skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The bombastic claim

"The large galaxy pictured here contains 8 times as many stars as our own Milky Way Galaxy. It is so large, it technically shouldn't exist"

has a much saner description here:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2005/28/fu...

It appears to be "too young" according to the expectations of those used to look at the "closer" things.

So not that impressive, compared to what had to happen before: According to our current knowledge, the whole universe must have grown up 10 to 78 th power times in volume (!) in only 10 to -32 th of second (!), so I'm not that impressed that there existed some big galaxy somewhere the whole 800 million years after the inflationary period! Why not?
I borrowed a friend's for a week and really found that I was more frustrated with the limitations of the device, what I couldn't do (usually because of some arbitrary Apple policy than a technical one), than how enamored I was with how it changed what I could do -- at least once or twice per usage "session". That being said, I'd be far more willing to accept those limitations if it wasn't so darned expensive. When I held it and used it, I kept thinking two things:

1) The user experience is really nice, and pretty well thought out despite the constraints of the design, like no multi-tasking. The instantaneous reaction to swipes and zooms and such are a necessity on touch platforms, I'm convinced of this after using the iPad. Other devices that aren't absolutely instantaneous shouldn't even be on the market. I only say this because on the very few occasions where the interaction stutters a hair, I really noticed it.

2) This is a $300 device, not a device that starts at $500. I can't believe that there is seriously a version of this device that sells for north of $800. For $800 I expect this thing to come with 500GB of storage, a dockable keyboard, cameras, USB, flash, and a 3g plan for 2 years etc. etc. etc.

I'm just not sure I can sink that kind of money into something I won't use for much more than surfing the web from my couch (which I will admit, it provides a superior experience to my netbook for that use-case). Perhaps if I owned one instead of borrowed one I would find other uses for it. It's potential applications for board games and such are vast.

However, considering it's pitched as a casual usage device (Jobs even premiered it from a couch), half a grand is serious money, not casual money.

I found it to be "adequate" as an e-book reader. The apps were "ok", user interface inconsistencies were as common as anything else I've seen on any other platform. It surfed the web great, I spent one of the more enjoyable 3 hour wikipedia link clicking sessions on it that I can remember.

I missed flash fairly often. In particular, I was shopping around for some cell phones, I had no idea that some of the carrier sites have upwards of 6 or 7 flash apps containing all the content on the site. The iPad was useless for those among many others.

I'd probably be interested in getting a 2nd or 3rd gen version if it was significantly cheaper and had usb.
No I haven't seen that, Thanks. That was the general idea I had in mind. Obviously they weren't too effective, but that could be for a variety of reasons, so I'm not discouraged.
Not HN.
Diaspora website redesign, now with more info about the project
Given that I've 'verified' a US address based on a Skype number in Chicago I have whilst I am based in London, UK. Well... I wouldn't say that a phone number verifies anything more than something can respond to the endpoint.

If you need real verification of a human and their identity, don't use phones for it. Especially not an automated phone system.
Heh - I've tried several iterations of styluses (styli?) until I came to the conclusion that (a) the screen isn't high enough resolution to capture the data that I'm trying to communicate, and (b) the processor (or input system, I'm not sure which), isn't fast enough to capture and display the data.

Napkins + Pen are about 10x faster for quick sketching, and about 15-20x more accurate for fine-grained details.

The iPad is many things, but a replacement for my pen and notebook it is not.

I'm in a lab right now, and a quick network sketch of the components took me 30 seconds. Using omnigraffle, (God, I pray I somehow manage to get my $50 out of that App), it took me about 5 minutes.

Of course, the difference is I now have a rich-vector drawing that I can email, modify, update, and _always_ have with me.

I would be very, very interested in hearing about other people's experiences using their iPad as a:
o Sketch Book
o Technical Diagramming Tool
o Not Taking Devices.

Particularly your success and techniques. :-)
I met a lot of my geek friends from going to various programming and tech meetups. I'm in Vancouver but most substantial cities have them. The best ones for meeting people have both a technical component (weeding out the non-geeks) and an afterparty component (allowing you to introduce yourself and socialize.)
I'd be happy if they just made it legal to license it for use in an emulator. That would cover 99% of the use cases I have for running either of their os's (iPhone OS, OS X) on non-apple hardware.
I'd only recommend doing that once, however. After that you're better off being a founder if you like the risk, or a later employee if you don't.

Being a very early employee means you get paid in knowledge and seniority, instead of equity or salary. You hit diminishing returns when you do it again.

Signed, a guy who has been employee #1 at three startups. ymmv, etc.
East-blowing pollution was a huge problem in early industrial London, where many American settlers came from. Whether or not there was a pollution problem where they later built cities, the meme of west=fancy, east=working class was ingrained. Certainly in places like East Palo Alto, the problem is not being downwind of something. It's just that the name "East" is a self-fulfilling prediction of being worse. It only takes a tiny nudge to tip the economic divide towards one side of town or the other.
Really? Time Machine doesn't result in your CPU Fan Spinning up and your Macintosh falling over? I gave up using Time Machine on two generations of MacBook Pros for that very reason. Oddly enough, backblaze has never caused a problem (Highly recommended)
I would appreciate some evidence for whether that is actually true. Chicago and Milwaukee are both examples in the midwest for which that is not true - the east side is the nicest, very valuable waterfront property.
Couldn't the AA focus on permanence be simply based on the observation that alcoholism has a high rate of relapse, even years after an apparent cure, and the theory that constant vigilance is the best method to prevent this?
Excellent :)

Why do you have a separate wait & waitForAll? Couldn't get() wait automatically?
You might want to use mueval (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/mueval) in order to prevent evil people from being evil (at least to your server.)

It works pretty well at keeping crazy stuff out. Hopefully you added some sort of limiter to your page... but if you haven't, this is a great start.

Nice UI & stuff, though. Seems to work pretty well. It would be nice, like paulgb said, to be able to enter a block of code and execute it. I know this currently behaves a lot like ghci, but it would be nice to test larger sections of code.

Also cool job with the lessons. Sure it's pretty light, but it provides a good, quick introduction.
I loved it from the beginning, and I still love it. I'm happy it's catching on because I think it will improve a lot of people's experience of the internet. Partly because of the form factor, partly because it's so much simpler than administering a Windows system.
Stoicism is not about masking pain, but understanding that no one has control of their environment. To violently react to that which we cannot control is damaging to the individual.

A Stoic will grieve like anyone else, but find comfort in reason.
Cray-1 30th Anniversary
I'm doing something similar (not similar to this niche, but going after a niche that has many competitors). But, we did it intentionally, so there was no surprise.

What we're doing is focusing on one killer feature -- and addressing it in a way that none of our competitors do.

So, what's your killer feature? I would think hard about that, because that's what will differentiate yourself.

Once you have a beta product, I'd pick a geographic area and market there. Research the Yelp approach. They were very, very far from the first to market -- and had a unique approach to get a competitive edge.
Best Exercises to Boost Your Metabolism | Hi Health and Fitness
I do hope this will get you into Haskell!

Hey Paul, that's correct; there's no state stored between expressions. It's planned that there be a text editor where you can put top-level definitions, kinda similar to DrScheme, if you know of it. You may notice parts of the tutorial that would've been better (e.g. having to write `let .. in ..`) with state between expressions. I will rewrite those once this is implemented.
It seems you have three questions, how do you find who your costumers might be, how do you reach them, and what do you say to them.

Keep this separated as it makes easier to research :)

I'm going to suggest something for your first question, which is your submission title. How do you identify your potential market? The simplest way is to think what problems you are solving, and then come up with people who have this problem, and preferably who would pay money to avoid it.
Actually the educational technology sector is well established, most of the large textbook companies already have programs for flowing their content into multiple application formats, and have well established sales teams that understand the market. Not to say that there aren't opportunities in that space, but you are going to have to provide unique value if you want to be competitive.
wow! lots of ifs, maybes, projections and conjectures. It would be nice to see someone give a concrete example when they give an opinion. Seriously, if you disagree, for example, and it is based on provable data, please share. Lloyd Moore.
I haven't seen an iPad yet, but I expect the design obligation to be much bigger; you can't slap something together with five default elements which already covers up 60% of the screen on an iPhone.

iPad is a canvas to the user and the designer---and the letter is a big commitment.

I don't think that there are any standard designs to iPad apps like with the iPhone.
It's worth noting that splittester.com calculates 95% confidence that those two (identical) ads will have different long term response rates.
I played around with this eight years ago ( http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/hypertext/fragment... ) and it wasn't hard then (no Javascript either). In fact, I used four different options of displaying links. No guarantees on the external links working any more though ...
>However, considering it's pitched as a casual usage device (Jobs even premiered it from a couch), half a grand is serious money, not casual money.

Ah, so here's an interesting something about that keynote in which I was probably the only one to take note of.

The chair Jobs was sitting on was Le Corbusier's LC-2, and I believe it was paired off with Saarinen's Tulip side table, presumably with the extra-white marble top. Realistically you can expect to spend $4,000 for that chair and another $1,500 for that table. Taxed, shipped and delivered that's easily a $6,000 pair.

Like Apple's products - in which Ive is known to draw on Deiter Ram's influence, as those of other modern designers - they're simple, extremely well-made, beautiful, and try to provide a great experience in at least one area. I'll agree the iPad has some usability shortcomings, but it's still a very solid 1.0.

The average person would love some great furniture. However the average person has a hard time justifying spending such a great premium for some excellent design qualities, and most would agree that such a decision to compromise on price is perfectly normal. However at least in terms of price, something like an iPad or iPod is more accessible to people, whereas beautiful furniture and homes - of which the costs can be terrifying - are not. They're (Apple products) still without a doubt luxury items, but they're within the reach of most.
Best Friends
Here's an interesting article about friendship.
You are mistaking knowledge and experience for intelligence.
She could have honestly corrected her "mistake" by saying "I don't have a degree; I lied on my resume."
Hi, TryHaskell actually uses mueval underneath. See here http://chrisdone.com/posts/2010-04-05-haskell-json-service-t... for more details about how. The JSON service supports state (code loading), with restrictions on imports (e.g. no importing unsafePerformIO), it's just that I haven't added a box to TryHaskell to enter the code. Definitely, it seems people would like to write bigger sections of code, which I like! I'm still pondering how to alter the layout to support this!
If that's the kind of statistic that you're going to use, then count iPhones and iPod touches along with that if all we're looking at are devices running a certain OS.
Go for it if you're passionate about it!

I understand the principle but don't understand enough of how it would actually work to speak for it as much as I'd want to.

Such a technique could also be especially useful for low bandwidth situations, most notably Paul English's proposed Internet for Africa effort, http://joinafrica.org/ .

If you're interested in this pursuit you should also look at SPDY, Google's suggested augmentation of HTTP. It would probably speed up the web more than better compression in many cases.
Herculean Device for Molecular Mysteries
Open source Rails apps to study and learn from
Whenever I press "[" it actually inserts "8[" into the editor. I use Opera 10.5 and a German keyboard (on the German keyboard layout you get an "[" by pressing ALT+"8", if that's any help).

I think you might want to look at how Opera handles keydown and keypress events in Javascript. I had a similar problem working on my own project a few days ago.
Oops Firefox could not find www.netshet.org
Doesn't render well on iPhone. And do they not own the -join.com?
Your $200,000 at work.
First and foremost, getting an app for the iPad on Day 1 has been the priority for a lot of developers---presumably some of the best, too.

Second, as a developer, from a design perspective, the iPad is much harder to design for. See this as a bonus to the iPad: a sh#t deterrent. Security by obscurity if you will.

Third, the kind of applications, games aside perhaps, that feel apt may not feel as tangible as with the iPhone which was an all-portable device, meaning you could bring it with you everywhere: cities, restaurants, vacations, beaches, ski resorts, running, in a cocktail bar mixing drinks, partying, going to the theatre, for use with (acute) pocket reference, etc., etc., etc. Add to this the microphone.

I also think we are overestimating how many genuinely great apps there are in the App Store. Everyone's BS detector goes off when they hear Steve Jobs touting the number of apps in the App Store. A lot of these apps extend already existing services on behalf of companies who also develop the apps for their services, usually as a web client for an already existing internet service.

Take away the apps on my iPhone that are pocket references, out-and-about-based and extensions of services already existing in another form, and the number dwindles precipitously. And that is counting the oh-so fantastic catalogue that Jobs love to rave about.

There are a lot of challenges facing iPad developers that iPhone developers did not face. We should also accept the fact that comparing the two devices will usually be counterproductive.
Probably not - Seattle wasn't settled until the Industrial Revolution was effectively over, so I'm not sure this article applies. Its early industries were timber and coal exporting, and supplying the Klondike gold rush. Manufacturing, and the air quality problems it creates, didn't really hit until WWII.

Views seem to be a powerful anchor for property values, to start with. Which is why you get dicier areas like the Rainier Valley, and multi-million-dollar homes just over the hill on either side.
Ah, I haven't tested with a German layout. I have OS X and Ubuntu available to test on. What operating system are you using? Indeed, I had to add some special support for Opera in places with the key codes. For example, it's impossible to tell, on Opera, when someone presses the End key and when they press, say, 'h', because Opera sends 'h' for both keys. (Or whatever letter.) Actually it is possible with some hackery but it is a pain!
Jim Coplien: DCI Architecture, OOP, Agile and User Interface
The typography is pretty bizarre.
It seems like they do not own diaspora.com no, some guy in Las Vegas does and I'm sure he's gotten quite a lot of traffic to his ad-parked site.
List of Hacker Spaces Around the World
Best part of the article is in the comments:

“'I quit my Masters at Stanford because I knew I’d learn a ton more working on the ground floor of a startup than I would sitting in a classroom.'

I don’t recall a lot of sitting in class on your part."
Beautiful home page.

But, how are you going to fill it with content? If I do a search and don't find content, I'll permanently bounce.

Maybe you could do a double focus:
+Search for reviews (de-emphasize for now)
+Leave a review (increase emphasis on this)

I'd tap into the desire for people to vent. Then, overtime, with enough venting (or endorsing), you can provide the content as a value as well. But, until then, you'll be permanently losing visitors.

Also, I'd say become the go-to site for a specific geographic area. Then expand from there. If you have a thousand posts, but only 10 posts per city, there isn't a lot of value. But, if you have a thousand posts in one city, but few elsewhere -- you may just have a chance.

Design wise, seems like you know your stuff. Great colors!
It took me a few seconds to realize the CSS had completely loaded.
Especially in the navigation area.
Not mine. :)
The logo on this new site is also a completely different typeface from the logo they provide in their media section to lead to further confusion.
Do you think you have a great memory ?
Yes you are right, this is a consumer focused implementation.

For one thing we wanted something to show at the Consumer Genetics Conference that I'm attending this week.

Beyond that, I expect that this platform could be easily adapted to other kinds of genomic analysis - for instance a medically oriented Cancer/Normal genome comparison tool.

My feeling is that no one knows exactly how the genome future will pan out over the next few years and we hope to be nimble enough to capitalize on a number of directions it could take.
What people here might really wanna know it's that the source code will be released under AGPL (you must let your users download the source of the program they're running).

In my opinion for boosting commercial adoption, a MIT license is truly needed. I know it's not in their interest to do so (they plan to build a wordpress.com-like hosting).
Facebook Moving to Answer the Quora Question
"To maintain intellectual honesty and consistency, MIT should announce that it would henceforth stop requiring formal credentials in evaluating candidates for this and other similar jobs. In other words, future candidates like her, who feel confident in their ability to perform the job, shouldn’t feel the need to invent degrees on their resumes. Come on, you may say, how are they supposed to find out who is a good candidate and who is bad. Well, they hired her based on an invented degree, didn’t they? Didn’t she work out OK for 28 years?"

I'm not following the line of thinking here. A single instance of a high performer with fake credentials does not negate the fact that credentials tend to be a rough indicator of performance in many jobs.
well at least we know they have 200k to spend on a good designer now :)
Maybe I just wasn't being clear, I'll try and elaborate. Both public schools and charter schools are publicly funded. Usually the difference in the two is that charter schools get less funding per pupil in exchange for not having to adhere to the same administrative and academic standards.

My only point was that the article seemed to be suggesting that charter schools are good and public schools are bad (which doesn't make any sense since they are both public schools) and that in a perfect world charter schools would replace public schools (which doesn't make any sense because then, by definition, they wouldn't be charter schools.)

Remember, charter schools are given more freedoms so that they can experiment and see what practices work. The original idea was that the successful experiments would be used in normal public schools. There are lots of truly superb charter schools and some pretty bad charter schools.

I'm all for charter schools and I'm all for implementing successful practices in public schools. However, in my experience the people who want to "replace public schools with charter schools" either don't understand what charter schools are, or just want to cut the budgets of public schools.

There are plenty of people who advocate more funding for charter schools, and I am one of them. But in the public school reform movement there is almost no one who advocates expansion of charter schools instead of wider implementation of the successful practices of charter schools.
How your perspective of time can change you
New Reddit: Potential Solutions for the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill
Thanks for your ideas
Yes the comparison tool and the ancestry tool are not complete yet.

As this progresses, we will definitely look for ways to simplify and engage the more average user
The only difference is that Nokia isn't as wide spread in the US as it is in Europe and Middle East. Plus Nokia targets simple users ($100 phones) while Apple and Google (SmartPhone) targets users ready to put $500+ on a phone or a tablet. So Nokia will have a much larger audience.
I spend significantly more time interacting with my computers than my lovers. Don't you? So the quality of my computers affects the quality of my life as much as choosing the right woman. The iPad is smart, sexy and low-maintenance.

I'd like more options, of course. It took 4 years for someone to come up with a halfway credible competitor to the iPod (the Zune). I wonder how long it will take for the iPad.
Sorry, but this is a law to prevent US companies from joining foreign-origin boycotts and contradicting US foreign policy. Companies are freely allowed to boycott Israel or whatever country they want for whatever reason they want, and they do, and are unprosecutable under US law as a domestic boycott is not covered by this law.

This isn't HN.
That was funny.

I wonder if she's right about what you learn at a Stanford master's program. I don't feel like I got a great undergraduate education and sometimes daydream that I could learn it all properly if I got into a good master's program like Stanford. I've been doing web startups since undergrad. The stuff you learn at a startup is wildly different from what you learn in school. A lot of the stuff I've learned on the job, I wish I could forget. If only there was a pill I could take that would allow me to regain all the neural pathways now taken up by UNIX arcana.
I'm on Win7. Actually I made a slight mistake on my original comment. You get "[" by pressing ALTGR+"8" not ALT+"8". Don't know if it makes a difference.
Cool. Is there a way (or can you add a way) to link people to expressions? For example, if I want to show someone :t (id >=> id), could I just give them a URL somehow?