skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Location Data Gets An Important New Layer: The Alcohol Layer
New Data: Foursquare Is 5x Larger than Gowalla And Growing Faster
because some people disagree with that idea. I don't.
Yeah, this is a deliberate stab at the Daily Mail, not an actual sorting of factual information.
This site you are posting on reminds me a lot of this other site I read, http://reddit.com.

In fact, I'd say it's pretty much the same idea, just with a different community.

Oh wait.

Let good ideas/designs prosper and spread. Humanity is better off that way.
"One thing I see missed sometimes is proper form when asking questions. Standing up, stating your name and where you're from ..."

Is it okay to say where you work - the name of the company? Or is it better to leave it out? Can it be considered rude and something like trying to get some free marketing for the company? I am asking because I am not sure, and I heard both opinions so far...
I wish I had time to write a longer post, but I have to catch my train. Suffice it to say the stealth startup is a relic. It's like waterfall methodology is to agile development. It had its day and its uses, but now there are better ways to create a startup.

Here is a fantastic essay on this very topic:
http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/01/achieving-failu...
that is irrelevant to the OP's point
You could have another unified micropayments platform, but that's still another system I need an account for, etc. (unless you can back-end to iTunes...good luck! :)
Google Exploring The Games Market
I would say the real solution, the one which increases readability the most, is to remove the need for many parentheses at all by using optional significant whitespace – see http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/ for an example of such a syntax. (Of course, if you don't export your code to normal, over-parenthesized Lisp before giving it to others, they will have trouble running it.)
Most programmers prefer to use spaces instead of tabs because of some rant written ages ago by a Lisp programmer.

Spaces are better only for Lisp. Tabs are better for C++.

At least for parenthesis the custom is different.
Thank you for your response.
> But I challenge you to find a payment provider who will let you sell something for .99 and wants much less than 30%, as a fee or percentage.

I believe PayPal has a special account for micropayments that charges $0.05 + 5%. That's 10% for a dollar.

https://www.paypalobjects.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropaym...

Not saying the app store is bad deal though.
Using your browser url history to estimate gender
Twenty years ago, when I was in college, I went to hear William F. Buckley give a lecture. At the end of the lecture there was question time. The second or third person at the microphone started their question and it turned into a 90 second monologue weaving obscure historical facts together with personal conjectures. At the end of the "question" Buckley leaned into his podium microphone and simply said, "My, aren't we educated." It was beautiful.
The Real Reason Google is So Worried About Facebook
I think its clear that the store offers some benefits to developers, but mostly economic. Which is to say that the biggest argument isn’t that the development platform is awesome, but that the distribution platform is awesome. Probably even not that it’s awesome, but that it’s the only game in town.

What if there were a third party store out there, one that could provide the trust, and authority need to get consumers over the small purchase hump. What would it look like?

I think Google Chrome team is working on a HTML5 App store but its going to be for Chrome, do you guys think it would be possible to do it outside a major company.

This is something that I have been thinking about for a while, no one has tried this, but it could be huge.

What would this store need to offer, what would it look like?
Because they haven't fully formulated their idea yet.
State of the (Java) Lambda
Safari reader is actually the same codebase as Readability. http://twitter.com/chrisdary/status/15672452287
This may be so, but the threat of cyberwar has also been grossly under appreciated.

Consider the state we live in today. Remote execution exploits that remain unpatched for significant periods of time on the most popular operating systems of the day are very common. Government authorities seem helpless to stop relatively mundane acts such as leakage of secure data (identities, financial data, etc.), maintenance of huge networks of "zombie" machines, use of zombie networks in perpetrating denial of service attacks, etc.

Imagine a competent hostile foreign government with a well funded and talented team of hackers putting every known technique into use. Doing research to discover unpatched vulnerabilities. Taking control of massive botnets. Exploiting numerous individual systems, using very sophisticated phishing and social engineering techniques where necessary to gain useful confidential information from individuals. Using that information to snow-ball into more useful information. Carefully exploiting systems at major corporations to gain access to sensitive data and systems.

Imagine what you could do with that if you were careful and executed a well thought out plan well. Gain access to millions of email accounts without their knowledge. Gain access to internet banking and stock trading. Transfer billions of dollars out of the country before it can be stopped. Manipulate stock prices and make a fortune. Crash the stock market and the entire stock trading system by executing trades automatically on behalf of thousands or millions of individuals without their knowledge. Destroy companies by causing them irreparable damage. Sabotage an internet company's systems via compromised internal systems, while botnets DDoS it from the outside. Or simply execute huge numbers of automated orders, exhausting the company's inventory. People end up with items shipped to them they don't want, the card holders get the charges reversed as fraud, the company ends up with no inventory and no revenue, for a lot of companies that could be a death blow.

It won't be the end of the world, it won't be a catastrophe on the scale of hundreds or thousands of human deaths, but it could be an incredibly bad day for a lot of people.

And this hardly touches the surface. What's feasible and what's been done so far are not the same. We are living in an era of false confidence due to non-event feedback. It's only a matter of time before the right means and motive come together, we can only hope that the result is only just barely bad enough to kick us out of our complacency.
Because some people think the idea is important and if anyone were to hear it, they would surely copy. However, people don't tend to copy unproven ideas, they see traction then copy.
Yes, but if it makes sense to stay in stealth mode for the reasons you outline, doesn't that mean that there is value in the knowledge of what you are working on, i.e. there is value in ideas?
For primary sources, try Propaganda (1928) by Edward Bernays.

Bernays pioneered many modern advertising techniques. He created demand where none existed prior, typically though psychological means. Torches of Freedom is a famous example:

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

Supposedly, he also had a hand in convincing the public that water fluoridation was safe and beneficial to human health, on behalf of Alcoa, and in concert w/ the American Dental Association. Does anyone have a primary source for that one?
Sigh. That’s just not true. Here is what Gruber said about Nexus One’s screen (January 2010):

“The high pixel density of the display is marvelous for reading text. Letterforms are, as you’d expect, very crisp. My biggest gripe about the Nexus One display is that certain colors are way over-saturated. All skin tones look very orange to me. Everyone gets that spray-on tan look. Reds, pinks, and especially oranges all go fluorescent. In short, I love the pixel density and brightness (and, so far, the battery life), but I do not like the color reproduction. I don’t know if that’s the nature of OLED, or if it’s specific to the Nexus One.“

— http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/19/nexus-one-oled
I daresay it's only a problem you're having. As I write this 250 unique IP addresses have downloaded the Torrent, and I've uploaded 1145.7 MB of it myself, or 8.9% of the expected total: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100+*+(1145.7+MB)+/+(51...

That's not bad for outsourcing your bandwidth, BitTorrent rocks!
Actually I think the other way around that you should watch Day9 if you're new as he explains everything better.
It's not front-end widgets that are responsible.

It's the coupling of user interface and network. The best way to achieve sub-20ms response times (instantaneous to the human eye) is to decouple the user interface from the network, to transport views and controllers separately across the network, fuse them on the client, and buffer data against the network.

This cannot be done with server-side MVC frameworks (no matter how popular) as they simply were not designed to do this, to deal with network latency, one of the "8 Fallacies" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput...). The problem is there's too much CPU activity on the server and not enough on the client, when the reverse could be true.

What is needed is a network-aware, network-straddling framework. The "thin client/fat server" metaphor must give way to the "thin server/capable client". This would probably also encourage Javascript on both client and server, and make offline access a reality as a matter of course. For example, see https://szpil.com.
Ten Economic Blunders from History
You bring up a good point, but is that really the reason most stealth startups choose the stealth route? Isn't it more common due to them not wanting competitors to start working on their idea?
The Daily Mail causes cancer.
Seems like a pretty obvious way to express frustration, although likely that it was also a learned cultural behaviour, popularized through television/media.
Never heard of a hiring consultant, actually. Do you have a little more background on what you do and why I need your services?
You can also use (define) inside others (define) if you want private functions. And, because of closures, it makes it extremely powerful and flexible since you don't have to repeat parameters already given in the outer scope.
Most of the time, RSI is more in your mind than in your hand.
It should be noted that many of the big names who claim ideas are worthless have a vested interest in you believing that.
I think there are a few rare cases where keeping your idea close to the vest makes sense, but overall I think it's delusional to think your ideas are worth protecting.

Think of it this way: most, if not all ideas have already been thought of by somebody else. Are you damaged by those people having thought of the idea first, or are you damaged by them having executed it first? If they don't execute, then it's just an idea, and therefore it's of no value and of little concern to you. If they do execute, then they have something of value and it's something you should be concerned about.

The thing about ideas is that they are usually very one-dimensional. People will think of "foursquare for dating" like byoung2 mentioned but rarely think past that initial idea to things like what the competitors are, what are the barriers to entry, what will attract users, what type of design will work best, which framework should it be built on, has it been tried before and if so why did it fail, etc.

Of course, once you've answered all those questions you now have more than just an "idea." You have a plan of attack, a strategy, market research, design concepts, historical data, etc. In other words, you actually have something worth protecting.

As far as the bias on Hacker News is concerned, I think a lot of that stems from a couple of things:

First, there are two types of people in the startup world: ideas people and builders (not mutually exclusive, mind you). I think builders get frustrated by ideas people when equal value is put on the thinking up of the idea as the actual building of the idea. I can personally attest to this; I am constantly running into people who have a "great idea" but just need someone to build it (for equity, of course). It's hard not to get angry at those types of propositions. Every now and then I'll run across someone who has genuinely put in a lot of work on the non development/design side of things and has really thought about the ins and outs of an idea, contacted the right people, formed the right partnerships, etc, but it's rare.

Second, everyone on hacker news has ideas. Hundreds of them. I myself come up with at least one good idea a day. Also, a lot of us have acted on quite a few ideas and learned how much more difficult it is to be successful than one might initially assume. We also learn that lot of the mistakes we make with these ideas as we build them out could have been avoided had we subjected the idea to public scrutiny earlier in the development cycle. So when we run across people who are protective of their ideas it makes us scratch our heads - they're missing out on a critical component of becoming successful.

I could probably come up with hundreds of examples of sites that weren't first to market but now dominate, the most obvious being Facebook and Google. If ever there was a better argument for execution over ideas, I haven't seen it.

One final point: most people who have the capability to build good apps would rather work on their own idea, not yours.
Well, perhaps there is value in knowing other people have a similar idea.
How we deploy new features on Forrst
Find out how Forrst schedules and rolls out new content and site updates.
If I understand this correctly, saying that vowels tend to be close to vowels is just a special case of using n-grams. If you have a fingerprint with the common n-gram distribution for the target language (or even subject), you get an optimization problem where you try to guess the substitutions such that the angle between the fingerprint vectors are minimized.

If it cannot be solved analytically, it seems something like a GA should solve it well.

Is there a standard method for solving substitution cryptos?
Back in the day, every OS was written in assembly. Writing Unix in C rather than assembly was actually a controversial innovation at the time.
Do you think the niche is big enough to support an achdirect.com competitor?
just curious, how do you know it's a hash?
In my experience, parenthood is often challenging because we are given so little good information in advance concerning what is actually challenging about parenting.

When we talk about the difficulties of parenthood, we normally talk about sleepless nights and tantrums and expense. We do this, I think, because these are safe topics. They allow us to have ritualized conversations about parenthood. We know what we are supposed to say and we say those things, even though we often don't think they're true or important.

But the real crisis isn't something we talk about. Raising children requires a huge commitment of time and energy--time and energy we can no longer give to ourselves or our spouse. And while almost all new parents try to keep their pre-baby lives intact for some period of time, eventually the futility becomes so obvious that they relent and cull many activities out of their lives to make space for the baby. The real crisis is one of identity. We fear that by cutting so many of the things we care(d) about out of our lives, we risk not being ourselves anymore. Am I the same person now? Is my wife the same? We don't talk about these questions because many of us don't like the answers.

For me personally, any such fears were unwarranted. I love my new life. Having children improved an already wonderful marriage--my wife and I are now an unstoppable team. My toddler has become one of my best friends. The infant just looks like a new buddy in waiting. But I'm a fundamentally happy person. I suspect it's like winning the lottery. If you're happy beforehand, you'll be happy afterward; if you're unhappy beforehand, you'll be unhappy afterward.
Ideas aren't worthless, but they're not 'excludable' and so there is no market for them. Well, maybe a bit for patents, but that doesn't seem to be a very healthy market...
That was a serious comment; I'm not being snide. Stack Overflow is the only company I know of in the Q&A space with the deliberate strategy of creating individual Q&A communities for like-minded experts. The strategy of creating one uber-site for everything with a question mark, in our opinion, leads to crappy, low quality sites like Yahoo!Answers, where the current hottest question is "Is my name as weird as i think?"
For the majority of people migrating from MySQL, these would be deep enough for them to say "Oh $h1t, my codes will break!" since MySQL defaults to not caring.
Reversible Watermarking for Digital Images
Where did you point out that you prefer the one unit game?

Essentially everything you put in this second comment is absent from the first- it's in your head, but not anyone else's until you say it. Anyone who knows what Dota is will know why it only needs 100 apm, but to anyone who doesn't? It's disingenuous. Your value judgment of 300 apm was completely absent, as was your reason for your (again, unmentioned) preference.

It's not even clear how you prefer the one unit game- to play, or to watch? They both merit claim as a spectator sport. Is your preference complete, partial, or completely uninspected? Not everyone thinks like you (snark: thankfully), so please do us some favors and try not to leave all your relevant assumptions outside of the conversation.
The point of writing software in assembly is exactly the same as writing an OS (or even a kernel): fun and self-education. I mean, they probably don't mean to take over the current mainstream x86 operating system with MenuetOS, I believe it's more about fun and learning. The same is true for writing code in assembly; it is a lot of fun (at least for me) and you learn a lot about how the underlying architecture of your chosen platform really works.
I only do this for test instances where there are two or five users. Anything else and success will crash your site and cause you nothing but trouble. Your time will be better spent on building your business.
A main problem for speaker independent automatic speech recognition systems is the variability of the speech signal - i.e. the same sequence of words uttered by different speakers or even uttered several times by one speaker never results in identical speech signals.

ROS (rate of speech) is one of the primary contributors to this variably and some recent research (http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/PfauR98-spkrate.pdf) has shown that good estimates of speaking rate can be obtained using vowel detection as vowels in general correspond to syllable nuclei.

I wonder if Sukhotin's algorithm could be modified to improve upon this work?
It's a gotcha to people using mysql with a case insensitive charset setting.
A lot of comments here missing the point... The Daily Mail is a tabloid that is exploiting people's (evident even here on HN) love of hearing about cancer cures/causes regardless of evidence.
New YouTube Mobile Site Puts YouTube App to Shame
How a Smart, Decentralized Energy Web Is Essential for Managing Renewable Energy
You could extract a macro to create a ZipEntry, bind it to standard out, and execute some actions that write to the ZipEntry. Then the code starting with .putNextEntry and ending with .closeEntry becomes something like

(with-zip-entry out "META-INF/plexus/components.xml"
(xml-emit ...)

This macro should be useful other places where you are writing to zip files. And it should bring the println closer to the start of its containing scope, making it easier to tell at a glance the scope to which it belongs.
Agreed. In my mind "front end" is HTML, JSP, CSS, JS/AJAX, Design, browser compatibility, etc... "Back end" is business logic/code development (Java in my case).
Here's my 2 cents:

The idea is the execution. An new idea is worthless. It's the refined ideas you arrive at after you've executed a prototype that are worth something. It's because those ideas can be tested and played with and refined. You can't refine a idea without building something first.

So it's not that execution is everything and ideas are nothing - it's that truly good ideas are the result of iteration and execution.
If you have a revolutionary idea that could really change politics and you're keeping it for that perfect moment when everything in your life aligns, it's foolish. If the idea has merit, let someone with the time and passion work on bringing it to life and show the impact.

Going to your grave with a pocketful of possibilities is not only a disservice to yourself, but also pretty selfish.
Where can I get some details on the tech behind this?
Language Is Software For The Mind
Feels pretty responsive. I like it. :)

Brushes, private rooms, etc? Probably still wouldn't be too useful, but a great proof-of-concept.
About your editor rant, I am not sure I agree with you. A great editor will help you for sure in productivity. However, a language shouldn't be unreadable without a correct editor.

Imagine that, to read English, you actually needed a powerful editor.. Yes, some tools help you to be more productive (such as searching, replacing, etc.).

So, again in my opinion, a good test to see if a language is readable is to print it and read it without any special tools such as syntax highlighting. If you can actually do that, imagine how syntax highlighting will make you even more productive!

By the way, it may sound absurd, but try reading English or Python without colors..
Pro games from Korea:

http://www.youtube.com/user/jon747#g/u

http://www.youtube.com/user/nevake#g/u

For first person view search for videos with FPVOD in the name.
If a competitor knows where you're going, they can focus on stopping you from getting there. If they don't know, they have to play defensively and spread their resources wider.
Ask HN: Best VPN Server for iPad/OS X/Ubuntu Server
I run my own VPS with Ubuntu Server 10.04 and would like to have my own VPN to secure my connections when I use public wifi connections on my iPad or MacBook Pro.

I've tried looking at PPTP (even the maintainers of the server don't recommend it), Strongswan (NAT Transport is disabled in the Ubuntu package because of security issues), OpenSwan (I couldn't get it to work, possibly due to a bug in the version in the Ubuntu repos), and OpenVPN (not supported by Apple products).

Any tips on what would be the easiest way to get a secure VPN working?
Revenue model: You should make it so that after a certain number of people vote on its completeness, a print can be made and the board gets cleared for the next work of art.
I haven't had any issues with clunky Java IDEs since my 256mb ram IBM laptop died.

Visual studio on the other hand lacks so many of the things that made it nice to develop in Java, such as automatic implementation of interfaces, inplace renaming, the ability to move a variable from being inside a method to becoming a field at the click of a few buttons.

That said, C# is light years ahead of Java - too bad that the ide isn't.
well, exactly
Game Theory: Perverse Incentives in Soccer
It is their execution that is in stealth mode not the idea itself and Details of an idea is part of execution.
Your Midyear Startup Checkup: Are You On Target?