skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Low bit rate codecs with acceptable quality will be a boon for VoIP over satellite. Satellite Internet service is both bandwidth-limited and hideously expensive-- Inmarsat Fleet Broadband for cargo ships, for instance, typically costs $6/MB. The idea would be to set up local phone networks that employ one of the GSM codecs or mu-law (allowing the use of plain vanilla handsets) and then transcode the voice to a more efficient codec like this one upstream/downstream of the satellite connection to the PSTN.

Incidentally, David Rowe is one of the pioneers of the Mesh Potato.
Does anyone know if there is going to be a video of the talk available? I haven't been able to find anything so far and as a Java dev currently getting my feet wet with a Scala hobby project, it seemed like an interesting presentation.
After further examining the source I dare to say the size of the html sent could be cut in half.
In my case, it's because it's a pretty good emulator of what we do.

We're the oh-so-loved BitKeeper guys and we're working on tech for very large repositories. A bk clone is essentially the described benchmark. Or should be, if we're slower than that we're doing something wrong.
Did you read the mouse over on the xkcd comic?
MVP does not imply lack of polish.

Maybe you have a puzzle game and you launch with 10 levels instead of 50. You can always add more as updates later.

Maybe you're doing a side-scroller and your character can only shoot horizontally right now. You can add shooting at angles in later updates.

Maybe you write a racing game, but you only include one car type right now. You can add more later.
Why post this here?
Just yesterday the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) released a report (http://www.oecd.org/document/35/0,3343,en_21571361_44315115_...) that shows how over weight our populations are becoming.
Maybe its time to start taking some responsibility for the food we eat and its affects on our health.
Oracle wants to buy chipmaker, ARM shares rise
If a company relying on user-generated content did do this, it might well give them a useful advantage.

Though there would probably be problems with people gaming the system.
To clarify this further.

This is true if the party in question has ordered ballot papers from the central voting authority. This is (strangely enough) a different thing from being a runner in the election.

So "Donald Duck" and "DONALD DUCK" would count the same iff someone has ordered official ballot paper for Donald Duck party (or similar). They would (or at least should) count individually if not.
Quicklisp projects: what's missing?
http://fitnesse.org/
Well, they ARE a dev group and are customarily paid for their work. Also, this is pretty big and portions will be shipped overseas so there will be real costs incurred.If things get too weird, I'll post here.
Apple Headphone, Camera Patents Reveal Obsession With Design Details
They should have made the projected keyboard more Swype-y.

I think though that in the existing IR keyboards there's one beam for "drawing" the keyboard, and a second invisible beam parallel with the surface which actually detects where your fingers are pressing. It's not clear where that second beam is coming from in this video. You could probably do the touchpad with just that single invisible beam, though of course iPhone and Android aren't made for touchpads and cursor arrows, but rather for direct finger interaction.
Really? I reply with clarification and receive anonymous downvotes in return?

hyperbole isn't a fancy word for exaggeration
Facebook cannot because it happened in California, and California has strong protections. See http://law.justia.com/california/codes/2009/lab/2870-2872.ht... for details.

I'm firmly of the belief that this is very good for Silicon Valley. How many people do you know who work at a job and a startup on the side? In California that generally won't get you in trouble. Elsewhere?
Im using at my day job Qt with Visual studio express 2008
and its a great combination for developing. im doing small tools. its very fast with Qt
Ask Notch (the developer of Minecraft) anything
And this kids is why you don't couple a complete front-end makeover with a back-end overhaul. It's never going to be perfect and bug-less from day one, and users will always equate something wrong on one end with hating the entire redesign. Comments not loading because of some consistency issue? They'll associate it with your new layout and start hating it.

The roll-out of features and changes should be gradual and isolated from one another. Theme something different there, move that widget to the other side, change your navigation scheme, comments are now NoSQL, ok start moving stories to NoSQL, and finally this is our new front-page system of you following users with a customized My News.

If any of those individual pieces caused an issue, or there was too much backlash, it wouldn't be associated with the excellent work and effort you've placed into all the other parts of the new site. You get targeted feedback, can quickly squash bugs, and your user-base is now accustomed to what would otherwise be a jarring change. Instead you get Digg v4, with weeks of broken axle pages, entire parts of the site not working, huge features and functions of the old site just completely missing, and what I can imagine is an entire development staff running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to figure out what part of their new system (or multiple parts) are the issue, and how to solve it.

Pains me to see them do so much right, yet still get so much terribly wrong.
could it then be just a general "method", as in "the way to do a certain thing"?
I've been in touch with Yodlee recently as well. I'm going to call them back today to clarify, but it was my understanding that the fee was per user account not user. Meaning if John Doe signs up and has 3 credit cards and 2 banks, that's 5 user accounts. Hopefully I'm wrong on this.
Plays havoc with the poem's meter, though.
Randomized Quicksort?
Spoon.net runs any software without installing it (incl. IE6/7)
...which also references 1984 and a Hanna Barbera cartoon. Of course it's less funny now that I've analyzed it, but still a good joke.
all I need is a cup of coffe and toptwittertrends in the morning..I am Following trends from here. Great job
A merchant account usually takes 7-10 days in my experience. Although merchant accounts are pretty much all the same, payment gateways are not. Charify is awesome and makes your payment gateway sort of irrelevant (at least as long as they keep supporting the one you have).

As for gateways, Braintree is head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to service and their API. 3% is about right, or a little high. For more info on the process and market prices check out Braintree's website. They are quite helpful, but a little on the pricey side.
California tracks school kids with RFID
I am running IE6, 7 and 8 in parallel on the same windows install. Properly, without IETester and its glitches.

As a web developer, this is a pretty awesome find. Basically, it means that instead of needing to run 3 VirtualBoxes (4, soon), one for each version of IE, I can now run just one, thus saving me a gig of RAM and a lot of performance.
"Traffic lights should respond to cars, not the other way around"

True, but believe it or not it is incredibly difficult to get right.

I'm on my local council and we recently did some prep work to look into adding "AI" to the towns traffic lights.

Here is the problem; you have to do a significant portion of the lights - or it actually gets worse. A stupid amount of planning goes into light sequencing (at least it does here....) on a macro-scale - so all of the towns lights are pretty much synced to optimize traffic flow as much as possible.

Imagine doing that on the fly for the entire town.

What ''has'' been suggested, and looks good, is a sort of hybrid approach - where traffic levels are monitored and a number of different optimized sequences used to clear traffic jams as appropriate. Even this is a pain because it is essentially the same as replacing the towns system three or four times over :)

And we are lucky in having a medium sized town with large areas of uninhabited farmland (read little traffic) around it.

Not that it isn't a good idea - but I don't think it is a very simple option.
> If the user moves further from the screen while a video is playing on the focused window, the video will go automatically to fullscreen.

No.

It shouldn't do this, I don't want this to happen. The computer should do what I tell it to (making it go fullscreen is just one keypress FFS), not what it thinks I want to do, because it'll inevitably get it wrong from time to time.
i guess windows maybe mac latter
After Angelgate, a good moment to go back to the basics
I guess we had a violent agreement.
with the consistent misspelling of "entrepreneur", this just hit a new level of entertaining. i wonder if an angel in the group just funded the moonraker laser.
My experience with WPP is exactly the opposite. Total clusterfuck. And Chargify doesn't support Paypal, last I heard, because Paypal was so unreliable. YMMV.
This is bad idea from YC point of view. It's OK to invest to startup that most likely fails but in case of success pays out other failures.

Redesign doesn't have such upside.

Why pay someone 20K for redesign if you can pay much less on 99designs and have a lot of propositions?

IMHO HN has good design and usability for(at least in general better then redesigns appearing from time to time).

It's not so convenient to use HN from mobile phone. I believe that this issue is better to fix with releasing good official API and we get good client very quickly.
I didn't have the same experience. Maybe try these direct links:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727781.400-brainhack...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727781.500-brainhack...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727781.000-brainhack...
Ugh. If there's one thing that the French road system does badly, it's roundabouts.. Firstly, they have the weird idea of having two types - roundabouts that have traffic entering into the roundabout giving way to the traffic already on the roundabout, and then roundabouts where the traffic entering has priority over the traffic already on the roundabout. Some roundabouts of the second type have traffic lights on the roundabout.

And who hasn't seen photos of the traffic on Etoile (the roundabout that goes around the Arc de Triomphe)? Nightmare! All of those stories people tell abot Etoile are true - I sometimes go up there on foot so that guests can see the arc de triomphe up close, and I see an accident about once in every three trips. Insane.
Mathematicians. Musicians.
Yes, the basic part is pretty knarly with some heavy brick and mortarish aspects to it. The rest is pretty straightforward web stuff, I believe.

Thanks! I'll try to get in touch with LaunchBox today.

I'll drop you an email and you can see what I've got so far.

So what is a fair split?
Is user data safe in the cloud?
"More than 90% of small business owners prefer to use pen and paper than a computer to do accounting."

Uh, where does that come from? I have been running my own small businesses for 20 years and I have used a PC for accounting the whole time. I meet regularly with a group of small business owners and everyone of them uses a PC too. I would love to see the source of this idea.
Great site, nice clean interface with intuitive controls. I think there are some HTML5 magic. Hats off to the developer.
Textmate-clojure, SLIME for TextMate (sorta)
Only if you're willing and able to sue them to collect, if it comes down to that. Assuming they have any assets by that point ... after all, they don't have enough to pay you for the three months of work.
Yea it suggests really interesting experimental hypotheses: would the content in the different groups diverge or would it stay more or less the same? And would the degree of divergence change over time?

I wonder how strong the correlation would be.
> Fullscreen notifications
> If the user is not in front of the screen, the notifications could be shown at
> fullscreen so the user can still read them from a different location.

This sounds like an excellent way to play pranks on co-workers. "Bob, your shipment of Viagra has just arrived!". The trolling is on.
TL;DR: improve the accessibility of the best comments

I've always thought the real value of this site was in the comments.

Sometimes a thoughtful comment gets lost because it has no replies, while a less substantive thread might be dominating the discussion.

The voting system doesn't always help either, since the fanboy (and pariah) effect causes some comments to be inflated (or rejected) based on who said them, not their significance or merits.

So if you can think of a good way to present the best comments for a given link or topic, that would be a useful improvement.
I agree that there are parts of the UI that could use some fixes (I think papercuts is the term people are throwing around these days).

But are you kidding me? The Alt+MouseKey combos for moving and resizing windows around is probably one of my favorite features of their desktop interface. The moment a coworker or friend sees me do it they immediately start telling me how "awesome" it is and plead for me to "make it work" on their Windows or Mac PC.
The very first thing I tried to do was click on the words "comments" and "points" to sort the entries by that column.

Placing those columns on the left-hand side gives them the highest importance. Is that the intention of this UI?
does it work on mac?
Interesting. When working on my DBs, I am 75% Artist 25% Hacker. When working on anything else, I tend to become the novice.
Awesome video.
I would never ever get late again if somebody gives me one of these clocks.
At the time I made the comment, the article was two paragraphs long, the first being the actual news about Apple and the second being what I quoted. It doesn't stick out from the most recent revision as much, I agree, but I still think it's a pretty bad story.

These stories come out all the time in the financial press

Which is a big reason I dislike the financial press so much. "Event + chatter from random analysts with vested interests" is a terrible template. It's lazy, boring, and uninformative, and to me counts as bad journalism even if it doesn't cross ethical lines.
Why I rewrote chronic
Not my favorite. The current design, IMO, suites the audience and content perfectly.
just playing devil's advocate here, but why is slapping together an API with some javascript worthy of a job offer? what's so exciting about YT instant? from hurley's twitter message, it sounds like he asked this kid to drop out of stanford to join youtube, which sounds a little crazy. maybe I just have no imagination.

(congrats to the kid in any case)
I am trying to find out a bit more about the methodology he used. Best I can find so far is page giving a bit of description about Bill Rankin mapping Chicago which Eric says inspired him to do other cities: http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?chicagodots

Looks like the dots are at the block level.
Why not crawl the google text cache instead?

It indexes HN within a few minutes of any post.
http://ytinstant.com/
When I was a junior programmer at a bank, I had an assignment to change some reports in the plastics issue/reissue system. I used made-up cardholder names, such as Malaguena Splunt, Maxie Terwilliger, and all the Beverly Hillbillies. I ran my test, checked the reports, and thought I was done. Then a phone call from security informed me that my cards were ready. That's when I found out that running a test would actually result in test plastics being created. Since fraudsters could get hold of plastics, the person who created them was required to go to the plastics area (located in a vault with armed guards) and fill out a form for each plastic, including the name on the card and the purpose of the individual test plastic. I spent a very uncomfortable half day writing up forms for my cast of stupid names, under the watchful eyes of the security guards.
Is this the same Uncle Bob as the Object Mentor Uncle Bob, i.e. Robert Martin (http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/category/uncle-bobs-bl...)? Or is this another programmer going by the nickname Uncle Bob?
I didn't know http://resourcey.com ! Nice project. Is this new ? Related to YC ?
I want to know how much Spoon Studio costs so I click the buy button and it wants me to register and login? I clicked around a little more but I couldn't find the cost.

Unfortunately it doesn't work on my Mac either, on my Windows machine though it was really cool to see IE6 pop up!
Apple TV Splits Networks
One thing I would change in HN: I would make it faster. Pages load times are a bit annoying.
I've been using it for a long time now (for IE6/7) and it is pretty good I must say, a great alternative to IETester.
How Adam Weinstein Disrupted The Traditional Greeting Card Industry
Another bank/plastics mishap in my yute: one of my colleagues had a PIN pad on her desk. I ran my own credit card through it for a $1.00 charge, and it was approved. I tried a few more times, approved each time. Finally I got a "pick up card" response. I said, "Hey look, the test system wants to pick up my card." My co-worker: "That's connected to production, not test." Oops!
It seems to me in your situation it's all marketing and sales. You have to educate these people on what your product does and I'd start by helping them see they can spend more time selling and less time doing whatever it is your product does
The pomegranate is way better: http://www.pomegranatephone.com/
Tell HN: An Observation
For what it's worth, seems to me like nobody is reading the new page much any more.

Used to be I'd submit an article and get 60-150 reads as the article dropped off the new page. Today I submitted an article http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1723576 and got only a couple of dozen.

Now perhaps you guys have managed to figure out that all of my articles suck all of the time, but even then you'd think with 10x the traffic it would still translate into more initial readers from a year ago.

I'm not trying to complain that nobody upvoted my article! Hope it doesn't sound that way. I'm much more interested in the lack of drive-by readers now as opposed to a year ago and what that means for the site.

If you'd like to hear me complain, happy to oblige. Meanwhile the front page has gossip stories about how a lot of Angels are actually assholes, some famous guy quit Oracle, another guy rags on .NET, Uncle Bob is a great person, and more Google/Apple fluff, along with the more usual HN material.

Just seems kind of strange. Don't know about you, but all this industry gossip, fanboy-bait, and the lack of user-generated content drives down the quality for me in a big way. Combine that with a lack of readers from the new page, and it seems like there is a feedback loop setting up. It's not that HN is turning into reddit, but it seems like the mechanism of HN itself has changed significantly.
Also, see his profile on github: http://github.com/unclebob . Some clojure stuff, which he is really enjoying lately.
"The Spoon kernel is a lightweight implementation of core operating system APIs, including the filesystem, registry, process, and threading subsystems, completely implemented within the user-mode space, allowing Spoon apps to be executed without any device driver installation or administrative privileges."

Two thoughts:

1. Wow, I cannot imagine how much work it would be to fake all the necessary Windows APIs for this to work.

2. IT managers everywhere should be afraid. Very afraid.
Sorry, Spoon isn't available on your browser yet!
Please try again from a different machine or browser.

What is supported?
How To Give Your Photos A Lomo Effect [Photoshop Tutorial]
Obviously, you’re pretty much into lomo yes? Then you’ve come to the right site. This Photoshop tutorial will help you get that lomo effect even without a lomo camera. Your cheaper alternative to getting that oversaturated, cool-looking photos you have always wanted. Good deal huh?
you'd be surprised. i have a bunch of friends who read XKCD for some of the generically geeky content, and to who i have to explain a lot of more technical punchlines to. including the premise behind little bobby tables. there's a lot of people whose initial exposure to a CS concept is through XKCD, which solidifies that relationship into the future.
They have a group of designer/developers specifically dedicated to UI development. I remember mark saying that the changes will be incremental over some time as they experiment and get feedback from community not drastic.

If you look back in the last 2 Ubuntu releases you will see there has quite a bit of changes here and there, they all add up over time.
Thanks - that definitely qualifies as "something obvious" that I missed.
At least not Chrome, Firefox, Safari nor Opera (tested on Mac)
No. At least not on my builds of Chrome and FF.
Windows only. But it means you only need one windows machine as opposed to multiple VMs.
Ask HN: How would you improve Google News?
I had been reading Google News for years, and now will still look at it periodically, but I've come to realize that even though it is good at what it does, which is just collecting and categorizing the latest news in an intuitive and somewhat visually appealing manner, it sucks as a way to get the news you want. This is because they collect every version of every news story and show the latest instead of the "best" article.

Case-in-point is the top current sci/tech story "Facebook Blames Outage On Database Failure" by InformationWeek, which has a really misleading headline. It was not a database failure the way you and I would think of it; it was a config tool problem. Now many users are going to think a database was at fault, when it wasn't. The method of bringing the crappy headline up to the top is just bad, bad, bad, and I don't think that ranking by popularity would help, because the non-techs or uninformed might thumbs up such a story.

So, how could they improve it and resolve this issue?
It look Wine almost 15 years to get to the 1.0 release.
These maps are mostly disheartening.
LA more mature than Silicon Valley!?
Don't worry paperclip, you'll be made of computronium.
I don't think that is the correct interpretation. It's not that it's through paper that it's "Little Bobby Tables". Little Bobby Tables is an injection through someone's name.

In this case, the reference is because it's through the voter registration list--i.e. voters purposefully put a SQL injection in their voter registration.

The analogy breaks down if you look too closely because it's in the party name field, not the voter name field. However, I think it's funny enough to stand notwithstanding the fact we're sitting around analyzing the joke.
The kid's innovative and imaginative, can clearly build and design product quickly, and has a Facebook and Stanford pedigree. That sounds like a winner to me.
I heard someone say $2,395 (http://twitter.com/fowlduck/status/25408002640) but I haven't verified that myself, so not sure...

The plugin is free, however.
Checked it myself now. it's $2395 / user.
Real-time cloud app built and deployed live over 45 minutes using Rails 3
How to Raise Boys Who Read
Thanks for checking it out. I'm probably a little ignorant toward color, I'll have to look into changing the background.
I switched to Mono & MySql & Linux a year ago for my startup and in my experience performance is the same or even faster than .Net & SQL Server & Windows.

A couple of complex queries not optimized at all where slow in MySql and very fast in SQL Server but I think that that is because of the database engine itself and not because of the driver.
With all the money and resources at these peoples' disposal, why the hell would they meet at a bar / restaurant to plan their nefarious nefariousness?

Wouldn't this kind of business be better transacted on a yacht or submarine?