skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are definitely short-term cognitive consequences to getting hit in the head. The nausea you can experience with head trauma can also interfere with thinking.

After suffering a blow to the head, I was given a battery of cognitive tests: Repeat this sequence of numbers, and the like. Three days out I was failing the tests rather spectacularly. At five days everything was back to normal.
20sec is pretty short, good discipline though
The Perfect Server - Ubuntu 10.10 [ISPConfig 3]
Around '94 I used a close to the top of the range (at least in CPU power) DEC Alpha workstation - which I used for running Lisp programs.

One of the other research teams in the department were working on some kind of custom chip for some specialized application and they wanted to show how much better it was than even the best commodity CPU so they gave me a chunk of completely unoptimized vanilla C to compile and run as a benchmark.

Turns out the Alpha was way faster than their chip - which I don't think they were too happy about!
Browse the new profiles using an incognito window first.
Gap: Controlled Brand Demolition? No.
Some years ago we invented this sport independently, but our version had three components: boxing, chess, and alcohol.
> the social security trust fund is empty.

The social security trust fund contains something like $2.4 trillion. Current projections are that if nothing changes then it will continue growing until 2025 and not be empty until 2042. See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Trust_Fund .

All that stuff you've been told about how Social Security was bankrupt, and "reform" was urgently needed, and so on? None of it was true. I shall refrain from speculating here about the motives of the politicians and pundits who said it.
Is that what is going on in America? I am not so sure. Just because I have a group that is mixed race and gender doesn't mean they are multicultural. They could have all grown up in Dallas and gone to SMU. Most of the multiculturalism in the US seems to be the Chinese restaurant verity. So changed from its origins that you couldn't find it in China.
How Transgaming gets EVE (and other games) running on OS X
IPad Games Development, iPad Game Developer
I read a related article a while back: http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-...
It's interesting to draw parallels to Lua, they both started out as embedded scripting languages with a small core.
In this case, you would be looking at PHP and Java, not node.js.

Last time I checked node.js and libraries for it (about a couple of months ago), I could not run the library I wanted on the latest version of the node.js because the API has completely changed.

Platform software that completely changes itself over a course of a couple of months ? Thanks but no thanks.

Disclaimer: It's been couple of months. Maybe the things have changed since then, will be grateful for an educational reply from someone who has used node.js, about its maintainability, especially for the use with third party libs.
The MetaOCaml example is certainly interesting but what it does is increase speed, not reliability. In this case, the type (in some general sense) of n is known at compile time, so the compiler can guarantee that whatever is generated at runtime conforms to that type.

But that's not the type of meta programming that depends on runtime discovery of entirely new information, say, an ORM that discovers changes in the database schema. That's the type of meta programming that made Rails so popular and productive (and slow) for some cases. Obviously, it is impossible to provide compile time guarantees about something that is unknown at compile time.

But I tend to agree with you that it is desirable to have correctness proofs at compile time wherever possible.
What are the best iPhone and iPad apps for business today?
It's true that computers are really fast. I solve Project Euler puzzles on a pretty old PC, using Python which is an interpreted language, and it's amazing how much "brute force" I can get away with. Test all permutations of the digits 1-9 for primality? Easy.
The clitoris is the female analog of the male penis.

However the genes that cause that are likely to also cause large female clitorises.

I highly doubt both statements. What does "analog of the male penis" mean, anyway?
Do you have anything at all to support them?
To me the surprising thing is that ANY women check in to venues.... I can't think of any of my mates that do. But that might be a Manchester, UK thing.
Mint blasts e-mails from Staging server
It would seem that's just for WCBO Championship fights. The amateur boxing world is almost entirely self-regulating.
Another Video Of Google’s Automated Toyota Prius (On Its Campus) Arrives
They don't talk about CPU utilization or memory requirements, two things that Flash users gripe about on desktops. Anyone has experience/info on these?
There have been quite a few sightings of Lua here on HN: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+lua
A little outside perspective: This is exactly the way it goes with a huge percentage of IT-related projects, in many serious industries. The "Enterprise" is screwed.
NetBank is pretty great in terms of online banking!
It's hardly unprecedented for games based on existing franchises to turn out less than stellar. They knew what they were getting in to.
mmap is not SuperFetch; and memory mapping has been in NT since it started.

What SuperFetch does is collect statistics about files hit by processes when they start up, so it can proactively cache bits of those files, to the point that it can cache files read by processes before those processes are ever started, assuming they are either commonly started or started on a schedule.
Elevator Pitch Hotline for HN users
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I think those who find it a productive tool, just use it without waiting for the whole herd to head that direction - and since it's just a tool that provides a productivity edge - why advertise too much about it on blogs ;-)

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/security/csd/csd35/configura...

(disclaimer: cisco is my employer).

(disclaimer#2: I did use lua for quick prototypes that involved the low-level C code and higher level logic to glue it. So the positive feelings I got from it may be biasing me).
Some ideas:

- Embed the m3ps (maybe use soundcloud?)

- Let people vote them up or down

- Let people record directly in their browser (via flash?) or upload their own 20-second mp3s.
Yes, of course.

I had a ton of fun building that stuff though. And with co-generation you use the 'old' tech and use the byproduct (heat) for some other purpose. That way you can get to very high efficiencies too.
Top iPhone 4 Music Apps
Interesting, thanks. It seems plausible that it isn't possible to redirect light from a uniform temperature black body to produce a higher temperature somewhere else. I'll have to think about it more, though. The thermodynamical argument made in that thread seems flawed to me.
What versions of node and Lua are used in the benchmark? Where can SXE be found (Google can't seem to find it)...?
Strings operations is a tricky part though.

It's easy to slow the code down with "obvious" coding - which is a bad thing in a language.

Some other operations like metatable lookup might not be always the fastest.

But overall the convenience of having a 700K source tarball that compiles on any ANSI C into a modern language blows all these concerns away for my use. And the performance-critical parts can be easily pushed down to C. If they are not premature optimizations to begin with.
So, if anyone reading this has a Prius and lives in SF, just bolt a metal bracket and a food blender to the roof and people will take videos of you as well!
October in Montevideo
Track responses on your emails and see when they've been opened.
I chose phone because ultimately I want the service to call you at random times & force you to pitch.
Why just focus on technological change? Sure our gadgets are getting better faster but there has also been a marked reduction (at least in these parts) of people trying to force change on others at the gunpoint or by dropping bombs on them.

Places like the UK look rather placid and unchanging in many ways compared to say the first half of the 20th century.
Wow, seems to be a lot of animosity here. I have a lot of respect for what these guys achieved with Twitter. Although the advice is pretty general, IMO it's not bad advice.
How To Succeed Like Apple
Ultra-Awesome Article.
wasn't there a goog spreadsheet floating around with all the exits of all the yc, techstars, etc startups?
yet another site that fills the stereotype of "hyperlocal" and "location-based service". Both of these seem to be a euphemism for "NYC and San Francisco"
The FBI is tracking whom?
Just had a quick skim over some of that chapter, and it is very compelling, especially when I see how well its worked for AwesomeWM (my desktop environment of choice) and how many commercial games are using it for user scripting [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lua-scripted_video_gam...
Start-Ups Drawn to SF's Design Talent, Amenities and Rents Create a Boomlet
It looks 'sum' is not defined at all.
Looks just ignoring undefined symbol.
Replies and Retweets on Twitter, a Report by Sysomos
Eric Kidd's feedhose client in Javascript
Is there a link to his app somewhere?
The Growing Importance of Messaging
Sounds like reverse auctions. Rather than people competing to buy an item on sale, sellers would be bidding to sell a wanted item. Does anyone do this? Would it actually work?
> It was new, shiny, and multithreaded

sigh, when will people learn about asynchronous I/O.

It would be interesting to see if something like this could be implemented in a programming language that has relatively "slow" virtual machines (e.g. Ruby) but base it on a fast event-processing library (e.g. Eventmachine). The tracker doesn't do a lot computation. It's mostly I/O, isn't it?

Another interesting choice would be node.js. A framework that seems to be optimized for that kind of architecture.
A bit of caching and a scalable backend (e.g. Riak) would be a nice combination...
There were some similarities in the situations from what EA Louse is saying to what I experienced. I'll be interested in seeing the Old Republic launch product because of that.

In respect to the RTW failure, senior dev Luke has a series of articles which explain it much more eloquently (and kindly) than I ever could.

http://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/where-realtime...
Two Italian radio hackers vs. The Soviet Union's space program
Lua is gaining momentum, but it's been a very slow burner. There are a lot of programs (mostly games) that use it, and they aren't required to be open about it. Lua also improved quite a bit (IMHO) between 4.0 and 5.1, but 5.1 has only been out since 2006.

Some things omitted from Lua's std libs because you'd typically just do them in C anyway, and it keeps Lua very small. While you don't need to know C to use Lua (and there are community libraries for them, see LuaRocks: http://luarocks.org/repositories/rocks/), it really shines in symbiosis with C.

Most web devs don't know C, though, so it misses quite a bit of the free hype that would come from word of mouth in that community (look at e.g. Ruby), especially compared to word of mouth in the (NDA-infested) gaming industry.

FWIW, I don't think it would take long for somebody proficient in Javascript (or Python) to learn Lua - This comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1786280) is a good summary. The languages are very similar in overall design (prototypes, JSON/dict-style objects, etc.), but where Javascript has numerous design bugs frozen in its spec (thanks to the browser wars) and "The Good Parts" telling how to sidestepping them, Lua had 15 extra years to evolve and fixed them.

Recommended intro: Ieursalimschy's _Programming in Lua, 2nd ed._ (http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/pil2/). The first edition is free online, but covers 4.0, and the language changed a lot (most notably, the packaging system).
I think the lesson here is to keep away from social media crap. They generally don't work, either make it big or die (and certainly 99.99% would die). For example, what's the point LikeBetter? I think it can be built as a side-project, a simple App and not a startup. Also the monetization would be little hard. (Ads don't pay any more).

However, Xobni happens to provide something useful that businesses need. They have a clear monetization strategy (sell a product) And they seem to be doing well and they have some jobs openings.
It's Lua, not LUA. Not an acronym. (It means "moon" in Portuguese.) Could you correct the title?

Also: Serving "Hello World" is not a very informative benchmark, especially for an async web stack. Something like making an asynchronous database request and then sending the response may be more representative. If you want to eliminate the database response time variable, then write a C program that listens for incoming connections and responds with "Hello world" or something, but either way, make it actually do some work server side.
b) you can meet students in universities.

Also, realize that everyone has ideas for an app. Everyone. You need to build the ability to execute. That can be by coding yourself, by outsourcing, by finding people that work for free (good luck), etc. Without the ability to execute, ideas are worth zero.

Learning to code probably won't make you a good coder, BUT it will make it much easier for you to find and talk to good coders. That's worth investing a few months in at the beginning of your career, it will pay off handsomely. Do it. Just get a book that you like in your local bookstore.
> "Ads don't pay any more"

That's a bit of a generalization. They pay well for me :)
My first job was for a company with about 1,000 total possible customers. It was the early nineties and we could charge 35k+ per company because it was necessary software to be in the business. I guess what I'm saying is -- can you charge more? How necessary is it?
The sales people at the last place I worked were looking at a target market of 5000 firms, but they were looking at contracts that would cost $10,000-$30,000 a year.
Is this relevant for Rails 2 as well ?

On a related question, is Rails 3 a good idea for any new projects (especially those using ActiveMerchant) .. or should one stick to Rails2 until all the plugins/gems are ported ?

In which case, this tutorial is not exactly relevant (for me) right now.
I just timed it as well. VS c++ 2008 Express on my super old and slow P4, 5 seconds. And this is the first time I started VS in weeks.
Dude predicted we'd literally use rockets to literally travel to the moon at a time when literally the only common application of rockets was for fireworks; they weren't even reliable (in any/every sense) enough for military applications.

Didn't he just have a big cannon for the space travel, not actual rockets with continuous thrust instead of a single impulse that would reduce the human crew to paste?
Facebook Groups, what is in store?
Ulf Wiger on Robustness and Scalability in Erlang
I thought the most interesting slide was "Value to Partners" (#7) that listed average Customer Acquisition costs for various companies - ex E-Trade spends $475 to acquire a single customer. Wow. That is a lot of money.

The slide lists http://www.emetrics.org/articles/acquisition.shtml as the source, but it is 404'd.
Hot Konkona Sen Sharma Is Pregnant
There's more good news for Konkana Sen Sharma and Ranvir Shorey, who got married in early September this year. Bollywood hot actress Konkona Sen and husband Ranvir Shorey are expecting their first child.
I'm curious about how he stores the hydrogen. Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to store. How does he keep the indefinite cycle going with hydrogen in a sealed chamber if the hydrogen is constantly leaching through the walls of the chamber?
MonoDroid
Some of the slides from Mint's actual pitch deck were shown in a 2008 presentation by the Mint founder:

http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/08/startups-101-the-complete-m...
I don't know about all steam turbines, but for the ones with which I'm familiar, clanking is a Bad Thing. (Between college and law school I did my ROTC scholarship payback as a Navy nuclear engineering officer.)
Working on it. Libev-based. It's a spare-time project of mine. I have the "portable but not particularly scalable" pure Lua and luasocket backend done (for easy development + light deployment on Windows), working on the error handling in the libev backend now.

Much of the complexity comes from error handling, not just the async IO. Erlang gets that right, too. I don't know how much error handling node.js does. (I plan on checking it out eventually, since my framework will be compared to it.)

I don't have a time frame yet. I'm also working on a compiler and a bunch of other stuff, and I'm really not a web developer, so it's been a fairly low priority.
The cool thing about the article was that I learned about the free video tracking/analysis software. Could be pretty interesting stuff in other contexts.
This is a really good extension for gmail, do you know any other extensions?
nice handbags!!!
I would actually ask "why use AIR?", which is totally unclear to me.

I mean, you can place a WebView in your application, and presto, you've got an HTML/Javascript based UI with all the access you want to native APIs: http://developer.android.com/resources/articles/using-webvie...

The reason people don't do this is because you don't want HTML, you want native controls most of the time (God, I hate UIs that try being different) and you also don't want your stupid app that fetches content from the web to flicker on screen transitions.

And why is this article giving reasons for the native API? Do they think AIR is appropriate for everything else? What else remains that couldn't be handled by a web page rendered in the browser?
So if I hire stupid and lazy programmers my valuation will approach infinity?
This. Lua doesn't even have a standard class/inheritance model. If you want that, you implement it in-language. There are some nice general purpose ones out there, but nothing canonical.

If someone makes a killer web framework on top of one of these models, that might establish the standard and bootstrap the Lua scene, kind of like how Rails established a lot of idioms for Ruby.
maybe just me, but I wouldn't appreciate getting random calls. I really don't like giving out my phone number and having someone call to do a survey on their service, or asking me if I need anything. If I want to take the time to reuse your service it will be on my own time.
IOS 3/4 Compatibility 
I've got an app which I'm building for iOS4 (so that it automatically supports Fast App Switching), but I've got the 'iPhoneOSDeploymentTarget' set to 'iPhone OS 3.0' so that it works on 3.0 onwards.
Feedhose demo: NYT headlines in real time
I didn't get that, good catch. It illustrates the scalable aspect of SVG really well.
UnifeyeSDKMobile iPhone - deploy on iOS 3.x
I'd like my application to also run on 3.x devices - however upon launching an error is displayed:
Do Marathons Hurt Your Knees?
It is cool, use this coupon to receive 5 extra email tracks a month. Your coupon code is UAS8Y2XDISBY6.
http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/pdf/02DispatchTables.pdf
well, there was this blog post last year: http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-combinator...
Also in the linked document:

> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
ok I get that, good point. It'd be an opt-in service of course. FYI: while Twilio returns the caller ID, I'm not actually storing that right now, so no worries.
I made one. It's showing up as "None by None website audio permalink" - I should note the sound quality is low on my end, that was SkypeOut into a built-in laptop mic.

Overall looks like a cool implementation.

> So tell me: what should be the next feature for PitchPower?

1. Some sort of tagging or summary that makes it easy for people going to the site to choose which pitches to listen to.

2. Some elegant method of leaving feedback on a pitch. Maybe contact info - Twitter, email, something else? A static comments/feedback link for each pitch?

If you got a significant number of pitches, really anything greater than 10, you'd want both of those features so people have a way to figure out what they want to listen to, and a way to easily give feedback on topic.

Overall, looks very nice - congrats and cheers.
I really dislike talking on the phone.
ha ha ha!!! ...woah! I just found the Tresling page: http://tresling.org/
Interesting article. I'm not certain I understand the complaint about the non-existent marketing campaign. According to the author, they sold a million boxes, but lost two thirds of the subscribers in the first month, and kept losing them thereafter. It sounds like they got the bums on the seats, people just hated the show.

I could understand faulting Evans for not pushing back and saying "We can't release this, it it's not ready" But it's hard to see how inducing more people to experience a lousy product would have helped, given that the business case presumably lives or dies on recurring revenue.
As someone who literally has two Warhammer tattoos on his forearms, I was so let down by WHO. I was one of those launch purchases, and I wanted to game to be good so dearly... but it just wasn't.

It's unfortunate when developers are forced to release something that they feel isn't ready.
Find Big Mail: Have you run out of space for your Gmail account?
It's currently the top-voted question on the site. We programmers are a bunch of cheap bastards! :)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=votes
Couldn't help but notice the pg-ism "but it turns out most people don’t use friend lists"
You can't put a value on a company that is based on an unknown idea with research by an unknown individual with unknown skills.

Sorry but no. I don't care if the founders are prepared to dedicate the rest of their lives to it (assuming it is founders and not founder), after all you could dedicate your life to making a better mousetrap but for me that would be worth $0.

The guy is basically asking how much his time is worth without giving his qualifications for all you know he's flipping burgers at McD's.

My brother in law came up with an idea for a better garbage can, not immediately obvious and not in production anywhere, after some 'research'.

What is it worth?

For me it's worth $0. He has no background in manufacturing, sales, marketing or design, he does not have anybody that would dedicate his life to it, and he's not prepared to mortgage his house and let go of his day-job to pursue it. So it won't be going anywhere.

I don't see this guy making any statements about what he will bring to the table either other than the idea, not even implicit ones, no statements about commitment or anything.

So, more info is needed. Both about the idea and the OP (track record would help but likely none or he wouldn't be asking the question).

No realistic valuation ever rested on this little info.

Sure 'angel' investments fall in to a certain range, say 0 to 10% of the stock for 0 to $1M. But that's like saying the sun will be shining tomorrow, that's not an answer to the question.