skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These guys are trying - http://www.kno.com/ - but I think it's silly to literally copy the physical form factor of a textbook. I think textbooks will not be replaced by devices like this, but stuff like the Khan academy.
Maybe these bits are "out of context" or "need fleshing out" because you can't always summarize learning in a series of tweets or a blog post. Maybe that's why the event is $1,000 - you're paying for a learning experience, not just content.
WikiLeaks cut off from Amazon servers
You could just use Posterous.
Go ahead and post long links on HN. We'd rather see the URL we're going to, and the text for really long URLs will get shortened. Example: http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=search+fo...
In Sweden, a mobile phone is called a "mobil". In Germany it's called "handy".
I feel like this is Google's version of Yahoo buying Skype. Overpaying by billions of dollars, marking one of the large failures during Yahoo's decline.
http://pastebin.com/8gMi4iAU
Wikileaks To Sen. Lieberman: Eat S*#t And Die
This doesn't explain the iPhone though.
IP addresses are owned by IANA, not the user. They can't be sold.
The question is, does it even matter? RIM's customers are business, who don't really care about the access to apps, but whether they get fired for choosing the wrong brand. And nobody gets fired for choosing RIM.
I know you specifically asked about the YC startup, but there are a few really cool lock-related startups out there. There have been a lot of NFC (near-field communication) startups popping up for the last few years, but those require special hardware in the phone, so a company (I can't recall which one at the moment -- sorry) came up with a novel approach: have an app on the phone that plays a series of tones on the speaker, which the lock receives and uses as an audio key. While this could very well be dangerous if not designed properly, it's a really novel approach, and could very well be more secure than existing electronic locks; I know that in the hotel lock industry at least, security is horrendous as it stands, so hopefully this could help there.
To be fair, it looks like this page suggests a lot more than just adding points to things. I am reading it as a primer on human psychology.

The real question in my mind is this: What causes X behavior in my audience? The good guy in me wants to make things fun for people, to arouse excitement and enjoyment. What arouses these emotions in them?

Thus is gamification more of an art. You cannot just add some points and badges to a product and expect it to take off. You must appeal to the pleasure centers in ways that make sense.

It is interesting to see listed on this site what kinds of things have been proven to cause these favorable reactions in people. Maybe there are some fundamental concepts we can derive from the long lists. Maybe we can boil them down to some core principles vaguely reminiscent of Skinner. With this study, we are going to learn more about ourselves, our base, instinctual needs.

This is cool stuff. Why should anyone hate it? Perhaps there should be a disclaimer: "Don't read this as a list of TODOs. Read it as a guide towards proven motivators, and adapt what makes sense for your needs." This whole thing is entertainment. And as in all entertainment, various motivators will come in and out of fashion, be great today and boring tomorrow. This is a moving target.
This is one of those issues that the HN community needs to think about. The solution is not simple. A simple do-not-track option in a browser breaks a great many sites, facebook for one. do you have a do-not-track policy version 3.4, add a new service and now v 3.4 have to opt in, but v 4 users get an implied opt in. Do a massive change and everyone needs to opt in again? This obviously needs clearly understood standards, probably legislated ones. If we rely on ANSI or even worse ISO, they wont arrive for a decade. Worst of all, a Sorbanes Oxley type solution. Sure you created a couple weeks of Ramesn to create your site, but you now have to spend a couple of million to get it certified.
Oh-come-on. With the same logic, neural-nets were applied in a thousand and one domains. The problem of object tracking has been solved a thousand times in the past. Even if Numenta's algorithm is better at it than every other solution, you still can't call this a major result!

Even Hawkins himself has admitted that his hierarchical network design hasn't caused the huge bang that he expected it to cause.
So you don't own reading glasses anymore?
It's probably safe to say titans of industry tend to have a diversity of motivations. In markets like finance, I don't doubt that it's often as simple as money, but the cultural currencies of other markets can be equally alluring pursuits. Industrial design, and in the last few decades, tech, have a currency of having a positive impact on users' lives. UX, basically, specifically with the opportunity cost of bad UX.

If there were any way to quantify this -- "quality-of-life improvement credits" -- Apple would likely be quite rich in these as well as simply in financial currencies.
When my iPhone runs the iPod app, it almost physically becomes an iPod.

In a sense, the tablet format is more than just a software or hardware platform. It's more akin to a new kind of material - one that you can mold at will, through software, into a myriad of distinct widgets.
25) Use a thick marker during design since you can only focus on the key things.

More info:
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/466-sketching-with-a-sharpie
Interestingly they're still devices. It's just that with iOS (and soon Android) this is the first time a general-purpose operating system is perfect for a device.

Cocoa's for-scientist, rapid-development ideology is perfect for using the OS to create an ethereal device.

Also, that's some solid hardware/software.
Confirmed:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=182...

Google's algorithm needs some more improvement.
Google implements “don’t be evil” into its algorithm; uses reviews for rankings
I don't see it in the bing search results anymore.

I guess the answer to how long would it take Bing to change is, about as long as it takes Google.
List Inventors Killed by their Inventions
As far as I know, Yahoo never bought Skype. I think you probably meant eBay.
From what I've seen, arguing comes naturally to children.
Of course, this solution probably produces lots of false positives, so they will have to change it later when other complains are raised.

I think the original idea of Google was great, but with each iteration their search results get worse. In the end, it seems that anything they do can be gamed in some way.
What about luck?
Research may not hurt. Trial and error does if the error affects the users.

If something bad is happening in the world, like thousands of people being murdered in some remote country, and every page that links to articles about it has a negative tone because they're condemning what's happening, should google hide those articles?

I would be fine with alphabetical results if they would give me a regular expression search instead of recommended results.
I doubt that MS could have created the tablet boom in 2006. Less than two years ago, Steve Jobs said "we don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk." I think he was right; the hardware just wasn't there four years ago to create something enticing enough. An iPad with the technology of the original iPod touch would be too slow, have too short a battery life, would have cost $800 or so, etc.
Maybe there was no change? They just want to discourage people from doing something similar until they come up with a good solution?
Exactly, thus my comment above about attendees paying $1,000 for a learning experience:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959654
> poor stay poor, rich stay rich

Sure, but I've always thought about the American Dream as opportunity. Whether an individual takes an opportunity before them is a personal choice but it's still there for the taking. That can't be said everywhere in the world.

Nothing about the "American Dream" guarantees success and no one says it's easy.
Does this mean we can consider the Google Reader API stable now?
Could You Have Passed the 8th Grade in 1895? Take a Look
Can you explain how the statistics cited in your link support your argument? All I see are comparisons of income distributions at various points in time - without any discussion of whether people are moving between different parts of the distribution.
I'd like to echo your question.

It's crazy how quickly the meme that "google is losing it/becoming a slow giant bureaucracy" has taken hold in the recent past...
Ah, thanks. We just restructured our servers in my house, so I need to move gitosis over to a different machine anyway. Might as well try out gitolite instead.
How much the world has changed in 4 years...
A few of them are even pretty similar in the mechanics. The first person the article profiles is Harold Hamm, a wildcat driller who struck a huge well in 1971, more or less by luck (he doesn't appear to have used any of the geological-formation analysis that modern drilling uses). Gold-prospecting had some similar success stories.
"If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy man- he will find an easier way to do it"
Amazon Bows To US Censorship Pressure: Refuses To Host Wikileaks
I agree with you. Edited my comment above to reflect my full opinion.
Organisations who have been assigned /8s were almost uniformly assigned them very early in the internet's lifespan. That marks out those organisations as those with a vested interest in the internet-- that is, science and technology organisations. In the 15 years that have passed since then, there's an excellent chance that they'll have expanded to internally allocate or at least earmark all the IP space available to them.

Freeing up even half of the block would probably require a huge amount of internal reconfiguration and only buy the IPv4 internet another few weeks at most.

Of course, if it could turn some profit, that makes it more likely.
Holy Crap! Jason and DHH got 40 people to pay $1000 to hear them talk for a day about starting a company.

Wow... Just... Wow...

Dudes, really. Save your money for ramen noodles and start hanging out at other Hacker News meetups[1].

Or, better yet, move to Silicon Valley, start attending meetups[2] and startup events[3]. Make a point of handing out business cards and asking people out for coffee. I can guarantee that within a year you'll become friends with any number of entrepreneurs who will give you similar or better advice for the price of a beer.

Hell, if you move out here, come to a Hackers and Founders event, I'll buy you a beer.

By the way, we're probably going to be turning Hackers and Founders into a non profit, because I feel like it's wrong to try make a quick buck off of hackers who are eating ramen noodles and trying to get a startup off the ground. YMMV

</rant>

ref:

[1] https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AmQExXr67OcTdDBZZl9...

[2] http://www.hackersandfounders.com

[3] http://startupdigest.com/
That may be, but how should I know that? Until the singularity occurs, the best of intentions aren't an appropriate substitution for even the weakest attempt.
Story goes that a co-worker's wife heard him talking taking a call about game mechanics. When he was done with the call she was puzzled and ask, "Why are you guys so interested in gay mechanics?"

It's all I hear now.
I stayed at the airbnb corporate apartment and mentioned a reprogrammable lock as an awesome upgrade to their service back in 2009. I hacked something crappy together with a schlage lockset for my own use, but ended up having to go to Afghanistan a couple weeks later. I actually prefer the usability of what I had to how the lockitron appears to work.

Hotel locks are amazingly lame. Audio is an interesting output from the phone; flashing the display in front of a photosensor in a pattern would be cool too.

Mechanical locks are basically obsolete in the age of digital photographs and rapid prototyping...if you let me look at a mechanical key for a second, I can make you a perfect copy in 15 minutes.
Sound interesting. Where in Europe are you located?
Money quote:

"BlackBerry code must be compiled at the Java 1.3 level. This means that developers cannot utilize any of the improvements made to Java since 2002"
My phone's battery died last time I was flying home from a business trip because I was listening to music in-flight. I already freak out a bit when my phone dies -- I can't imagine being locked out and not being able to call anyone.
I started working on a idea management web application this weekend actually. You can not only share ideas, get feedback (threaded comments with voting, HN style) but also signup potential customers. Probably will launch MVP this weekend. Would love to know what you would be looking for in such service. Email on my profile.
I'm saying that many things you own would work better if they had a little computing power in them, or if they had access to a computer. So, for instance, it would be too expensive to put a PID controller in your toaster oven. That's why there's a simple thermostat and a simple timer in there. But imagine if your toaster could send temperature data in a bluetooth-esque way to your tablet. The tablet does the proportional-integral-derivative calculations and sends commands back to the toaster. So you get all of the benefits of PID controlled temperature without the cost of the PID controller.

Another idea (likely in the works somewhere): tablet as guitar effects pedal.
Just had that conversation... Everybody charges per repo and that's pointless. Charge for disk space and let us have unlimited repos. I would sign up for monthly plan then.
You'll find that users only looking for a reward are more than happy to jump through one or two hoops to get their reward. An incentivized user is often no better than no user, especially when the reward is tangible like a gift certificate.
Don't hyperventilate. Anybody, from a Senator to a high school janitor, can "call a hosting company to have a website shut down". Nobody made Amazon comply.
Set a deadline (maybe 6 weeks) and finish a side-project I have going on - While still in 'work mode'. It frustrates me sitting around at my day job and then scrambling to work on it in free time/travel time.

I'd love to get up, get ready in the morning, (go somewhere, ideally) and do 8 hours of MY work a day.
On the Benefit of Virtualization: Strategies for Flexible Server Allocation
A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?

I like how the volume and weight of a bushel of wheat was common knowledge :)
They've got an impressive product and team, as well as a bit of cash.

Naive question: What is their business model? Consulting?
Here are the direct links to PDF and ePub versions:

http://pragprog.com/magazines/download/18.pdf

http://pragprog.com/magazines/download/18.epub
It's impossible for both B and Python to be untyped. Pick a definition and stick with it.
Since you seem to know a bit about "airline hacking", I'm wondering... Would the OP have gotten away with it if he skipped the second leg instead of the first, in a case where the direct flight is more expensive than round-trip? Or do the airlines have a way to discourage that?
If you're using Firefox, you might find NoSquint[0] useful. It allows you to customize per-site settings for font sizes and colors (as well as more precise global defaults than Firefox does naturally).

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2592/
Weka isn't limited to the GUI if you want to mine your data. It's a regular JAR file you can drop in your server-side web application and make calls to it like any other Java library. I've used it in some of my apps for some clustering algorithms (the easy stuff, since it can get complicated).

I've also written a few articles on Weka if you want to read a few nice tutorials on how to use it. I'm not a Data Mining Expert, but I've had a few semesters of it in grad school.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-weka...

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-wek...

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-wek...
I agree this is a problem. While like the idea of a remote-controlled lock, from what I've read about how lockitron does it, this is a major problem. (Lockitron is basically a sheeva plug with wifi to the Internet talking over zwire to a commodity remote-controlled deadbolt)

Also, it isn't always the case that you have signal in an entryway, especially in weird apartment buildings, basement apartments, etc.

Also, I am not comfortable taking my $800 iPhone out of my pocket in front of a door in a dark alley, whereas a fist full of keys makes a damn fine improvised weapon.

Also, I don't want to do a wan connection, web API call, wan link to home, and low power rf link to the door every time I want to unlock my door. Especially if both of my hands are full of bags.
Google's "opinion" for better or worse is fact. Let's hope they figured out a way to differentiate between genuine bad reviews and those with underlying motives.
The conversion rate increase appears to speak to the publisher, ie the company with the landing page being incentivized and not the company offering the reward.

According to the tech crunch article the company offering the reward pays the $5 and the publisher gets the widget and offers the reward to their potential users for free.
Great detailed list! Thanks for sharing and inspiring us! Looking forward to hearing all about your launch experience!

Great job!
Have you looked into using an online bookmark system instead?

Del.icio.us responds at the same rate, whether you have 10 bookmarks or 10 thousand.
This, in my opinion, is the genius of Apple's choice of form factor. By omitting any physical buttons apart from meta-functionality, and allowing only full-screen applications, an iOS device essentially becomes dedicated hardware for whatever it happens to be running.

I remember marveling at the YouTube app the first time I picked up an iPad. It was the best YouTube experience I'd seen; it felt like I was holding a purpose-built device for YouTube viewing. The home button simply prepared it to morph into a different purpose-built device.
Choose your news source:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959697 - techdirt.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959655 - cnn.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959633 - arstechnica.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959607 - bgr.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959335 - npr.org

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959328 - guardian.co.uk

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959308 - readwriteweb.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959305 - reuters.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959257 - techcrunch.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959142 - foxnews.com
The way to fix that problem is with sources. Wikipedia is becoming more and more aggressive about deleting articles without sources, because it has been enough times already by articles that 1) plagiarize copyrighted materials, or 2) appear to cite sources but actually "fudge" the sources, or 3) blatantly push a point of view by omitting to use sources that are readily available. The quality screen for new articles is slowly becoming more stringent, so, no, that is not at all a record for speed of deletion of a new article. The long-term slog, for which I wish Wikipedia well (as registered Wikipedia editor) but would have to be paid to do in the current contentious editing environment, is to add correctly cited, balanced sources to the existing articles that have the problems just mentioned.
http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.asp
Top Semantic Web Products of 2010
Ask HN: Tesla Motors?
I’m looking for a job at Tesla Motors, but have had no luck with multiple resume submissions. I’ve submitted resumes (i.e. applied for jobs with detailed cover letters) several times in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Last month, I noticed a very interesting (and relevant) position on their website, so I decided to use a different approach this time. I connected with 4 (yes, four) Tesla recruiters via LinkedIn and emailed them one at a time, 3-4 days apart. Yet again, no response to my emails from a single recruiter. Nothing.

What would you do in such a situation?

Has anyone else had success in getting across a resume?
I'm using Tumblr for my personal blog, have been for years, but am starting to become very unhappy with their stability problems. I'm using Wordpress (self hosted and Wordpress.com) for a number of other sites and I'm very happy with it. There's loads of themes and plugins for Wordpress, many of which are free, and it's fairly easy to customise.
Shame it doesn't work with my Google account (not @gmail). I'd been waiting for this.
The Big Economic Story, and Why Obama Isn't Telling It
I think so - building rich cross device apps for other companies. Very few people know SproutCore well, but those who do can quickly whip up apps. It is analogous to Rails and 37signals.
While unfortunate, I don't necessarily fault Amazon here. Amazon is a shopping website first, cloud computing platform second. I do find Joe Lieberman calling for a boycott of an American company reprehensible though.
That's going down. What about going up? And yes, it's not straight-forward - like pg said, "clever tricks."
This is an excellent point and deserves more votes.

Google does have somewhat "sneekier" options:
- Demote negatively reviewed items only on searches which seem "inherently commercial" - ie, act differently depending on whether the search is for a store or an opinion.
- Have some sort of "realness" index: is this entity actually selling sunglasses.

These aren't necessarily easy so your question stands.
I know its fake but...
Arithmetic 6 - Can't get the interest(at least any interesting one) without the capitalization period.
I started using Pentadactyl when I switched to Firefox nightlies, and I must say I like it. I can't place my finger on anything in particular, but it feels... better. And faster.
Ask HN: Please think about changing your life
This is throw-away account. I honestly wish luck to all HN community here. I am business man(i believe word 'entrepreneur' is over-rated) with several online and offline business. Doing quite ok.

I honestly wish luck to all HN community here, but after reading HN for sometime I can see that some of you guys are simply wasting your time here. In fact most of you are. This community pushes you toward starting your own online business, which is not for everyone(and not so glory). Pushing someone towards being a businessman is a terrible mistake, dont be influenced by that.

You can be very happy just being professional at what are you doing, having family, enjoying your hobbies, having vacations, free time etc. etc..

Seriously, think about life you are loosing every time you open another HN story and dont allow any community to dictate you what should you do. Fact that many really smart folks here waste time reading crappy advises on how to start business, grow it, etc just kills me. Its not better than buying "How to become a millionaire" crap books, seriously.

Sure some of you will succeed with their ideas, but most will just become depressed after realizing how they spend their LIFE.

Internet-businesses, entrepreneurs and hackers glory are overrated in this community. Try to take a break and re-think your life goals(and make sure you have some)

This post is irrelevant for some HNsers, but if it will make just one HN reader to re-think his life, wouldn't it be cool?

Thanks for reading this. Happy holidays!
Nice find. What I would be more interested to find out is how it compares to tests that are presently being given to 8th graders. It might be difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison though. I don't seem to recall having an actual final exam in 8th grade.
Reminds me of the partial rationality problem so eloquently laid out here:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/