skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
hckrn.ws was a class project that I used for getting my hands dirty in some server side js + nosql technologies so it was an opportunity to kill those 2 birds w/ one stone.

whosreppin.me was built for an NPR KQED iPad hackathon event. So it was super simple and streamlined and I used a more familiar set of technologiess (postgres, django) in order to mash something up in a weekend. The neat part is that whosreppin.me shared 1st place w/ one other team.
Wow, I loved that, I even tried creating a Google story that I hope will one day be my story.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE4Zh7XXUO4
They are mentioned on Discovery Channel's Powering the Future. I believe it was Saturday's episode. It has interviews and demos. No mention of Google but they do say they feel their problem is control systems for the kites, not the actual energy generation.
Google Story: The Startup
My grandfather's iPad:

http://creativecitizen.com/system/attachments/0000/0607/lega...
I offer a similar service via BitBuffet.com (I own/run the site). It's similar to e-Junkie or Payloadz. Basically, you upload the PDF to us, point your PayPal's IPN point to us and we deliver the PDF to purchasers via email (we have a nice short walk-through on how to do this). As a matter of principal, we don't offer DRM of any sort, which might be a deal killer for you.

You could probably build your own system to do this (just grab the POST variables from PayPal IPN response and send off emails, validate codes, etc...), but if you want to check us out, email me at contact at bitbuffet.com and I'd be happy to extend your trial for however long you like (the default is 7 days). Offer applies to any interested HN'ers of course!
No, even at altitude wind is fairly local phenomenon. As the price of wind power drops, more places become competitive with coal, but the best drip below the price of coal. http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/wind_maps.asp

Edit: You also need to transport that energy, so while much of the Midwest above average resources powering L.A. with that energy would would require a lot of new power lines.
It's cleaner because you, in theory, can outsource an entire functionality class to your infrastructure. Less complexity for you to deal with.

A bit like serving static files - you put your files in a directory, and they're not only served, they're served faster, better and more reliably and scalable than whatever you can code as part of your app.
I suspect there may be some voodoo hidden in that term "real cost" -- i.e. it's dependent on some "cost" of CO2 emissions which they've derived ex anum.
I kind of toyed around with adding a little addition to langpop.com looking at the 'rockstar ratio': overall popularity compared to "rock star" sitings in the job ads. Never got around to it though...
You forgot "How to sell your product" or "How to generate revenue from 1B pageviews"
Can anyone comment on what role the obsessive safety culture mentioned in the article may have played in NASA's current declining trajectory?

It's interesting to see that they have ramped up testing; IIRC, all the problems they've had were tied to manufacturing mistakes, not design flaws. This makes me think safety would be best served by more rigorous Q&A to prevent flaws, rather than testing runs to find them.
This is an incredible idea and an amazing feat of engineering. I'm sure they'll face huge challenges in deploying this thing but it just shows that real engineering is still alive.
Damn, makes me wanna break out my fluid mechanics textbook :).
Not sure why you are being downvoted. Our financial priorities as a country are a wreck. You would really be downvoted if you had pointed out how morally and intellectually bankrupt we are as well.
Apple are obviously using their discretion to accept monotouch apps for now, but you shouldn't depend on that happening.

I'm in two minds on this. Obviously, the somewhat democratization of app development is a good thing, but it makes Apple look petty for making rules, then only enforcing them selectively so as to keep Flash out of the app store.

Disclaimer: I'm writing apps, but using objective-c.
Go find access to ReferenceUSA, Biz Miner, Capital IQ, D&B, Hoovers, InfoTrac, EBSCOhost, Factiva, ProQuest and do searches by NAICS code. Ideally you ought to do this before launching your venture as part of due diligence on the opportunity. Best way in is through a university library. Ask a friend or shoot a question out to your network to see if you know anyone with access. A single license is prohibitively expensive and you really want an aggregate of databases because they each have their positives and negatives.

I know MBA bashing is en vogue these days, but grad students have access to incredible database resources and rarely take advantage of them. The other day I read a $9,000 research report on a niche medical device industry segment and then pulled 5800 executive leads for my startup's first marketing effort.

happy hunting
NYTimes on Facebook death, and why we created 1000Memories (YC S10)
Yep, this is it. I have at least two friends from college that have spent over a year trying to find work. "Defeated" doesn't even begin to properly describe how they feel.
I downvoted you, but I feel like I owe you an explanation.

Here's the problem with what you said.

The use of lethal force in the national interest is either justified or it is not. I mean, you can't half-kill somebody.

If it is justified, then whatever the cost, we have to pay it. It is a matter of survival and critical national interest. Compared to this, any other program doesn't make sense. We're doing what we have to do. It trumps everything else.

If it's not justified, then by definition we're wasting money doing something that involves killing people. Any other program would be better than than this. Everything else trumps it.

But we haven't gotten anywhere at all. It's either obvious and non-optional, or optional and totally unworthy compared to anything else. Neither of these two conditions tells us anything about the space program. It's just a way of commenting on the war -- a way that you can insert into any policy discussion about anything, without moving the discussion forward any. It's off-topic.

You want to talk funding, pick something everybody can agree is somewhat optional and discretionary -- keeping lots of military bases open, foreign aid, public financing of campaigns, entitlements, whatever. But picking something where we're actively trying to kill folks just takes the conversation to a place where logic and reason can't go. Whether the war is a good idea is probably a crazy-good topic of conversation somewhere, but it has fuck-all to do with NASA or funding.
Bad advice? The only advice I gave was that if he decided to take on Facebook, to attack them from an angle similar to Diaspora's.

I agree that his odds of winning the Powerball are probably higher.
The classic legal pad, not a bad choice. I personally prefer the Moleskine, though(;
These threads come up two or three times a year. Usually, the people who indiscriminately encourage everyone to pop pills get voted way up.

I'm seein' robots.
Isn't this because the GPS on the iPhone is assisted and not true?
"Then at the end he sees his kids, but they're exactly as they appear in his dreams. The top continuing to spin just makes it more explicit."

Nolan was just doing that to mess with the audience. Yes, the kids were wearing the same clothes, but the top started wobbling right before it cut away. So the audience is left not knowing if he is stuck in limbo or not. It could be interpreted either way.

Anyways, an easy way to tell if you are in a dream without relying on a totem (in the movie's universe) is to look at an analog clock. The numbers appear upside down in the dream world. For some reason this was only illustrated once in the movie.
The End of Location Based Applications?
From a marketing standpoint, calling it "Perl 6" is a terrible way to market it. Perl 6 implies that it's Perl, which has both good and bad connotations, and it also implies it's just an iteration on Perl 5, when in fact it's one of the most ambitious languages ever conceived. An ambitious new programming language can take ten years to develop and people are only halfway suspicious that it took so long. An iteration on Perl 5 should take nowhere close to ten years to finish. So don't call it Perl 6 :)

If you wanted to keep continuity with the Perl line, then from the outset, it might have been a better idea to plan out a roadmap for Perls 6, 7, 8, and 9 rather than just Perl 6. "Perl with grammars" can be released and then you can move on to the next iteration. "Perl with grammars, objects, lazy evaluation, macros, junctions, optional static typing, and not just one but two kitchen sinks" will take upwards of 10 years to reach final release status. This has the benefit of increasing usability as idioms and common practices for new language features can evolve as each set of features is released. In practice a lot of this has been done for you ("Perl with objects" became Perl 5 + Moose).

Since that didn't happen, I think casual observers are suspicious that second-system effect has taken place with Perl 6 and that it may never really be done.
The clause 5 of the GPL v2 says:

5. You are not required to accept this License, since
you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants
you permission to modify or distribute the Program or
its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by
law if you do not accept this License. **Therefore, by
modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based
on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this
License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for
copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works
based on it.**

IANAL but it looks like Thesis could be implicitly GPL'ed.
You make valid points, but I think that some of them could be addressed to improve the current situation.

1. Allow the server to dictate to the browser some customizations of the dialog box. For instance, the server could instruct the browser where "Forgot Password" or "Forgot Username" links should point. In their absence, the browser does not present those links. The same could be done for "logout" links that can appear somewhere in the browser toolbar if you're logged in (see #2).

2. Just like session information, basic authentication information must be sent from the browser to the server every time a resource is requested. State is trivial to manage: if the server returns 401, the user is not logged in. If the server returns a 200-series response, then the browser knows that the username/password work and can display a modified url, as someone suggested, ala "http://rgejman@news.ycombinator.com/resource. The browser continues to show this as long as the last page visited gave a 200-series response.

Changing who is logged in thus becomes trivial: click on the username in the url and you get the option to login as another user. This prompts the browser to refresh the current page with the new basic auth info, etc.

You can still track state using sessions, but now you have nice separation of functions. Basic auth is used for managing authentication and sessions are used for tracking state. Much more elegant this way IMO.

3. Digest auth is a nice security win only insofar as you don't have to transfer passwords, but I agree that SSL is really the way to go. Why can't you do SSL + basic auth?

4. Multi-factor auth is a good point, but not insolvable. It needs some hard thinking to do well, but it could be done in an elegant way. I can elaborate if you're interested.

5. I think web forms have a lot of problems, most notably the lack of standardization. My parents often have trouble locating the login/registration/logout pages on websites—and I have seen many others with the same problem. Allowing this to be handled by the browser would lower the learning curve for many people and allow them to use a variety of websites without difficulty.
Hmm, OK. Try a different example - the compiler should allow the following code without any warnings:

void foo(int * a) { }

void bar(int * b) { foo(b); }

void baz(const int * c) { bar(c); }

Point being is that the compiler should warn of the const violation based on whether a function argument or a class member is getting touched in the function code.

In fact, the example above is more relevant, because what I am ultimately aiming for is to not need to make member functions const, and yet be able to call them for const class instances.
The problem with the iPhone 4 seems to be low sample size. Honestly, I would not be at all surprised if Apple lowered the sample rate of the GPS to extend battery life. GPS is a terrible power-sucker, and you probably won't know the phone is skimping on GPS readings unless you do comparisons like in the article, since most consumers are pretty happy with ~20-foot accuracy. People recording precision data, like surveyors or geocachers, though, would do well to get a device with a high sample rate and good accuracy.

My N1's GPS accuracy is easily good enough for my purposes; if I pull up Google Maps, it shows my location as about where my desk is on my lot in my neighborhood. I can't really complain.
I teach at a small liberal arts university. I too witness the observations made by the article author more and more. It is especially apparent in one of the final classes for our degree plan, a class meant as a professional development and practical prep seminar course. I see students list Microsoft Word and Windows as a skill on a resume. These same students have no skill with managing their online identities. Until reading this post I had assumed this was due to peculiar circumstances of the university, students and major. While this may still be a factor this article compels me to address this situation aggressively. Any material from educators who currently address this?
You're making it far too simple.

The military industrial complex causes us to spend more money on the military than we should.

It's definitely possible to support a military effort but at the same time not overspend on it. I'm not saying that we're spending too much on Iraq/Afghanistan, just disagreeing with the principle.

On the other hand, not so sure about those fighter jets. :(
how does it get relaunched when it falls to the ground?

I'm guessing: the same way you'd launch a regular kite: by starting with it off the ground and slowly letting out the line. Possibly the propellors can be switched from generators to motors if it needs an extra boost.

A balloon would lose too much in drag. If they can actually solve the software problem to get these things up and flying autonomously, it'd be pretty darn effective.
That's a great start :) We've definitely been successful getting links and I'll think about racially charged pieces :P

For sure the 'ask your customers and track the results then go for the most common denominator' is a great idea. We'll run with that one.
Hang on here, I'm not the one throwing up Afghanistan as compared to NASA. That would be the parent poster. I met those comments at the same level of abstraction as they were presented.

EDIT: You guys read my comments and think I'm some kind of shill for the military-industrial complex. But that's not my point at all. What I'm trying to tell you is that comparing the high-level goals of national defense to the space program doesn't work. And if the high-level goals don't compare, it's not like you can pop down to some lower level and compare. You'll always get trumped at the higher level. This is a categorization and logic error -- nothing to do with politics. One B-2 bomber may be much less valuable to the nation than a new space system, but you can't compare bombers to rockets. Bombers always win.

Charuru is heading in the right direction. Instead of picking a war -- arguably the one thing that has to be "on" or "off", pick the entire national defense system. Does the X dollars spent on national defense compare favorably against the Y dollars on NASA? That's the high-level question. If you argue at this level, and then somebody tries to pull you down lower "Yeah but it's not like we can just stop fighting in Afghanistan" then _you_ get to pull the trump card: "we're not talking about using lethal force in the national interest. We're talking about total expenditures and how they match up against the national interest."
These guys are using e-Junkie, which is a great service and I've used them before. They do cater to physical goods as well, but I rather disliked their flash interface.
Yeah, I guess. ;)
You can always create a better one if you want to.
Here is one Creationist who wishes that other Creationists would actually take the time to read and study the evidence and theories of evolution as evolutionists understand them, so that they can stop making bone-headed assumptions and comments which make the rest of us look like idiots.
The concept looks amazing!

I'm a bit concerned about how to protect human lives around - will it be required to forbid access to a large area ?

The FAQ states that the peak altitude is 600 meter. Does that mean a circle with a radius of 600m must be protected ?

Pretty sure they thought of it already, it looks like a well thought out project, I'm just wondering.
It lives on very promisingly--and largely unadulterated--in the world of SIP digest authentication for a) registration requests (401 Unauthorized) and b) proxy challenges for outbound calls (407 Proxy Authentication Required).
I downvoted because it was an off-topic attempt to digress into talking about the war, a topic which is always guaranteed to start a very dull argument pretty much anywhere. Let's talk about NASA.
The Space program may be best served by moving to the private sector. I believe the private sector will be able to do it faster, cheaper, and just as safe as Nasa. The only thing that worries me is once control is conceded from Nasa to the private sector, the government will regulate the new industry harshly.

It is sad to see the American Dream squashed because of politics but I think a new chapter is around the corner written by the citizens and not bureaucrats.
Considering the miserable state of the US grid system new power lines have to be built anyway.
The original iPhone had only assisted GPS. The 3G and 3GS have both assisted and true GPS.
Let me make a bold statement:

The touchscreen will obsolete the keyboard within 5 years.
You need to cater to a real need if you want to be successful.

Why do you feel the world needs an alternative?

What problem would your product solve (that facebook isn't already solving)?
This was on the Discovery Channel last night, currently(or as of the taping of the show), you need somebody with a remote control to fly the kite. They said they were working on making everything autonomous - which will most likely be one of the more difficult challenges for this project.
Advocating the past's policies with the future's hoped for or even expected technology is not really what I'd call responsible. At the current time we're not close to having the technology that would let a metropolis the density of Paris feed itself without depending on a comparatively sparsely populated area at least thrice again the size.
too late sigh
Can't believe no one has mentioned The Album Leaf.

Also, Uyama Hiroto, Nujabes, The Dead Texan, Oceanlab, Antoine Dufour, BT, Dosh, Juno Reactor, Lusine and Lusine ICL, Pacific UV, RJD2, Shugo Tokumaru, The Cinematic Orchestra and The Six Parts Seven. Most of it has no lyrics, most of it is rhythmic and soothing to some degree.
The difference between the two is pretty stark. Could true GPS have been turned off?
The desire to convey facts to an audience of readers.
You can be both passionate and exceptionally talented, and utterly broke, quite easily.
You should go for it if you can offer a compelling feature that facebook lacks. (I mean really really compelling).

I think the advice about going at it obliquely is only necessary if you're creating a straight up clone, this targeting a niche thing is only about marketing, but if you can offer something better, I think you'll find many early adopters.
If it helps, I downvoted this and the parent because it is sycophantic and content-free. Everyone agrees that our financial priorities are a wreck. Say something substantial. I have no idea how you could expect such a post to engender anything more than a flame war.

The only thing worse than this is if you made a big post about how "morally and intellectually bankrupt" we are.
Google Funded Wind Power - Are You Next?
> Python has engineers and Ruby rockstars

This meaningless statement really bugs me. People who write Python and Ruby aren't rockstar engineers. They're just programmers/developers/[whatever you like to call them].

People who speak English are simply English speakers. Nothing more can, nor should, be inferred from that fact.
"You must log in to share content from news.ycombinator.com with your friends."

So, why would I want to do this?
If you haven't already I would highly recommend you watch The Pier (La Jetee) which was the inspiration for 12 Monkeys. It has a really beautiful and unique style being composed almost completely of still images which suits the story very well.
I downvoted both of you because you're off-topic.
Now that's an interesting idea. The light contains an oscillating magnetic field that you could use directly to spin a permanent magnet, if you had one that was small enough. (Any atomic nucleus would do, but you can't connect a shaft to it.) Maybe you could build a multipole nanomotor so that the rotor itself doesn't have to spin at 600THz; if you have 100 poles, which is not that far out of what people commonly do with macroscopic stepper motors, then you could get the rotation down to only 6THz. (But then you're only potentially absorbing light at the rim of this rotor.)

Gearing that down to 60Hz at the nanoscale — without losing most of the energy to friction — could still be a significant challenge. I don't know of any hundred-billion-to-one gearboxes.

The basic difficulty with the nanomotor approach, I think, is that electrons are lighter than nuclei, so it's easier to get them to oscillate over useful distances in any particular frequency range, and this is especially tricky in the terahertz to petahertz frequency range. A nucleus, under the influence of the same electrical field as an electron, will accelerate about three or four orders of magnitude more slowly.

Ultimately this should be a scale advantage for mechanical computation, since it means you can localize an atom to a much smaller region, given a certain momentum uncertainty, than an electron. The atom can't tunnel as far, so it can store a bit reliably in a much smaller region. I don't think we're there yet.
Too bold.
Assisted GPS is superior to normal GPS. It's true GPS plus faster acquisition via cell towers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS
I was thinking that, too, but I'd presume that an app designed specifically to do GPS measurements like that (for use in plotting a pedestrian route) would be using true GPS, since you have to be moving pretty quickly (like, traveling in a car) for assisted GPS to be useful. Additionally, on the Motion-X website, they say that Motion-X doesn't work on the original iPhone or the iPhone 2G, because it doesn't have the necessary hardware to get a true GPS signal. While it is entirely possible that true GPS was turned off (it'd be great if the author could verify/retest if needed!), I'm somewhat doubtful that those tests were done with only cell tower position estimations.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned developing and hacking the crap out of view code in order to support Internet Explorer 6. It's a waste of time. People who use IE6 already see the internet as a horrible experience, so trying to make your own product or webpage work is just a big waste of time.

Sysadmin work is also really horrible, though I would say it's unneeded these days with the help of services like Heroku.