc) and partnering up with people with the technical skills?

Why I ask: I'm a grad. civil eng. who wants to get out of the industry, saving up hard to start my own business/further my education. Would my money be better spent on a MBA or MSCS? I see a Stanford MSCS doesn't require a CS background (although I may be hard pushed to get in anyways). Neither is also an option but I see huge value in the networking potential of going back to school.

Really interested to hear what you guys reckon! Any (potentially life changing) advice is greatly appreciated.
A bit of professional curiosity: I note the site appears to be written in Rails. What did you use for the A/B testing? [Edit: I see below that the answer is A/Bingo. I approve, for the obvious reason.] Any opinions on it?

You probably already know this, but the statistical magic behind A/B testing lets you know if A was better than B but not by how much. You can calculate "Hmm, 60% more conversions" but that conclusion is written on water, as I discover with disturbing heaven-smites-you-for-arrogance regularity every time I mention the results of the test that way.

If you sustain the 70% higher level, though, hats off and keep spreading the testing gospel!
No, I don't think it would. It would increase the supply of oil to the rest of the world, and decrease the supply to the US, which would depress prices in the rest of the world and raise them in the US, which in turn would encourage other oil suppliers - other than BP - to sell their oil to the US, rather than outside it.

The only way it would really harm BP would be if BP's share of oil production approached the US's proportion of global oil consumption, and even then, its effect would be to raise US oil prices.

For similar reasons, the notion of relieving the US from its dependence on foreign oil is similarly meaningless. Oil is fungible, and the price of oil for the man on a US street will still be affected by events in the Middle East, even if not a drop of oil he uses comes from outside his own country.
The reason is that "hero worship" is what "respect" looks like when it is done by idiots.
This is more an attack on the nature of social networks than an attack on Facebook. Friendster had the same problems (particularly the loneliness bit - because you visit friend profiles filled with happysmiley party pictures and so feel rather left out) and on that I have to agree.

I must note, however, that much of what the writer talks about really only applies to teenagers. Metrics like popularity (measured by friendcounts) are meaningless when you're older.
I agree with your criticism of the article. I thought you might find PNaCl interesting, though: replace x86 with llvmbc: http://www.google.com/m/url?cd=3&client=safari&ct=re...

edit: sorry I couldn't canonicalize that URL from my phone
I did share my signup conversion rate at the beginning, you can apply that to the trials for an idea.

Here's an example I grabbed from A/Bingo dashboard for the 2 different headlines test:

Version 1: 672 participants - 96 (14.42%) conversions

Version 2: 683 participants - 129 (18.97%) conversions
You're missing the point: of course it's not in BP's interests to have a well explode, but the people making the important decisions are often not making those decisions based on sound engineering, but on political pressures and incentives from above.

Richard Feynman showed an excellent example of this after the Challenger disaster. He was on the Presidential task force after that disaster, and he asked NASA management and engineers, separately, to quantify what they felt the odds of a catastrophic failure resulting in crew loss were prior to the disaster. The risk values quoted by engineers and by management were something like 2-3 orders of magnitude different (with the engineers quoting the much more likely value)...
Marvell backs ambitious $100 OLPC tablet
"the error from faking it looks a lot like defocus"

Mosaic cameras tend to have an optical antialiasing filter that blurs the image, to reduce the moire effect.
International Hulu support with an anonymous Squid server on CentOS 5.5
There was good info scattered among the intertubes, decided to bring it all together.
He's right though. A lot of the "green" movement is feel good rather than practical. Not that the good intentions aren't there of course.
I don't know of a single libertarian that opposes government action to prevent harmful externalities. They may differ on the mechanism (property rights + tort law vs preemptive regulation), but they all believe preventing harmful externalities is a responsibility of the government.

You seem to be confusing anarchists with libertarians.
Screen scraping flight data from checkmytrip.com
I'm not sure if I agree with you or not so I'm going to play devil's advocate. Corporations in and of themselves can't make decisions. Plus, if a corporation were to receive the "death penalty" you're suggesting, it could be as bad for us as it is for the company (in terms of lost jobs, competition, etc).

Why does the corporation need to be held responsible for something like this? Why not hold the employees behind these incidents accountable?
automated customer support via phone(impressive demos):
http://smartaction.com/Resources.htm
We should make a gentlemen's bet about this that our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandkids can settle.
Thanks for the correction, of course you're right. For some reason I always confuse the two names (this isn't the first time I've written one when I meant the other...). I'd edit my original comment to prevent future confusion but the editing interval appears to have elapsed.
I use A/Bingo [1] on CareLogger. Although at work (Learnhub.com) we use Vanity [2].

I found that Vanity splits the participants more equally. I noticed that with A/Bingo one would have 50 more trials than the other ones. Not a big deal unless you check the dashboard constantly.

They both do a simple task well so either will work fine.

Regarding the sustainability, this is something I've noticed as well. The conversion rates fluctuates heavily depending on the days of the week (middle of the week is best). It swings back and forth but 25% is the new middle ground and not just the good days as it was before.

[1] http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo/

[2] http://vanity.labnotes.org/ab_testing.html
And by having used a petroproduct, and/or continuing to do so, you upright citizens are complicit in the negligence.

Congress is bought with your money, so that you can have cheaper ironic tshirts and replica 80s eyeware. All the fingerpointing and assorted loraxerei makes you look silly.
Most people are not pissed at BP - they just want them to fall. It's reality entertainment.

(This obviously excludes anyone who's really affected by the spill.)
<Insert rant about software written in Perl here>
If I had to guess, I think he's lamenting the relative death of blogs as indie publications of sorts (with novel designs and formats) and the migration of people to tools like Twitter and Facebook which are basically glorified, controlled forums.

I'm convinced the former type of blog has significantly gone away, but merely the marginal fringe of people who don't care too much about format seem to have swung away from them.