skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC:  Taking justin.tv to the next level:  real-time clustering of lifecasts a good idea?
The idea here is to cluster together people doing similar things in real-time. You could then watch all these people from the same web page.

The reason this would be compelling is that sometimes what a particular person is doing might look boring, but if you compare what that person is doing with similar things other people are doing, it gets more interesting.

The actual clustering can be done in real-time by looking at the chat text.
the problem with the site (no-spec.com), aside from the legal argument, is that its arguments for "spec work devalues the potential of design" are pretty weak. It runs with the main assumption that only talentless, "less-than-great" designers would go for this... which judging from the 99designs submissions - isn't true
PersonalBrain: Mindmapping on steroids
I've never used the site, but I'm guessing since it's a contest - you pay for the best design out of the contest entries:

http://99designs.com/help/howitworks
I'm currently experimenting with PersonalBrain (http://personalbrain.com/) -- it's basically a "mindmapping" tool on steroids. Works on: Linux, OS X, Solaris, and MS Windows. So far, it's definitely better than all of the other mindmapping tools.
Yes. This is why I grudgingly approve of the idea of a 'canon' of great (or maybe just popular) works. The actual quality of the work isn't so important - but shared culture both acts as social lubricant and provides a higher-level language to discuss your lives. That's true whether you're quoting Buffy or Faust.
3banana of course! =) I'm releasing it to my friends this weekend, shoot me an email at beta-feedback@3banana.com if you want to be an early tester.

What is 3banana?

3banana makes your notes useful again. With 3banana you can easily jot something down from any device and then share that note with your friends or colleagues to have a discussion. Share your notes to Facebook, Twitter, Email, Instant Message or to wherever your social graph lives.

http://3banana.com your notes are social

My goal is to make it as easy to use as a Google search.
Book: Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (free pdfs)
Finally, some actual Web 2.0 apps at Web 2.0 Expo
Another nice site in this contest-design space is DesignOutpost, http://www.designoutpost.com .

I'm often impressed with the variety of good designs which show up for just $100-300 prize money.
The Art of the Interpreter -- Steele and Sussman [pdf]
I used Worth 1000 to run a logo contest, and it worked out well. http://www.worth1000.com/faq.asp#C40
Storing your life's (intellectual) work in a proprietary, non-future-proof data format seems like an excellent way to be forgotten by history.

I'll stick with FreeMind.
I would feel kinda lame making 30+ people spend several hours working for me and then not paying them anything.
Lots of little text files, with markdown-like formatting. pyblosxom [http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/] gives me a web interface when I need one - generally when I want to lazily read through my notes on a certain topic. The files are all in an svn repo, with a copy checked out on every machine I use regularly.

I've been doing something like this for perhaps 5 years, accumulated something like 400,000 words of notes across hundreds of files, and the system's holding up well.

It's not pretty - but my data is safe, I'm not relying on a website staying alive, and if I ever move to something more sophisticated it'll just take a few scripts to convert everything. And, since I always have vim open, editing one of my text files is quicker than almost any other interface.

At one point I had the whole lot publicly-available online - I may again in the future, once I've done a sweep for other people's secrets in there.

I was incredibly pleased to find that Cosma Shalizi (who I admire immensely) has a similar system: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/
For some reason I just imagined "Does Marsellus Wallace look like a pirate?!"
I used to email myself notes all the time, but that gets really cumbersome.

I want something that is as easy to use as a Google search or notepad.
This is the sort of ugly typesetting that spurred Knuth to create TeX.
A Mensa for programmers sounds like a good idea. I'm in favor of mandatory licensing requirements for commercial developers, but in lieu of that, maybe a society of competent programmers would highlight the difference between those who can and those who can't program. But I foresee difficulties in keeping membership pure; for instance, how would we ensure it doesn't devolve into people paying to get in?
It's not that SVN is particularly bad for merging; it's that bzr and git are so much better at it.
I think that a couple hours of design practice could be valuable to a designer regardless of whether he wins the cash.
The author says it's a paradox that although management cannot tell the difference between a good developer and a bad one, the good developers are the ones ultimately held responsible for the product. It's no mystery: the difference between a good developer and a bad one is that a good developer already holds himself personally responsible for the quality of the product.
Promise and Peril for Alternative Ruby Impls
I always use something similar to this: http://designoutpost.com

There's no limit on the amount of design revisions you can get - it's over when you're satisfied.
I would take that bet. 37 Signals > Twitter in 12, 24 and 36 months. 37 Signals has real businesses paying monthly for a service intrinsic to how they make money. There are clearly scenarios where Twitter can be more successful, but if I had to bet it would be on 37 signals. And I don't user their service but I do use Twitter.
what "security" is about is selling protection from a perceived threat, whether it really exists or not

No. As anyone who works in the field can tell you, the first step in any security work is to analyse what threats exist (which involves assessing both opportunity and motive -- if you're the US Air Force, you probably don't consider the NSA to be a threat even if the NSA is able to break into your systems).
what about Madrid, Spain?
http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/22/smbusiness/small_global_spai...
I knew that I could do something like [:admin, @record] and the path would know where to go, but I didn't know I could do something like an edit path with edit_polymorphic_path[:admin,@record]. Very handy indeed.
On a side note, I love how Yahoo! totally gamed their financals by laying off 2000 employees the previous month to save costs and artificially drive up their valuation.
This seems intuitive if you consider that social standing is generally more important for procreation.

He notes that this new insight into how the brain processes social standing may have important public health consequences, possibly even paving the way to new stress-reduction therapies.

The prospect of the government trying to reduce public stress by making sure everyone gets laid makes me laugh.
I've got a serious problem with 'no-spec'. It makes a lot of bad assumptions, especially in the sense that thee designer has no guarantee of being paid, and devaluing any work. This would only be true of a designer for any reason is working without having formalized a proposal and or contract.

And if you're working without a contract or some sort of document that states and works in the interest of both parties, then yes you're only hurting yourself.

Either/or, if you win the contest or not, doing the work is just great practice, and design is a skill you have to continue to work at. If you're not practicing your skill you're not worth anything to anybody.
I don't see how you can use the word "never" when referring to the future.

Everything's possible - 500 years ago no one though the Americas would produce anything..
Practicing is always valuable. But if a company asks designers to "practice" for them on a commercial project they should compensate them.

Try inserting another profession into your sentence and see if it still sounds reasonable.
Google hiring freeze?
Ext JS… no thanks
But that's my point (and that of several others here -- and really I'm just providing this commentary in hopes that it will help) -- your elevator pitch isn't for anyone who works in the field, it's for your customers and their bosses and investors. I understand that factually you're solving a real problem and noting that in your pitch and that other security experts will understand that too, but if customers / investors read it and immediately think, "nutjob", then it's going to work against you.
An amendment: Thinner(ism): http://www.thinner.cc/pages/home.php or straight from ftp.scene.org
I think Africa has a couple other more serious issues to worry about first...
What's the difference between this site and saying to a hacker:

"Make a web application to my specs, please. Do it a few different ways so I have options. If I don't like it, I won't use it, but I won't pay for it, either."

Some industries do follow this model (e.g. architecture, design, custom enterprise SW), but the business case for proposals/POCs/loss-leaders can only be justified when:

(# of proposals generated) x (cost of work to produce proposals) < (value of awarded contracts) - (cost to fulfill contracts)

However, with contest sites/spec work, that equation only makes sense if you value your time (costs) at close to zero, since the ratio of proposals generated to awarded contracts is so lopsided.
There's this one famous guy that flew to space and started something related to Linux. Oh, that's right: Ubuntu.

Mark Shuttleworth's African startup sold for US$575 million. That's not exactly Google or Microsoft, but nothing to shake a stick at.
I don't know if it's only me, but I don't like reading books online.

I like the touch and smell of paper. Also, I guess there is a psychological aspect as you can feel how much you've read and how close you are to finish.

Anyways, if someone could create a device that mimics books but digital... I would buy it. Maybe a couple of OLED screen with the feel of paper?
We have contests in our profession (programming/development) all the time, and we're still fine.

Here's one example from Google: http://code.google.com/android/adc.html

Here's one from Netflix:
http://www.netflixprize.com/

The difference being instead of hours (or even days), programming contest submissions can take weeks or even months (and in some extreme cases - years) of work.

Engineers are subject to contests too: http://www.xprize.org/

They seem to be doing fine by me
well when the pharoes (africans) built the pyramids, it made everyone else jealous

and it kinda jynx-ed the continent for the following several thousands years

this is why we africans dont wonna build another thing that will draw much attention to us, or make anyone jealous
I really think that's the wrong (though common) way of looking at things. Much of Africa desperately needs a sustainable economy and parts of Africa are rather developed (parts of South Africa and Botswana, notably). This whole shakedown with Mugabe in Zimbabwe is that Zim was well on its way to becoming a developed nation when his government destroyed the economy.

To put things in perspective, India is horribly poor, but by latching on to high-technology, it's finally creating a mechanism for social mobility. There's a light at the end of the tunnel for India. If something like that could happen in parts of Africa, it really could start a disruptive economic chain of events that might help pull some of the nations up by the bootstraps within a couple decades.

Feeding the hungry is noble, but it doesn't solve long term problems.
Cash for answers (continuing contests/prizes debate)
I feel the same way, their statements are a bit bold.
Weren't those the layoffs that were announced before the buyout offer?
I think buying a physical book, even if it's available for free online, denotes and reinforces a commitment to read it. For example, I could read SICP online anytime but I know I'll read it only when I buy it.
as I've already mentioned in another post, this isn't new for programmers; It's been around for years. (Correct me if I'm wrong but Google map's origins can be traced to one) Here are a few examples:

http://code.google.com/android/adc.html

http://www.netflixprize.com/

We're still fine, and I'm not mad about it either. It's not like companies like Google and Netflix are forcing people to code at gun point. There is choice involved. If contests cause my work situation to change for the worse, then I adapt (or get lazy and become obsolete...)
Why is this a big deal? Essentially, a Javascript library is only "linked" with the HTML, which is being sent back to the client. By sending the HTML back to the client you're effectively providing the source. The GPL doesn't say anything about accessing resources over a network, so the server side of the application is fine. On the client side, you can still copyright the design of the site and it's content, so you're not loosing anything. Am I missing something?
That's a pretty limited view of the capacity of computers. I'd bet a good 60% of your editing commands are cursor motion. So one pretty obvious improvement is to just look at foo, then do your edit. heck, it's still called cut and paste, how about pushing words around on the screen? not with the mouse, but with your hand on the screen.

The perfect ui is literally, read my mind and do what I want. I doubt we'll see fmri-at-a-distance in my lifetime, but I can indicate my wishes many many ways.

Also, there's some evidence that moving your hands to the mouse is faster, you just notice it, because it's effortless, whereas working out the key combination to move the cursor chews up clock cycles. (http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html)
And even if you are faster with the keyboard, it probably took you years to get as fast as you are. If programmers can provide a ui to get users to some sizeable fraction of your editing speed in days instead of years... it's worth it. The only real risk is if the fastest of the new ui category can't edit as quickly as the fastest of the traditional. Really, there's no way your hands can compete with looking at what you want.
I wonder how much of the music being stolen on the internet really translates into lost revenue. My gut feeling is college and highschool students are responsible for most music downloads and they don't typically have the money to buy all the music they want. But these people typically grow up and get jobs and start purchasing music on iTunes (or Amazon) because their time becomes more valuable.
Well, many other professions have solved the "how to stop the profession from being diluted" dilemma. No need to reinvent the wheel - just have a formal, oral entrance interview administered by respected members of the community..
Pretty peculiar looking African. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth. Might as well use Cecil Rhodes as a disproof of Africa's lack of enterprise.

Nonetheless, I agree with the article, and every time the question of Africa's woes come up, I'm the first to point out that Bill Gates and Bono (and the 1000s like them) are destructive, and that the proper approach to the problem is investment rather than charity. Whatever potential is there will emerge eventually, no matter what the local VC scene is like.
There's a third flavor of FFM: http://glyphobet.net/blog/essay/234
Most of the submissions are awful.
Get free 250Gb Storage before May 15th
It's not just for reddit and digg, but everybody.
IPhone Video Recorder Released
The wii is a game? That's like saying netflix is a movie. Is a chessboard a game now?

The stuff about the wii I was talking about wasn't the games but the software that manages the new controller. The new UI for the wii is what I meant. I'm not complaining there aren't open source games. I'm just saying I don't think open source regularly produces something like the wii interface or the iphone that's both really revolutionary and good enough for people to use all the time without effort. That's pretty well supported by evidence. Sometimes, open source produces good solutions I like to use.

Now, I think there are lots of projects that don't need to be easy enough for everyone to use or revolutionary. Open source is great for those situations and lots of others. Remember I don't hate open source stuff. I don't even know what it would mean for open source to fail or succeed.

Everyone wins when everyone helps each other out, but everyone also wins when a company pursues a singular vision an open source development style would cramp, and puts out something great closed source. It's not a zero sum game here either. [sarcasm]I don't think I'm trolling, I think you bitter open source cultists are projecting your misery at the better looking closed source people who get laid more then you onto my obviously true comment that probably everything in the world won't be open source in a year or two (just like Gilligan probably won't get off that island this time) and anyone who likes really awesome new stuff thats easy to use should thank God for that.[/sarcasm]

Sorry for that miscommunication.
Except that entries to those contests have value that isn't tied directly to the contest-giver-- android apps can be resold independently, and netflixprize entrants are developing machine learning algorithms that have tremendous value (and it's open-source, IIRC, which is a whole different kettle of fish).

In a logo design competition, the elements cannot (easily) be resold or repurposed, since they are specific to the specs of a particular client.

Also, winning one the Android or Netfliz prizes confers lots of value in terms of publicity, which can't be said of 10,000 small logo competitions.

One other note: Rentacoder, for instance, has specific rules prohibiting posting design comps or source code to prevent uncompensated work.
10 reasons that start-ups 100% absolutely should outsource (almost) everything
To be perfectly honest, that's a pretty racist comment. Mark Shuttleworth was born in Africa, educated in Africa, started his business in Africa and proudly refers to himself as African.
well program submissions for contests can take weeks or months to develop... logo contests typically only last for a few days at most.

the price of entry isn't as much comparatively and again it's by choice

besides its not like u can't take off the company's name and just include the design in your portfolio. it still has some value
Web2.4 is all about semantics according to the RIAA who interprets the use of the term 'pirates' with a twist.

This is straight from their glossary of terms:

http://www.riaa.law/glossary.html

RIAA SEMANTIC TERMS AND NEW MEANNESS:

Definition of pirate: Someone who has an internet connection but who cannot afford a lawyer...
False Dichotomy.
I think you'd need more than 20k simply because of the equipment to sort and scan mail.
Home Brew Ethanol
Keep telling yourselves what you want to hear. Morons. And don't dead me bro.
I cannot even imagine background apps aren't coming.

I could imagine that the new iphones have more RAM then the old ones, and that background apps may be limited on iPhone 1.0. I could imagine them as a killer feature that would help get people to upgrade their 1.x iPhones to 2.0 version.

But there is no way that iPhone background apps don't happen eventually. Apple is smarter then that.
> The difference being instead of hours (or even days), programming contest submissions can take weeks or even months (and in some extreme cases - years) of work.

You don't think the time spent on entries simply reflects the prize money involved? How much time would groups be putting into Netflix's contest if it was for a $250 prize?

Also notice how both Google and Netflix pay contestants along the way (Google giving $25,000 to fifty groups for completing the first phase, Netflix giving $50,000 each year to the group that makes the best improvement).

Those contests are legitimate contests. They are truly seeking creative and valuable entries. And they reward the winners with millions of dollars.

The "contests" at 99designs are just regular contract work where companies are trying to get as much labor for as little as possible.
It's been a couple of months for me.
What ain't no web site I ever heard of! They speak Lisp in What?!

(I see some moderators have no sense of humor, even on the weekend.)
You aren't making anyone do anything. They choose to participate. If they think it's a bum deal, they don't have to do it.
Text from under one of the contests linked in this thread, from a designer, posted 1 hour ago:

since there is no forum here, I have to post it here.
after 200 designs, seeing many of my idea's incorperated into
other peoples designs, and some do it be better, but still.
I have decided to leave, no more free idea's from me for the other more experienced designers. The game is over, I unsubscribe, if I can figure out how, and leave it for what it is. The site owners make money on it now (39 credits a pop) , designers got free idea's, and I make more money now locally then I ever would make here. (like zero until now.;o) ) So I bid you all a farewell, it was an experiment for me, and I must say, with a negativ result.
I wish all the designers a good time here, and many profits, it was
a different experience and it was fun when it was free, also for the contest holders, but for now, I am gone. cheerio.
As a test case you can see whether younger "grunt-level" workers tend to be friendlier than the older ones since they can't actually get higher level jobs just yet so they make the most of what they can with what they have.

But in a few years these youngsters may have moved on to better jobs due to their friendliness.

On the other hand, younger people may just be less bitter since they haven't been working as long at "grunt-level" as the others.
Yes, they were the first who started this. I used them 3-4 years ago with good results (actually, all submissions were terrible except for one, but that one was good.) I bought a good but available domain name in case I ever wanted to make their idea into a web app.
For developing apps that run on a Mac, XCode.

For web apps being written on a Mac, TextMate.
Neat concept... although,

1) earthclassmail came across as 45-yr-old snore-me-to-sleep self-absorbed douchebags.

2) They made a total mockery of themselves by switching from open source to microsoft because open source "won't scale." So cute.

3) I had no sympathy for any of the characters and found myself cheering at every failure and misstep.

I read somewhere that the producers were wanting to do another season with a younger startup, could be interesting.
But I think it's a bum deal. I may not directly be taking advantage of people, but I'm giving people an opportunity to be had. Which doesn't sit well with me.
That looks absolutely great. Going to have to download now.
The Paradox of Technology with Generation Y
This is a great quote: "The time to be buying is when everyone else is selling. The time to be selling is when everyone else is buying."
An Endangered Web Species: The Personal Site
How To Make Money Online With Super Affiliate Marketing
Here’s a great video by one of the internets #1 Super Affiliates - Ewn Chia. This man is someone I’ve been following for several years now and have purchased many of his products for my own education in order to build my internet business.
I think your example of someone who is native English speaking saying "I am not good at English" is the perfect analogy. Members of GenY are likely comparing themself to other members of GenY (guys that built Facebook, for example) and in comparison, find themselves lacking. If they were to compare themselves to Baby Boomers or even GenXer's, however, they might sing a different tune.
The title is hyperbole, but the core idea - recommended search by contacts - is what EVERYONE is trying to do. Even Google has admitted to such.

I don't know that Twitter will ever be able to make use of it, but there are some bones there (mentioned in this article) that represent the next great frontier in better searching.