skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Based on this post (and more so what I've been able to find of the original discussion) I don't think he's overlooking this at all; if anything it's so obvious that he's not calling it out literally, like saying "I'm building an automobile"; you don't expect to have to say it's going to have wheels...
This G thing has been getting out of hand for quite a while now. A friend was recently telling me how much better his new phone was because it is 4G. He said he didn't really know what that meant, but it was definitely faster than 3G.

Also, a coworker of mine refers to his company provided Nextel Blackberry as "half-G".
As I understand it, there is a year after an invention is published in some form or another for an inventor to file the patent. That way the patent filing won't inhibit, or be inhibited by, the actual publication of the invention.

As a result, the filing date isn't the exact delimiter of what's prior art, but of course it must logically allow art more than a year prior to the filing date.

You'd have to look at the first time the public or media saw Tweetie use this technique. Anyone have any evidence?
Dell Will Soon Charge into the Smartphone Market
Dell Thunder prototype is ready and the Android phone should be launched by the end of the year with Froyo.
Noticed a bug when creating a new account - I use password safe to manage my passwords, and it created a password that contained a symbol that caused an "Invalid Password" message to show up. Some feedback here would be nice ("Invalid Password: Numbers/letters only please" or something like that). Better yet, accept anything in the password box (there may be i18n issues here, others may be able to chime in with their experience).
I really wish the author had mentioned the name of the app with the sucky UI. I would love to take a crack at implementing a competing program with an awesome UI so I could completely own that market.
The problem is that lots of different software engineering styles are implemented using the language feature of inheritance. For example in C++ implementing interface X looks the same syntactically as inheriting from some class X to modify it.

Sometimes people refer to the specific problematic inheritance style as "implementation inheritance". I found it very useful just to know that such a distinction could be made.
Support Our Troops – Donate a Kindle 2
Can you sell? A lot of people with business degrees can't or won't-- but some can.

Non-geeks can be good at selling, designing, SEO, SEM, PR, finance, copywriting etc.

I'd suggest taking two steps. 1) Try to move yourself nearby startups (if that's really your thing). This can be in Spain-- just spend time at whatever geeky meetups you can find and start batting around ideas. And 2) Start trying to get smart about some of those non-geek skills that are valuable in a small software company. Optional: 3) Learn to code. Most startup coding is just about form fields and databases-- not algorithms.
It took a while but the guy makes a great point towards the end. Cell phone companies have sold an idea of the service that you will get but never give you the specifics of how it will be. For instance the new 4G network is coming. We know it's fast or should be but have they given a list of the speeds that you will expect while using this new 4G service or simply the idea that it will be fast so use it?
Storing semi-confidential data
I'm developing a diary/journal web-app - there are many things that make this better over using a diary but the obvious disadvantage is that you can hide your diary under the bed and be pretty sure noone is reading it. While I can say in a privacy policy I'm not going to read any entries you make that's still up to the user to trust me on that. So what I'm looking for is a method to encrypt (and decrypt) the text entries made by the user.

I'm really not very knowledgeable on encryption so I'm looking for some advice on how to do this. My main idea at the moment is to have a key that is never stored and is entered each time they login and used throughout the session to encrypt and decrypt each text entry. Again the user can't necessarily know the key is not being stored but as far as the implementation goes this seems ok. This also has the added benefit of users being able to store entries under different keys so that there isn't a single key to unlock them all.

Is there a better/more common way of doing this?
Is that even required? I mean, to simulate a brain, would you really need to go all the way down to simulating every cell or could an averaging of the interactions be enough?

I don't know if what I said even makes sense but I really don't believe that we need something that simulates the brain at the cell level to replicate some of the processes.
Yeah, I came over here to say exactly the same thing.
What possible benefit justifies writing the code to be little-endian only? Why on earth would anyone do that?

It's not a trade-off if there's no upside.
Well, if that is all it takes to dominate the market. We can narrow down the app with sucky UI to only every application on the market since the existence of software.

Pick one you find interesting and go with it.
Yes, you are right. Toyotism is just another way to say kaizen, is the way I learned in the first place, so I keep using it all the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyotism

Kaban => Kanban
I respectfully disagree. Your business is not a start-up of the kind where that is likely to happen, but there is more than one kind of start-up.

The kind of start-up where you have a fairly large capital outlay, where you have to hire a bunch of people from day one and where there is significant pressure from windows of opportunity and a race to market can easily go out of control in this respect.

The other thing that can turn your world upside down is a real success, or a real setback when you're moving ahead full steam.
"(with sufficient simulation of the environment)"

The point is this parenthetical dwarfs the information in the genome to the point of irrelevance.

At least, that is Myer's argument, as I understood it.
I wonder if having a catastrophic start-up experience is practically a rite of passage for the serious entrepreneur.

Yes, but one in which bodily harm is also on the table? I've read a lot of entrepreneurial tales, but this one puts "sacrifice" and "earning your stripes" at a whole new level.
Gotcha, and I agree, if the goal is to keep Flash alive, it's going to need to find some compelling way to remain competitive, and fast.
This is so true. I have a really hard time getting my girl friend to understand that I can't carry a conversation while coding... I brought it on myself trying to work in the same room she does though. If I could I would 100% have a private area to work in. I dream of having a house with a PRIVATE study right now.
I disagree. The basic rules for copyright are fairly simple. (If you include something because someone told you it was OK, but didn't do at least some minimal work to verify that it was in fact OK, then you have erred.)

Start from 'no' (that is, you don't have permission to copy something you didn't write). Even if you do have permission to copy something[1], you probably don't have permission to claim that you wrote it. Even if you do have permission to claim that you wrote it (because it's in the public domain), you would be a first-class jackass to do so.

The cases you point out are subtle, and were attempts to expand what copyright covers. (This is similar to the discussion some months ago about the copyright-ability of one's tweets, with the general consensus being that they cannot individually be copyrighted, but one's "tweet-oeuvre" would be. Single words and short phrases are too short to be individually unique.) Yet, neither of these cases change the basics (assume you don't have permission, don't try to claim what you didn't write as yours).

Fair use is a more subtle item because it's based on case law instead of regulation or explicit law.

I never said that copyright law wasn't hard, or that copyright issues couldn't get complicated quickly. But getting the start of things right? It's not hard at all.
The term I've seen used is 'software sharecropping.' I think it was coined by Tim Bray: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...
Ask HN: Where do you draw the line when interviewing?
I'm interviewing at a startup and they asked me to do a task as a test of my abilities.

I didn't mind at first but I've spent a lot of time the past few days researching and working on it and following up with them.

If they were paying me for my time it wouldn't bother me as much, but they've basically got me working for free - and now I'm not sure I even want the job.

Where would you draw the line with this sort of thing?
CYC is an important development in that direction, but a modern memomic approach doesn't privilege top-down over bottom-up approaches.

Like the human genome, the human memome is already available (in natural language) and the challenge is interpreting it. I don't believe the state of the art is good enough to create an upper ontology that can capture human experience, but sectors of ontology that capture chunks of it can be built from the bottom up now and merged as necessary.

Think of it this way. I know something about quantum physics and I know something about french lit crit. I don't need a general theory that encompasses both of them until I actually need that general theory -- at that point I'm going to build out as much of that theory as I need by an appeal to thought, experience and experiment.

The immediate term strategy is to find areas in which "unreasonably effective" strategies make it possible to extract facts and partially solve the "grounding problem". It's important to recognize that this is essentially a finite task: like the Earth's atmosphere, the Earth's noosphere has no perfectly defined 'edge'... However, there's a principle of interconnection and attraction of concepts that causes it to form a 'main body' that is essentially finite. The game of 20 questions shows that, more or less, the scale of human shared reality is 10^6 or so terms.
Mathematical surprises
http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/d3d8r/just_a_normal_d...
The borg is one example of a half half. Star trek truly invented the future ;p
I have a policy wherein I will spend a half hour trying figure out problems myself (reading code, etc.) before bothering the local guru. This way, I limit the interruptions I cause and learn stuff myself so less questions arise in the future. Also, I can have a semi-informed discussion if it comes to that.

You have to balance it against yak-shaving though so resist the urge to go much longer than a half-hour.
I only have 2 years of work experience, I highly doubt I am qualified enough to work as a product manager :)
The irony that Mashery contributed to this article is just perfect.
221 points submitted 7 hours ago by pitrpitr

Intel CEO: "We need antivirus, can someone buy me McAfee?" Few hours later: "Done." "Great, which version?" "Version ... ?"

ahem
The first few, I don't fully agree with. I think the numbers are exagerated. But these 2 have more truth:

"Although most software is made by teams, it is not a democratic activity. Usually, just one person is responsible for the design, and the rest of the team fills in the details."

When things are designed by 1 person (IME) they work better and have a more flowing work flow. Designing in a committee has been a freaking nightmare.

"Programming is hard work. It’s an intense mental activity. Good programmers think about their work 24/7. They write their most important code in the shower and in their dreams. Because the most important work is done away from a keyboard, software projects cannot be accelerated by spending more time in the office or adding more people to a project."

While I don't 'code in the shower', I do think about my projects constantly. An 'ah hah!' moment can come at any time. Just the other day I left for lunch and in the car on the way I thought of a possible reason for an issue we were experiencing. I was getting nothing while staring at it.
The Fading Glory of the Television and Telephone
Thanks a lot for the advice, sounds like an interesting start
There needs to be some kind of NoFollow attribute for 'social objects.'
This is why you should only be an optimizer in few, very important areas, and should be a sufficer in the rest: You get paralyzed by this sort of choice.

Get a cheap enough flight, get a good enough understanding of the one feature on the watch you care for (and write it down if possible) and arrange a movie night with your friends without caring if they'd like a slightly different variation just a little better (I mean, hell, they are always able to arrange it if they would).
Really? Generally I mostly simulate things whose macroscopic behaviour I don't understand, and I simulate them so that I can understand them better.
Japanese Monsters
Here is a collection of monsters from Japanese mythology.
There is a great market for that. Sparklit (http://www.sparklit.com/) has a hosted product (which looks might be derived from vbulletin), for example, but pretty much everything out there I've seen is old (1.0, as you put it). There is lots of room for innovation.

Data portability is still a huge problem. There is a massive lock-in once you get a forum going on a hosted platform because it's such a pain in the ass to get everything out.

I've considered rolling my own, but decent forums are deceptively complex. It would take way too much effort.

Go for it.
The premise of this argument is that Google's services require a Google-supplied OS. This premise is false, and therefore this little article is just plain silly.

It is in Google's best interests to see to it that there is a widely-available, royalty-free platform upon which to build the thin clients necessary to use the services in the cloud. iOS works just as well. Use iOS and you are in no way limited in the Google web services which you can use. Apps are another story - and a key part of this puzzle. If you were Google, would you want to get locked into a single-vendor's platform? Of course not. Thus we have Android - an open platform which keeps the industry honest.

Witness the Google Voice debacle: A freely available service that Google wanted to make usable on iOS, but Apple refused. Android is a direct response to platform vendors refusing to support open standards.
common, wolves can't type!
What do you think he means by the closing comment 'the unspectacular things are the important things'??

I think he is still talking beyond products to experiences. Do we have any example of an unexceptional experience that has been designed to be exceptional?
Another NYT Article on this theme talking about "food miles"

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/opinion/06mcwilliams.html

Here's Will Wilkinson on why eating Local may not better

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/08/27/ea...
Managing 1.4 Petabytes can be tough, see how Blip.tv does it
A great story. All the more for not being a pure code product (it was a an industrial machine product).

Starting out in business we all make mistakes. Learning from them should be sufficient reward.
I hate to say it, but if a application requires me to work more than 1-2 hours in order to apply, it isn't worth my time. The company could be great and a wonderful place to work, but between my current job and applying other places, >2 hours is simply too much time to devote to a small chance at employment.
Forgive me for being all Toyota-y, but we have a specific definition of "out of control", and it is not "the specific anticipated consequence of a policy which is culturally celebrated and is considered one of the defining features of our industry."

I have some other issues with the assumption that any CRUD app can reasonably be said to be racing to market in 2010. Many "real" startups, for whatever definition of "real" one wants, have been technically viable for every single day of the last ten years. The race is also a social construct. The world will little note nor long remember the first mover in groupons (hint: not Groupon).
- average price of property was $2,675

- 54% of listings sold in last 3 months

- $40 million total sales
Why should all discussion happen on the mailing list?
Fortunately, this is a topic that has been widely discussed in academic philosophical circles. Read Rawls' "Theory of Justice" - he goes into great detail on how one ought to balance the competing forces of efficiency (e.g. maximal utility) and distributive justice.
Having another proof of location can be useful to defendants in a trial as well as prosecution. It's also useful to be able to say you're not at the scene of the crime. While this could make the effects of bad laws worse by making them more enforceable, if you think the legal system is good as a whole, it doesn't seem obvious why this is not a good thing. It seems we'll be more likely to get verdicts matching the truth.
User can only login using a salt that he throws at the system.
U: ambiate P: pass S: BlueSky --> Server md5(BlueSkypass) and check it, never storing it. Save two passwords, one for general logins (using your own salt) and one resalted password with the user's own passphrase for the hidden data. Maybe just implement an OpenID or Facebook login or something of that nature? This might be misinformation... I haven't looked at encryption in forever!
Get a travel agent and never worry about travel again. Fixed overhead to not worry about the problem.

I still think the most-complained-about reduction in benefits when I worked at MSFT was when they changed over from a corporate travel agency to this hideous book-yourself model. The agency used to also give you the options for your personal travel, if you asked nicely.

Of course, it was just a rank and file issue. Once I was high enough in the org to have an administrative assistant, I stopped having to book my own travel again. Then, I understood why none of the people who travel frequently complained when the agency was removed. After all, who cares if it takes your developers three hours on the company clock to book their travel? owait...
I used to be pretty rude/arrogant. I was quick to judge/dismiss people based on only a few actions. And I fixed it, though this post will be very direct and (some will think) harsh.

But before I get to how I fixed it, I want to point out something very important. You are not that smart. Something like 90% of people think they are above average. Nearly half of them are wrong. You're not special. But even if you are, NO ONE is so <anything> that their behavior is overlooked. I once saw a guy in wheelchair get punched out because he was a dick. The dude that punched him was thanked afterwords by a lot of people.

Don't think that because you believe yourself smart, others will
a) even recognize that you're smart (You don't recognize that they are smart, after all, and they most likely think they are above average)
b) overlook your shortcomings because you believe you're smart.

I don't think you're smart. If you were, you would have realized that it is more desirable to be courteous rather than curt a long time before it started affecting your business.

Here is how I fixed my problem... I realized that just because something appears to be the most efficient way to do something (in my mind), doesn't mean that it is in the real world. This is the major premise needed in changing your behavior. It really is that simple. What I started to notice was that people have experience in a lot of things that I don't have experience in. Anyone will tell you that in order to accomplish something you need to stop thinking about stuff and actually do it. The value of that is learning how things happen in the real world rather than in your mind. People know things you don't know. People can conceive things you can't.

One other thing to consider: Most people don't have the chip on their shoulder that you seem to have (though correct me if I'm wrong). Most people aren't trying to convince you of how smart they are. So assume that because people don't use big words or try to sound impressive that they are of a dull mind.
Your point still stands but the mechanism was first in Tweetie 2.
CRUD apps are only a very thin slice of the whole spectrum though.

When you have a few hundred K of your own hard earned cash and a few million of investors money, as well as the livelihood of a number of people riding on your start-up succeeding or tanking and you hit a significant road block there is a very big temptation to dig in and try to save the company at the expense of your private life. Even in situations not quite as dramatic the temptation is there.

It may work, it may fail, there may be private consequences, there may not be. But that all depends on the circumstances, and those are not specified.
It's true that we do that, but we at least understand the framework. Simulated models are the basis of a lot of neuro research, but we need to do so much more biology before we can begin to even try to simulate the brain in any useful way on a macro level.
Cardmobili launched in the US
Thanks, I'll check this out.
Don't worry, no regrets, I learned lots there, especially things not to do and I credit a good part of later success to that particular period in my life. I also found two lifelong friends, the kind of bond that experience forged will not be broken.
There's more to owning a market than just a slick UI.
Lets separate "modeling the brain" into two classes of work: modeling the interaction of complex proteins in large systems, and modeling the physiochemical structure of the brain. The first is very difficult, and we have been working on it for a some time already. Meyers' argument is that this is an astoundingly intensive job that will take an prohibitive amount of time. The later relies on both the former, and an understanding of how the most complex biological structure that we are aware of is constructed. Kurzweil suggests a (surprisingly low) bound on the complexity of this structure (which builds on complex proteins and should be seen as multiplicative of the former complexity).

But to say that Kurzweil is an optimist is to completely miss his perpetual argument. As drug companies dump billions USD annually into both complex protein research and sequencing technologies, we advance the state of the art in both of these classes. And while we have a long way to go, automation will get us there faster every year. If Meyers were to show that Kurzweil's estimation of complexity was off by 1000-fold, Kurzweil would still win because we would reach the goal 12 years later than expected, and "off by 12 years" isn't as wrong as "never".
Artificial intelligence: Riders on a swarm
Couple things here:

* First, it's not true that the overriding concern of "locavorism" is energy conservation. Other concerns include food quality, the survival of small farms, highlighting the bad practices of huge corporate farms, and animal welfare.

* 80-90% of the "value" of these ideas you can capture by eating only what's in season (ie, no fresh tomatos in February) and sourcing protein from small farms. Both of these things: you want to do anyways.

* "Locavorism" doesn't support the notion that we should grow oranges in Wisconsin so they can be local. No, the Alice Waters types think people in Wisconsin shouldn't be eating many oranges at all.

It's true that Locavorism is on the cusp of becoming more a yuppie religion than a valid principle. It's certaintly true that industrial farming is more energy efficient. Maybe it's right that the word "Locavore", which is stupid, be tainted by association with this trend.

But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Small family-owned farms carefully raising high-quality cows, pigs, and lambs are a very good thing. Restaurants that can tell you name of the farmer who raised the lamb on their menu are a very good thing. Seasonal cuisine is a very good thing. These ideas don't have to be "locavorism"; maybe they can just be common sense.