skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I couldn't disagree more. Just because a method "works", does not mean a rigorous approach isn't required. It seems you are also forgetting that most science was started as "intuition" but at some point point a rigorous approach was required to actually turn it into science.

From the field of mathematics, set theory comes to mind.

You forget that you are not teaching it to kids who are supposed to have fun with it - you are teaching it to people who will presumably use that info in a few years, and most won't have another chance to learn it again.

I also don't know exactly how it is taught in the US, but here (Israel) there are calculus courses which deal with with the practical side for physics students and such, and there are courses which deal with rigorous theory and proofs for match students and the like.

I have to add I'm taking my third calculus course this semester, and so far the second one was my favorite subject (Math major).
There's also lack of energy... do all the distillers come with free solar panels? Otherwise you need to have fuel.
Pre-iPhone I suppose.

Worldwide mobile advertising is projected to surpass $2.7 billion in 2008, up from $1.7 billion in 2007, but the market has developed slowly and obstacles remain, according to Gartner.

Ref: http://www.cellular-news.com/story/30208.php
Never mind Paul Graham, where is Rick Astley?
or look at betaworks too
Building a 5-ton mechanical calculator...from 19th-century plans
The Future Is Now
Summize Offers a Better Twitter Search
Do you mean the internet, or the web?
Mowser Founder Says Mobile Web Is Dead. It’s The Opposite: The Mobile Web Was Born Only Yesterday
Strong Crypto from the ground up. Binary standards instead of HTML, so if anything is broken even the least it cannot be displayed.

JS goes out the window and is replaced by a scheme like language that can process HBML as if it was native list.

But those are minor points when you compare it to the first.
reverse domain name resolution... eg. org.reprap
Sadly, those aren't opposites.
Kinda surprised there was no mention of anybots. I think the general populace is going to be shocked at how quick some major changes happen in the near future.
>Is it possible for a hacker to teach himself to do research?

I don't know a single good researcher who doesn't fit that description.

However, I do recommend some flavor of apprenticeship (1). A good mentor will suggest useful bones to search for, and act as a tour guide to stuff that already exists.

A comment like "did you know that in the 80's, $BIGNAME tried to do $X with $Y (not $Z), take a look" can save you LOTS of time.

(1) The useful part of the PhD is the apprenticeship to your advisor. If you can get the apprenticeship without the PhD, take it.
This post is junk. No evidence besides hearsay (without quoting the source, no less).
I agree with mark_ellul, reverse domain name resolution.

com.google.maps etc...

I'd also like to see more crypto.
I think IP and TCP/UDP work pretty well... seems like they messed up a bit on the size of the address space. That's what I would call the "internet" (along with some general services, e.g. DNS). Sounds like you are talking more about HTTP/HTML.

True anonymity seems a bit hard (when you make a request, the reply has to go somewhere).

With regards to the "standard runtime environment"... I'd add true bidirectional communication, and a built in local storage mechanism (though Google gearbox and the flash hack seem to have mitigated this).

UPDATE: (fixed some cases).
an extra level of indirection in all protocols for redundancy. the MX records in dns for mail are a good example. it's currently rather tricky to get good redundancy (fault tolerance) in software.
(1) No ads

(2) If your markup is not syntactically correct, the browser won't display your site.
"Mowser lets you view the Web on your mobile phone."

Which was relevent back when mobile phones didn't have fully functioning web browsers. Since the iPhone though, there's really no need for such a service :/
Usage, technology, resources, bottlenecks - all have been changing all along the time and further will change. The ideal solution of today will not be a good solution for tomorrow. What you call mess, is the result of an evolutionary development that will be replaced by something appropriate when the time has come. Although your question is surely mind-challenging, it assumes that a bright from-scratch design would beat the outcome of the competition of different technologies. I don't believe in that.
It fits with the theme of the article that no one outside of this circle has heard of them. It takes people a while to notice huge progress.

I also think robotic cars are really going to sneak up on us.
Kill, maim and murder the insanity of "be liberal on what you accept and conservative on what you emit.". Instead, have a standard dtd, and if any site deviates even a bit from it, render flashing red text on the site that says "The developer of this site is an incompetent moron. You really shouldn't trust him or do business with him." Make implementing this feature required part of every web browser.
How can you have innovation if you get a standard runtime environment ?

If I would do something I wouldn't display the pages if the markup isn't correct.
Tandem looks interesting.
First Androids Return To Base
I'd say "Mobile web", yes.
Browsing the web just as you do with a PC, using your iPhone etc, - growing massively.

The distinction has just gone away. People want a fully functioning web browser on their phone, and that's what they'll use. Not some WML stripped down horrible to use thing.
Just reading the title, I thought "oh cool, an article on anybots". But, yup that was the point. No one knows.

hehe... yeah, a year ago I polled a couple of co-workers on when we would have self-driving cars. One said 50 years, one said never. :)
That's why the article refers to the Stirling engines as a potentially partner - you chuck your cow dung or whatever into the Stirling to generate the heat needed to distill the water
Seven Startup Lessons from Intuit
I would change almost nothing on the web side of things. Having no ads would seriously change the business of the internet today. Who would foot the bill for everything that we use now? End-users?

HTML is a leveler for a lot of people, and it helps designers and developers actually work together, instead of being limited (VS.NET), it also allows for quick (albeit not always concurrent) innovation, and competition. TCP/IP Is so well generalized that you can do anything with it. Redundancy is not well executed, but it doesn't have to be if the pipes get bigger.

Doing things like calling new developers "incompetent morons" stifles innovation. I certainly would have quit a long time ago, if when I started there was no room for mistakes.

HTML and Javascript were the 'gateway language' for me for all sorts of things.
Why do some people want anonymity? Bad idea IMHO

Privacy? Yes of course.
Anonymity? Definitely not - just means people can do what they want without any come back.
No concept of bandwidth
Probably not. I turned 40 last month. I find that I'm much less likely to write the wrong year on my checks than I was 10 years ago. When you're younger, what year it is seems permanent, hard to change. Later you're no more likely to forget what year it is than you are to forget what month it is.
Ad hoc encyclopaedia for the information age
I use http://www.freeagentcentral.com to handle the lot (no US-specific tax support yet)
I don't like the bone finding analogy much, actually. Heres why: in most sciences, big bones are made from small bones.

(I'm sure there is some flavor of this in paleontology as well. But I don't like the analogy because to people like me who know very little about bone hunting, it sounds very wrong.)

Let me give an example. I'm hunting a big bone right now: clearer MRI images from low resolution data.

To do that, I need the following small bones:

1. Understanding why low resolution data sucks, and finding unused information. (This is something along the lines of literature review.)

2. Small bone: How to optimally extract that data?

3. Small bone: Result of step 2 gives me an unordered list of points. All I know is they are samples from some set of smooth closed curves, and I also know the tangents to the curve at each point. How do I get the curves?

3a. Smaller bone: some points are wrong. Can I figure out which, and ignore them?

3b. How much of this can I prove?

4. Small bone: If I knew these curves, how do I use them to get a picture that a radiologist will like?

(Step 3 gets extra emphasis, since that's what I'm doing right now. ).

Every scientist is a small bone hunter. The only question is whether they are looking for small bones to build one particular big bone (like me), or whether they are search for small bones in some region where they like the scenery.
http://www.alocalprinter.com are great for those of you in the UK
IPv6 instead of IPv4.
No NAT and enough IP's for all your network devices (pda, laptop, printer, etc.)
5 Interviews with leading UK web designers on Design, Marketing, Etc for Small Biz
I meant internet but most people seem to focus on web these days. For example I miss the old usenet days.
Wow. That site is good. It makes for very fast browsing. I can make sure all text reasonably fits in a narrow area. Great for window management on my laptop.
edited the original to add quotes around 'mess' ... guess I'm just cranky from the javascript nightmares I've been having lately.

I agree with letting evolution & competition do its work, so
let me rephrase: "Given the opportunity to re-arrange the basic conditions out of which the internet evolved (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, HTML, ...) what would you change." The choices encoded in these standards are as much ethical/philosophical as technical. Do we value security? Openness? Speed?

I agree with IPv6 & getting rid of NAT on a technical level. What else?
Need Help in Designing Ranking Algorithm
Hey Guys,
I have this site called http://rivals4ever.com. In one line it is "Community based on Rivalries". You can create your own rivalries on this site and invite your friends to join and have kinda virtual fight with each other.

Now we need help in divising proper algorithm for the homepage listing of Rivalries. We tried 2-3 so far but none is giving satisfactory result.

We want something like this site where news on homepage constantly gets changed everytime you refresh or something like reddit or digg. But in our case there are many more parameters which can be considered while designing the algorithm.

1) creator rating
2) number of videos/images/weapons/weakness
3) quantity and quality of content etc
etc etc.

Can anyone please guide me on this ? I want the best rivalries on homepage same as this site where best news are on homepage.

Any kind of help is greatly, sincerely appreciated :)

Abhishek
Tell that to people in some more oppressive regimes, or in places where the alignment between what is legal and what makes sense is out of sync. True anonymity is hard to implement, but it certainly has its virtues.
Trolls and other misfits are trying to get attention, however negative. Denying it to them is the best way to get rid of them.

It's fine if they keep posting: after a few posts of theirs are soft-deleted like this, the moderation system should soft-delete their posts as they're posted. Let them waste their time shouting into the void.
Stamford Researchers Use Directional Antennae To Help You Track Relatives
Sad story.
I don't live near Staples but there happened to be several printshops all near each other in the local business district. I found one that gave me a hefty discount if I would just email them a PDF of the card (according to their specifications).

I made a PNG of what I wanted in Paint.NET and converted it to a PDF using ImageMagick, both free programs, and emailed it to them.

It required two visits, one to decide on the shop and get the email address, and the second to pick up the cards.

Color is more expensive than black and white.

There's a really cheap shop on the internet called Vistaprint that will do it, too. If you web search for 'vistaprint fraud' you find a lot of complaints that they charge your credit card once a month forever. I have no way of verifying if these accusations are true or false.

So I avoided giving my credit card out over the web and trekked to the local shop; They were very nice and friendly, much more human than a web site.
Collected Java Practices
To be honest, this is not the only such case. Eve Online folks migrated part of their system from SBCL to Erlang for seemingly the same reasons [http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2102].

Having said that, it is still not a language issue, since we have systems such as Termite/Gambit Scheme [http://toute.ca].
S-expression syntax for markup, Scheme in place of JavaScript, and I'd like HTTP to have a header that sets modification times or other cache information for resources other than the one being sent in the current response.
You can really tell the difference between a vistaprint premium card and an overnightprints card. On the latter, the dots are tighter, the cardstock better, and the colors more accurate. For maybe a few bucks more you get less hassle and a better card.
Isn't that what the $250 is supposed to help do?
All of that money is coming from the traditional web side though. As is evidenced by this statement:

"Among our users are almost two million monthly uniques on mobile where have not yet made any revenues."

My question would be, Why can eBuddy monetize while Meebo has such challenges?
I love this post. I even wrote a little mini-response to it on my own blog.

I liked it mostly because it made me think really hard about what motivated me, and I concluded that it's not programming, which is what I do for a living. I really enjoy being a business domain-expert and architect.

It really helped me realize why I've never been as happy at my current gig as I was in the past. And it made me realize a big part of why entrepreneurship is so appealing to me.

Wow - what a moment of clarity. Thank you for writing this, Carleen Hawn!
Me too - I will go
The return of Ada
I'm sure you're not being facetious, but I can't figure it out. What's the advantage of this?
To somewhat counterbalance the conformism of having a business card: http://gapingvoid.streetcards.com
"I am pretty sure that starting a business involves some level of desperation."

I agree. People do have to be pushed up against a wall to some extent and feel they are left with few options, otherwise, it is too easy to convince yourself not to startup.
Mobile Web must die
A lot of people are responding to this article by saying "The Mobile Web" is dead insofar as reading stripped-down websites for mobile browsers are dead. I think everyone is missing the point, and this has frustrated me for some time.

What's important to the mobile web isn't presentation, it's context. It's correct to say that mobile browsers are no longer the sub-par readers of teeny-tiny pages anymore. But the type of information you want when you've got one hand free riding the subway, or when you're stranded in an airport, or when you're waiting in line at an ATM, is fundamentally different than the kind of information you want when you're sitting at a PC or laptop. That's the key to understanding the mobile web - it's context. When a user is browsing on a handheld device, chances are that they want more concise bits of data, or data which is related to their geographic position, or a way to remotely "check in" with a home base.

I've tried to envision a business that addresses this gap, but I haven't quite gotten there yet. Anyone have any ideas? :)
Boom Head Shot!
I don't think that is true. There are probably opportunities for new services (location based), but mobile users will still want all the other internet services on the go. For example, sitting in the cafe and chatting with friends, they might check wikipedia to clarify some topic they are talking about. They see somebody walking on the street with an interesting fashion accessory, and they might check ebay to see if they can get it, too. Not everything that is useful on the mobile has to be location based.
That's exactly what Vint Cerf said, the men who invented the Internet.

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2008/04/vint_cerf.html
More info please? How big is it, how long does the battery last? Could it really be used to retrieve a parrot? Is it just a standard RFID tag?

I'd like to have something like that for my bicycle...
1) A better mail transfer protocol. I don't view spam as inherently inevitable, but with SMTP it seems to be.

2) Internationalization from the ground up. Domain names are still effectively limited to 7 bit ASCII (even though "dots" are represented by '\0's in the DNS, which doesn't rule out UTF-8, in practice it doesn't work well). I also still get mail I can't read, even when it's in a language I can, because of encoding issues (increasingly rare, but it still happens).
Well, I think the IPv6 switch is finally going to have to happen anyway within a few years. So hopefully, you'll get your wish.
The Problem of Overcapitalization
I think we have a false dichotomy here. What we call 'intuition' and 'rigor' are not necessarily opposed. I think the problem with math classes is not any lack or excess of rigor, but that they focus too much on details instead of the general principles from which those details are derived. Complicated formulas and procedures are presented for students to memorize without any understanding of their origin. It's mostly 'how,' a little 'what,' and never 'why.'
What year is this? Just give the person a cellphone or maybe a horn.
Kill NAT!
It darn well better be, with the amount of personal leverage we hand them when we let them keep track of our every move online and target ads to us right in our email. DARN well better be the motto I say.
Getting your data on, and off, of Google App Engine (by Google)
RED is going to change the game for indie films
What happens when we organize?
Psystar (generic PC with OSX vendor): Apple’s terms violate U.S. monopoly laws
I was surprised to see Steve Jobs and Nelson Mandela at the end, IMHO they should be way higher. Most of the people on the list I really do not know. I recognized a few artists, but thats all. The pope is number 74, I suppose there are only 1,131,000,000 catholics in the world.
Entrepreneurial quotes
Someone forward this to Atlanta, GA...
That title just seems like voting-bait. Could have just said what the contents of that article are.
OK - you're right. I should clarify what I meant, I guess. The point I was trying to make (and doing a poor job of it) was to re-define "Mobile Web." I.e., it no longer means tiny, content-less web sites. Instead, it means the information itself, not necessarily the presentation, is applicable to the context of a mobile device.

You're absolutely correct to say that there are sites which will be useful on a mobile device, like Wikipedia or IMDB or whatever. But the web is like one of those Ven Diagrams where there are sites that are mostly applicable to PCs, sites which are mostly applicable to mobile sites, and a large area of overlap. The area that's mobile-directed is comprised of what I was speaking of (location aware stuff, remote checkins, etc), and what defines that area is not how the information presented, but what is presented.
MyStealthStartup: A different approach to approaching VCs
Usability: Nokia's "user anthropologist"
A Small Company's Response to Monster Cable Patent Infringement Claims
Whether the Slingshot is a holy grail in providing clean water to the poor in the world's developing countries, its possible future impact is larger than its own achievements. The press it gathers will attract more attention from engineers, funding providers, and the general population. The more smart people we have working on this problem, the more likely we are to achieve a feasible solution and solve one of the greatest problems facing the world's poor. I applaud Dean Kamen for his work to-date and for putting the clean water problem in the spotlight.
Something about this article didn't sit well with me (as with others, judging from the comments). It felt awfully like "Too many YC companies are out there looking for that $300-400K, but not enough takers, so the VC system sucks" kind of argument. To turn it around (and to be the devil's advocate), perhaps too many YC companies aren't finding takers because the investors don't feel confident - for whatever reason - like the looming downturn or that they are in too small a niche or they will find it difficult to find independent traction against more well-endowed players or whatever?

What percentage of YC companies launched till date (launched means the initial YC funding is exhausted) that haven't found angels or VCs? That would prove instructive.

Contrary to what you may heard, while it may be good to start in the middle of a downturn, it is no fun to try to last through a downturn if you are "pre-revenue" and have no investors.
10 lessons I've learned from running Adwords for our product
The 4-hour workweek for startups
A Psystar employee:
“They’re charging an 80% markup on hardware,”

I've seen a lot of price comparisons over at /. but I don't think even the most fervent Apple haters believe the markup to be that high.
Build in semantics from the ground up.
It's having the same problem with this card (haven't checked on the printer, thought). But it does seem to be the distro of choice for hackers.
Does the funding rate go up a whole lot if you hire someone to rewrite your proposal?

Depends on their name, the journals and review boards they sit on, and their current interests vice yours. The clever thing to do if you have good juice is simply to get their name on it.

I work with some people who rarely get turned down, and others (in the past) who often have. It's more fun to work with the former, if you have the choice, but sometimes the topics end up being a little less interesting.

Grant writing is such an insane time sink...
Trust a site called Government Computer News to publish a glowing review of Ada. :)

I recall reading about Praxis a couple years ago and was impressed by their low bug counts. It seems like it would only be useful in situations where the software's purpose is prespecified in detail, though -- a way to make rock-solid software, slowly.
I'm not an apple hater but think of it this way...spec out a mbp at 2400 and compare it to a thinkpad with the same specs. Is the case and "industrial design" worth 1200 bucks?
i'll summarize the article for everyone:

"buy and read tim ferriss' book and make sure to click on my amazon affiliate link to buy it."
Ooohhh, ouch! That is a brilliant response. One can't help but feel a little uplifted after seeing a small company stand up for its rights against a behemoth who attempts to persuade solely via its size and financial resources.
extremely well said
linkbait (and shameless amazon affiliate pimping) alert
What they mean is: "Want to make more money at a video games company? Be a business or marketing person, not a developer."
It’s too bad they couldn’t get Buchheit to take it with him when he left to found FriendFeed.

Arrington is either a brilliant troll or an incredible asshole. Mayer was effectively pointing out that moral relativity gives even SEO spammers an excuse to claim that Google is "evil" in whatever way they frame it, and it falls to the GOOG to fight this perception. So Arrington (tongue-in-cheek, I hope?) apparently decides it would have been better if one of the more demanding corporate mottos ever embraced were to have left with Buchheit.

Regardless of whether Google would have been better off (doubt it), the rest of the world would likely be poorer for it, since many painful decisions would be a lot easier to justify on the basis of profit-and-loss than right-and-wrong. I'll bet you that motto (and its consequences, and the perception boost from trying to follow it publicly) is worth far more than even Google's PR folks calculate, over the long haul.
A VC's thoughts on Paul's essay