skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More info here: http://www.theaircar.com/acf/air-cars/energy-storage.html

With all the hype around the Prius, Tesla, etc, I wonder how we never heard of this till now.
Let's Just Blame Intel | My Philly Network
I take it there's a lot still to be done? Otherwise why not give it a shot and see how it does?
I agree with you--my point was not that twitter should have initially approached scaling like large enterprises do--only that as a natural consequence of smallness, small companies don't and aren't in the habit.

Twitter now has the resources and real user load. The window where performance problems are permissible closes eventually--see Friendster. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. But when your userbase is threatening to leave and dreaming up alternatives on their blogs daily, it's hard to call it premature.
Now that would be an awesome iPhone app
How'd I do? Follow up to last week's TV appearance thread
Last Thursday I asked for advice re: my first TV appearance. That thread is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=235406

The submitted link above leads to the video of my TV appearance as well as an article I wrote in response to appearing on the show.

Last week I received advice about what to wear, say and how to comport myself. All super useful. How'd I do? Suggestions for next time?
This blog entry, by the way, is very annoying. It outlines the problem and then stops dead. "We'll debut the answer this week!". But no description of the answer.

The irony of a page that complains about "More..." links but leaves you wanting more was not lost on me.

So I clicked on the link marked "the answer" and I got... a page that neither discussed the problem nor demonstrated the answer.

I came this close to just clicking away forever, in complete annoyance... but I finally decided to click the link to Humanized, where I found the feature in question. I agree that it's kind of disorienting, but I might get used to it. It's an interesting idea that's worth trying out.
Ten Thousand Cents : A Crowdsourcing Experiment
10 Incredibly Awesome Documents to Help You Start a Company
Howard goes deep twice to lift Phillies (AP) | My Philly Network
It's a little amusing that Loopt pulled off a better Yelp application than Yelp itself.

Yelp promised tons of cool location-aware features for their iPhone app, but what they released today is little more than Yelp Mobile. Terrible usability and lack of new features.

I'd say that Loopt, on the other hand, is the best app released today. I'm very impressed at what they're doing. And Yelp integration is just icing on the cake.
this is why politics can be so frustrating. we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying.
people sometimes don't realize the second part.
Before starting a new business talk to customers - your Mom is not a focus group
d0mine, personality types affect the success/failure of any venture, its relevant and useful to this community.
But we are resourceful. Sometimes at justifying our own special, unique, boneheaded worldview.

Don't send a Stallman to do a Kay's work (or vice-versa).
Beer Is Health Food
Interesting - I would've drawn a different conclusion than Stephenson from the same data. Instead of "Do it right the first time," I would've said "Revising means rewriting. Don't try to salvage crap."

I never get it right the first time. I also never succeed in turning that ugly first draft into pretty code. Instead, revising for me means taking a look at what I was trying to achieve with that ugly first draft, throwing it away, and doing it right the second time. All this done iteratively, so I'm never throwing out a complete body of work, only the latest bits on top.
No wonder I can never get any funding. My stuff is too out there. Venture really means "do not venture", i.e., "to boldly go where everyone has gone before". LOL.
I would guess that about 3%-5% of the population is actually attractive. and that's being optimistic.
the same for intelligence.

combine the two and you have anywhere from .25% to .09% of the populace as actually worthwhile :p
Windows Mobile and Symbian cover a lot of devices and many years of brand building and development - Apple has one phone, 12 months of sales.

For them to get it so right that it competes even slightly impresses me.
Feedback on Startup: Simple, fast photo sharing
I agree. Along with what you said in your first paragraph, I've found that the times that I've completely lost all my work on a project and had to rewrite it from scratch, the second "draft" was far superior and easier to write than the first; mostly because I had already weeded out all of the bad assumptions. However, I doubt this is feasible for anything larger than a fairly simple one-man weekend project; for exactly the reasons you mention.
At Photosleeve we're trying to eliminate the photo workflow. We've made it so that you can plug in your camera, and a few minutes later have an email full of your photos that you can share. No more manual copying, resizing, rotating, uploading, backing-up, etc. Just one step.

We recently enabled signups and are looking for feedback. Here are some specifics:

* We use a two-stage upload process so we can satisfy instant gratification and give lasting peace of mind. First, smaller versions of your photos are uploaded so that you can share quickly. Once that's done we back up your original photo data to S3. You can use the originals for printing, or just so you can stop worrying about your hard drive crashing and taking your photos with it.

* You can upload photos from your camera to email/web in a single step (copies, rotates, resizes, uploads, sends email) using the Windows desktop app

* Alternatively, you can upload using the web-uploader, which also resizes photos before uploading them, and does it all right within your browser (uses Silverlight + Flash)

* We'll send you an email with thumbnails of your photos right in it (HTML mail) that you can forward to people without clogging their inboxes

* You can use drag-and-drop within your browser to create albums, export to Facebook, order prints, create another email, etc. You can try some actions on our demo site, http://www.photosleeve.com/user/demo/album/eiffel-tower

If you're curious about what we've used to build Photosleeve, check out our credits page, http://www.photosleeve.com/credits

Feel free to give us feedback on any aspect of the site.
except that ziPhone does nasty things like giving every unlocked/jailbroken iphone the same MAC address.

d'oh - but it's easy to use :-)
Writing a compiler in Ruby bottom up - step 10
One thing Derek failed to mention that might be interesting to the HN set: we're using Catalyst, which is a Perl-based MVC framework. It's a little unorthodox, as the popular choices these days seem to be RoR and django.

We've been really happy with Catalyst, especially its Chained dispatch type. And CPAN has been really helpful since there's just the two of us working on this right now. :-)

Catalyst has an active mailing list and IRC channel full of helpful people. For more information, check out http://www.catalystframework.org/.
They seem correct because they almost all change their minds so they can't be wrong:

"Last year, Joe Q. Bloggs wrote 'Why the iPhone is terrible, stupid and will go nowhere and nobody will buy it'"

"So Joe, are you surprised by the iPhone's success?"

"No."

"Last year, Bill Q. Briggs wrote 'the iPhone is absolutely and without any doubt the. worst. phone. ever., bar none, and it has no redeeming features. at all. It is the "big rigs" of phones'."

"So, Mr Briggs, are you surprised by the iPhones success?"

"No. Anyone can see it's a great phone, I always said it had the bling factor."
I'm old, Gandalf. I know I don't look it, but I'm beginning to feel it in my heart. I feel... thin. Sort of stretched, like... butter scraped over too much bread. I need a holiday. A very long holiday.
Actual numbers: a third of VCs surveyed attended one of five schools: Harvard, Stanford, UPenn, Duke or MIT. So presumably, two thirds didn't. This doesn't really sound like a huge degree of homogeneity, especially given that your average VC has more than one degree.
It is beautiful code, but a lot more attention needs to be paid to the production quality version. In particular most beautiful quicksorts take O(n^2) time on a list filled with identical items (see Tim Peters ch. in the Python Cookbook or my article: http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2008/04/sorting-in-anger/
isn't compressed air pretty dangerous? i.e. if you end up in an accident
Followup Answers re: Lifestyle vs. Investment and Angel vs. VC
Aren't community papers essentially already "hyperlocal" (think SF Bay Guardian, East Bay Express, etc.)? Even at the city paper level for most small- and mid-sized cities, the local section is a big part of why people subscribe (think SF Chronicle).

A large percentage of the national reporting in these papers comes from the AP, so the papers aren't adding any unique perspective -- they're just delivering the content to you... at a high cost. You may rely on those AP stories for a broader view of the nation and world, but for the owners of the paper it's a whole lot cheaper to deliver you that news online.
I have to strongly second this: one of the best psychology books around.
video from TED: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/frans_lanting_s_lyrical_n...
yes, that's right. all the teams get together all the time plus every week they provide support to one team for a couple of hours - helping them with whatever they need. in addition, dreamit hosts dinner events where they bring in successful entrepreneurs and experts to talk about funding, pr, UI, etc. it's been great so far - the founders are entrepreneurs themselves so they're also a good sounding board
the workspace is different. we work in the third floor of the science center and the workspaces are a cross between cubicles and dressing rooms (provides some privacy). we also have access to private conference rooms if needed. we get everything we need (copier, printer, etc.) except everyone needs to bring in their laptop/desktop
"... Look at his areas of expertise. Netscape. Ning. Loudcloud. Don't see any TV or movie industry experience. Do you? ..."

But Andreessen is just smart enough to know that "computer + foo = computer".

I found this neat heuristic in Alan Coopers "inmates running the asylum" ~ http://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/06723164... It means digital media processed by computers are right up his (and other computer/digital natives) alley.
Facebook Launches for the iPhone
About Gigafollowers on Twitter
I think the technically correct answer to your question is "door number three".

I'd watch out, though, because if I were blader I'd be sorely tempted to answer by punching you in the face. :) It's not like you didn't receive fair warning!
A lot of people in India drive cars that run off of compressed natural gas.
Henry Ford probably didn't have a lot of experience with horses either.
What fraction of college grads have even one degree from any of those places?
I always thought it was that funny that animals have humane societies.
Test Drive of the Google Hosted Ajax Libraries
Presentation Slides and Files from Velocity Conference on Web Site Performance
Very roughly, 1%.
Few things in the common life of people are as dangerous as 25 gallons of unleaded.

I'd much rather face any compressed air explosion than be soaked in burning gas.
Neat. This also opens the door for more energy dense and pressure stable compressed gas fuels like nitrogen and CO2.
The Prototype-Production Knob
This is probably a stupid question, but how did you find out what other sites were hosted at that IP address? Are you reliant on search engine data, or is there some other way of doing it?
Nice. jrockway would be happy to hear that.

I'm debating whether to do my new app in Django in order to learn Python or do it in Catalyst as I already know Perl.
Introducing DataFabric
I've found the CBC still delivers quality today. The show you watched is profiled here: http://www.cbc.ca/national/

Click "Latest Broadcast" if you'd like to watch it.
Another key early Facebook employee, Jeff Hammerbacher, is leaving the company
Get your E3 and game questions answered -
Silicon Valley Losing its Luster?
I don't quite buy this argument. Gas is far less volatile than people think. In the event of an accident, I would much rather face a tank of gasoline, which most likely wouldn't explode at all, than a tank of compressed air.

In the middle of the fire, however, I'm not so sure.
If you already know perl, then there's no reason not to use Catalyst. While it's lacking in the shiny marketing (build a blog in 5 minutes) that other frameworks seem to like, it's a good bit more flexible in terms of your choices of Models and Views, and in the way that you can present dispatch logic than other frameworks.
As the author of Catalyst::DispatchType::Chained, thanks!

I think most of us in the Cat community consider it a secret weapon - it's not optimised for simple, fast stuff like rails is and it's not optimised for content sites like Django is but it scales really nicely to large projects and CPAN helps keep them from getting too large in the first place.
Play with both.

Perl and python are very different languages. They're both good. You might find you're vastly more productive in python. I'm vastly more productive in Perl.

(declaration of bias: I'm a Catalyst core team member and would be delighted to see you on #catalyst on irc.perl.org :)
Aussie students quench farmers' thirst for water management
Thanks for that link - fascinating story about a fascinating life. As "clippy" as it was though, I have to wonder how much great conversation was edited out...
>Few things in the common life of people are as dangerous as 25 gallons of unleaded.

How about driving a car?
IGDA 2006 Casual Games Whitepaper
The Mythical-Man Month Surgical Team Revisited
Attractiveness is context sensitive. Go to this page, and click on "photos" for the various women,

http://www.fashionmodeldirectory.com/models/search/now

Now, with rare exceptions, ALL of them are perfect 10s. And yet the votes hover around 5 or 6. None of them rate the "8" that the woman in the link gave herself. Yet, down at the wastewater treatment facility, she's probably indeed an 8. Or at the local WalMart. Or a lot of places.
Here's a Catalyst screencast on how to quickly create a form:
http://letsgetdugg.com/view/Catalyst_with_FormBuilder_screen...

Also, there's a WikiVS entry on Catalyst vs. Rails:
http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Catalyst_vs_Ruby_on_Rails
Ask YC: Typical mentoring times and template NDAs
Hi, I'm about to start approaching possible mentors for my idea/startup and I'd like to know whats the typical cost (in terms of time) for a mentor. Just a few hrs a month or more frequently? What have people/mentors found pls ?
Also, does anyone know a good place for sample/template NDAs ?
Tks Alex
Health Goes High-Tech In Philly | My Philly Network
How about "Try it now" instead of "Join now"? Also, how about more varied and colorful pictures on the front page?
I hope these two questions are not related.
Re: NDA, revise and tweak anything you find but docstoc is an ok place to start...

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/272018/Non-Disclosure-Agreement-(NDA)-Template
Metaprogramming Roundup: Speed, Ruby Macros, Screencasts
Other than "thinly described" :-(. Noticed it too late, now it's there forever.
I'm sorry but I don't believe them that it can run for 300km in between refuels. Compressed air is just not a very dense fuel. Enough fuel to power a car for that long would be a tank about 1/3 the size of the car.

(My calculation: gasoline stores about 3000 times as much energy as compressed air per volume. But a gasoline engine is also only 10% efficient, an air engine would be much more efficient. Assuming 100% efficient, then gasoline stores 300 times as much. I can go about 300km using 11 or so gallons of gas. Lets assume a lighter car, so 5 gallons per 300km * 300 = 1500 gallons of air, which is about 5.5 cubic meters. So you'd need a box 1.75 meters on each side. Which is about 1/3 of a car.)

Obviously if they can store the air at a higher density then the box can be smaller, but if they did that it would also have to be stronger and thus heavier. (Edit: they are running at about 1/3 more pressure than my numbers assumed.)

And now comes the bigger problem: you waste a tremendous amount of energy by heating the air when you compress it.

And then you let the air cool, and lose again, because as it expands it gets _really_ cold, and won't expand as much. On the plus side running the A/C will be free. But forget about heat in the winter.

Using higher compression makes this much worse.

All in all, I simply don't think this will work for that distance. Maybe as a 30km car it would work fine (and there's a large market for that), but not 300km.

And the heating/cooling losses are really going to hurt efficiency.

And as an aside using vegetable oil is a bad idea. Unless you can seal it away from air (doubtful) it will oxidize and won't be oil anymore.

Now please tell me if I made any mistakes in my calculations.
Yay! My article made to the front page of Hacker News again :)

I just wanted to tell you that if you like my articles, you can subscribe to my rss feed here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/catonmat

Thanks! :)
"There's not a lot of put downs". I guess times have changed.
Gas vapors are dangerous. Without the air, you can drop a lit match in a gas tank, without a 'big boom'.

However, in an accident, you'd want to pick the compressed air tank. The tanks are very strong. Gas tanks in cars are built with very flimsy steel.

Industries like welding has been using high-pressure tanks for decades, and bottles rarely fail.
If you decide where the entrepreneurial hot spots are by polling your site visitors, what you get is a lot of data about where people wish they were.

The fact is, practically all startups need investors. Entrepreneurship means more than web/software startups, of course, but for web/software startups, the limiting reagent is investors with expertise and connections in that area. And they are highly concentrated in Silicon Valley.

It doesn't matter how vibrant a place seems if it is missing the specific type of expertise you need. So while Brazil, for example, may be a fine place for some forms of entrepreneurship, it will have the same drawback as a home for new tech startups that Silicon Valley would for, say, new fashion labels.
Frans Lanting: A lyrical view of life on Earth [video]
Compressed air is dangerous if it is released too rapidly, especially if it's pointed at your eye or someone breaks the cap off a bottle.

Otherwise, compressed air is used in every car shop in the world for. Pneumatic tools may not require as much pressure as this car, though.

But we have plenty of experience in designing containers to hold gas under high pressures.
Board of advisors, not board of directors.
I'd be curious how difficult it would be to migrate from a traditional setup to this setup.
I didn't go there...
sleep.fm?

Hopefully those guys have something amazing up their sleeves.
Thanks for the feedback. Good point about the front page photos.
No specific feedback on the startup, but I don't care for it when folks send images via email. Put it online, where I have more control.

I guess I do have advice: why not focus on a 1-click way for getting images onto a webpage they can email to their friends?

(But I can understand how complex it can be for some folks to figure out how to get images to their family and friends.)
Ask YC: Four Year Roadmap
Over the last week I've submitted several questions to YC regarding startups and programming. Your responses have been intelligent, thoughtful, and inspiring -- thank you.

I realized my questions all revolve around a central issue and I should have just addressed it from the start. I'm 23 and work as a manager in a nontechnical field and won't be able to pursue another career full time for another 4 years. I have a computer science degree and consider myself a very good hacker, but my web programming experience is currently limited to HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, and some JavaScript.

In four years I either want to be able to work at a tech startup (or a company like Google) or have the technical and business savvy to start my own. The question is: How should I spend my time to give myself the best chance of success?
"number of people allowed to follow = people following me * N"

Makes it tough to get started on Twitter. If I sign up, I want to find my 10 closest friends and follow them right away.

It'd be good to introduce a formula, but that one isn't quite the right one. Maybe a velocity based solution?
Question: where do you guys even begin learning how to deal with legal issues like this, copyright issues, incorporating, etc etc?
U.S. Considers Takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Shares would be worth little to nothing.
My vote for the most beautiful quicksort is this Haskell one:

module Quicksort where

quicksort (x:xs) =
quicksort [ i | i <- xs, i < x ]
++ [x] ++
quicksort [ i | i <- xs, i >= x ]

quicksort [] = []
the air tanks in the garage aren't in danger of being suddenly ruptured by a car that rear ends you at 40 mph.

And don't tell me that doesn't happen, since I had that happen to me two times already, strangely enough the accidents were less than 2 weeks apart, and both times they were big SUVs(Navigator and an X5). Actually the same thing happened to a friend(in his case it was a Grand Cherokee). So accidents like this probably happen quiet often.

And yes before someone asks in all 3 cases, it was a soccer mom on a cell phone.
Ask YC: Where have all the cowbo... web designers gone?
In my spare time, I fancy myself an entrepreneur and maybe even a decent web designer. More specifically, I am a computer scientist who loves to hack away for however long it takes to bring a particular idea to life. (i.e., I am NOT an MBA looking for a handout and I do fully appreciate the difficulty of both frontend and backend development)

That being said, it is quite plain that accessible, standards-compliant, and beautiful(!) web design is just as essential to the success of a startup as is the code powering the thing in the first place. And frankly, my sorta-kinda-not-really-good-enough web design skillz simply won't cut it when it comes time to do the public launch.

Now, problem is, though I have something like one or two dozen friends that I could very easily ask for help on the technical end of things (with the promise of equity, partnership, a few beers, or whatever) I know exactly ZERO folks who could join up and help to build a sleek, functional, and standards-compliant frontend.

While I do realize that I could solve this problem by spending the Big Bucks and hiring someone with the aforementioned credentials, the problem remains that I'm not exactly loaded at the moment and I'm really just looking to launch something on my own with the help of some friends. After all, big design contracts can come later once a few investors have been brought on board.

Thus, we arrive at the big question: have any of you folks out there experienced a similar dearth of designers? And, if not, do you have any suggestions as to where one might find local web design talent whom share in the entrepreneurial spirit and are more interested in becoming part of a potentially growing startup than in being contracted for large sums of money?
One option would be to do what Joshua Schachter did. He built Delicious in his spare time. When he was ready to quit his job, he transformed Delicious from a hobby into a startup by raising money.
You must have never written any GUI code.
Thanks for the feedback. This is exactly the kind of detailed feedback we were hoping for.

A revised landing page is in the works. You gave us a ton more to think about :)

RE: squares. We do create square thumbnails (it lets us fit a lot more on a page, especially at 1024x768). Clicking the thumbnails goes to a larger, correctly aspected version, and of course there's the original photo data as well.
Wow. That's so beautiful and elegant! Thanks for sharing! I added it to my article!