skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mono is open source, so anyone can continue developing it.

If your concern are licensing the patents, MonoMac only uses the ECMA core and the MS-PL bits. If you want to use stuff outside of this and you are still scared of Microsoft going after your very profitable enterprise, remember that Microsoft is open to licensing their patent portfolio to anyone that wants it.

If Mono were to be discontinued, there is a business right there for an enterpreneur: negotiate with Microsoft a license deal for their patents, add a markup, pocket the difference.

That is the worst case scenario, you have to pay the patent holders.

That being said, you do live in a dark, sad and terrifying place. You harvest what you plant, and this fear and horror that you plant can not be good for anyone's health.
He will change the world if he can get 50-60% efficiency. Photovoltaic cells would be out and parabolic mirrors aimed at a heating elements would take their place - even better, tubes running under asphalt streets all circulating water through JTEC heat exchangers.

A huge unmet need is extraction of heat energy at lower temperature differentials - it could put to use tons of waste energy at industrial plants, your car exhaust, h20 that leaves current steam generators, etc... The JTEC has the potential to make use of all this would-be entropy.
Sure it can - you just have to focus the sun's rays into a smaller area.

The sun delivers on the order of 1000W per sqm during the day, so (eg.) focusing 100 sqm into 1 sqm == 100,000W. 12 hours of daylight will then give you a theoretical production of 1.2MWh per day, but it's usually a lot less, due to the angle of the sun in the morning/evening and inefficiencies in your energy capture.
Good idea! If it helps, I liked this site- maybe it might give you some ideas for things you could add:

http://www.peacecorpswriters.org/pages/depts/resources/resou...
At a guess, it doesn't need to create a full-on plasma, just needs a lot Hydrogen ions hitting the membrane. A small amount of ionization will suffice - sort of like 'micropayments' or a long tail phenomenon.

Because that's what the membrane filters do. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_exchange_membrane
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_conductor
Mainly they work on size - small versus really small.

Again, at a guess, it doesn't need to cool the other side - it's not a temperature gradient, it's a concentration gradient. And since the ions are being reacted back to H2 at a brisk rate, it's not a big problem. The more thermal energy you could maintain in the ions the better, because they wouldn't need as much heating once they'd been recycled.

It has a whiff of perpetual motion machine to it. Maxwell's Demon, I think.
My kid brother wants to start programming/web dev, ideas where to start?
is there some sites out there that will give him some intro lessons? sample problems?

He's 14.
haven't logged in. few things that didn't make me login:
no screenshots/preview. Although there is a demo video, I won't be able to watch this at work.

No Privacy policy listed - how safe is my data? how secure is my data?

Also, you could connect using facebook and twitter, but you have your blog link just beside - confusing me that you could connect thru posterous (send emails?)

ps: could you tell us what stack/framework are you using? Is it on a VPS or shared host?
"People" aren't saying you can't place a value on it. "People" are saying you can't place a value on it based on 121 characters of text, less than half of which even describes the startup in question. If you rephrase the question as "What is this thing in my hand worth?" you haven't changed all that much....
To anyone who thinks: that a very small team creating an entire, enormously complex operating system, with unending goals for platforms improvements, that has already been successfully iterating at an extreme pace, is up against enormous competition from Apple and Microsoft, and is playing the long game for the future of mobile and computing as a whole... is really ignoring these extremely common complaints and resting on its laurels...

...uh, really? There are many very concrete reasons to believe they know about the vast majority of these issues and have respective solutions addressing them somewhere in their product roadmap. (ie, major UI revision in Gingerbread, along with optimization for tablets.) That, and they've been overwhelmingly successful so far, as Android phones now consistently outsell the iPhone each quarter.
Think Again: Global Aging
Yes, I see your point. I have a full-time job that pays well but also consumes a lot of my time, so this is just a side-project of mine. I can't provide great turn-around time, especially while I'm at work, so I thought that this project would be a quick way to build up a client base and get my feet wet in freelance.

I agreed to $50/hr for this project. It's a community site developed in ASP.NET/C#/SQL and I'm sub-contracting, the end-client is a Fortune 500 company. They very cheaply outsourced the project and, not surprisingly, were left with some bad code.
I signed up and I love it. It seems to be geared towards fiction though. Is there a way to use it to help organize ideological themes and subtopics, so you could switch them around and put them in different orders? Maybe a place to set down main ideas so they could be elaborated on at a later time?
No you don't. Earning more never causes you to take hom eless after taxes (at least in any country I know of). That's a common fallacy about them amongst people who don't understand the tax code.

Tax rates are marginal. So for instance if the tax rate was 20% up to $100k, then 30% afterward, you'd pay 20% on your first $100k, then 30% from $100,001 and up.
> How would this work? Surely sunlight can't create enough heat to ionize a gas (creating plasma?).

He isn't ionizing the gas, he is increasing the gas pressure by heating it. "Only instead of using those pressure gradients to move an axle or a wheel, he’s forcing ions through a membrane." See next for why that is important.

> Why don't the whole hydrogen atoms go through the membrane to the lower pressure area?

He uses a semi-permeable membrane http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semipermeable_membrane. They also have use in chemical applications such as batteries and fuel cells.

The membrane blocks the atoms, but allows the ions (protons) through. It does require a substantial amount of pressure for it to work. That is where the heat -> pressure comes into effect, and why the reconstituted hydrogen on the "cold" size has to be compressed and pumped back into the "hot" side.

While this sounds a little like a perpetual motion machine, it isn't because the sun's heat is adding the energy that is being extracted via the electrons.

> How does he alternate which side is heated? How does he cool the other side?

He heats one side and cools one side, no alternating. The heating (and cooling) cause a pressure differential, which drives the reaction via the semi-permeable membrane.

---

I suspect there are some pretty substantial challenges remaining before this becomes a sizable / viable energy source.

It sounds like it is related to proton exchange fuel cells, except instead of using the catalyst + oxidant to drive the reaction, it is using pressure.

Refs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell#Proton_exchange_fuel_...

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fu...
Is earning a graduate level degree online worth it?
No. As long as it's OpenJDK-derived and GPL-licensed, all JDK 7 features can be added.
(1) All life on Earth is based on DNA. There is no alternative, no second choice, no runner up.

(2) While there are millions of species on Earth that have long been stable and successful and still are, humans have by some astronomically wide margin the most powerful capabilities with, again, no alternative, no second choice, no runner up.

(3) For all we have done with working with information, computing, human physiology and psychology, we still have hardly a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue how to program a computer to be as smart as a human, dog, kitty cat, dolphin, or ... many more.

(4) On the one hand, humans, both individually and collectively, commonly make serious, disastrous mistakes for even just silly reasons. On the other hand, humans have made shockingly good progress even at understanding the universe. How could the same species have both such big disasters and bit successes?

(5) As we try to understand the universe in greater detail, we get in effect 'throttled': We can't go faster than the speed of light; we can't look in detail at a scale much smaller than an atom; we can't have energy enough to explore all the possible particles. In each case, we are throttled, and essentially blocked, not by hard barriers but just by increasing costs.

(6) As mentioned by others, the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen (EPR) spooky action at a distance paradox.

(7) There is a naughty boy in his room with his relatively large computer. He types in candidate laws of physics and then clicks on the button Big Bang. Mostly all he gets is a fast poof but occasionally he gets something interesting. How do we tell our universe from something in this boy's computer? More generally, how are the laws of physics enforced?

(7) Suppose n is a positive integer, R is the set of real numbers, R^n is Euclidean n-dimensional space, and C is a closed subset of R^n. Then there exists a function f: R^n --> R so that f is zero on C, positive otherwise, and infinitely differentiable.

It is fair to say that the Mandelbrot set is bizarre, but it is a closed subset of R^2. So, the Mandelbrot set is the level set of an infinitely differentiable function. So, a very smooth function can have a bizarre level set.

Also, the graph in the plane of one dimensional Brownian motion is closed and almost surely differentiable nowhere. So, a curve differentiable nowhere can be the level set of an infinitely differentiable function.

So, could have a landscape given by an infinitely differentiable function, in a valley pour in water, form a lake, and, as in Mandelbrot, have the boundary of the lake be as irregular as the Mandelbrot set or Brownian motion. So, a very smooth landscape can have lakes with very irregular boundaries.
Even if it's not meant to be true, I find it even more disturbing that the symbolic and English formulations doesn't seem to quite match up. (IMHO the symbolic formulation doesn't state that n must be integer.)

It's like the source code and comments being out of sync - you don't know which one is wrong.
I will be surprised if it is a good investment, but... go Google!

$5B would just be a drop in the bucket to take on something like that, I'd imagine.
With all of the platforms available now to C# developers (iPhone, Android, Window Phone 7, Windows, Linux, Mac) it makes sense to build applications in a way that will allow you to create native experiences, but also share your code across multiple platforms.

Our recommendation to developers is that they split their applications across the User Experience/Business Logic fault line. Developers then can replace the user experience with native user interfaces for each platform.

This is a bit abstract, so we tend to tell people to build a lot of UI-less reusable libraries and for libraries that have UIs, to split their Model-View-Controller libraries in a way that the Model and its support infrastructure are reusable and the View and the Controller are UI-specific.

This extends a little bit further. You also might end up with an "OS" layer that performs certain tasks in a different way depending on the operating system that you will be running.

For instance, while running on an iPhone, you have access to the gyroscope, something that you wont find on say a Linux desktop. Or on Linux, you will have access to /proc, which you wont have access to on Windows Mobile 7.

A nice example was Paint.NET. When that application was built, the operating-system specific features were all placed on a library called SystemLayer.dll. The UI was all Windows.Forms, but porting the program turned out to be limited to replacing the SystemLayer.dll with one that spoke Posix as opposed to speaking Win32.
No, I'm pretty sure declining marginal utility applies more when you're in debt, not less, because interest rates on loans compound. Someone who owes credit cards $150 is going to be FAR more in debt, as a percentage of earnings, after a year than someone who owes $50.
You must deal mainly with very old poorly maintained houses (rentals?), because all those problems do not exist in normal outlets.

You have soot on your contacts???? Corrosion? Did it rain inside your house?

NEVER tighten aluminium contacts! You will cause exactly those problems that you describe. If there is a problem with it you need to remove it, apply the anti-oxidant paste and reinstall.

But aluminium to the contacts is very rare in america these days, where it does exists it's usually been pigtailed with copper.
Shhh! Nasa was all excited.
The spark of meeting someone special in the flesh, eyes meeting across the room etc is something I hope is never replaced by a computer matching you to someone with similar interests

What does one have to do with the other? They will meet in the flesh at some point, you know.

I've known my wife for 10 years since meeting on Yahoo! I still remember vividly the first time we saw each other. If it wasn't love at first sight, it was certainly love that first night.
Before attempting to unleash an internet mob, please take a look at this post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1785593
same elitist attitude drove me back home
* Experts tell him it won't work and point out the PhD thesis (or equivalent) that "proves" it... however, he is attacking the problem in a different way that the expert did not expect.
Also, consider how Google just added Market support for buying and selling paid apps in ~20 countries:
http://www.androidcentral.com/google-expands-paid-app-suppor...

The improvements really are constantly coming.
"When determining what product you are going to build, Ev notes that the key is to create 'something for everyone.'"

Really? My understanding is that trying to create "something for everyone" is a great way to make "something for no-one".
It is however, perfectly sane considering the drivers we have these days.
The kind that accepts valid currency?

[Edit:

Since the HN crowd seems to like stories, here is one.

One night, back when I was single, a friend of mine and I rolled up to the Blue Room in D.C., decked out in white suits, smelling of day old booze and good times. We had fire in our belly, and barely a sandwich each, with some change burning holes in our pockets, ready to be thrown out like confetti, at any reasonably priced vice. Not to get religious, but we felt like Mickey Rourke and Billy Bob Thornton on a pilgrimage to Vegas, sans the cream '59 Impala, of course.

We walk in, more attitude than stature, two short Arab guys, escorted in by vintage house music, courtesy of the resident DJ, and shamelessly head to the first pair of women closest to the door. Quick awkward introductions, complete misunderstanding, wild gesturing and on to the next. As our luck has it, it was the same again, hand waving and written pleasantries ... damn. Third time is the charm, and what do you know, same thing again.

Fuck me dead! If it wasn't clear then, it is now; we hit The Room on deaf night! Everyone there belonged to an online dating community for deaf and mute people.

We came out and headed to 7/11, we each bought a pen and a notebook .. then back to the club. Ali, my friend, an SOB whom I am eager to meet in hell, said: deaf girls don't mind your thick accent :-]
It's not useless. It still pays for groceries, gas, etc. It's still $130 less she needs to put on credit cards for whatever.

In the real world, where you're never faced with two simple options like retire on $10k or start a business for $50k, money's marginal utility is effectively always diminishing.
"Fair"? There's nothing fair about valuing a company at millions of dollars when it's just a few guys and an idea. It's about getting the right amount of investment while not selling too much of the company (but selling enough to make it with the investors time).

Check: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/10/employee-equity-dilution.htm...

Because you've offered zero information to dial it in, $500k to $4m post-money as a wag. Depends on team, if you're in the valley, and your ability to create a market for your stock.
Just out of interest, how many 0day pre-auth OpenSSH vulnerabilities are you aware of? The last publicly disclosed pre-auth OpenSSH vulnerability that if exploited would lead to arbitrary code execution came out in 2006.

I'm not saying that SSH 0day doesn't exist, but why SSH and not other 0day for say a VPN or the HTTP server? I think I see what you're saying, perhaps that SSH 0day is more valuable and less likely to be publicly disclosed but without any data on attacks in the wild, someone at wepay needs to make a risk decision.

My main point isn't that they shouldn't harden their platform, on the contrary I think they should, but they need to do so in a structured manner that doesn't leave them with a bigger mess to deal with. Hardening SSH isn't hard, hardening an IPSEC 2FA VPN is going to be a different story.
I've been. It kicks ass. Tons of great little weekend projects (and more).
Michael Hartl is very good at explaining concepts. Very well written book.
It depends primarily on the track record of the founding team. If the team has a history of being able to execute and the idea is promising, I'd say you can raise money on valuations between $1-3 million pre with just a powerpoint and some background research.

If the team has no track record, it will be much, much harder.
IO = Google's annual developer conference.

Gingerbread = Android 3.0, coming by the end of the year.

Honeycomb = Android 3.5, coming next year, with further optimizations for tablets.
Live feed of Chilean miners rescue
The Fed's Zero Rate Policy Is Destroying America
Not much of a bias, though. I know people who regularly use dating sites but don't own a computer: they use the one at work. Just about anyone working in an office these days has access to a computer and browsing during breaks/lunch (at least) is considered normal.
It doesn't though, because you're not considering the rest of life. Whether or not this person pays the BMV, they still have to buy groceries, pay off credit cards. That $130 is not useless at all.

The most likely result of gambling is that they will still have to pay the BMV bill plus now have to recoup $130 (which is hard for them to come by) to pay other bills.
Snug and Tight (PassivHous design)
The "Natural Talent" Excuse
You're scaling this to typical SF angel investment sizes, right? I got the impression that this was, like, one guy.
But is this really how people use grocery stores these days? I just can't picture people running around to different stores, trying to get the best deal on broccoli.

If there is one big grocery store significantly closer to my home than any other, that's the one I will go to when I'm out of food, no matter what. If it's late, I'll go to the one that's open late. If I have options, I'll go to the "cheap" grocery store, which tends to have better selection and slightly lower prices, on average.

Never, ever have I done prior research on where to go or what I was buying, except to check their hours. Most of the time I don't even know what I'm going to buy.

So, they can't lure me in with sales. But what they could do is keep track of which flavor of yogurt is ten times more popular than every other flavor and stock the shelves proportionately, so that I have a fighting chance of actually being able to buy most of the things I want on any given trip, and so they don't have to throw tons of unpopular food in the trash.

They could also lay off the guys that awkwardly try to pack food in my backpack for me since I can do a much better job of that myself. They might as well lay off the cashiers too and replace each one with two or three of those lovely self-checkout machines (I have tremendous sympathy for young people who find themselves unemployable, but doing work that doesn't need doing is no solution to that).

Because of the location thing, the grocery stores aren't really competing with each other for my business. But they are competing with restaurants and starvation, both popular alternatives to the hassles of buying groceries.

If e.g. Google launched a grocery store chain, with all the expected technological and common sense enhancements, they would steal most of my business and create a lot of value that was never there before.
Ask HN: What sources do you use for forecasting trends?
Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital talks about the importance of launching products only when there is demand for them. What information resources do you use to forecast trends (for example, processor speed, mobile capabilities, etc.) for the purpose of developing products and services at the right time?
Unlike other states, a lot of services and digital goods are subject to sales tax in Texas. The article mentions a few examples.
Don't pass is a much safer bet if your goal is to bet once and double your money. Blackjack can have a positive expectation (craps cannot, absent some unusual promotion) but that requires much skill. Even with knowledge of basic strategy though, which can get the house edge very low (assuming rules that favor players, like what you'd find on the Vegas Strip) it's not a good all-in wager. A significant amount of the EV from blackjack comes from doubling down and splitting, which require you to put up extra money, so if you're playing it all-in, you're much more likely to go bust than at roulette or either line bet in craps.

Also some of the EV comes from blackjacks (typically paying 3:2) so there is some chance you'll end up with more money than you need. You could walk out with $325. Again since marginal utility is diminishing the extra risk is bad.
for the main ideas, I just use a new book. As for subtopics and switching them around, I would use the chapters section, which is completely sortable.
Maybe they'll finish Perl 6?
I personally would like to see more stuff like this in Toronto, maybe it would be worth my time to organize it...

I'm looking into doing a similar thing with month HN meetups here in TO.
I don't get it. Why isn't Google investing in this along with robot self-driving cars? Why isn't Khosla investing in this? Or is this the article that gets them interested?

I don't pretend to have the engineering knowledge to know whether this will work or not, whether it's snake oil or not, but surely, if an electric sports car for the rich can get funded, so can this guy. I'm assuming the guy isn't peddling snake-oil, the circumstances certainly seem to indicate that he's sincere.

Is it that he needs a super-salesman to the money? Godin, Kawasaki, surely one of them would step up for the potential for good and profit that is possible if this technology is feasible.
I built it RoR on the heroku system.

As for the privacy policy, I've been meaning to put that together. On the site, nothing is shared. Your information is entirely private.

Understandable about the posterous link. It's just a link to my blog.

Thanks for the feedback.
Hmm. You are right. All of the examples I was taught with used fictional examples of magical taxes. I though surely there must be somewhere... but no, just a clever fiction, repeated ad absurdum to make word problems for 5th graders and then glossed over by time until I took it for reality. Ouch. Harder still because with a moments reflection I should have seen its absurdity(1).

But the step function thing was the point, not the taxes. I'll put in an edit and get that last bit ignored.

(1) Be careful what you take as truth when young and don't rethink later.
The Igor Naming Guide to Creating Product and Company Names
That's the most fun part.