skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ultracapacitors are cool, and may in fact be useful for this kind of thing, but in order to justify a headline like "Finally, an [x]" then you really need at least a working prototype of an [x], not just a press release that says "we're gonna be building an [x] any day now".

(See also: Moller Aerocar)
Yahoo Files Proxy, Offers Chance To Rescind Icahn Votes
Maybe it doesn't exist because data-mining unstructured bits is not worth the effort and there's no obvious place to attach ads?
TI Downgrades 2Q Forecast
Good going guys. I love articles like this.
I am wondering why evolution happens here and not elsewhere. Every planet in our solar system has been hit by comets, has a cycle of night and day, etc. We should be seeing evolution on the planets near us. For example in the Russian nuclear reactor that failed there is a bacteria that has adapted to feeding off of radiation. So life can happen in the most extreme circumstances. Just because other planets of extreme circumstances doesn't exclude them from evolution.
Interestingly, the one thing that really jumped out at me from the first installment was the fact that YC has 22 groups this summer. Wowzers - that's a lotta people. Agree with the first commenter at G&M - give us an RSS feed though ... The odds of me remembering this, despite it being something I'd like to read, are low to say the least.
RailsConf Europe 2008: Registration is now open
"why Disney stopped innovating"

Walt Disney died in 1964. Disney hardly stopped innovating then.
Wow, just because he's not overweight it's assumed that he has an advanced case of cancer?

He's probably a lot healthier than a lot of CEOs, most of which are old and overweight (and therefore at a much higher risk for all kinds of health problems). No one is writing articles about them and how shareholders should be concerned.
Actually that point isn't necessarily obvious to me. Maybe we can create an AI which is 10% smarter than ourselves, but maybe a 10% smarter AI still isn't smart enough to create an AI 10% smarter than itself. Maybe building a 121% AI that smart is such a hard task that even our 110% AI can't manage it -- maybe the best it can do is a 115% AI.

Analogy: Out of Lego, I could build a robot arm that's capable of building a slightly larger robot arm out of Lego. But I can't just keep on doing this 'til I have a robot arm the size of the Burj Dubai, because there are limits to how big a Lego-based robot arm can be before it collapses under its own weight.

I'm not saying that AIs are like this, just that they might be.
Well, the PS2 is cheap and approachable. The games are generally no longer $40 and $50 and good games can be had for under $20. The PS3 and 360 are still very expensive machines. Not just in initial outlay, but in keeping up with the Joneses. At $50 or $60 for every new game, that sure adds up fast. Let's not forget, that $400 is a lot of money to a lot of people.
Apple's Latest Generation iPhone Unveiled
You are presenting a false dichotomy. A professional is not going to stop you from grieving in whatever modality feels right to you, while helping you identify emotions, process them, and dealing with what unique challenges come up.

You can have both. Get the professional help.
The correct quote is "attitude is no substitute for competence", and I believe esr said that.
By developing for the iPhone you are mostly restricting your market to North America. It is available overseas but not very popular for a number of reasons. This may not bother you but it is something to consider. By comparison Blackberry seems to have a well entrenched user base everywhere I go, and almost every business targetted device seems to run J2ME or full blown Java.
It's also a good test for services that might be ripe for the picking. In other words, if their mobile site viewed on your PC is better than their actual site....well maybe they deserve to be put out of business by a startup.
Somebody at the LA Times is incredibly receptive to PR people: first friendfeed profile and now weebly. Great scores guys!
iirc it allows for two different versions of code running at the same time. application is responsible for consistency issues. mostly used for hot code loading.

of course, this is assuming i got your question right to begin with :o)
European Official Offers Rebuke of Microsoft
| Maybe I just need a quality tech blog that updates infrequently.

A Friday Week-In-Tech Wrap-up? I'm about to launch my own blog soon, and that sounds like a fantastic idea. Mind if I have at?
I totally agree that a story SPECULATING about Jobs having cancer is total crap. But on a slight tangent, I disagree (reluctantly) with his decision to keep it private if he DOES have cancer or if it comes back at a later date. I don't think he should have kept it private the first time, either.

If you're a CEO who can be easily replaced, this isn't as big of a deal (i.e. making it public or not public isn't going to rock the boat too much either way). But to a great portion of the general public, Steve Jobs and Apple are the same thing. He's largely credited with single-handedly bringing them back from the brink. If Jobs announced today that he was quitting Apple, the stock would almost surely tank. He's the CEO of a public company, and if his personal health has a signification effect on stock price, I think he has an obligation to disclose that. Billions of dollars are at stake to shareholders, and they have the right to make decisions with all the information that controls the price of that stock.

If you're a politician, you know your lifestyle is under the microscope and your morals and ethics are always in question. You know this going in. If you're a CEO of a public company, you know that you can personally have a large impact on the stock price. You know this going in. It's unfortunate that personal issues can impact the stock, but if they do, I think it needs to be disclosed.

While I find the article itself off-putting, I can't help but think of the loss of trust in Jobs when he didn't disclose it the first time. I think it sucks that he is in a position that he needs to dislose it, and I can't imagine going through that publicly if I was in his shoes. But is it really that surprising for people to be worried and talking about this when they're going to assume that he won't disclose the information if he does get sick again? Probably not a very popular position, but if you had a couple million in Apple stock (hypothetical -- I don't), would you be okay with it losing half its value in one day because Jobs didn't disclose in advance as possible and let you decide over time whether to take a chance and hang on or to sell on your own terms?

Either way, I don't envy the position the guy is in. I hope it really is just something he can quickly get over.
Google Result Offers You to "Skip Intro"
Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing
EU pushes open-source standard as 'smart business'
AT&T and Apple Tightening Policies to Reduce iPhone Unlocking
Web Ad Revenue To Double In Five Years? Doesn’t Seem Too Crazy
Facebook Platform: The Year Ahead
willchang - thank you for your insightful comment. I believe you have captured my intent for writing this particular article which is that I am not trying to demonize VC's but only to explain that VC's are humans too (using your words) and they have needs and responsibilities, just like entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, for most entrepreneurs, we don't understand how VC's operate and as a result, we end up paying dearly for our mistakes when we project our own romantic desires onto the harsh reality.

Based on my past experience, my only correction to your analogy is that we (the entrepreneurs) are in fact the mistresses here, not the other way around. The relationship is asymmetrical and we are on the short end of the asymmetry (until we can generate net cash on our own).
Ah, I know the answers!

disport

headaches

mistakes

-----------

Alternatively:

pork

mommy & daddy alone time

the beast with two backs

-----------

The possibilities are overwhelming!

Interestingly, I find that some of the more creative "euphemisms" for sex (pork is a middling example) have more shock value when they show up in conversation... the old standards are simply overused, in spite of our best efforts in child rearing, and don't work anymore in conjuring up sufficiently taboo images. Terse, vivid imagery is much more of a live wire.
Wake up, Silicon Valley! Chinese Lessons for American Entrepreneurs
Curtains | duvet | bedroom accessories upto 50% discount
Weebly is the best online WYSIWG I've come across, but I've run into several issues (even in firefox). One big problem I had was trying to help someone create a site when they had some (not sure) version of IE. I understand that for a rich site like this, IE will be buggy. But they either need to fix it or tell IE users to upgrade / download firefox.
Your analogy is particularly apt if you consider that two of the means of achieving AI are emergent and thus not engineering and not at all friendly to reverse engineering. If we can simulate the brain's processes in bulk, we still don't necessarily understand how it does what it does. (Like making a photocopy of ciphertext.) Likewise, if we create some sort of architecture that lets us evolve AIs, there is no guarantee that we will be able to understand how the results work. There's no guarantee that the resulting AIs will be able to either.
I vociferously disagree. This is social hacker news. This article talks about the externalized costs of buying salmon that are not represented accurately enough, thus highlighting a huge problem/unmet need.

This is the community, if one exists that has the ability to create the technical hacks necessary to create social change. We can create tools/systems to solve problems like these, e.g., measuring externalized costs that prices do not/cannot account for. Until we more accurately represent costs/effects in our behaviors/purchases, it will be difficult to effectively promote positive behavior, i.e., solving the big problem.
Ask HN: Have you shifted your hours for better productivity?
I've been working a full-time job and trying to get some Web development done.

My typical day was something like:
- Wake up at 7, get the kids ready (one off to school)
- School drop off by 8:30
- At work by 9
- Home by 6
- Family time, dinner
- Work on Web project from 8-midnight.

Needless to say, those last 4 hours aren't the most productive! Recently I've tried going to bed at 9:30 and up by 4am. A good night's sleep seems to be working. Anyone else becoming an early bird?
How do you know we'll be able to create an AI smarter in nearly every way? What if we just create an AI that's like an average human, but is able to pay attention without distraction? What we'll have are a bunch of ideal slave laborers, not a runaway exponential increase of intelligence.
Developing on an iPhone is pretty straight forward. As a first time developer on any Mac platform, I spent about a week learning Objective-C and the frameworks in general using the very nice tutorials Apple has available. It's interesting working with such a dynamic language for application programming.

I am on the developer program and one thing you should be careful about if you develop using the simulator is to use only the published APIs within the iPhone developer website. The simulator will sometimes let you use API's that are available on the Mac but not (yet?) on the phone. I've run into a couple of cases where this can be an issue.
Thanks for the replies.

We're definitely looking for a programmer.

If anyone wants to grab a beer in the city, give me a shout.
We don't have any PR folks, just us :)
Hmm... does ballet count as social hacker news? No? Oh well, I can link to several sci-fi book reviews on Amazon instead.

(Move along. Nothing to see here. All of you redders and diggers can go back home now.)
I did this for a while when I still had a day job. I found that I was much more productive before spending 8 hours at a cubicle, so I went to bed at 9:30 and woke up at 6:30, then got 2 hours or so in before I had to go to work.

I've found it's not as helpful now that I've gone full-time, because my productive times tend to rotate around the clock. It'll be 10:00 AM - 2:00 PM for like 2 weeks, then suddenly shift to 10:00 PM - 2:00 AM, then come back to 4:00 PM - 9:00 PM (which is where it seems to be now, so I should get back to work).
Ask HN: Legality of Republishing News (a la Google News)
We're working on a service that would benefit from displaying current news headlines and summaries along with other content, some of which is advertising (this is not for a web site, but I can't get into too many specifics).

We've looked at every major news source's RSS feeds, but none of their terms of use allow for non-commercial use. One lawyer told us we had as much right to use the headlines and summaries as Google News does and that "non-commercial use" meant that we couldn't resell the content. I find this hard to believe.

So my question is, where's the line for what we can freely use and what we can't? Does Google News get special treatment because of the traffic it drives?
April 2007.
If he announced he had cancer, he would be unlikely to leave the company the same day (if at all). It's also not a guarantee that he would die (sorry to be morbid). There is a LOT of additional information that can be provided. He might beat it again.

The problem is that if he is not announcing when he has cancer, we're only going to hear about it if two things happen:

1. He knows he has beaten it.
2. He knows he cannot beat it.

He can also put a plan in place where he is grooming a successor that the public slowly becomes familiar with, and they can decide how comfortable they are with the replacement, letting the stock reflect that confidence accordingly.

By the way, what's with the "Answer that first. I doubt you can." comment? How about just asking a question letting me take a crack at answering it?
Lisp has AI built-in!
Yes, I've noticed that. Seems as if people are feeling more free with the down arrow in general. I'm not sure I like it. I'm no karma whore, but I do like my karma points.

Personally, I reserve a down vote for comments that are particularly stupid of 4chan-y.

I too wanted to comment on the salmon is/are thing. I enjoy the vagaries of all languages, programming or otherwise.
Well done good sir.
Your perception is Apple’s reality
While we're joking about Jobs... I hope his cancer treatment has the following conditions:

* can only be used in 5 locations

* requires a two-year contract

* only available in 6 countries
I use USAA for banking. Their online interface rocks. The bill pay is especially nice.
The Myth of the Cheaper iPhone
Why not just have a text box that says "type in what you want the mailing label to say. if your package is misaddressed, it's your fault."?
But, with the iphone, you have a userbase that will have an easily available way to get the programs. Almost no one in canada installs java programs at all. All the money is in the default blackberry apps. It's the difference between a feature being there and it being easy enough to use.
Suburban Chicago Tech Networking Event - Anyone Going?
Hmmm; agreed. Some of the obscenity taboos aren't quite so brain-dead, either, at second glance. Sure, "cunt" and "vagina" aren't at all the same word, but I wouldn't say that if my web developers co-workers used the word "vagina" constantly that would be just fine.

As we're living in a reality where, you know, rape and suchlike happens fairly frequently, if I were a woman in a mostly male workplace and the word vagina was constantly bandied about, is it wrong that I'd feel uncomfortable?

Or say I was a middle-school math teacher who wrote all of his word problems in the form "so, one vagina is moving at 12 miles per hour due east, and...".

Talk is a step towards action, and it does matter what people say, as we are led to imagine them carrying out related actions, and we often assume (rightly or wrongly) some level of intent behind speech.

Maybe that's part of the reason behind some of the taboo words? Not to discount, of course, the unreasonably deep cultural discomfort with sex... but just, you know, tread lightly if you want to accelerate taboo expiration.

And it doesn't so much explain "shit", but that's possibly related -- I don't really want a discussion of poo-poo during lunch, for example, and there are very logical reasons that it might spoil my appetite (I'd rather focus my imagination on this delicious steaming burrito, thank you very much).
Very cool news. I've always been a big fan of Weebly. I've sent them quite a few users.

I've hoped for a long time that they'd open up their system as a re-usable tool. So many web sites are forced to create (very limited) web page builders because it's just too much effort to justify creating something as complete as Weebly is. I think a lot of companies would pay a nice monthly fee to be able to re-use Weebly's page builder on their site. I know I'd use it for some of my projects.

It's on my large List of Ideas To Do If No One Else Will.
Does this assume that at some point humans will have successfully mapped the entirety of the brain and its functions?
Damn! That's why I can't get into Twitter again!
Some A/B-testing would be in order, though.
A human brain simply can't keep up

Can't keep up with being an iPhone?
Ask HN: Resources on bots, spiders
Hi guys,
are there some resources and mainly IDEAS for usage of bots, spiders and other software agents to help your business (ex. competitive inteligence)? I already read book Webbots spiders and screenscrapers from Starch press and I really like it. Could you recommend other interesting resources?
The article (and the DFC Article it links to) only mentions "install base", not software sales (which I think would be the most informative metric if we wanted to see whether the industry was being "led" by the PS2).

In fact, the only mention of software sales was this: "From a pure revenue perspective, the biggest system for software sales in 2007 was the PC, if you include revenue generated from online services."

Of course the PS2 is going to have the largest install base of any system still on the market, since it's been out far longer than the others.
unless the navigation scrolls the page, this is a horrible idea. I agree that if you can fit all of your info on one page, it should be done, but the example was 5-6 pages long. I wouldnt scroll down that far.
The iPhone hasn't been out for even a year. Furthermore, over that time, it's only been available in 6 countries, and maybe only the US when it first launched last July. Now that it is going to be available in 70 countries before the end of the year, and has support for about 16 languages (versus just English), I think a developer may see 30-50% of his customers come from outside the United States.
Ah, yes -- on a related note, this is what I've seen as the function of "political correctness" (at sensible levels... it can obviously be carried to counterproductive extremes).

We lie about how racist, bigoted, homophobic, etc. the general public is (and try to browbeat them into lying as well), in the hopes that our kids will be less so.
BMW prototype uses textile instead of sheetmetal
How about something that compares users and their comments, and helps you find a hacker like yourself?
I don't think relying solely on everyone's ability to restrain themselves is very reliable.

Especially since the ones you'd wish they restrained themselves the most are usually those less able to do so. (as an extreme example, ask a spammer to avoid spamming you...)
The Best iPhone Applications
i've been playing around with the sdk extensively. each new beta adds a couple of new features. the iphone simulator is pretty good. if you've done any mac cocoa development in the past, it will seem very familiar.

i applied to get one of the developer keys, but apple didn't pick me. they did pick another guy i used to work with though, despite the fact that he has pretty much zero mac development experience, and no plans to develop any real apps. i'm pretty sure they handed out the keys to the first 4,000 people who asked for them, without checking qualifications at all. you can still develop for the simulator without the key, though.

i'm hoping to have a demo app done in a couple of weeks, so that i can convince some startup to hire me to do iphone development.
your iPhone or other new gadget won't be invented in years, months or weeks, but hours or minutes. A human brain simply can't keep up.

What would be the point of that? A Magic iPhone Box, one that coughed out new designs so quickly that humans couldn't keep up, would be throttled back. What's the point of filling up warehouse after warehouse with beautiful new iPhones -- each unique and special -- that we don't even have time to try out? It's a waste of material resources. Why even bother building the Magic Box in the first place? Or should we build another Box that can appreciate the iPhones for us, faster than the eye can see? Who's going to pay the fuel bill for all that?

In manufacturing theory there's a concept of balancing the line: the slowest step in the manufacturing process serves as the bottleneck, and the secret to maximizing efficiency is to let that bottleneck control the speed of everything else. It doesn't pay to produce a million nuts and bolts per hour if you're only using ten thousand per hour: You just pile up expensive excess inventory -- and if the inventory rusts, or the designers eliminate nuts and bolts in the next version of your product, you lose all that inventory.

Similarly, the pace of technological change is ultimately constrained by human timescales. We're the technologists. We're the ones who control the knobs. We now have machines that can play master-level chess faster than the eye can follow, but we don't let them do that -- we don't let them run day and night, filling up our hard drives with recordings of dazzling strategic moves that we'll never have time to see. Instead, we turn the machines down to our speed, and use the leftover processing cycles for something else. Or turn them off and save some precious energy.

If you've lost the distinction between the Terminator films and real life, or have watched too many episodes of Pinky and the Brain, you might believe that a smart machine could somehow take control of the knobs from the humans. But, really, it's hard to sneak up on seven billion people, no matter how smart a toaster you are. Particularly when those people control your supply chain.
Wrong story...
Some great and inspirational comments here. I hope the original poster realizes that there is simply no wrong/right answer to this question. Everyone is different.

My personal experience, which I would not curse upon my own worst enemy: I am in my late 30's and have a family, mortgage, a mountain of bills, and zero savings. What I did have was the passion, drive, and a incredible knack for shifting debt around via a variety of 0% interest credit card offers.

So in a nutshell I kept my day job, did as much of the grunt work myself (overall architecture, protoypes, server config and setup, performance tuning, etc) and shifted the rest offshore to some developers in Eastern Europe. My typical work week is 70 hours which sounds brutal, but a combination of a 3 hour train commute + a 3G Data Card means I can get a lot of work done instead of watching movies on my ipod. Also, while I can't quite figure out why I haven't flatlined, I still somehow find the time to be a good father and husband, though I barely remember what it was like when I had time to catch up on TV or twitter.

Would I have preferred to go full time? Hell yes. Would it have been easier if I was not bootstrapped and was spending other people's money? Of course. However, all that matters is my service is somewhat established, and while tiny is growing strong. If I can do what I have done in the last 12 months, than anyone can.