skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I made most of this last weekend and polished it a bit over the past couple days. You need to install both the Extension and the Plug-In... this was the only way to make it work.

You can write your own mini apps for any website using javascript. If you create one for a public website, send it to me and I'll put it in the gallery to share.

What do you think? Is it useful?

Should I make a Chrome version?
I think USA is the best place for hackers to live and work! Don't you think so?
You'd probably enjoy formulations involving Kolkgomorov Complexity or Minimum Message Length, both of which cover similar topics while having more direct interpretations for complexity.
It'd be a pain in the ass trying to get your book back?
Unfortunately, the courts only deal with the law not the right.
Thanks, malloreon. It was indeed your unanswered question that prompted me to ask again. I appreciate Austin chiming in below.
As console/pc video game programmer I can just say:

Make it compilable on your target platforms: PC, Wii, PS3, Xbox, what other is needed.

Don't care about other platforms, until they arrive.

Instead of #ifdef, try to find the pattern in your code, and use select macroses such as:

PC_WIIXBOXPS3(pcValue,consoleValue)
or
WII_XBOXPS3_PC(wiiValue,xboxOrPs3value,pcValue)

wrap align, threadlocal, etc. as macro-define.

The UNICODE advise is wrong. These system do not have even working locales, so don't trust strupr(), strlwr(), toupper() - etc. to work correctly for your localized game.
Paper: Netflix’s Transition to High-Availability Storage Systems
Mbed is a tool for Rapid Prototyping with microcontrollers
> Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years?

This is a foolish comment, even beyond your arbitrary splitting up the cost of a degree between 40 "middle class families", or the insinuation that one can actually earn a degree by simply "partying for 4 years."

The value of education goes beyond landing one a job. Simply having well-educated citizens is of value to society -- especially in a representative democracy, where our level of education has a direct impact on how wisely we choose our own leaders. In fact, that education for its own sake is of great value to society is the core assumption behind public education.

Besides which, how exactly would you propose to "fix" the "problem" of well-educated people choosing overqualified jobs? With a state-controlled labor market, dictating what kind of people are allowed to work what kind of jobs?
Came across this today, thought it was neat because they provide an ARM compiler / IDE as a webpage. No need to set up a cross-compiler locally, which can be a royal pain in the ass.
It's almost impossible to make a living writing technical books, worse yet if they're actually good (because the best technical books tend to have a smaller audience since they tend to be targeted at the best developers).

Technical books aren't written because they are profitable, they are written out of passion or pride.

Edit: the same is true for a great many non-technical books. The average writer has a day job, writing is for most a questionably lucrative hobby.
He's also got listings from my company from back in February.
Microsoft stores, one year later
Open source economic models have been pretty well established, no? My income is through payment for services, not software. My software may be free, but my labor is not.

The same is being applied to music, artists like Unwoman regularly write songs and albums on spec and through crowd-sourcing. A friend of mine is a huge fan, and donated money for her to write a song using a Voltairine DeClayre poem.

http://www.unwoman.com
Thanks for jumping in, Austin. I wouldn't expect a direct answer as to your monetization strategies. I was hoping others had monetization ideas that were as yet escaping me.

Can we expect any kind of data report from you? A growth chart, usage data, anything that might defend the viability of the concept to those who question whether we need another social network?
How do you define good answer to that question? I have thought about that question (probably more than any other) over and over again since filling it out. Mine was about something fairly early in my learning of systems, but it was something that some could consider a bad thing.

My Dad owns a wholesale fence company and when the fire and police dept wanted to rewrite the fire code for gated neighborhoods they wanted to do something different EDIT: By code, obviously I mean as in LAW, not as in programming, my Dad being a fenceman is obviously not a programmer lol. So they came to my Dad and asked him to help a write a forward thinking code for the city, what they eventually settled on was an RFID card system where every police and fire dept vehicle has a card which constantly emits a signal that opens the gate of any neighborhood which has this reciever (it is mandatory for the two parishes nearest to us). So being young (13) and new to programming at the time (this was almost 10 years ago) I decided to try to reverse engineer one of the cards. I took it apart piece by piece looked at the programming software they were using and eventually (after much tinkering) made my own card.

Obviously this is highly illegal and so I was slightly worried about putting it on there, but I also thought it showed characteristics of curiosity and a will to find a better way... In case you are wondering, yes, i still get into any gated house or subdivision in a two parish radius without hassle :P lol
SciPy, OpenCV bindings, PyML, et al. I've worked more with Ruby than Python (and like the language itself better), but there's no question Python has the more momentum in this space.
Language integrated asynchronous programming
I don't believe you can show me a single comment anywhere that implies "it's OK because some of them probably even deserve it," because that sentiment makes no sense. It's extremely rude to put words like that in other people's mouths.
When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.
This is a pretty interesting concept. I like it! It's really well executed for being a weekend project. It'd be cool if we could integrate Google Analytics to it at some point.
Only if you can manage to "prefer" your new, scaled-back lifestyle.
Most of my personal library is comprised of books I was given free or bought used in the $.50 - $6.00 range. On average I've read about 20% of each. What I can't get around with the Kindle is the idea of paying $10 for a digital copy of something I could find either for free or really cheap, that I probably won't even read anyway. Not to mention you can't give away or sell a copy of a kindle book to someone else after you're done.

Oddly enough though I don't have the same gripe with the apple App Store...
This same series of videos and content has been making the rounds on new aggregator websites for quite some time now. One of the videos was published over two years ago:

http://vimeo.com/2229299

This tech is cool, but it's not going anywhere fast because its use isn't practical.
Almost correct.
The main problem to me is that GPS apps still run in the background when you close them, and they KILL the battery life. So every time I want to exit my GPS, I have to close it, double tap, press and hold the icon and close it.
Mozilla has used the term "chrome" to refer to their browser UI for many years; before Google Chrome even existed.

Once you understand what "chrome" is in this context, I don't see how it could "jar" you or possibly be considered a problem.
I'm glad to see these responses, this forum moves so fast I thought I could have been lost in the shuffle. A big thanks to both of you for taking some time to help me out!

Each time I get into something new it's so important for me to learn the language of that area. Sometimes it takes a while to really be able to understand and operate within a new system.

I'll keep my eyes open and do the best I can.
Take a Bill Gates-Style "Think Week" to Recharge Your Thinking
I'm aware of that. The market for cloud computing should grow 50-100x in the next ten years, and Amazon is well positioned to capture almost all of it, with declining costs and increasing profit. Not only that, they will be a serious threat to iTunes with their book distribution. They should also be able to displace Craigslists and Ebay for the sale of used goods. Their service is easier, faster, and usually generates higher prices.

The analysts are still undervaluing cloud services, and haven't really talked too much about the Amazon marketplace ecosystem. Ebay is worth about $37B alone, so if Amazon can soak up chunks of that market, their value will go up tremendously. Used goods can probably still grow 1,000x at Amazon. Also, expect major growth in their fulfillment services. Once awareness of that picks up, they can probably take that industry and do long-tail order fulfillment for everyone selling anything online, through Amazon or not. Like I said, Amazon is definitely worth a 3x premium on Google, simply because they have so many different places they can grow revenue, and almost everything they're getting involved in has the potential to be huge businesses with clear paths to revenue.
Amazon will undoubtedly settle. Texas is trying to close a budget short fall for the next cycle that begins in 2011. Amazon has a distribution center in Texas and Texas believes that means they have a nexus of operations. Amazon disagrees. Texas wants/needs money and Amazon certainly doesn't want the court to rule that they are subject to paying sales tax because their distribution constitutes sufficient operations to conclude they do business in Texas. Therefore, my prediction: settlement.
I don't think that it's that extreme.

The difference between Wikipedia and Reddit/HN is what I would venture calling 'contribution barrier.'

Think how hard is it to contribute to a Wikipedia article vs. Posting or commenting on Reddit/HN. Let alone voting.

I'd imagine that most of the registered users have voted, and a majority have commented. I don't imagine quite a lot of people have posted links.

If I'd have to guess a ratio of lurkers:voters:commenters:posters, I'd say it's 40:30:25:5.
Mike Maples: “You Have to Be Willing to Throw it all away” [video]
I'm pretty sure that "self-serving political organization" is a tautology, based on the fact that an outsider-serving political organization would be an oxymoron, or at best, a charity by definition.

That said, the NDA is probably more so they don't leak the announcement before WikiLeaks does. They put a lot of effort into releasing information, and having a third party say "WikiLeaks is going to be releasing information on X day" undermines the control that they desire.

edit: what AlexTGordon said, it's a product of paranoia / control.
I would assume the thinking behind time limits is that a compromised Nook or Amazon account could be used to buy a crapload of books and then lend them out permanently.

Doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense, because they presumably know who you've lent them to.

Then again, non-limited lending raises other issues. How do you get it back? Do you allow the purchaser to forcibly take it back, removing it from the borrower's device? That sucks for the borrower. But that also requires that the device be connected to the web at some point; if the borrower only uses USB to load the device, the loaned item can't be snatched away.

Time limits, that don't rely on connectivity, are probably the simplest solution.
Huffman coding is very very related to this. If you have a capped block length, huffman coding is optimal.
I work for a company that provides a mission critical service to a lot of people. Maybe we're just spoiled, but we have multiple failover environments. That means that we can deploy in the afternoon by failing the service over to a hot backup during the deployment. When the deploy is finished, we fail the backup system to the production environment and we deploy to the backups while the primary is running. Since there's 0 downtime, we like to work through the process in the morning/afternoons. No all-nighters here, and its definitely not a nice-to-have service. It's all about architecture and design.
One wonders then why you do not resent the iTunes store. After all, you can get vinyls and cassette tapes for next to nothing at thrift stores these days.
Are you willing to force 25 median Americans to work 100 hours each, just so that their waiter can party for 4 years and maybe quote Beowulf?

No, but I'm willing ask they put in that amount of work to subsidize college students based on the probability that they'll later make a net contribution to society, including the laborers - if that probability is high enough. You are counting the costs while avoiding any calculation of the benefits, as if you knew with certainty which students entering college would never progress beyond being waiters afterwards.

I might as well say we should stop funding all training of doctors, because every year some of them lose their license to practice medicine, or that we cease funding mathematical research because some of recipients perpetuate logical fallacies on the internet.
Update: I got a notice yesterday.
BA in English

I think it's a fallacy to automatically hone in on liberal arts degrees. When I worked for several manufacturing companies, I always came across people with engineering and other technical degrees that were working on the production floor as assembly workers. These were entry level jobs paying $6-10/hr.

They often had one or more or the following attributes:

- They were 45+ years old.
- They were more introverted, less likely to network.
- They had technical degrees from outside the US.
- Their careers had taken them into management or PM roles.

So these are just a few career considerations if you don't want to be pushing a mop when you're 55.
And just let me correct myself: Ramanujan was at Cambridge, not Oxford.
It's the former, and it looks fine to me: http://i.imgur.com/g38Ix.jpg
I would bet it's even higher
It's a feature list checkbox. Now Amazon can say they also have a lending feature, and the Nook loses that advantage.

The more important news, to me, is that they're now going to let you get subscribed magazines and newspapers in the kindle apps. Right now those only work with kindle hardware.
Fight Club Philosophy
I love this quote: "It's only after we've lost everything are we free to do anything." - Tyler Durden
I am firm believer that if you know you are going to succeed, then you will no matter what you are working on. It might not be your current project and it might not be the next, but it will come. You need the right energy, positive attitude, and patience.
"Thinking" is not the same as time-consuming research through thousands of pages of bills
Link to the actual paper, for the mathematically inclined:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~glmiller/Publications/Papers/KoutisAp...
The article says that ISP's and others would be required to block the domain name. Theoretically you should still be able to access the site using its direct IP address. Of course, this doesn't justify the blacklist, and I certainly don't support it. I'm just thinking that even in the worst case scenario if the bill is passed it shouldn't be completely crippling.
Fsharp-mode: Emacs major mode for editing F# code
"A. Why can't the library just buy as many digital copies as are needed for the customers, and keep them forever, if they don't naturally degrade?"

My local library offers assorted e-books. Every so often, when I've tried to request one, I was told I had to wait until someone else "returned" their copy.
Isn't that similar to GCJ (http://gcc.gnu.org/java/) which can compile Java bytecode down to native machine code?
I tend to think of this as a “bug” in the OS and I think that it’s very much Apple’s task to come up with a solution. You shouldn’t have to do that.
I'm inclined to believe the petition is worth signing just because Leahy seems to have taken over for Fritz Hollings (D-Disney).
In a coffee shop, you still have the option of not using the connection at all if it is unencrypted, and your OS should notify you that its unsafe (I know WinXP does this, though I don't have much experience with linux or osx). So, while you don't have the option of using a wired signal, you're still not forced to use an insecure connection.

As for the example, I think in the interest of making it more realistic, I lost a lot of the impact. Regardless, you sort of made my point for me. We're talking about the expectation of privacy, and the moment you start broadcasting your private information - whether shouting in public or sending out an unencrypted data signal - it can no longer be considered private.

As for your example, it depends entirely on the letter/package. Opening someone elses mail is a felony/indictable offence, so there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. AFAIK, while connecting to someone elses private connection might be illegal (war driving, etc.), I don't think that's what Google was doing. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to be that Google was just sniffing data in the air rather than making an actual connection to the network.

What Google seems to have done is more like reading a postcard. The data was clearly visible, you just needed to know how to read it. I don't think anyone could rationally say that postcards are a secure form of communication.
The problems is that many popular hosts have not deployed PHP 5.3 yet. So, if you're planning on using this framework, you need to make sure your host and anyone you distribute it to are using at least 5.3. This nullifies one of the common reasons for using PHP ("it's supported everywhere").
Works on my droid 2, except I can only tap different places, as dragging causes the browser to scroll
I do, kinda. Lets just say that I haven't paid for music in quite some time.. and when I did it was always CDs, I've bought maybe one album digitally.

Its not the idea of paying that bothers me so much as the price point. I know damn well there's nowhere near the overhead costs to digital distribution that there are to printing, publishing and retail, why am I only getting a $5.00 discount? Popular digital books and MP3 albums could cost $2 and still be profitable...

Not to mention that I can't resell or exchange the digital copies like I could physical media, so there's no longterm value. If you consume as much media as I do you'll quickly go broke if you were to pay what they wanted, and not be able to at least recoup some of the value in tradeins.

$9.00+ for digital DRMed media is a total ripoff.
Sounds right to me. Do you have any evidence that this is true or does it just sound right?
Hey, that wasn't in the article when I read it!
This is patently false. My girlfriend owns a Kindle, she buys books at a very good rate (among other media), and she wants to be able to lend her ebooks.

Lending books is part of book culture! I don't own a Kindle yet specifically because half the reason I buy books is to lend or give them to friends. Sharing books is one of the greatest joys of reading. Everyone who shares is not a pirate.

I generally agree with you that people who complain about media costing money are not useful as customers. But there is a world of difference between not wanting to pay and wanting to be able to lend and give what you buy.
Great, if a standard of mere adequacy is your goal it suits perfectly.
WikiLeaks has found that the mainstream press won't cover anything in depth unless they're assured of some exclusivity and advance notice. I don't know for sure, but that's probably the reason for the NDA.

WikiLeaks used to just dump information on the world and assume that researchers and journalists would take it from there, but apparently it doesn't work like that.
Isn't interstate commerce non-taxable, as per the constitution?
I'd say the people who admire grand failure only admire it when they're not negatively impacted by it. For example, tech startups vs Wall Street. There's a difference between grand failure in fields where the expected payoff is asymmetrically positive, like the former, and asymmetrically negative, like the latter.

Failures in the former may cost their investors their investment, but it won't cost them more money than they've ever made, or put them into the red so deep as to destroy their whole industry, or bring down the global financial system. While both sides play the odds and spread their bets, the nature of risk and payoff is very different.

Also, startups represent an attempt at creating real wealth where none was before - combining labor, capital, innovation, and raw materials to make products that can be sold for more than the sum of their inputs, or services that save time. Alot of what caused the financial crisis was more akin to gambling, despite protestations of 'financial innovation' to the contrary. Failure in the former is admirable, the latter not so much.
Do you mean, "you need not just suspect, I can confirm that in my experience at CMU the professor is over-credited", or "you need not be suspect, in my experience at CMU the credit is properly allocated"?
Pulse has a much better UI, in my opinion.
I think you're right. Don't wait for things to be perfect before building.

OTOH, pursuing most of these things is probably a good thing for general reasons. Hacking some non software thing, if you do not tend to do that sort of thing will probably benefit your thinking. Making friends is obviously good for you too.
Any Open Source startups?
I'm looking for any advice regarding a startup that primarily sells services for Open Source products. A lot of HN startups seem to be geared towards consumer websites or SAAS for B2B. Anyone have tales of an Open Source B2B solution that is making money?

I've heard of the success stories, MySql, Redhat, Jboss, are there others I should pay attention to? Thanks in advance for any advice, links to blogs, book recommendations, etc.
Seems like perfect new rejection criteria: "Your app will be rejected if it continues to use location services in the background without making the battery life implications clear to the user and showing an option to easily turn this function off."
I don't think you understand what diversification means. :)
My Google Docs fu is weak. Anyone know how to generate a PDF of the paper linked in the article?
Hey guys, this is the author of the Teardowns. Happy to talk more about the cost structure of different models, if you find it helpful. Just let me know what kind of biz you are thinking abut doing and I can help out.
Sorry, I think I read your earlier statement backwards. Thanks for the clarification.
1. Speaking tours make money. Conferences make money, etc.

2. Fame, recognition, i.e. non-monetary benefits to being a good writer.

3. At least some people write because they believe what they have to say is important and/or helpful.

4. People will always want to own physical books. This is different than music or a dvd as a book can be passed-on/gifted much easier than a DVD or a CD, which will be obsolete.

I can see both arguments, but I'm definitely not worried about the possibility that people will stop writing books.
The first thing is think about who your audience is and what kind of connection they are trying to make with you when they view your about page. An about page for a startup, a freelancer, a blog, etc will all have different audiences and different goals.

If you are a startup, your audience will likely be potential and current customers, journalists with press inquiries, and possibly people looking to fund you. They will want to know why they should use your product, what makes your company/product unique, who are the people behind it, etc.

I'm currently redoing my own about page, and have gathered a few helpful links:

For startups: http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/08/what-does-your-abo...

For freelancers, but contains some great general tips too: http://www.onextrapixel.com/2010/09/06/how-to-write-an-effec...

Good general tips: http://sixrevisions.com/content-strategy/about-page-guidelin...