skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>it's all notifications about his recent shows (which I get via iTunes automatically) and (self confessed) pictures of food he's eating

Leo, after the thousands of words he's written promoting these types of social media, found out that that's what most people are writing about, trivialities of interest to no-one/notification information we already have two dozen ways of getting...and thus everybody finds everybody else's tweets annoying and instantly put into that same part of the brain that selectively ignores web advertising.

That's why nobody noticed. I doubt most people would notice if most of the people they follow stopped tweeting. They're probably ignoring most of it anyway.
Groups is a social network feature that I definitely think is valuable. But, is it enough to get anyone to move to a new social network? Are you at all afraid that Facebook might just release this feature one night?
A Republic of Letters: The Overreach of Intellectual Property
I hope not. I just re-installed Swi-Prolog (http://www.swi-prolog.org) and ran some of my old code and Warren and Pereira's CHAT-80 program.

It has been over 5 years (I think) since I have had any paid consulting work using Prolog, but it comes back quickly.

I am happy that I have had long periods of using Prolog thanks to SAIC IR&D, and later when I spent a fair amount of my own time experimenting with the very good semantic web library for Swi-Prolog.
Wasn't anyone else annoyed by the ultra high pitched beep, I thought my ears were going to bleed
And information theory. The salient concept here is the "entropy" of a chunk of data. The maximum degree to which a given sequence of numbers (or symbols, bits, etc) can be losslessly compressed is called Kolmogorov complexity. Wiki away! :)
The Putnam Prize Examination is certainly harder than any examination for a particular professional grade. Examinations like MCat, lsat, etc. have to pass a certain percentage of those who register. As an exam of a competition, the Putnam Exam has such no constraints.

http://math.scu.edu/putnam/

I would assume there are many other such exams in other fields.
Hi vyrotek. This group concept is not a feature which can be integrated in any social network so easily. For this, a social network would have to make heavy changes (not technical) which gets difficult because users are used to of their old design.

In tubri.com, we have designed the whole network based on this groups concept. But we are trying to make a network which is like real life, which people find complementary to real socialization. This groups concept is a start.
So true. This "American Dream" is basically a bed-time story for the children so they can feel good about being American.

It is also everyone's favorite "rags to riches" story. If you just work hard enough you can be anything you want to be. Judging by the disappearance of the middle class and the enrichment of the very few at the top, it looks like Americans are just terribly lazy. They just simply _choose_ not to work hard enough. No fucking wonder they can't relax during their 3 week vacation. They feel like the should have accomplished a lot more given their 10 hour days + only 3 week vacation but there is still no result. So obviously they haven't worked hard enough, so while they are at the beach with the family, perhaps they should just check their work email or call the office to see how things are going there. If they work _just_ a little harder they, might get that white picket fence, 2 care garage, kids' college fund will be full and maybe, just maybe, the bosses at the end of the year will spare a couple thousand as "generous" reward for the hard work.

All the sarcasm aside. The root of the problem is horrible labor laws in US + laws protecting corporations. Everything is geared to please the corporations not the individuals. No mandated vacations, no mandated 2 week+ termination notices, no public health insurance, inflated college tuition, expensive over-inflated mortgages, while the culture keeps telling us that we can achieve the "American Dream" if we just work hard enough.

Also "American Dream" is one of the greatest propaganda motifs. Any candidate can apply those 2 words to any agenda they want and it will be swallowed hole, no questions asked, because it evokes such strong, warm, fuzzy emotions.
No pain, it is simply reused.
This looks good but does it support background updating like Chrome?

I am not aware of a win or a Linux (I mostly work on Linux) solution either
Aamir Khan Twitter Profile at Tweet Idol
You may not be knowing that Aamir Khan is on Twitter. Watch his Tweets closely on Tweet Idol. A lot of other famous celebs are on Tweet Idol.
This sounds more like a "Latin American nightmare".
I'll bet that Americans have to travel further to see family than most other countries. The bigger the country and more mobile the population, the more days are lost to family visits...making true vacation days even more scarce than they might appear.
While I agree with social groups being interesting, how is this different than making a 'list' on Facebook?
If you want to play around with this easily, a friend of mine wrote a ruby thinger that moves all the external resources into data: URLs.

http://github.com/afiler/pagecan
Predicting Weather is near impossible in theory forget the practice.

Are you really saying that everyone from pre-historic hunter-gatherer societies tracking the seasons to modern meteorologists with their supercomputers and satellites have been engaging in something theoretically and practically impossible? That would surely be staggering news to everyone involved.
Oh don't worry, the CIA has got that under control ;-)
I was going to mention the Putnam as well. The median for the test is sometimes zero. (Keep in mind that only college students with serious interest in mathematics attempt the exam.) My freshman year of college, the median score was three points (out of 120), and this was considered an "easy" year.
Nice example. I remember hearing that the median score is often 0 out of 120 points, and Google search results confirm that.
In Daniel Kahneman's talk "The riddle of experience vs memory", he details how vacations are most important for the memories they create. When we go on a three week vacation to the Bahamas, when we look back, it was just a vacation to the Bahamas - the duration didn't matter. For our happiness' sake, we would have been better off splitting that vacation in thirds, to three different locales, because our vacations, when recited, dissolve the time spent at each location.

http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper...
Failure sucks but instructs
I see these types of posts and it astonishes me that people will look for cofounders "on the street."

I can't imagine that increases the odds of being successful -- but maybe I'm wrong. Employee number 5 can be an unknown quantity, but employee number 2? That would terrify me.

And since you're not a technical person that can code, it's going to be doubly hard for you to validate the person's technical knowledge.

In any case -- you're here now -- what better place to start looking for talent than this community?
mean the fire of 1904 caused by the quake?
Nice. This page http://stackoverflow.com/questions/252986/is-there-an-auto-u... lists a few alternatives, including WinSparkle http://winsparkle.org/

I like that Sparkle's open source, and it's being used by many open source apps on Mac already. Getting the auto-update software to actually be secure is not trivial either (a recent attack was discovered on Acrobat's updater for example).
unless you have this! http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23049/smcfancontrol

It cools your laptop down to an assigned temperature by adjusting the exhaust of your fan. It works pretty fast too.
I wandered around the planet for a year (American). Totally worth every second (and every penny).
> I am not aware of a win or a Linux (I mostly work on Linux) solution either.

I'm trying to say this without sounding snarky, but why the heck would you need this on an operating system that already gives you apt-get, pacman, yum, portmaster, or what have you?

As for Windows, apparently there's a WinSparkle now: http://winsparkle.org/

Also the WiX people have been working on something along these lines, but I don't know how mature that project is or if it's even still a project any more.

EDIT: Looks like Google's made a separate open-source project of its update framework, Omaha, which is apparently how Chrome gets its updates. So I guess you can get Chrome-style auto updates in your own applications now. Don't know if Google's nifty binary diff compression algorithm is included.

http://code.google.com/p/omaha/
Australian here. In 03/04, I spent a year going around the world. Hit 20+ countries on multiple continents. Financial obligations aside, I find it sad to meet anyone over 30 who hasn't left their home country at least once. In Australia, we're very isolated, and traveling outside the country is quite expensive. If you're in the UK, for example, I envy you!
I dislike admitting that Chrome is a lot faster than Firefox in some useful ways.
One useful way I ran into is with 2000+ svg objects in a custom UI.

SVG + Javascript is a fantastic platform for user interfaces, in my experience... compared to both HTML divs / css /js and also Cocoa native.

Please google, turn on svg in Android...
AngelPad: Seven Ex-Googlers Are About To Launch A New Incubator
Why Open Source/Free Software Rocks
Clickable: http://www.tubri.com/
fair enough. however, we can't please everyone! tuesday night is what worked well from the start... we're looking into more nights though...
more like dusted.
I was interested, but browsing the rules

>> The competition is open only to regularly enrolled undergraduates, in colleges and universities of the United States and Canada, who have not yet received a college degree

Anyway, does anyone have a resource to some examination. Just curious to know how hard it is.
This TD is awesome, I don`t know what you're talking about. Let's just say that I've played this game instead of SC II for the last hour.
Honestly thats probably a waste of your time.

Go to startup events, get involved in the community. Meet people and let them know you're looking for a co-founder. If you find someone who you think might be a good fit ask technical people who you've met to evaluate them.

But chances are you're not going to find an amazing co-founder this way. Good luck.
I've found that whatever savings the prices of online goods offers is mostly offset by the ridiculously high "postage and handling" charges. And the handling charges are not consistent even for the same item. It's a scam.
What's happening with Canvas/JS right now is exactly what happened with the Flash scene about 7 years ago. Every little interactive thing pushed out to the web community was fawned over simply because it was now doable in the browser.

My guess is once IE 9 is finally pushed to the public and HTML5 is considered stable, we'll stop finding this all hype worthy.
Robert W. Gundlach, Leading Xerox Inventor, Dies at 84
When I mentioned framework, I meant something more than apt-get that just fetches and installs the packages. Something that would allow me to build background updates in my app like Chrome.

EDIT:
I guess G Omaha is what I am looking for but ...
"Support of platforms other than Windows 2000 (SP4+), Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7; in other words, we will not support OS X, Linux ..." from http://omaha.googlecode.com/svn/wiki/OmahaOverview.html
Keeping in the present moment, at all times. No matter what one is doing, whenever a thought arises, come back to the present moment, to awareness.

I also do this for a couple of hours daily while sitting on a chair or lying down, or sitting on a park bench, or walking in the park. But i try to keep it on all day.

Results: mind becomes quiet, i am no longer behaving and reacting based on conditioning and the past. The identification with the mind, and the mind-story is almost gone. Now there is an identification with the living force that is there in the present moment.

One can return to silent awareness by many means:

- focus on breathing for a few seconds

- remove thoughts of past and future

- see what is present when there are no thoughts

- still the mind and see what is present, or what is paying attention to the silence

- focus on feet while walking for a few steps

All these will sooner or later reveal what is always present and aware.
The original blog post: http://kevinrose.com/blogg/2010/8/21/why-apples-itv-will-cha...
The problem is this. If you only get 3 weeks vacation / year, you usually leave 1 for family holidays (extended xmas, thanksgiving week), another for emergencies and then another 1 week for a traveling vacation with the family. In one week you can't get anywhere too far. You end up spending 2-3 days just traveling if you go half way around the globe. Then you only have 4 days left to actually have a "vacation". It's hard to relax in 3-4 days before having to pack your bags again. So I think people just shove as much stuff as they can into those 4-5 days and they have an "active" vacation -- because then it seems to them like they did more, but that often ends up being just as stressful as working (at least to me).

> is there some better way to spend a vacation?

Another way to do it is to go to a lodge in the mountains for 2 weeks. Hike, relax in a hot tub, read, enjoy some time together with the family, not browsing the web or reading work emails, not rushing anywhere.

Another option is the beach. I have no problem laying on the beach listening to the waves for hours. Just give me the time. Sure I like an "active" vacation -- but I also like to have the options for a relaxing "do nothing" vacation as well. That is what recharges my batteries at least. The typical American vacation time doesn't allow too much for that.
For the spatial memory impaired: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom#...
Yours should be more like 'front defence.' Anyway, good job, I would definitely remove it from the 'experiments' section if I were you, this game is popular... I like how the turrets are missing from time to time.

PS:
Why front(+al) defence? Well, expand the game field a bit more, and put the player into defending strategic locations, let the AI figure a way through... I can imagine giant fields & fortified positions, much like WWI :)

(Or you could christen the game 'Lobotomy')
Bad advice. Some people are just not meant to code. What do you expect them to accomplish with a book and 3 weeks of effort? A lot of junk.

My advice: go out an meet people.

True, you can't test coders, but you can validate how good they are through social validation. Good coders are respected.

Shoot high: find out who the great coders are. Pitch them your idea. That's going to be the challenging part. Find the one great coder who gets excited. The fact that you can pay them just removes a headhache down the road, but don't open with that. Close with it instead.
Completely agree. You're in San Fran, so startup events are plentiful.

Networking is the best way to find a co-founder. Spend some time and get to know some people.

Then follow your intuition.
Sounds better then having to pay $70 a month for cable TV. When I had cable TV I never watched the majority of the channels they pushed on me.
Add some details to your HN profile. That was the first thing I looked at after reading your post, and there isn't anything there. (Not that mine's a particularly epic tome).
Agree. Mine is also a newer model (but without the SSD :( ) and I've not managed to get the bottom of it hot yet. Warm yes, but not hot, and I've had it working pretty hard at times.
Just tell them it's "trickle down economics" and watch their head explode.

Or maybe they'll pat you on the back, and give you hug out of pity...
Depends who you listen to. There is intense media pressure about making anything other than that your American dream. That's because the media seeks the largest possible market, so their goal is to find the largest identifiable subgroup of people and then make it even bigger. If people broke down into subcultures of small groups, they'd never be able to target a demographic efficiently, and they'd be out of business. Perhaps that's why they're so vitriolic against Google and FaceBook and blogs and anything that empowers people to seek out like-minded folk independently.

If you listen to actual people, however, I can almost guarantee you that you'll be able to find someone who shares your quirks. You might be separated by 3000 miles and have to limit your interactions to the Internet, but there's somebody out there. If your American dream is to write Battlestar Galactica fanfiction, well, there's a fandom for you. If it's to play in a garage band at night and live the struggling rock star life, there's a group waiting for you (you might have to move to a city, though). If it's to work odd jobs during the weekends so you can write the next great American musical, that's possible too (thank you, Jonathan Larson). Heck, if you want to live in a log cabin in Montana, you can do that too.

You can choose your friends, but you generally can't change your friends. Pick wisely. :-)
Hi by_harry, the difference is in focus. We are focusing on 'Social' with 'Relationships' in mind. Whereas Facebook lists were added later on to address grouping needs. Its not the main design point of Facebook.

With tubri.com, we are trying to make it easier and tightly integrated into the network right from the first step.
Bem loko!
This is the route that I am taking, except I am capable of coding to an extent, I am designing the prototype and getting some help (paid from an offshore very-part-time programmer to design some classes, mostly only to speed up the process) and I think I am ready to launch soon, however I am lost about how I would find a co-founder (who's interested enough and that I can offer enough to stay and lead the company in the right direction)
Our company makes wyBuild: http://wyday.com/wybuild/ . It comes in 3 parts (wyBuild, wyUpdate, and the AutomaticUpdater control). wyBuild makes the tiny update patches, wyUpdate is the open source updater (BSD licensed) and the AutomaticUpdater control is the open source control that adds the ability for fully automatic updates (LGPL Licensed).

Here are the links to the source code, for those interested:

wyUpdate: http://wyday.com/wyupdate/

AutomaticUpdater: http://code.google.com/p/automatic-updater/ (instructions: http://wyday.com/wybuild/help/automatic-updates/ )
I watched Mad Men tonight and about to catch up on Entourage. Both shows have a ridiculous amount of product placement. But the product placement works in the context of both those shows.

The game changer would be interactive iAds for each product placement.
After reading Kevin Rose's post, I started to think about this and realized that another thing where the app model would not be great is that in the end, nobody cares what network a program is on. The only thing that matters is the list of programs you like and want to watch.

A user would want to see an aggregate of all the programs s/he likes, not go to one app to see what's new on ABC, and another for NBC… that's where the Google TV model is interesting I suppose.

I'd think that something more like Google Reader (conceptually, not in terms of UI obviously) might be more fitting: a bunch of feeds for shows you like. You can "star" the ones you'll always want to keep around, let others disappear if too old…

To be YC-centric, it seems that the recently-launched Teevox got that right by merging listings between Netflix and Hulu.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

To his surprise the weather that the machine began to predict was completely different from the weather calculated before. Lorenz tracked this down to the computer printout. The computer worked with 6-digit precision, but the printout rounded variables off to a 3-digit number, so a value like 0.506127 was printed as 0.506. This difference is tiny and the consensus at the time would have been that it should have had practically no effect. However Lorenz had discovered that small changes in initial conditions produced large changes in the long-term outcome.[43] Lorenz's discovery, which gave its name to Lorenz attractors, showed that even detailed atmospheric modelling cannot in general make long-term weather predictions. Weather is usually predictable only about a week ahead.[25]

Note this is different from predicting Global Warming, Global warming is a long term trend prediction, not what will be temperature at certain day at a certain place kind of prediction.
Question here:

2. You say that 3 customers complained. Is your product/service so specific that users that can't pay using PayPal complain? Are you sure that they just don't go away? What if you lost 297 customers?
We never talked about money. They were about to offer me the position as PHP developer, but I was about to leave the country for a few months while Zynga needed someone right away. The offer was shelved until I'd be back in the country a few months later. I got back to the US but I'm bootstrapping my startup at the moment, so I have not renewed the conversion with their HR. Zynga is a really cool company. I enjoyed my interview there quite a bit, getting to know the details about their platform and servers infrastructure -- it was quite fascinating.
Why would an app they control be any worse than what the networks are doing now, or what Hulu does?
i tend to have quite a bit of items stuck at pt 5b. i know it's something that could help someone other there. either i'm not motivated to build it, or it just make it feel like work to do it. i guess i could share my list some day, these day having ideas is the easy part, doing the work is the key.
The Kelvin problem: what is the optimum way to partition 3D space into identical cells, such that the surface area between them is minimized? Lord Kelvin conjectured that the Kelvin cell gave this optimum partitioning. This conjecture stood for 100 years until Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan found a better cell in 1993.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaire%E2%80%93Phelan_structure
To be fair, that's not really 99 lines. I mean, you could make it only one line that way. And, while I'm gonna get a negative score, let me ask about what everyone has with the "Look what I made in less then 1 day or less then 100 lines." It just usually sucks and would have been better with more days/lines.
Writing a StarCraft Bot in F#