skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone interested in helping finish an iPhone app?
Some friends and I designed an iPhone app with the goal of making it safer to make calls while driving. The app is called SafeLane and is basically a dynamic "favorite" list that you have on the native phone app. Users can add/edit/delete items on the call list in the app or using the web.

The two use cases we wanted the MVP to support were:

(1) User knows they have a 1 hour commute later in the day so, while in their office, using the web interface they add 5 calls to their SafeLane call list and they then make those calls while driving.

(2) User's assistant adds 5 calls to user's SafeLane call list from assistant's office using web interface.

The reason SafeLane is safer to use than the native phone app is that the user/driver has only to select a few (larger, easy to glance at) options instead of scrolling through emails, or worse, their address book.

The iPhone app is 80% complete and alpha versions are working on actual phones. The website is about half done. We spent some time/money creating a nice looking website and produced a marketing video. Check it out here http://www.reserver1.com/safelane/content/home/home.aspx (IE only right now).

If you're interested in helping finish the app (I'm guessing about 40 hours of work for someone who know what they're doing) then we'd cut you in for a piece of the economics. This isn't a business but it could be an interesting app that makes a little money and (hopefully) saves some lives.

Thanks for reading.
I am sorry this is a video, but it is the most amazing video I have ever seen. I highly recommend it to anyone reading this to see the pictures and his explanation of what's going on and how far we have to go.

That said and done. Tissue regeneration has a long way to go and the most pressing problem right now is how do you give the organs their intricate structure? How do you make a scaffold, or lay some kind of foundation for everything to come together? That has to be one of the most fascinating problems I have ever encountered.

I would give my arm to work on this. :)
most true competitive advantages are operational and cultural ones, contrary to popular thinking

That's true. Technology people tend to focus on the development-side. That is, creating something new and novel rather than running and maintaining something that already exists. Business people do pay more attention to operational concerns, but from a cost-cutting perspective. In other words, both sides tend to see operations as a loss rather than an opportunity.

This is probably changing though. It'll take a bit longer to know for sure, but that could be what devops is really about.
"Companies and nations do need more people to go to college to be able to sustain themselves."

No, not quite. Companies/nations need people to go to college and study useful things to be able to sustain themselves. I don't think the number of history majors has a positive impact on the challenges facing today's society.
I am develoing an opensource webapp with similar requirements (noticing relevant parliament/government news in Lithuania).

It can index more than RSS feeds (you know, government websites ;-)) and uses Lucene/Solr for searching documents.

Our website: http://kaveikiavaldzia.lt/
Source code: http://github.com/emilis/PolicyFeed

I would gladly answer any questions.
This problem isn't unique to academia. If I were you I'd create a few Pipes (Yahoo Pipes) and then use Google Reader as a front-end that supports sharing and commenting.
Yes, but you have to remember that at that time, we were all using feature phones. Smartphones hadn't really taken off yet, and they _did_ seem significantly more complicated, since they do so much more. I had a RAZR, and it could _technically_ play MP3s, but I certainly didn't want it to. I think that this complaint was totally reasonable, given the time period and the fact that it hadn't come out yet.

And by reasonable, I mean "still wrong, but understandable at the time."
There is definitely a need for this.

@kaelswanson had this idea 4 years ago (and I'm sure many others)

BUILD IT
>> Antiscientific and pseudoscientific attitudes will get corrected; it’s just a question of how painful that process is going to be.

Not necessarily true.

Things like astrology, alternative healing, etc. have been there for thousands of years and they just don't seem to be going away.

Roger Penrose makes some very interesting remarks on origins of these in his book "The Road to Reality". He says that ancient humans observed the influence the Sun had on their lives (day/nights, seasons, etc.) and also of the moon (tides, etc.). And there came a wrong inference that "all" heavenly objects have such an influence (astrology). He also speculates ancient humans figuring out geometrical shapes and finding naturally occurring crystals having those perfect shapes. And there came another wrong inference that such perfect natural objects must have powers to cure all that is not perfect (crystal healing).

More than a few thousands of years later, going from development of first scientific thought process in human beings (e.g.: astronomy) all the way to today, plenty of people still believe in these things (e.g.: astrology).

The third thing Penrose mentions amongst some of the first things humans learned is earth being flat, which again was a wrong inference (looks flat at human scales, must be flat at larger scales too). It took so much pain to fix this and that could only be done because a very simple evidence could ultimately be produced that everyone could see and understand by seeing a single photograph (of the round earth taken from the space). (Aside: And now humans wonder if the universe is flat. Penrose has beautifully connected some most ancient things in the human thought process to the most modern ones.)

I doubt such simple evidence is ever going to come against astrology and alternative healing, for one that it would be a lack of evidence instead. What was a "photograph" of a "round" earth there, would here be a "plot" of an uncorrelated variable (say improvement in health) against dependent variable (use of crystals) showing a "round" blob (no correlation) instead of a round earth. Just that this time, majority of humans are not able to follow (what some of us call) such simple a plot!
What an odd collection of people serving as advisors : https://www.gpal.net/gp?req=about

They're all firearm enthusiasts and members of the NRA, probably how they all met. There's a guy named Ulysses S. Grant. One of them is a hedge fund manager, orthopedic surgeon and conducts clinical trials.

They also all seem to be affiliated with calguns.net, "The California Firearms Owner's Home On The Internet". That forum even has a board devoted to GPal, which is filled with support tickets from people asking for their money: http://www.calguns.net/calgunforum/forumdisplay.php?s=efe632...
Yeah, I used the old math concept too for the first part, but got the values for a,b,c by hand. Remembering that math trick definitely made it easier. Fun to do a little math again.
http://academia.edu/
I worked at McDonalds. It was an abomination. So much so that I never ate there again, and that was well over 8 years ago. I didn't need the job. I basically picked it up as a second job when all my friends went off to college and I still had another couple months left because our school started late. It wasn't worth the extra cash. I was derided on a daily basis by customers who looked down upon me (despite the fact I was going to be majoring in Physics). When my manager noticed that I was reasonably intelligent, they took off early and left me to run the entire restaurant which was utterly exhausting. No one respected health codes. The other employees were living proof of how destructive the food is to your body. In fact you could almost tell how many years (or months) they had been there just by estimating their weight.

Working at McDonalds taught me a few lessons. 1) Never date anyone who eats at McDonalds on a regular basis. They don't care about their health and well-being. 2) Always treat others with respect. 3) Be happy and grateful for the opportunities you have in your life. There are less fortunate situations you could be in.
If you were considering rolling your own large storage infrastructure, a reasonable place to start might be https://spideroak.com/diy/ (entirely open source.)
seems like the site was overloaded and exceeded bandwidth capacity
The ACM abstract gave a good overview of what the site was supposed to do, but when I went to the actual site, it was horriblyi designed with no clear description of what the service was supposed to do.

Maybe if the OP Gave a very well designed application using existing implementations it would take off.
In case anyone is wondering what happened to this guy, he's writing for Microsoft now.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee532402.aspx?sdmr=...

Which makes sense. He's got that fantastically wrong sense of intuition in design that makes someone come to all the wrong conclusions with the data; the kind of person who couldn't see the iPhone was a Big Deal in UX. This means he's a great fit for the Microsoft UX base, because he can tell them what they want to hear.

P.S., I suppose this statement will anger people and they'll furiously hit the down arrow next to this comment, but I don't care. Having worked in Microsoft, I can assure you that the people who succeed in MS UX roles are the people who tell middle management what they want to hear (while the upper management and actual engineers watch helplessly).
Later than what? The presentation is from 2007, Erlang is from 1986, and open sourced in 1998.
https://renderosity.com

has a 3d orientation but same basic idea.
That really does sound like an awesome job. Was the grinding the reason you left?

Did your opinions change after hearing other people's woes, or did it help to reaffirm them?
I think that's not their point. What they advocate is based on Tony Hoare's CSP model. When you introduce locks and share data, your program suddenly becomes extremely complex to validate. Yes if you are skilled enough, you can lock things and it works (most operating systems would only rarely crash due to locking) but what this brings is true determinism.

The programs become provably stable and deterministic. Furthermore, the determinism can scale. E.g. If you achieve a safely validated program with 10 threads, you can consider that as a single block and replicate and connect it to thousands more, and yet your system remains safe from concurrency bugs.

The downside is that its overkill to separate the program into multiple threads just to make sure you don't have shared data.

But it has its merits, imagine you are developing a mission critical system. Its a powerful thing to claim you have a fully deterministic concurrent system with hundreds of communicating threads in it. Also note that cpus will multiply soon to 64, 128 ... cores, so might as well use some of them for something like this.
No, its not a bad idea.

The article is fundamentally about hitting limited backend resources.

Most application servers shouldn't have to deal with Slowloris attacks. Your load balancers will, your frontend proxy will, but not your application servers.

Letting your application servers transfer this load deeper into your architecture is a bad thing. Its even harder to debug the farther you get away from a web request. The right place to mitigate and detect is in your load balancing or reverse proxying layers -- most production node.js deployments I know about today, still sit behind nginx or apache proxies.
Need a pronounceable random n-character string?
And both Taco and Diego made reasonable points at the time.

"No wireless. Less space than a nomad" all true, like "no tactile response," etc were / are.

The complete package and ecosystem have made iPods / iPhones compelling.

And the firm belief on taco's and diego's parts that this "senselessness" would be clear were just clearly - in hindsight - wrong.

W
How to Network Without Business Cards
> In many disciplines everything is shared a year in advance via working papers.

Yes, absolutely.
Noobstories contains links posted from newly-created user accounts. The category is intended for moderation and tends to have more spam than others - the OP is asking you to flag spam articles on Noobstories to maintain the overall high-quality of HN.
One reason this is unlikely to pass is that Congress likes renewable tax breaks because 1) It gives Congress an "accomplishment" they can brag about. 2) Members of Congress like being lobbied for tax breaks for businesses because it allows them to extract campaign contributions and other favors. 3) They are a bunch of egotists who like being treated like VIPs by people asking them for things.
Return of The Gold Currency
If the user's browser agent is known to support HTML5 use <video>, else use <flash>.
At which price is doing the work still viable?

What if the added value of the work being done is lower then the minimum wage? Then no employer will pay you to do it. Or consider a machine which can do the same job cheaper then some employees earning minimum wage: How long before the job will be automated?

In a world where much physical work is automated away there might not be enough remaining work left for everyone. And the simple law of supply and demand a labor surplus will lead to increasingly lower wages. As soon as this hits minimum wage the work will either move to a place with a lower minimum wage or none at all, or the work is just eliminated (not done) if one can get away with it.

It all ends up the same… With a surplus of (some kinds of) labor, wages will decrease so that some people are unable to earn a livable income. At the same time a shortage of (some kinds of) labor will lead to higher wages, which means that automation becomes viable at higher prices. In either case, given enough time most people will end up without a job, without an income: Only the owners of businesses will share in the profits.
Youmeo.com
Producing globally significant amounts of biofuel (either from algae, as Venter attempts, or from other plants) is a terribly difficult endeavor. The world's yearly fossil fuel consumption is about 12 TW of energy; at the same time, the entire biosphere currently fixes about 55-60 TW / year into plant matter [1]. Thus, the biofuel-producing plants would have to amount to about 20% of the Earth's biosphere in order to completely replace our consumption of fossil fuels (assuming this consumption doesn't increase). This is a gigantic task, which would require extreme global effort (if it is at all feasible).

[1] "Global catastrophes and trends" V. Smil, MIT 2008, p. 83
What line of business were you in? What was the proximate cause of their demand for refunds?
Tissue regeneration has a long way to go and the most pressing problem right now is how do you give the organs their intricate structure? How do you make a scaffold, or lay some kind of foundation for everything to come together?

The body already has that information. It's called DNA. I've had a hole in my left lung close and decades-old scars itch like new scars and visibly shrink. The body can regenerate itself if you clean it up adequately and give it sufficient resources to rebuild (nutritionally).

Thank you for the video. It's highly relevant to my interests.
Yikes, 2 out of every 3 submissions (as of right now, at least) are [dead].

This may be a problem which requires a procedural solution rather than the goodwill volunteerism of HNers.
To be clear, as andyn said: the blog post "suggests that Consumer Watchdog is a for-hire astroturfing organisation hired by Microsoft." Emphasis mine.

Take a look around his site. For example, the links at the very top include: "Comes vs. Microsoft", "OOXML", "OpenDocument", "Novell". He's not an impartial observer.
In New Books, a Look at People and Places That Innovate
The A* algorithm in Clojure
True. Translating the script to linux is however just a matter of exchanging some of the bash commands with corresponding shell syntax. Frankly, I don't have access to a linux box right now. Maybe you could give it a try to convert it?
Debugging the Linux kernel with JTAG
Is it the government's job to ensure that everyone has a job? Should it be hiring everyone? Where does this economic theory come from? And why is its logic never questioned?

Yes, the government can continue to borrow massively to spend so much that everyone has a job and subsidize lending so that otherwise unviable economic activity occurs.

But this is the economic thinking that produced the housing bubble and the dot com bubble before it, both of which left economic disasters in their wake.

More of the same faulty action will not resolve the underlying massive structural problem being created.

Some day, the bill will come due for borrowing trillions that do not result in an improvement in our ability to produce products and services the world is willing to pay for.

Both parties have wasted massive amounts of money on things which add no value. The difference between Argentina and the United States is that the US has far greater wealth and ability to borrow and thus can piss away vastly greater amounts before the bill comes due.

The government is like a rich child that is never disciplined by his parents. Its easier to throw money at all of the problems created than to impose the same discipline that created the wealth in the first place.

Yes, more people will be without jobs. But the
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It takes a special kind of gutlessness to complain like this from behind a brand new account.
مشاهدة مباراة مصر وسيراليون
The grind and performance targets were the reasons I left. That and the low pay. Every time you hear on CNN or on TV that according to so and so opinion poll or market research company ... it means that a whole army of pollers had to call a ton of people to get that information. The pressure is on to get a statistically meaningful sample, and there are tough time constraints. To make things even worst, you are encouraged to be automatons, and need to follow the script.

It was a total grind.

But it did change my opinion of people, their wealth, and how they know their world. I've spoken on the phone with people who routinely charge hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to their credit cards, and they'd turn out to know not much more about the world than the average joe in a suburban home, with 3 kids and a hospital bound spouse.

The seniors are who you need to watch out for! They're smarter than every other age group, and know what you're after - they make you work for every answer. They don't hesitate to challenge whatever you ask - sniffing out trick questions and assumptions built into the surveys. And also offering the most amount of reasonably intelligent alternatives for tough questions and current events issues.

My personal opinions about the issues at hand usually didn't change, but talking to people did teach me a ton. During the presidential elections, I got a professor of political science on the line, and he basically dissected the entire political landscape and tried to tell me why Obama would win. It didn't help me with the boss though - they were concerned that I was spending too much time on the call.
Talking about Tax policy without talking about spending policy doesn't really work. The government has been running increasing deficits, under each successive administration, from both parties, for my entire lifetime.

While I think that a tax break for research is a great idea-- in fact, make research %100 write-offable and make it permanent-- I think that the increases in all kinds of taxes and fees at other areas and the impact of inflation will overwhelm the effect of this tax break.

Time to address the disease, and stop making hay out of the symptoms.
Seeing that Redis is a datastructure storage mechanism, I guess it shouldn't shock anyone that it maps well to existing datastructure interfaces. Maybe the more interesting aspect here is the power of having datastructure-aware datastores as opposed to trying to hide the implementation details behind (potentially) leaky abstractions.
I guess it qualifies as SaaS (software as a service). When shit hit the fan, the business was running exactly as it always has been, but at a higher volume.

They mentioned something about not allowing "intangible products" but it was complete bullshit because they always have, always will, and still allow intangible products. This wasn't their reasoning for it but just something they vaguely mentioned once, I never did get any answers out of them.
On your last point, it would be cheaper to give every man, woman and child in the UK GBP 3k/year no questions asked, no strings attached than to operate our present system.
definitely use heroku if you are using a ruby framework. we've had a much better experience than with managing our own EC2 server or using RightScale
I've worked at microsoft as well, and I concur. The corporate culture seems designed to produce bad UX, even though all the MSFT employees I knew were earnest and well meaning.

Interestingly, the OP post suffers from the problem he accuses the iPhone of. He says "you're not your customer, don't design the product for you" and then laments the iPhone because it doesn't fit what he thinks a phone should be.
The Dirty Truth About Digital Fasts
Intel archs have support for call gates that allow jumps to privileged code (ring 0/1/2). It maps nicely to the notion of syscalls, but I wonder why it hasn't been used.
I was under the impression it is colloquial English for female genitalia.
That's quite a bit outdated, though.
Voice recognition algorithms aren't "getting better everyday." Development is actually kind of stagnant.
If someone sends me a check, and I deposit it, within a day or two I know the money is mine and can't be yanked back.

Not true. Any and all financial transactions are reversible, per US law.

They don't make it obvious that they'll do this

This is a standard policy for all electronic funds transfers, not specific to Paypal.
I don't get the downvoting here. I think it's a legitimate question. Makes me think thoughts like: For what purposes are we alowed to take away a childhood?
How does one "flag as spam"? I don't see any such links on either the article discussion page or the user page.

Example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652503
I am not denying that it does. What I am trying to say is that when you are trying to grow an entire organ for a person then how can you tell it where the intricate structures should be? A heart has chambers, valves and a structure that responds dynamically to pressure. How do you make that? From essentially nothing.

An embryo does it, somehow, by magic that no one truly understands. That's a puzzle we need to solve. I've spent some time reading about it, but I have no clue whatsoever what lies beyond the surface.
You need to have a certain amount of karma to flag, but if I recall it's fairly low.
Has anyone used Amazon FPS or Google Checkout? Anything to report, or are they still fringe/niche that the normal customer won't recognize it, and avoid your site?
and any good developer can pick up and be proficient in PHP quickly
Heroku is a great way to get your app up and out there quickly. Get in front of users and then iterate on your product. The perceived cost of Heroku won't turn out to be an issue until you've scaled out to many dynos.

Don't fret optimizing your hosting bill until it gets large enough to be an issue!
Heroku is awesome. Not only does it work well, it also encourages best practices.
Kill PayPal with something having a long radioactive half-life.

I bought toys for my 1-year-old's Christmas and they were delivered stinking of smoke. The ad clearly said - "smoke free." When I complained to eBay they simply would not help (one person did at first and then flipped to the party line).

eBay will never get my business again as a consumer or as someone that uses payment mechanisms for business. Their DNA is defective.