skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yup. From 2003 to 2007, I spent an enormous amount of brainpower thinking about different ways to share photos. In the near term, I failed at it.

Here's what I learned:

1. your everyday photo taker won't pay for using a photo sharing site

2. little revenue means assets are measured in the number of users

3. viral adoption is needed to get to a large number of users

4. certain features limit viral adoption

5. people hardly ever upload private photos

6. private photos are only shared with a handful of people

7. photos suck up bandwidth and hard drive space like none other

8. there are lots of other photo sharing competitors

Based on all this and about a 100 other observation points (like nobody was going to acquire the current offering) I considered doing a simple offering called FotoFluff. The idea was to create a 'fluff', a collection of photos, and then assign three URLs to it. One to view, one to allow adding, and one to allow edit/delete. You'd only need the URL to do stuff to it, so you could IM it around, or post it in public if you dared. Propegation and commenting was left to the linking sites. Viewing privacy was only as good as the users kept the URL to themselves. Display of the photos was all on one page, with an API to do more if you wanted. Like Imgur, without logins. Delete stuff that never got viewed, or was older than X many days.

I just don't think I'd try this again. I'd say it's a damn tough nut to crack.
I am left in the bittersweet position where a) I 99% agree with an article and b) scratch one post in my Wordpress drafts, because it would add very little to the topic now.

I also sell software to customers with substantially the same technical aptitude as Andy's. My comments:

1) Copy/paste: they can't reliably copy/paste. Of those customers who can copy/paste, a number of them know exactly one way to copy/paste, and will fail if it does not work in the context they need it in. (i.e. they either know what an MS Word copy/paste button combo looks like, OR they know how to right click, OR they know the keyboard shortcut -- and it is, far and away, the keyboard shortcut which is the most widely supported and least widely understood option)

Andy's suggestion is to make it easier to type things out longhand. I suggest making it unnecessary instead -- you can do some client/server trickery to avoid this (discussed here: http://www.resultsjunkies.com/blog/back-office-exposed-bingo... under the heading "When a sale comes in, can you walk us through the process?")

9) My sole point of disagreement with Andy: this type of user really wants to relate to their computer like they relate to a toaster. No one reads a toaster's documentation, and no one should have to. If the UI needs external documentation, that is probably a bug.
MeeGo Conference Deadline for Proposals Extended
I got sick a few times from street-vendor food in 3rd world countries. It turned out that they often reuse oil for too long. I now avoid deep-fried food, dirty or tap water, and things like ice-cream. I've been fine on my travels since.
I'm curious: is that a personal preference or a convention of the site? I don't think I've noticed it one way or the other.
I've never, ever observed this.

Back when I had downloadable software prominently available I'd get this about, oh, five times a month and twenty times right around the start of the school year.
I think that watching a five minute video like this of my day before I went home would be more motivating than reviewing my Rescue Time statistics.
There's no such thing as burnout. It's really heartache in disguise.
It's a fun thing to have done. The whole travel experience is very different from shorter trips and it becomes at least as much, if not more, about the actual travel experiences as the places you visit. Sure places do get blurred and looking back I often get confused about which events happened in which country, but that's kind of part of the charm.

All that being said, I'm really happy to have done it a couple of times, but have no real desire to do it again. Now I much prefer shorter (4-14 days), more frequent, trips within a more limited geographic region and a higher level of comfort.
I don't know why, but there's a fascination with everyone outside the materials science/chemistry/physics world that nanotechnoloy is only about little tiny moving things inside a larger system. Yes, there are bio-molecular robots that are supposed to be used for things like drug delivery and whatnot.

But nanotechnology encompasses such a broad array of other disciplines that are primarily concerned with operating at the nano-scale. For example, anyone doing research that involves the electromagnetic spectrum (light) would be considered doing research in "nanotechnology". Those people would include: solar cell manufacturers, laser physicists, radiation specialists, electrical engineers...and so on

Hell, since nano is just a length description, ANY profession could be considered "nanotechnology". "Yes, we our car can travel 26 822 400 000 nanometers per second, its amazing"
Hey Klaut

We have quite an active community in edinburgh, most of it is organised around http://techmeetup.co.uk/ techmeetups are once a month in edinburgh, glasgow and aberdeen (not this month in glasgow). There are various meetups that happen around other times as well, lean startups, functional programmers, etc, most of this can (or will soon) be found on the techmeetup site, also checkout http://startupcafe.co.uk as well.

on hackernewsusers it mentions you are from dundee, this month there was someone offering a lift from dundee to the edinburgh meetup, I dont know if he wil be doing it every month but theres a chance of a lift. There has been interest in starting a dundee techmeetup as well.

Hope thats helpful, you can catch me @daleharvey or emails in my profile, any questions you have would be useful, the techmeetup site is currently a large work in progress and its good to hear what information people want to find.
A very big occluded:not-occluded ratio, on the order of 1:10 - welcome to Ringworld!

Well, we can always dream, but it would be intriguing.
I use pacnames.com - very simplistic design/interface, easy to use, $9.99/year registration, timely renewal notices, etc.
Not that I necessarily agree with this particular summary in everything, but the point of summarizing something it to make it easier to digest the core of the argument before criticizing it.

For that to work you have to have a really good understanding of the subject matter though, and I think he does Drexler great disservice when he says "He seems to lack the imagination, and of course, the physics to figure out what a real nanosized doodad might look like.".

That to me is the hallmark of someone with an ax to grind rather than an objective reviewing of a book written quite a while ago.

Of course Drexler didn't have the physics to figure out what a real nanobot might look like, nobody did, and nobody does.

Drexler could not have easily foreseen some of the obstacles a direct translation of mechanical concepts would encounter, but there are more ways to skin a cat, and biology seems to have found at least one of them.

Now it's up to us to find either another path or to harness biology to produce those structures that we can not produce by direct means and to build up a library of tested components to do our 'nano engineering' with.

I see Drexler more as a visionary than as a 'hard applicable science' guy and that's the way to approach his book. If you're looking for a 'ready to build' nano bot or a hard treatise on nano engineering you're not going to find it, if we had had that at that time then we wouldn't be where we are today.

Incidentally, I think that the 'proponents' of nano tech have done a very bad job at raising expectations (Drexler among them), I do believe that long term nano technology will become a reality and will become a mainstay of our technological arsenal. Just like electronics, which were practically non-existent one hundred years ago are today.
This is a good list. It would be interesting to see a similar list of Singularity detractors. I know Jaron Lanier is one. His claim is that software in general is crap and won't be up to the task, even if the hardware is capable.

Kurzweil does not say much about software. He feels we will get everything we need by reverse engineering real brains. I think this is possible, but it's certainly not obviously true, and it's not a simple extrapolation. We could be sitting there in 2040 with gobs of computer power, and detailed maps of the brain, and just not understand how it all works. Look at the Genome today.

I saw Kurzweil speak in 2008. I thought he was compelling but certainly leaned heavily on hype about the exponential which I don't think is entirely justified:
http://www.kmeme.com/2010/07/singularity-is-always-steep.htm...
Perhaps predictions from the mid 90's will finally come true: RISC will win and x86 will be held back by its legacy baggage. This is more notable for how long the predictions failed to come true. (The turnabout would make it even more interesting.)
Verified. Worked fine on my Macbook (i686-apple-darwin9-gcc-4.0.1 (GCC) 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5493)), broke on a Linux box (gcc (GCC) 4.1.2 20070626 (Red Hat 4.1.2-14)).

This will drive me crazy.

Edit: it has to do with 32-bit and 64-bit. When I compile explicitly as 32 bit on Linux (which is a 64-bit machine), the error goes away. Probably related to how he casts everything to an object, and assumes things will be in certain places.
I mentioned GWT because the linked blog post discusses some of the first baby steps toward the idea of building a real single-page client-side app, whereas GWT has been doing some real heavy lifting in that space for a long time...I'm a little disappointed that the post received so many upvotes, since it seems like using the URL hash to preserve state on-page should be common knowledge for any web developer.

I agree that GWT is not friendly to UI people who are used to writing their own markup. But I would argue that a good UX person should be concerned with how the user interacts with the application (not necessarily by writing HTML and CSS by hand, but by sketching out the design on paper or Illustrator), and a framework like GWT often makes it simple to build complex UIs that would be difficult/labor-intensive to create and maintain with a traditional web dev stack. A decent developer should be capable of taking mockups from a designer and building out the rounded corners and other pretty bits himself in CSS.
I take the comment "don't expect your partner to be an expert in your career; rather, expect support".

The comment's wording sounds a bit like "put women in their place", but I suspect that isn't the intent.
I have a LOT of experience in that field. We could talk for hours on the topic.

But let's start with the basics: even if you get a patent, the only purpose is so that you can later sue anyone who you think is copying you. That means at least another million dollars in legal fees right there. Is that what you are interested in? Or are you just trying to protect yourself from someone else patenting the same idea?

Usually, if it's software and web, it's not worth patenting, it's better to focus on getting a million users.
Everyone here is talking about the sensationalistic headline from the EFF. What about all the hype and sensationalism that follows Apple products??

The EFF is trying to work in your best interests, for the sake of your privacy. Apple is not.
The biggest takeaways I got from the article are:

- Be incredibly thoughtful/diligent when it comes to new hires.

- Make sure to set compensation/promotion/responsibility expectations very early on.

If you can get all of the issues on the table during the hiring process (or shortly after the new hire starts), then you can probably preclude a lot of heartache down the road.
It's very interesting. We use to have much more technically minded copy, but that wasn't as effective. Interestingly enough the points that were criticized are in fact some of the actual core tenets of NOLOH, it's not buzz, those are it's most attractive features.

Clearly, what's happening here is that the skeptical reader is dismissing them, and certainly not clicking to get more information when more information is available.

We'll definitely try to strike a fair balance in the updates ahead.
Luboš Motl brings his usual style to a denunciation of this article: http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/08/new-scientist-attacks-quan...

(Yesterday there was a HN submission of it but I can't find it now.)
Java is now deeply-rooted in enterprise software, and in this field, once a project have been developed, radical technology changes occours on a 10-year+ basis. You won't believe how many big businesses still relies on Cobol development for manteniance. So, imho, Java isn't going away anytime soon.
To me the really impressive part is his ability to stay attentive. He never strayed away, starting surfing the web etc.
Information Dealing with a Persuasive Essay Format
The persuasive essay format is no different from any other format you may use to write your essays. The only difference being it is written in a manner which has to persuade the reader of the validity of your idea. Therefore, although the same format is used, keep in mind your task is to persuade and nothing else.
Lisp Running in Flash Player 10
> Evolution wasn't trying to engineer the ribosome.

Evolution isn't purposeless. Sure, it is a random process but it has a purpose. And that's of survival of the organism (or if you like Dawkins, genes that encode the organism).

> The biological forms that have come out of that are completely random.

Wow, biological forms are NOT random. They are what they are because of the environment they are habituated in. The exact implementation (animal) may not be deterministic but if you set the right fitness function, evolution will produce what you wanted it to produce. Evolution is like a blind tinkerer who knows he needs to fix but doesn't know where to hit the hammer to fix it. He only gets feedback once he has hit the hammer. From the feedback, he can definitely avoid hitting at the wrong spot again and again. I wouldn't call this process random.

My original argument is about engineering macro v/s nano machines. Evolution is great at doing nano work because it is an inside out process.

PS: Thousands of moneys _will_ produce a Shakespearean work if their survival depended on it! (Just kidding)
It absolutely works for me. It's called "strategic procrastination." It let me channel my creative energy to a different use when working in a long and difficult project. Retaining control over creative freedom is very important for motivation and avoiding burnout. The nice thing about being your own boss is that you can change the schedule anytime you want. :)
mainly i feel sorry for this guy because of how out of touch he is. he packs more to be homeless than i pack to go camping and basically tries to emulate whatever he finds to be a stereotypical homeless person. maybe he never worked in food service and thus didn't know american dumpsters are goldmines of safe, edible food?

more than anything, this seems like a feeble attempt at a rich person to do something they consider "crazy" so they can have a cool story to tell their friends over caviar. "oh wow, look how dirty i was! ha ha!" this guy needs to get over himself.

there's lots of reasons why people become homeless (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness#Contributing_cause...) and most well-off people simply don't think about the kind of problems people have to deal with just to survive. homelessness is a multi-faceted and complex issue which encompasses millions of people in different situations. there is no way to "see how they live", unless maybe you got some head trauma, a broken leg, asthma and were dumped somewhere you didn't know with no support system and no job skills (compounded perhaps by a self-medicating drug or alcohol habit).

do you want to help the homeless? tell your congressmen to pass laws that help them with their real life problems they need to overcome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness#Problems_faced_by_...) before they can try to sustain themselves with a job and housing. donate to organizations which provide food and shelter to many instead of handing out money to individuals. give old clothes and supplies (like the backpack & sleeping bag he tossed) to goodwill or a local shelter. mainly the way people can help the homeless is by putting forth resources to help people learn how to elevate themselves above simply surviving, which most people eventually settle for compared to what seems like the immense difficulty of getting a stable job.
I'm not sure it makes sense to ask why mass curves spacetime in GR. That would be like asking why the speed of light is invariant in SR.
This is an interesting idea.
Right. And a skeptical discussion isn't necessarily a negative thing, or even indicative of disagreement. I certainly use a Socratic way of extracting deeper information, and this frequently comes across as disagreement or even being argumentative.
I just wanted to present a warning about Minecraft: That game is distilled binary crack. I have lost a couple of entire days to the damned thing, and I only purchased it a couple of weeks ago.

So just be careful if you try it out.

I'm a recovering Minecraftoholic.
Purely from a domain perspective, I too have never had any problems with Dreamhost - fine support, reasonable price, no problem transferring, etc.

One good bonus is free proxy registration; valuable if you don't want spam, but will still allow you to forward emails or whatnot received.
Amd discloses bobcat and bulldozer
It seems like an easy way to avoid many of these issues is simply to make web applications where all the software is stored in the cloud. Most of the arguments I've seen for web apps are from the devs' perspective (you control the hardware, you can pick whatever programming language you want, etc), but I guess web apps are better for users, too.
Contemplating an Artisan Economy
Indeed, there's no way you could say its dying.

That said, Oracle has rolled a grenade into the greater Java ecosystem and we're waiting to see what happens next. If "Oracle messes things up enough" I suspect we'll see a lot more than a slow down in new projects, or at least the sort we're interested in.
Your wonderful event sponsor Geomium has splurged on their startup anti-budget and bought name tags for the event. Now we can try not to frighten others at the bar.

Looking forward to seeing everyone there...
Back maybe 2 years ago, I got a C&D for copyright infringement on a website for a college student organization. Basically what happened was that we used the school name in the domain and the school was trying to bully us into giving them the domain.

The school called moniker and when they refused to give them my contact information or take the site down because their request was illegitimate. Moniker + DMCA loopholes are awesome.
Static Analysis FTW
Yeah I'd really have to be disconnected to pull that off heh.
Att Scvngr Rewards
In this case, the next point release will remove all of the deprecation warnings that you're given with this release. So, if you use 3.0 now, you'll have a nice checklist of things you need to fix before 3.1. If you jump right into 3.1, stuff will break.
Quote away!
This is the first time I've seen your question, so it isn't spam to me :-)

To me, rapid prototyping is any technique that will allow you to build 'something' that will give you a feel for what working with a deployable version might be like. Such prototypes can be paper-based, built in PowerPoint, built in an easy-to-prototype language (i.e, Lisp), etc. The key is to quickly see what the 'final' version _might_ be like so you can think more clearly, talk about it, demonstrate it, get feedback, etc.

Or, am I answering the wrong question? (See, even my answer is a prototype ... it allows me to get feedback).
SEO, A Love Story
This guy needs to watch Preston Sturges's "Sullivan's Travels."
The idea that the barriers to entry mean that Google will never have competition are very high is true today but won't be true going forward.

Once all books are published (or reprinted) in eBook form, the conversion is potentially something which can be automated for all new (or still in "print" books). This will cover the majority of titles of interest.

Additional titles can be scanned where they're of significant interest or projects similar to Project Guttenberg may do some of the work.

Google has a head start but in actual fact has done a lot of their work when it's high cost / high labour where future competitors won't need to invest this level of effort.

You could certainly see publishers providing access to their own works and, having access to the electronic versions of texts even for non-eBooks, they could do so relatively cheaply. Add a standardised interface over the repositories provided by each publisher and you have a decentralised repository, owned by the publishers which you'd imagine could compete with Google.
Ask HN: Anybody making money on Nokia OVI?
Want to know if you could share your story as I have not been able to make more than $300 Euros in more than a year on OVI.
So if you lost the idea that you could reach out to someone, what got you out of homelessness?
I believe the term "skepticism" is, many times, just a curtain to hide plain and simple ideological bias.

But this is not exclusive to HN. Reddit is the same, although in a more leftist way, while HN has more conservatives. But it is funny how each place has its own paranoia and conspiracy theories.
There are many fundamental errors about Go in the article: the := operator distinguishes declare and assign from pure assignment, not assignment from equality as the author states. Pointers in Go do not make the language unsafe. Pointers in Go do not relegate automatic memory management to a "supposed" feature. Goroutines are not the same thing as threads. The lack of implicit "this" in methods does not make methods a low value add feature over static functions.

There are several more errors in the article. Read it with caution.
Germany has 80 m, and hand-counting works well. It does seem to be easy to parallelize.
What I found interesting here is that to me, a libertarian who thinks access to all drugs at low, market-set prices is a human right, this contamination is one more indictment of the War on Some Drugs. No different from the many problems of wood alcohol contamination and poisoning during US Prohibition.

But the mainstream script will be: cocaine is even more dangerous than we had imagined; stronger measures are needed to keep the killer cocaine away from our children; users need to wake up to the inevitable disasters that await them if they continue to "abuse" cocaine, because any use of any prohibited drug is "abuse" never "use".
Various Limits to Computation
June through August, like always.
Funny thing is, mine recently went down. Obama's bill has made it illegal for credit card companies to continue to penalize you with higher interest rates for a late payment made more that six months ago (as I understand it). I called my credit card co and told them they have no reason for having my interest rate at 28%+ when I made one late payment years ago over the life of my card (15 years or more?). They dropped my rate to 9.9% three minutes later. I highly recommend calling them and asking them why your rate is so high -- especially if you have a late payment in your past that is more than six months old. And, if you've made a late payment recently, put an alarm in your calendar to call them six months from now. This was an awesome thing the Obama admin did that can save americans millions of dollars, but does anyone appreciate it or take advantage of it?