skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That they've had extensibility in mind for forever and actually make improvements that allow for richer features beyond text-only chat? Don't try to market DCC to me.
Odd that they're using a rip-off of the NYTimes blog template for their own blog.
Ultimately what matters is time spent doing math. In the short term this seems to have created a powerful motivation for his daughter to do math, which is something a lot of parents would kill for.

If in the long term this were to somehow remove motivation for math then you'd be correct. However I submit that the 'beauty' in math is discovered farther down the line and that if you've already got basic sums and multiplication under your belt from hundreds of hours of repetition the barrier to entry is much much lower.
I don't recall hearing how everyone had a handheld radio stuck to their head for substantial amounts of time every day, as cell phones have today.

Radiation damage, if it occurs, is cumulative. I'd be willing to bet that the heavier-use side of cell phone users have encountered far more radiation from their phones than a similar fraction of handheld radio users, even before accounting for the difference in proximity (phones = inches at best, radios = inches at minimum) which would give radiation from radios exponentially less radiation than they emit compared to phones.

(not that I'm claiming they do cause cancer. Merely that the handheld radio side of the argument doesn't really work)
Eric Schmidt: Multiple Android App Stores A “Net Win For Everybody”
What's the bargain Libya struck up with the IETF/IANA regarding delegations under .LY?
Yes, it's a stellar example of comments being far more insightful than the actual article.
It is pretty crazy how many media outlets will publish articles written by companies without even fact-checking them.
Awesome. Thanks man!
More importantly, you'd have an intimate understanding of the trade-offs required for various designs. Of course, the flip side is that you have to learn to ignore those trade-offs at times or else you start designing based on trade-offs instead of trying to push the limits.

FWIW, I'd love it if Apple did something like 10/GUI.
15 years ago, Danish researchers completed a 13 year study of over 400,000 mobile phone users and found no increased cancer risk. So there has been enough time for that data to start to show itself.

http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/93/3/203.abstract?ijk...
I believe your grandparent was suggesting that reverse-engineering was hard, therefore patents served a valuable purpose to the commons by providing a limited monopoly in exchange for publication.
Hmmm...It strikes me that her liking something is her internal mental association that you are not privy to, and any attempt you make to indirectly observe it using her choices as a proxy is problematic. I like the artist formerly known as Prince — Let's Go Crazy is a phenomenal track — but I haven't wanted him on my turntable for ages because he is in competition with other things I like more. I absolutely love The Beatles but i refuse to own or play their music because it has been so ubiquitous that there's no point in playing it more. (It's all in my head.) I think you may be deluding yourself about your superior knowledge of her likes.
You might be describing the next GitHub, but I think that arbitrary team-size and role limits probably make your concept less likely to produce something amazing than what's already there (does the 'pod' working on an API to connect Project X with Project Y really need a designers and marketers?)

P2P achieves the very simple task of reassembling a file: it works because the blueprint exists and the peers are just mindless drones. The wider OSS ecosystem works because people build what interests them and don't worry unduly about their efforts being uncompensated or the emergence of forks. Using the same principles to organise people to build something undefined, very big and purely profit driven sounds like a nightmare. And unfortunately you're also bound by rules set in place to regulate the status quo: when it comes to assigning equity based on levels of contribution that constantly in flux it's going to be a legal minefield

Anyway, if your idea ever kicks off you'll find me working on the pod that looks after the revenue collection... :)
Ask HN: Laptop that can really stay on lap
Related to the post of Linux laptops, I wonder if anyone knows if there is a machine that can really stay on the lap all day long without heading your legs and your palms (Older MBP here).

I'd happily trade some power for comfort: I'd take a 1 GHz computer that is light and cool for a 2 GHz that is just unpractical to use.
Kevin Kelly's new book, "What Technology Wants" is Alive
Indeed, which suggests that in order to move towards the less acrimonious legal atmosphere of the UK or Europe, you would need to do more than adopt some of their mechanics. You'd ultimately need to de-politicize the entire branch of government.

As far as I know, in the UK and most of Europe, and definitely here in Canada, Judges are appointed by judicial commissions on the basis of strength of legal scholarship, not picked in a popular election based on who can raise the most money and pander to the right interest groups.
Using Financial Derivatives to Deflate the Higher Ed Bubble
and a much lower bank account balance. strangely, not so gratifying. :)
> So, the strongest and most common objection against the English rule is that it would prevent the poor from suing even if they had a good case; they just couldn't afford a 10% chance of owing thousands of dollars.

The majority of cases where the litigant is "poor" involve contingency fees (the lawyer gets nothing unless they win), and contingency fees are considered unethical (to the point you'll get disbarred) in most European countries. I would add the issue where if contingency fees are any part of the lawyer's payment scheme, the lawyer would also be jointly and severally liable for the legal fees of the winning party.

I see three possibilities for this outcome - every case gets settled on the courthouse steps (as opposed to about half these days) or the lawyers fight everything to the bitter end (and there will be no more settling on the courthouse), and finally, much less litigation.

At the moment, the "rediculous" judgements that people complain about (one poster child is the McDonald's coffee case) are acting as a subsidy for lawyers. Without this subsidy, far less cases will be filed

I've strongly considered running with this idea as a ballot initiative in my state.
Out of curiosity, is there any kind of list the risks various TLDs pose to businesses? Something similar to the US State Department travel warning list, for example (but including the US too)?

I ask b/c I recently bought a .co domain for a side project which will depend heavily on the domain similar to bit.ly, and my surface impression is that Columbia is stable enough for TLD risk not to be an issue. But there is the FARC, drug cartels, and probabaly some unknown unknowns as well, and this .ly issue is making me wonder if I should reconsider before irreversibly locking in this domain.
If true, that seems like a pretty naive way to silence a blogger on a mission.
BitlBee (http://www.bitlbee.org/) is the answer. Use IRC, ICQ, MSN, XMPP and Twitter from within irssi.
Still... I think I'll invest a few thousand, just in case.
Guns, Germs and Steel has already been mentioned in this thread, but there are two Hans Rosling talks that also provide some interesting data points:

The rise of the Asian economies: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_asia_s_rise_h...

Talking to foreign aid policy workers: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_at_state.html
It seems to me the worse problem is those who come across a problem like this and just assume it will not work without searching for the solution OR looking at the code. It should be obvious to any developer that both methods of solving your problem are useful.
"Actions speak louder than words."

Granted there can be different definitions of "like" in play here ("It does not cause me revulsion" or "I prefer to eat it vs. almost anything else"). But still, actions speak louder than words. When looking for the truth always choose the actions.
We actually weren't using the firehose from Twitter for JustSpotted. That relationship was for Scoopler, our real-time search engine which we shut down on Tuesday. We're using the public APIs for this new site. Basically, everything still rocking.
Harry Potter aside, any child whose parents are this involved will be a smashing success.
Perhaps finding all the politicians' sites that use rollovers and pointing out how they are in violation of the patent might help.
Why Rupert Duchesne has no problem being a nerd
I make a living with Ruby and Rails, but I'd stick with JavaScript if I were learning today. Server-side JS is a LOT of fun.
I installed the Kachingle browser extension and it works like a charm for me. I read the NY Times blogs regularly and Kachingle showed me some lesser-known NY Times blogs that I'm reading today.

I like to be able to donate directly to writers, so I'm all in favor of blog tip jars, donation pages, and everything like it. Paywalls are a RPITA for sharing content.

[Disclosure: I know people at Kachingle]
2.3.5 may not necessarily be safe, just saying.
It's not a matter of "shoulds" - but rather one of cause and effect, incentives, and careful balance. The original concept of patents was borne out of traditional engineering fields, where the costs of bringing something to market is very high, but the costs of simply copying someone else's innovation is substantially lower.

This disincentivizes inventors and gives a large amount of market advantage to copycats, and when this balance reaches a point where inventors cannot reasonably expect to profit off of their inventions, innovation stops.

The problem here is that we've taken this concept and applied it willy-nilly to software without modification. Software is a field where experimentation, innovation, and even product production is fundamentally dirt cheap, perhaps hundreds, if not thousands of times cheaper than traditional engineering fields.

In this case, applying the system as-is has resulted in a gigantic power shift towards the patent-holder/inventor, where they can hold the market hostage, and the fact that you can iterate so quickly and cheaply means that, under current rules anyways, a solid day's work is probably patentable somehow. This is obviously bull, and needs to be fixed - but I'm not convinced removing patents globally (i.e., from all fields, not just software) is a good idea.

IMHO the concept of IP must exist, even for software, but we must also account for the fact that software is intrinsically insanely cheap to produce (compared to just about everything else in life), and that the amount of exclusivity, protection, or just plain definition of what is sufficiently innovative to be protected, must change.
Until mobile carriers solve the no service problem at large festivals, this app isn't useful in that situation. I was also at Austin City Limits last weekend with no 3G service at all, all day.
PyPy gets faster
Try doing a good old press release as well. prMac.com has been pretty good bang for the buck from what we've seen at least in terms of getting the word around for the $20 they charge.
Yo! No Starch rings a bell. I learned of Jon Stokes 2006 book "Inside The Machine" recently and it seems to be impossible to get in paper or ebook. How can I read it?
I would similarly object if someone were to breach my paywall. If you don't like the NYT's, write your own newspaper, or use one of the many competing options.
Isn't the entire market about manipulating people's perceptions?
Any chance this might be considered one?

(I don't know the specifics of what an "abusive case" is)
In reality though you don't sell any version of Windows for Itanium. You just offer to sell them. :-)
cool, that is fast! And i like that color filter, also.

two things after playing around:
1. it's a little inconvenient to hover on the pics to checkout the price every time.
2. where's the navigation, sth like 'next page'?
True, but I'm not sure it matters. This is 3rd grade math. tesseract (an apt name) already posted a link to Lockhart's Lament, and I tend to agree with that, but I also think that before you can really get into the "beauty" of math you need to have a firm, memorized command of basic addition and multiplication, because it is not possible to see the beauty of math if you are looking at a beautiful equation for Newtonian motion and have not got "multiplication by one half" so firmly internalized that you don't even feel yourself trying to remember what it means.
Maintaining records so that delegation to the owner of a domain happens. VB.LY owns VB.LY. LY stopped delegating.

This breaks the Internet.
Put this in poster form... I think a few people would buy it.
If only the lowsrc attribute hadn't been deprecated, it would have use in a number of cases, similar to this. With the fallback, it's kind of like content negotiation, which no one really uses, but closer to the presentation layer.
From exit and revenue generation perspective, my vote goes to -

- Dropbox: Great product. Awesome team. Good market with revenue possibilities.

- Hipmunk: User experience in flight travel search has sucked for a very long time. But, users are now getting spoilt by ridiculously awesome user experience provided by companies in a lot of different areas. So they will start expecting the same for travel search too. Hipmunk could totally revolutionize travel search and make it exceedingly simple and pleasant experience - their team has potential to make it happen. And, travel search is a huge opportunity from revenue perspective.
There is no way a 26 floor building in India cost $1 B.
The Cocktail Creationist - Story about the man behind Grey Goose
I don't think Apple would be successful today without both of them in their past. Jobs' inability to be satisfied could have killed the company but Sculley's ability to build revenue gave Jobs the cash to build a small number of great products and have a few fail when he came back. In the hardware industry being a visionary is easier with a lot of cash on hand.
Can you say what would be a complex extension to you?

vc.el, erc, ediff, slime are doing well with elisp...

In some way also, the most complex the extension, the more reasons you have to use a higher level language, no?
Of course you would object. Pepsi objects when you buy Coke, but that's not really Coke's problem.
It has copy/paste for files, but you can't "cut" a file. This is a continual source of frustration for Windows power users who come to the side with cookies. My guess is Apple doesn't think "cutting" a file makes sense: you are actually moving the file or deleting the file. However, why it would suddenly make sense to "copy" but not actually have "copy" do anything is still confusing to me.
My emphasis was on the fact that even Steve Jobs was not trusted by the board of Apple because of lack of experience. Being turfed from Apple might have been the best thing that happened to him but I don't think it was the best thing that happened to Apple. The company almost died. So, again, without diminishing the value of experience, I think those who have some, tend to overvalue it.
Nice platitude, but I don't buy it here. There is a finite amount of time in my life, and a multitude of things to enjoy. If our culture has overplayed the Beatles to the point where I know their material so well that my ability to extract value from listening has passed the point of diminishing returns it does not mean that I did not enjoy them, or no longer like them. It might simply mean that I think I'd gain more from my own private habit of over-playing Steve Morse.

I've had a great time on every occasion that I've ever gone bowling. It still wouldn't be in the top 100 choices of how to spend an evening, though. Yet I like bowling. Maybe we are using different definitions of 'like'.
Functional programming idioms for an expression evaluator
Sure, you can manage with elisp, but it's not always the best possible way. The UNIX folks built a pretty good OS in C, even though C is a terrible language for writing an OS in.

Have you ever used Gnus? Have you noticed that if you have more than 10 message in an mbox or 100 in a maildir or 1000 on an IMAP server that it becomes unusably slow? Profile, and you'll see all the time is spent doing the parsing in elisp. Having the option of using a different language that compiles to native code would make these extensions faster and equally easy to write. Use elisp for the stuff that the users are going to play with; drop down to Haskell for the data structures that manage the mail. Best of both worlds.

People are always able to bend their tools to perform the work they want them to do. Ever use a flathead screwdriver to turn a phillips-head screw? It works. But it's a lot easier when you use the phillips-head screwdriver.
However, a person often in crowded areas will likely experience far more radiation over time simply from others around them on their cell phones.
In addition to Fink, there is MacPorts. Between the two, you can get a lot of things installed just as easily as on Linux. Of course, proprietary software is still proprietary.
best quote: "If you meet any important people,” he said, “keep in touch with them . . . And marry a rich girl. It’s easier to marry a million than to make a million.”
It's going to be interesting when Google's market cap passes Microsoft's. Could happen in 2011. Microsoft still gets incredible revenue from Windows and Office but these aren't growth markets because they already dominate. Microsoft has almost become IBM.
They've developed a circumvention device. I don't know what the analogy is for soda -- putting generic cola in a Pepsi can , selling it as Pepsi, and putting out a tip jar for voluntary contributions to Pepsi? -- but if you were doing it, Pepsi would squash you flat and be well within its rights to do so.
> those keys do what I expect in Terminal right now on my Mac, and I've done nothing special to get them working.

Try using vim or other applications that run in the command-line.

> And I can assure you that Mac provides a much more Linux-like experience in a terminal than MS Windows.

Yes. A much more Linux like experience than Windows. And a much less Linux like experience than Linux.
The problem with abolishing patents is that while it might make it easier for companies, it would make it absolutely impossible for small-time, independent inventors to advance human knowledge.

It would make it easier for them, since there's no legally-privileged cartel locking them out.

What incentive is there for a couple guys to build a time machine in their garage when, as soon as they try to mass produce their invention, any number of larger companies better equipped to manufacture things at scale will just make their invention and sell it for less?

Because building things is fun, and because they get to use whatever they build. And because it takes time for the larger companies to copy them.

The problem with patents in this article isn't the patent itself, but the fact that it covers software, which is 50% math and 50% business process and shouldn't ever have been patentable in the first place.

Everything in life eventually boils down to math and/or thinking. What makes math special is how very clearly the fact of "standing on the shoulders of giants" is recognized, but this pattern applies just as well to everything else. What makes business process special is how clearly unjust it would be to tell people they can't use their own thoughts, but of course all other inventions are just as much people's thoughts.
I have found that you need to consider more than just the hardware. You have to consider workload, operating system support, and power saving configuration.

In particular, running linux on new hardware or poorly configured on older hardware will run generally run hotter as the drivers aren't tuned to use all the available power saving states.

If you keep the machines workload down, run the intended OS for the hardware (or use older/highly supported hardware), and maximize all the power saving features, quality hardware (Apple, IBM, etc.) will run much cooler.

Other ways to keep cool include running intense operations on a remote computer, plugging in ethernet and disabling wireless, plugging in power and removing the battery, and/or getting one of those tacky cooling pads. :-)
I did this on a small VPS server recently; worked like a charm.
Ask HN: Tips for writing compelling web copy.
I'm in the planning phase for the redesign of my SaaS application as it launches out of private beta and into the wild. Part of that is writing the sales and marketing copy including explaining what the product is, it's benefits, calls to action etc.

Writing decent web copy isn't a strong suit of mine but I would like to get a better grounding in some of the basic principles. Do any of you have any tips or pointers to good source material I can read up on? I don't expect to turn into Don Draper overnight, but I'd like to be able to avoid common pitfalls.

Failing that, do any of you have any experience with decent copywriters and, given that I'm a bootstrapped single founder who has finite runway (i.e. I don't have tons of cash to throw at this problem), any personal recommendations for individuals you've worked with?

EDIT: Spelling, grammar and, er, general copy :/
Australian Y Combinator
Yup - that's exactly what I was looking for. Awesome.
How about a vote-up mechanism to bring the most ridiculous patents to the top?
Are you on track for: Lets make November "Launch an App Month", who's with me?
This was the original post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1773398

are you track? progress reports?
Or you're more likely to die from not having a cell phone handy in an emergency, or not living in a society where they're ubiquitous, etc.

Even purely in lives cost or saved there are two sides of the ledger.

Multiply or more by N times for societies that never got serious landline coverage and jumped to major cell phone availability.
This is Mumbai. Land is comparable or possibly more expensive in some areas than NYC. Land alone (assuming it's at least a 30-40k sq. ft. piece of land) might have set him back by a cool 150M+.
Great PR but probably misleading. For instance, we signed up initially and didn't find it too useful (although they've added a lot of features since then). We didn't delete our account until just now and when we logged in (again just now) we had 6k notifications from instance startup/shutdown. Never once did we "manage" any of these instances on cloudkick.
I haven't seen where they gave the % paid to adsense affiliates before either. Believe me I've looked as a major portion of my revenue is from adsense.
What an eye sore
For every 1000 people who has the idea, one actually does it.

I think the really big differentiator is not how well you execute (in code or in marketing), but whether you do it at all.

If you're prepared to stumble-and-ratchet (ie. explore; try-fail-try-again; "pivot"; experiment), ahead of everyone else, you win.

The only exception is if someone is massively more skilled/knowledgeable/resourced/intelligent/determined than you. But a funny thing is... that for a new market-product fit, you are the expert, and the most skilled, because the only way to get the knowledge and skill is to stumble-and-ratchet. You are also most well-known in the market. It's really hard for someone to catch up.
Are you single and do you have kids?
Dude. enough with you generalisations about India. 2 bedroom apartments cost upwards of $120,000 in any decent sized city in India.

You know jack about India. So STFU.
The funny part is I'm sure a chunk of the 600-person staff exists to care for the rest of the staff (food, cleaning, health, etc). So he has staff for his staff!
The link said it was only 2.3.9 and 3.0.0.
vi TODO.txt
While impressive in numbers and facilities, the building looks ugly from outside. IMO YMMV.