skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just looked through that google doc properly. You guys have really done your work and I think you've hit this stage because you are users yourself fixing a problem you understand. Great work.

I was looking through the current top pool apps on iphone and while I only looked through the top 10 or 20, this is just another level. I guess the simple fact that someone stands in a pool hall with a mobile computing device this entirely possible now, when it was not previously (pre smart phone mass market)

You can make your name in the USA but in vision, this is a lot bigger. The USA is a good start though :) Get funding, go full time!
I'd compare this to leaving your house's front door unlocked and open. You're an idiot, but if someone walks in and trashes the place, they still committed a crime.

That's my brain talking, of course. My gut reaction is to say, "stupid is as stupid does", and blame the person who wrote a buggy piece of software.
haha! I didn't know this guy had a blog. I've heard Aaron Patterson speak, he is crazy and awesome at the same time, IE crawesome. Or, awezy (aussie?)
Next year, they will simply apply for .BIT – http://www.circleid.com/posts/reduce_the_risk_of_url_shorten...
I think it depends on how many servers you monitor :)

$99 per month for 6 servers is really cool.
So I actually did spend some time to create IPad apps for my kids to help them learn math (Beginning Math and Times Table Helper -- for sale on the app store now :).

Couple of things I don't like here:
1. First thing I see is time math quizzes. Timed math tests are flat out evil. I'm thinking of the 60 problems in 60 seconds variety I had as a 3rd graders (and failed). Don't do this to your kids. Let them go at their own pace.

2. That is a lot of distractions. If you have ever dealt with dyslexic kids (prone to mentally wander off -- and I am dyslexic as well), this is not helpful.

Not all electronic learning software needs to be game oriented.
They had me going with the story and background. It's complete and believable, covers everything about the product and some entertaining backdrop about where the idea came from.

If it were true, it is a very mainstream friendly story and could easily be picked up by writers for casual (non-techy) related publications. "College girl makes dating advice iPhone app", its fun and it draws eyeballs.
> Those of you who prefer some kind of GUI, look into Xemacs. It can be set up to respond to your mouse-clicks.

I don't want to nitpick here, but the tedious distinction between the "graphically challenged" GNU Emacs and the "some kind of GUI" godness of XEmacs is getting rather old. Precisely, it is around 20 years old, since the debate started somwhen at the beginning of the 90s. Much, much time has passed and much, much has changed since then in GNU/X emacs land.

But otherwise, youre completely right. Emacs feels today what running a Lisp Machine must have been back in the day, and it's wonderful. Your complete environment is written in Lisp, you code, chat, mail, all at the same time in/with Lisp, and you can modify all of it at run-time, all the way down (Well, mostly).

It is a pity that Emacs is stuck with Elisp for the foreseeable future, so although a "Lisp", it cant fully profit from all the available Common Lisp goodies, but for a beginner, it is all more than enough to start. And even if one day he or she might want to move on to Common Lisp, SLIME would be there waiting patiently.
My head is going to explode from the number of times "pivot" is mentioned in that article.
I love the concept - is there anything like this for Python?
I disagree.

What would you use instead?
Hi coryl, I'm Annabelle, the girl in the actual app. The app idea is mine and I'm the one who speaks in the videos and I also did the script and recording myself (trust me hun, it IS me in the videos!). My high school friends from FIPLAB created the app, which i feel is pretty obvious since its published under their name. :)

But do check out http://www.askagirlapp.com/ as it has my name there!
In general I don't like this approach to learning. I feel like it's counter to the rule that you shouldn't reward kids for things they should be expected to do.

That being said, he says clearly that this is about learning math facts. The are the one rote part left in the early math curriculum. It's going to be painful for most kids. I know this from very recent experience. Anything you can do to help I think is advantageous.

He should not have titled his post as he did. It should have been titled "How to get any 3rd grader to learn their math facts more efficiently". I think that's what he meant to say anyway.
Somewhat related from the article:

"It’s easy for Google to build something fifty percent of the way and release it, therefore sucking the air out of the room. They don’t even need to “finish” it – the very fact they’ve made it and put it everywhere is enough to make a market dry up and users to flock to it. It will have enough functionality – and just enough – to get the job done (“perfectly functional, albeit Spartan”)."
So you say because costs are high they should get protection?
Would love to, but I clocked 50k airline miles in the last 12 months :-/
If this app does indeed take off it will be an interesting statement about modern society. Perhaps it means we have become antisocial, or perhaps it simply means we've found a better ice breaker. I'll hope for the latter ;)
I tried porting VP8, but the spec is huge (the allegedly incomplete bitstream specification is 104 pages), and performance-wise, it couldn't compare to a native webm/vp8 implementation. I guess i'll give it another shot.

I'm not exactly sure how much of vp8 is part of the interframe prediction, because WebP only contains a single intraframe, it might be practical to implement a small subset.
I think resisting the urge to perfect the video is part of the same mindset as not using marketing lingo and buzzwords in the application. The entire YC application is about cutting the bullshit and being genuine. PG and the others don't want to see perfection, in the app or the video, they want to see who we really are.

Me and my cofounder did our video Tuesday night. We didn't do any preparing, messed up the first take, took maybe five minutes to get an outline set up, and were happy with what we got in the second take (51 seconds). It certainly wasn't perfect, but life goes on.
Free Windows Marketplace For Mobile Account for Students
Thanks! I appreciate the kind words.

The results: I'm working on that. This is more like the "MVSP" version as in Minimum Viable Side Project.
The handbooks are at any university library, I use George Mason in U.S., and UTS in Sydney.

The papers, however, are everywhere. Search for the SIGGRAPH stuff here:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/

Everything's there. See you in about a year :-)
how about a serverside implementation? Try loading native webp, if that fails, send the webp data to a webp-to-png service and render in png on the client. Performance would probably be fine, and imagemagick or something similar will probably support webp soon so the server won't require us to write a whole webp implementation.
MixPanel Platform
Also, a sample chapter: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709600
Please note: this only ruins your morning if you use accepts_nested_attributes_for somewhere.
>Courts are not generally required to award costs to the winner of a case here in England, it is more of a default in most cases instead of adopting "everyone pays their own costs" as in the US.

Thanks, I didn't know this. I'm still not convinced that the threat of legal fees wouldn't convince a non-insignificant fraction of poor plaintiffs not to sue.

> I guess you're referring to so-called "no win, no fee" agreements? If so, it's not quite as simple as that (the lawyers also stand to gain more if they win than they would in a regular case)...

I know. In effect, the lawyer is selling insurance to the client. The client will get less in case of a win both because (a) he bought insurance, which brings his variance down (and so, his total payout in case of a win is lower) and (b) the lawyer collects a premium for absorbing the risk.
Perhaps an insurance system would develop where you pay a portion of your winnings to the insurer if the suit wins, and they pay out if it loses. In this way we can leverage market forces to help determine the validity of cases.
Oops! You're right. Should be O(n^2). I'll update. :-)
I don't think you're understanding me.
Heating of water is a bulk thermal effect. Absolutely nothing happens when you microwave a glass of water that wouldn't also happen if you heated it on the stove, or put it under a heat lamp. Only the spatial distribution of the heat is different.

I'm assuming that your last sentence is merely snark, or perhaps you didn't finish reading my post in its entirety.

I already have too many books on EM physics written by people who are actually familiar with the subject that I don't have time to read or understand. Uninformed online posts end up being skimmed, for better or worse.
Seems a little over the top
Who needs ice cream? Who needs pets? Who needs love and companionship? Are they all just tools to satisfy our very basic desires?

Yes.
He missed a golden opportunity...they put a link to his new website, http://bemodel.com/, but the page doesn't load. He could have gotten a lot of traffic from that mention. Incidentally, when he mentions his number one competitor for the model site, he's probably talking about ModelMayhem.com. When I worked at Internet Brands, this site was being run on a few dozen servers and had several hundred dollars per month in Akamai fees. The site is hard to monetize because most of that traffic is there to look at pictures of seminude women, not to click on ads. I hope this guy has some money saved up to pay for a site like that.
It's even got a harder battle ahead of it than a dating site does. With Message Party, there's gotta people a ton of people using the site at that moment.
So ... your target group is the shy guys who reading this site? What is a point for a non-tech girl to post it here?
> Isn't the fact that you are guaranteed to pay legal fees, which the poor will always find expensive, to be the greater obstacle to suing?

With correct insurance/lawyer-agreements, the poor can set it up so that they have no chance of paying anything. In effect, they sell part of the expected value of their suit to decrease their variance to the point that they do not pay money in any circumstance.

>I think the 'English rule' would encourage many poor people to litigate if they believed their case was strong.

Well, to be precise, it would encourage many poor people to litigate if their lawyer (or their insurance company) believed their case was strong. And isn't this exactly what we want? That justice is pursued?
The marquee sidebar ad below the "Trending Now" panel is blatantly empty. The ad that ran this morning took up half the page and then resized. Very intrusive.

Don't advertiser's normally pay for an entire day in that space?
I take issue with several of the items you mentioned:

One, Terminal on Mac is extremely useful, even if the Page Up/Down keys don't work.

Second, those keys do what I expect in Terminal right now on my Mac, and I've done nothing special to get them working.

Third, Mac does come with curl preinstalled, which fits a very similar tool niche to wget.

In general, it is true that there are some Linux-centric tools and packages that currently don't build easily or have preexisting binary ports for Mac, however, that's true in reverse as well. And I can assure you that Mac provides a much more Linux-like experience in a terminal than MS Windows. Also, keep in mind, that with many of the software packages in the Open Source world, it's up to individual people to do the work to get a particular package working perfectly on a particular platform permutation. Nobody "owes" you anything, or guarantees any particular permutation will be perfect. Therefore, while there might be 1000's of libraries and applications that do work perfectly and have equal availability on Linux and Mac, it may not be wise to assume that everything will be, and then cite any specific imperfection as "bizarre" or spectacular failure. It's just software, it's very complex, and if nobody has come before you to smooth that particular cow path then it won't be smooth unless you yourself do the smoothing. :)
Shermer's stuff is usually good, but this article hinges on a false argument. Many things other than ionizing radiation cause cancer. Electromagnetic radiation is shown to cause small changes in biological function, and that could certainly include accelerating growth or halting programmed cell death, both of which increase risk of serious cancers.

Obviously the excess cancer risk must be small or we'd have seen it, so not to worry. I'd much rather see studies on the long-term impact of non-ionizing radiation on overall brain function.
Those of you who prefer some kind of GUI, look into Xemacs. It can be set up to respond to your mouse-clicks.

This is puzzling. GNU Emacs has mouse support.
Should be fun!
From the linked earnings summary:

"The majority of TAC is related to amounts ultimately paid to our AdSense partners, which totaled $1.52 billion in the third quarter of 2010. TAC also includes amounts ultimately paid to certain distribution partners and others who direct traffic to our website..."

So, primarily adsense but also likely includes the other methods of distribution you referenced.
No, I bet the idea came from an annual event at MIT's DU chapter. The name of the event is "Message Party" and the idea is the same but with physical messages and takes place at a frat party. It's been going on for years and years.
If you can guess how a person will react to market fluctuations and make money off of it, is that a crime?
What?

Are you serious?
Honestly, I think you deserved your downvotes. The segway is clearly not useless; the market has shown that. Just because something isn't a runaway success doesn't mean it wasn't a success.
I'll throw in my vote for Dropbox. I use it every day and still remember seeing the first post about it:

Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I watched the video and immediately got what it was about, knew I needed it, and knew it would be a hit.
Hi Annabelle, thanks for replying. Normally I'm not this pessimistic, but the circumstances screamed of suspicion.

So are you going to be managing marketing for this app? What have you planned to try and get coverage?
Exactly. I only suggested lawyers offering the insurance, but as you and someone else in this thread mentioned, it's also plausible for their to be dedicated agencies. It's not clear to me which would be more efficient.
"To receive EM energy you need a structure that's a substantial fraction of the wavelength."

The axons of nerve cells are millimeters to meters long.

It's also an open question just how sensitive neurological processes are to externally applied voltage. Neurons are polarized to about 50 mV, so a noisy oscillator composed of neurons could be measurably affected by a few millivolts of imposed potential. Fortunately it would be a statistical effect of similar magnitude to dietary changes or mechanical vibration, so the health effects would be microscopic.

"It most certainly can."

Stick a neon bulb in a microwave oven. The result is spectacular ionization resulting in bulk plasma formation, via nonthermal effects. And before you complain, certain proteins have a highly-hydrophobic cavity that does a remarkable impersonation of a vacuum chamber, and which would tend to accumulate noble gases.

The actual argument against this being a problem is not Sci Am's half-assed physics theory but practical data. Many people have implanted pacemakers and nerve stimulators that apply substantial electrical potentials to living tissues: muscle, peripheral nerves, even the brain itself. No apparent pathology results over thousands of patient years of intensive use.
Apple’s Big Mistake Was Hiring Me As CEO [Sculley Interview]
answerly, you really lived up to your name :)

Silly me. I posted this too quickly without reading the full release.

Also of interest, further down:

"TAC - Traffic Acquisition Costs, the portion of revenues shared with Google’s partners, increased to $1.81 billion in the third quarter of 2010, compared to TAC of $1.56 billion in the third quarter of 2009. TAC as a percentage of advertising revenues was 26% in the third quarter of 2010, compared to 27% in the third quarter of 2009.

The majority of TAC is related to amounts ultimately paid to our AdSense partners, which totaled $1.52 billion in the third quarter of 2010. TAC also includes amounts ultimately paid to certain distribution partners and others who direct traffic to our website, which totaled $285 million in the third quarter of 2010."
Meh. Not a patch on MPSADBW.
It is if the counterparty bought themselves a government regulator.
In fact, at one time it was usable, but it has gotten less so, assuming it even still compiles.
I was going to give some other advice, but, given that you have a year of runway, AND partners, AND revenue... what are you waiting for? Seriously? Do you have children and/or others who really depend on your income?

My other thoughts:

It strikes me as odd that there are two threads on this theme at once...

I'd recommend going part time (if you really don't want to quit), as another poster did, if they'll let you (my company did). My company also seemed to be in the same position as yours at #2, but when I left, it seemed pretty amiable - and when I came back a year later, they had no room for me.

It's quite possible that the hiring department is incompetent. Anyway, that is not your concern. Especially if you're not productive there; taking their money for nothing isn't that big of a favor to them.
How did he lose $2.5 million?
This is actually an interesting reveal. Is this something Google has disclosed before?

As far as I knew, they typically didn't disclose how much % of every dollar they give their Adsense partners.

But they essentially just revealed that $0.21 of every dollar from an Adsense lead/click goes to partners. This is VERY interesting...especially considering that Apple gives $0.70 to app developers.
Definitely read the comments of this one. There is a lot more evidence on this subject than it presented in the article.
A friend of mine is a patent lawyer. From what he told me the food industry is rife with patents.
The name DID come from that event. Jason Gavris (co-founder) is an MIT DU.
Org-Mode is for keeping notes, maintaining ToDo lists, doing project planning, and authoring with a fast and effective plain-text system. http://orgmode.org/
Just got back from Austin City Limits and even SMS was suffering the entire time. I never got data, not once.
The AdKeeper Service Lets Consumers Save Ads for Later
No worries. Have a pretty basic marketing strategy, gonna promote it via facebook and my Uni friends and try more viral approaches like youtube etc - due to a small/non existent budget! :p Posted on hacker news to get a more business/technologic approach and insight from you guys.
I'm actually glad someone brought this up. I'm starting a company around this very idea: making data available and consumable. Our first site is up:

http://www.cfbreference.com

There's about 5 years of data that we've culled from the NCAA about CFB. We're adding more every week and will soon go back in time for historical data.

But, our twist is that the site will be upgraded to be a completely consumable site. Full REST API support, dynamic url data generation and more. We're adding new stuff every day. So you can get the data you way in JSON, RDF, XML & HTML depending on your Accept header, querying string parameter and even url parameters.

We are going to try and build apps on top of this date, but data sites are and will remain FREE. We want to encourage community participation contributions. That means free for anyone, anywhere even if you yourself don't contribute data.

We're also going to add scoring / charting apps for mobile phones so that you can chart your own games and, if you'd like, contribute the data back to use.

We're not 100% there yet, but I'll post here when we are. We'd love feedback from the entire HN community, not only on the sports data aspect but on the technical implementation. After all, if it's not easy to use & powerful, we're not doing a good enough job.
And if you were running 2.3.9 or 3.0.0. (I've still got apps on 2.3.5)
It was explained in a blog post linked to in the article:

http://www.310andrewfashion.com/2009/11/30/young-stupid-how-...
Berlin University demos a whistlecar
1. the white macbook is by intent their cheapest, and therefore, lowest durability/quality laptop. that's the whole point really. their more expensive product models do have a reputation of being more robust. everything costs.

2. "don't support their products in the slightest" <-- this is hyperbole because it's easily shown to be false by hundreds of stories on the web from people who have had good support experiences with Apple.
Oh shoot, you are right. I posted that too early in the day.
Sorry, I had 2 minutes to type this up. I don't agree with your reason why this is alarmist (if you have "users" with "accounts", you care), but:

* you have to be doing mass assignments, and

* you have to have nested attribute assignments turned on.

It's bad, but I agree that it's not going to bite most apps.

Well, except for a bunch of these:

http://github.com/search?q=accepts_nested_attributes_for&...
As I understand it, one does not typically buy domains, but rather leases them. Your analogy to other kinds of property thus does not apply to domains.
It now also occurred to me that location of the victim and abuser is also important. City or state at least.
The best comment is definitely:

"What about the Newton?? I actually bought one. I still can’t believe that I did."
I still remember that day too, except I saw the story on Digg's front page. It had about 12K digs and the video was pretty Epic.

I, too, had that feeling that wow...this is gonna be a MAJOR game changer.

Just tried to find it but was unsuccessful. If anyone has it, please pass it along - would be good to take a stroll down memory lane :)
What IS sad is that he is not even using rollover images on the site! That's hilarious to me.
Leave it to patent trolls to make you root for a pharmaceutical company.
Exactly. That part was implied, I just forgot to say it. ;)
I already have too many books on EM physics written by people who are actually familiar with the subject

Good, perhaps you can explain yourself in more detail, then, because your post seems quite wrong to me and I would like what I assume to be my misunderstanding to be corrected.

Absolutely nothing happens when you microwave a glass of water that wouldn't also happen if you heated it on the stove, or put it under a heat lamp.

I was always under the impression that your stove heated via conduction (e.g., the transfer of heat from molecules on the stove to molecules in the pan holding your water to molecules of water).

I was also under the impression that microwaves heated water via a dielectric effect (i.e., the water molecules interacting with the microwaves directly and heating up due to their 'attempts' to align with the rapidly-oscillating field + friction).

Finally, I was under the impression that heat lamps heated things via radiative (e.g., infrared) heating.

Radiative, conductive, and dielectric heating can all warm up the right substance. But I cannot agree that "absolutely nothing [different] happens" since their mechanisms are quite distinct. Please tell me why this is incorrect.

Now, once you deposit the thermal energy into the water by one of the three methods listed above, I think we can all agree that convection will cause it to dissipate in the same fashion, regardless of how you got it there.