skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mixpanel is not something to get pissed about. It's an amazing source of insight for people who are trying to make good sites, and the data we collect with it is unreal.

My personal opinion is that Mixpanel is part of the ever-rising bar of things rich application sites should start to include. If I see a complex company site that _isn't_ using mixpanel, it will put them down a peg in my estimation. The data you can collect is just that valuable.
I'm glad you posted this. I think the Salon article frames this as something it wasn't. This wasn't the audience objecting to "art" it was the company realizing they'd promoted the discussion as something it wasn't and wanting to keep its customers happy. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Just to follow up: I didn't get close to being done. Looking back, November was an awful month for me to plan on releasing something. Between the two kids and everything they had, a week long vacation, and some big projects at work, not to mention commitments in other areas, I just failed to make the time.

I'm not disappointed... much. However, I did get some important stuff done, and after the holidays (which involves another big trip), I'll have some time where I'm not going for weeks at a time that I can put together an app.
Risk Reduction Strategies on Social Networking Sites
Didn't launch a new app but did get a major version update out the door (in addition to fixes for everything iOS 4.2 broke): http://ipadportfolioapp.com/
I wasn't trying to address any bearing this has on finding alien life, just speaking theoretically - we shouldn't assume that everything should be like us. If it hasn't been your experience that most people think that way, then I must have misjudged.

I agree on the second paragraph, but especially the last sentence.

I know "design" is used by IDers, but what other word can adequately reference the incredibly complicated way our cells and bodies work?

Thanks for the response.
I don't know about this challenge, but during the Tron AI challenge, execution speed was very important. There was a time limit for how long your AI could take to make a move so the faster your execution the deeper your min-max tree.
The ultimate goal would be to live in a world where nobody wants to blow up planes.
There's a thread on the competition's forums: http://ai-contest.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=1168
Normally when chroma keying you have to cover something in green or blue or use that as the background.

This technique apparently uses the kinect's ability to recognize the body to crop it out in real time to achieve this effect.
Surprisingly long gaps between the radio transmissions...
Having the flexibility to choose between those is better than having your hands tied and not being able to make the choice.

According to this article, the effect of TDD is to remove your ability to defer that decision until a time when you have more insight into which of those is better.
I refer you to this comment on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/edxyk/submitted_a...

(and its responses, if you think I'm serious :) )
China Announces Crackdown On Piracy
As Mono Lake is of volcanic origin and formed around 760,000 years ago (per Wikipedia) I'd be astonished if the arsenophile(?) evolved there in that short a time span. Which leaves open the question of where it came from, and whether arsenic tolerance is present but dormant in other extremophiles.

Other points of note: never mind the cellular DNA integrating arsenate, the whole respiration cycle seems to be affected, presumably running on ATA rather than ATP. Which implies huge amounts of molecular booty in the shape of enzymes that are powered by a different reduction gradient (ATA-AMA rather than ATP-AMP).

Possible down to earth applications? Lest we forget, Pakistan has a monstrous problem with arsenic-contaminated wells ( http://www.irc.nl/page/16331 ) and a bacterial culture that thrives on arsenic could offer new approaches to arsenic sequestration. And that's just off the top of my head. (My biochemistry is, alas, too rusty to go much further without a refresher course. Hmm ...)
Google Loses Lawsuit, ordered to pay $1
Obvious, yes (which is why people have been looking for examples). Proven, no, not until now. That's why this is important.
Why is there a login button and register form if all stories/links are picked from bit.ly automatically. I mean, there is not much registered/logged in users can do.
Piracy Is Over Like The Web Is Dead
His writing is pretty good as well (both for the screen and print).
I also think this would be really cool, although I would make retweets the source of 'comment' upvotes.
If a bacterium consumes the arsenic from a contaminated well the well is now contaminated with the corpses of bacteria that are rich in arsenic.

You'd have to add another pass to get rid of the bacterial residue (possibly easier, but still).
This seems like a false choice to me. Why are these the only two choices?
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1961780
A small warning: I tried using raphael.js for a project just a couple of months ago and discovered a big flaw. Transformations/rotations and scale-functions are not "stackable" which might come as a nasty surprise after a while.

For example, I designed a number of subcomponents using rotate and scale operators, then I wanted to use them as parts of the whole. The result is very weird when you first get it as it is only the last transformation of each kind that survives which results in everything thrown all around.

But that said, if you stick to one coordinate system you will be just fine. The animation-hooks and the event-hooks might just be worth it. Just don't try to think vectors and transformations/rotations just because it's vector graphics.

(I ended up using canvas and excanvas for that project which worked fine even though the printouts weren't as pretty)
Walking Man with CSS3 Animations and Tranformations
The only ones worth of this list are Quora and Square.
They are releasing Gowalla 3 for Android and other mobile devices/platforms early on 2011. There is hope.
The opportunities may not be traditional acquisitions. They could have spent that money buying fiber backbones, 4G Spectrum, clean or solar energy plants.

I would have much rather seen google branch out more into infrastructure then into another consumer facing web play, especially one with such a long window on ROI. Its not necessarily about having the money or not so much as how could that money have been better spent.

A nice counter example, in 2007 MS bought 1.5% of Facebook for 250M at a valuation of 15B. Currently Facebook shares are selling at a valuation between 100B and 200B - split that down the middle and that MS investment is now worth $2.5B, which makes their small investment in FB look a heck of a lot better then Google's Acquisition of YouTube.

EDITS - I keep adding to this point, I apologize. Most of this comes off of realizing that Google didn't even pay cash for YouTube, it was a stock acquisition.

NOTE: I should also say as an armchair analyst I thought Google's purchase of YouTube at the time was pretty good and MS's investment at the time in Facebook was pretty bad. I've now reversed my positions on both, so take that for what its worth.
I just have to say, since I don't know if you want the robot for the utility, or to just say you built one, but it'll probably be cheaper to hire a maid :P
Doesn't that depend on the byproduct produced by the respiration cycle?
Not sure if it counts since we have been in our beta for a while so it's not exactly an MVP, but we finally launched Mockingbird 1.0 in November (http://blog.gomockingbird.com/10-and-real-time-collaboration). I had been working on the real-time collaboration stuff for a while - felt good to finally get it out in front of users.
Good post, but in my experience full mockups and pseudo-code is still not close to 90% of the final product unless I'm doing something that is trivial for me. There is just too much complexity that emerges in places which are difficult-to-impossible to anticipate until I've dug into code and physically tested the ideas I've laid out in pseudo-code. I'd probably put the number more in the range of 25-50% depending on the scope of the project.

Of course for simpler projects or in domains where the developer is extremely experienced and can anticipate every hiccup that might occur, that number could go much higher, but I don't think this is usually the case in the wild.
HTML5, Mozilla and the Future of the Web
Ah, this is the original article (everything else uses this source as their reference). I forgot that my university has a Science subscription; I'll change it to the abstract, which should be viewable, instead.
Maybe I misread the article but I thought that the bacteria did not multiply if there was neither phosphorous nor arsenic present, but did multiply if there was arsenic but no phosphorous. I could be interpreting this wrong but this seems to rule out "neutralizing" or "getting rid of" the arsenic. (Otherwise why was it unable to multiply in the absence of phosphorous and arsenic?)
It took us millions of years to get all around the globe, when it "should" (in the same sense as above) only have taken a couple hundred. I don't think we should assume that life will necessarily take the most efficient path to any particular goal.
The bit that worked though, both for this and Richard Reid's shoe bomb, was that passengers - not air marshals - noticed the terrorist trying to set light to something in the main cabin area.

All it takes is a terrorist bright enough to try and set light to their bomb in the toilet rather than sitting surrounded by other passengers while fiddling with a fuse and lighter, and the system has failed. These attacks are failing because the chosen attackers are stupid, not because the system is effective.

Air Marshals. 4.2 arrests per year average, $200m per arrest. A very, very expensive comfort blanket.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

--Benjamin Franklin
Neat app and one of the best examples of a keep-it-simple webapp I've seen.

But let's talk about the ID. Sure, it's a hundred and forty trillion, but it's also less than 48 bits. Note that every visit to the site's root URL generates a new ID, and compare with The Fridge which (very reasonably) uses a 128-bit-equivalent ID: 25 alphanumerics!

I'm not buying this "hard to type" argument. First, an app would ideally just allow you to get a more-typable version if you specifically request it. Second, how often are you typing in IDs? When the URL is on paper or on another device? I'm thinking it's not often enough to truly affect usability. Third, I use a keyboard that doesn't even have a numpad and somehow I get by.

Finally, let's say we spec out that we do want at least 47 bits of IDs. The site can get there by using 10 lowercase letters or 8 of all alphanumerics. Game over. Now the lowercase option comes down to adding two characters for the sake of better typability, which is a crummy trade. Not only for Twitter reasons but because the longer the URL is, the less shareable it looks.
Soon-To-Be Professor Bob Metcalfe Sees ‘Innovation Bubble’
A simple Forth interpreter in Clojure
You can also flip it around and replace the background with a virtual set.
But the way this is working is by looking at the depth buffer and replacing only the person. So you could invert that mask and use this for chroma keying the person into a different environment. Then if you had depth info for the environment shot, you could potentially simulate a light and cast shadows from the person into the environment, and so on.

Long story short I think most Kinect hacks will be theoretically possible with 2d image analysis, but its more the speed of iteration and simplicity of these solutions that's interesting. For a similar scenario look at the way many modern game engines use a "g-buffer" which includes depth and surface normal info to create more realistic effects:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_shading
I'm going to keep this on file if the situation ever comes up again... I couldn't quite articulate the sentiment then. Although it might burn bridges.
Yeah I have to agree, but I still find this app very interesting and worthwhile. It's just a shame the most tweeted stuff is such dire, pointless BS.
I definitely agree that in terms of effort expended implementation is almost always >=50%, but effort can be of various types. Sometimes when I've implemented ideas, the implementation took 90% of the time, but it was basically straightforward code-slinging, so I wouldn't credit it with more than 10% or so of the total intellectual effort expended on the project. Other times, important stuff does come up when implementing that sheds new light on the idea (or shows that it wasn't as fully developed as I initially thought).

When I'm implementing someone else's paper, a heuristic I use is something like: did I "just" implement this paper, or did I learn important things while implementing it that aren't actually mentioned in the paper, and which I should probably write up somewhere for other people's benefit? Sometimes the answer is "just implemented" even if the implementation took a long time and was hairy.
I agree that this is remarkable, but I think it's valid to criticize publicizing the finding as an astrobiology discovery, which is exactly what NASA (or its public relations department, at any rate) is calling it--and which it is not, despite its implications for astrobiology.

If we care about engaging the public, we should be concerned about sensationalism that detracts from the solid work of the scientists. If you cause people to think you're going to show them extraterrestrial life, fairly or not, you run the risk of them tuning out when the reality is less flashy, even if it's groundbreaking.
Nothing in particular, I just really enjoyed the first two you wrote. Seeing the entire process of launching a product laid out was very interesting. Thanks!
I'm not a biologist but:

Assuming that arsenic life just adapted, we don't know if it is possible that arsenic life can evolve in a non-earthlike environment or not, do we?

I.e. we don't know if life can evolve in a non-earthlike environment.
Except for MUMPS. Fuck that shit.

Amen.
> free typing tutors out there.

Why tutor? At a glance I thought it was a very cheap way for employers to test via the browser an possible hire's typing speed. A certificate is printed by the person at home who brings that to the employer. It should have a URL that could be used to prove they didn't just make up the result.
That was a well written op-ed
Ya Doctorow writes everything under creative commons or some such license. I mentioned it because there's a fictional technology very similar to your app in it
Google App Engine Now Streamlines Push, Boosts API Limits And More
You can Google "YouTube Profitability" and one of the top responses is Eric Schmidt saying YouTube is "close to profitability" from Sept of this year.
Here's the article from Science: http://www.scribd.com/doc/44550217/Science-2010-Wolfe-Simon-...
We're very close to being able to replace a personal computer with cloud-based services, but the technology to replace a workstation is still in its infancy. We've got things like WebGL and Google Native Client, but they're immature and can't yet be strung together to easily make something like a 3d content creation app. Amazon's EC2 now offers GPGPU instances, but there are no frameworks to help me port my scientific computing app to use EC2 as a backend and WebGL as a front-end. (And I'd be out of luck if I wanted to visualize a resulting data set that exceeded 4GB: I'd have to shift all or part of the rendering pipeline to the cloud, and WebGL means it would be all or nothing.) It also seems a bit absurd that we still need something more than a web browser to do web development.

The other big thing lacking is integration: I can't save a Google Doc directly to my Dropbox account, proper OpenID support isn't widespread, when Photoshop does come to the cloud, I definitely won't be able to upload directly to Picasa and Flickr, and nobody seems to be interested in enabling the seamless (secure) sharing of data between web apps.
Scientists trained bacteria to eat Arsenic
Obviously, you entered it on a non-Japanese-speaking corkboard.
That's a bit pat considering that 95% of workplaces use Windows.
> Fearing a terrorist attack is perfectly rational the question is how much liberty we’re willing to give up to prevent such attacks.

How much liberty are you willing to give up to prevent automobile accidents? children drowning in swimming pools?

Both of these kill far more people every year than terrorist attacks against americans. Why is it ok for thousands of people to die every year from drunk drivers, yet I have to take off my shoes at the airport?

Schneier's point has consistently been to fight terrorism effectively. Spend our money and resources in areas that actually reduce terrorism and deaths, rather than areas that appear effective, yet are ultimately worthless (taking off shoes, 3oz liquid restriction, TSA circling things on your boarding pass)
Possibly a small sludge pond that would filter the water through as per a sewage treatment plant?

I'm thinking that if it's in the wells, it's due to the solvent action of water on the rocks, and cleaning out the wells would only be a temporary solution.
Just got picked up by tech crunch: http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/02/bitly-news/
Hands-On With Duke Nukem Forever
they can add comments.
DIY Thermal Imaging System for under $200
Pros and Cons for running Google Voice as primary number on an iPhone
That was "interesting" in that I like expanding my horizons, but it was a terrible presentation. Plus, it looks like Haskell and I got the impression from his lead-in that he was going to introduce a new language.

However, I actually came here to say something else about his material: if it is harder to decompose the business requirement into Haskell than it is to write monkey tests for one's Blub language, I am not certain anyone wins when going with a provably correct implementation.
Never happens again? You already have the 3-alarm fire, its too late. That's my point exactly. You catch only what you can think of and write tests to cover.
Diving with nitrox (nitrogen/oxygen) beyond 500 feet is very rarely done, and HPNS isn't really an issue because the overwhelming narcotic effect of the nitrogen would be devastating (think 20 tequila shots in a row). HPNS seems to be caused by rapid changes in the partial pressure of helium, so it can be alleviated somewhat by using less helium and replacing it with nitrogen.

COMEX (a French commercial diving company) has done successful working dives to beyond 1,700 feet on hydroheliox, a mixture of 49% hydrogen, 50% helium, and 1% oxygen. However, there are major practical issues with breathing a hydrogen mixture--namely, if you have hydrogen and oxygen together at high pressure with more than a tiny fraction of oxygen, it will explode. This makes it only practical to use a hydrogen mixture at a depth great enough where 1% oxygen is a high enough partial pressure to sustain consciousness.

Also, hydrogen at high partial pressures is said to have a narcotic effect similar to LSD, but permanent.
The APL literature seems to be pretty insular, including terminology.

I could not agree more, honestly! I think my route towards understanding some of the optimizations based on the current implementation of J and/or NARS2k (http://www.nars2000.org/), probably this is the route to enlightenment. Before embarking on that journey, I will read up on your hints, thank you very much!
Hey, no worries; to each his own. I happily spent $30 (twice!) to buy shrink-wrap typing software.

I think my app outshines the top Google result for "learn to type online". But as you mentioned, not everyone will be willing to pay for that difference.
Happy Holidays from the App Engine team - 1.4.0 SDK released
I believe that the punch-line is also "but I don't intend to pay hourly industry rates".
Could it be that sone people sacrifice a little of their liberty for the safety of... others?
Ask Hn: Why do startup has Programming Challenge as part of hiring?
Just wondering yhy do startup has Programming Challenge as part of hiring? I know Indinero and Quora does it. Who else does it? Why? Is it any useful?

https://indinero.com/jobs/backend-engineer

http://www.quora.com/challenges
Apparently they accumulate it.
Ten Times Blacker Than Black
The first three commenters are doing their best youtube comment impersonation. I do wonder how you start a new site and keep this kind of thing away.
Except: the assurance-contract aspect of Groupon is now just an eccentricity. Every deal is designed to hit its target; maybe the businesses get some small peace of mind knowing that they're sure to get X bodies through the door or pay nothing, but the value is all elsewhere, from promotional acumen.

And, the other idealistic parts of Groupon's groups-reaching-threshold-for-collective-action vision mean very little for their overall success, compared to more conventional ideas like great copywriting, being the first mover, having a large incentive-compensated sales staff, having a great name/brand, and so forth.
How to organize a Rails App?
This is a really interesting technique, and were I in charge of the build system here I'd try and implement something similar.

The code samples are particularly useful as you can see how best to adapt this to another version control system, even something draconian.
You've got three methods:

TAM, SAM and SOM. These stand for total available market, serviceable available market and serviceable obtainable market.

You should start by looking into these.

Here's a quick guide to each http://tamsamsom.blogspot.com/2009/03/tam-sam-som.html
His tweet of the announcement is, characteristically, more entertaining than the one in the article from the CEO:

http://twitter.com/dozba/status/10401328010366976
98 WPM @ 100% accuracy is probably not my main demographic. :-) It is a known bug though, and on my list to fix, but thanks for taking the time to screen cap it.

What tool have you used previously to measure your rate at 130-140 wpm? QBF counts every 5 characters as a "word"; other apps might measure differently.
Did the tool not keep pace with your typing?

Thanks for the feedback!
People can talk all they want about appropriate topics for an interview, but the bottom line is this is simply excellent customer service on the part of 92nd Street Y.
None. Pay the PR person instead somehow. Don't give away equity so freely.
What about grandparents with poor eyesight? That joke next generations of the iPad Photoshop aside, tablets are never going to have 24 inch diagonal screens.

My father's stuck with Windows because of legacy apps and he must have a large screen with large print, but if it'll run Skype my mom would be perfectly satisfied with Chrome OS and my sysadmin load would be significantly reduced.
Clickable: http://rclayton.net

I think it's very elegantly done. Kudos.
The Version Number Is Dead. Google Barely Whispers The Launch Of Chrome 8
that's a lonely way of looking at things; there's probably nothing quite like us. i've said before but should reiterate, we perceive and experience a tiny portion of what makes the universe alive.
Unfortunately your theory is mostly flawed. Industry standard click-through rates and funnel conversion data disprove this.
Looks like Google reads Hacker News :)