skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think people use degrees as a proxy for intelligence, because they aren't allowed to discriminate based on intelligence.
I just asked for this on twitter. Croatia beat Germany 2-1!
Taleb's life tips applied to start-ups
Taleb's life tips applied to start-ups - interesting take!
What algorithm and what type of improvement did you make? Also, can you prove the correctness/accuracy of your improvements?

The answer to these questions significantly affects the journal you should submit to. I can offer you suggestions if you give a little more detail.

You might want to work with someone at a local university on it. Doing research is hard, and writing papers is also difficult (especially your first paper).
"If we build a prototype or beta do we have enough for an investor to invest in our company/website?"

Investors tend to invest in companies/people and less in ideas (unless the idea really is something revolutionary). Get your prototype in order, but also do a little business legwork. Are there competitors? Who is the market? What's the revenue potential? How are you going to market the idea?
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/coolest-gadgets.com
imao.us

it still exists, but now it's a group blog and not as good.

if you want to try reading a post, this is a good one:

http://www.imao.us/docs/NukeTheMoon.htm
The title here ("Canada Passes Their Own DMCA") is completely wrong. The Canadian government has introduced legislation into parliament -- legislation which may be completely rewritten in committee, which may not get voted on before the end of the legislative session, or which may simply get voted down (this isn't a confidence bill, so the opposition parties don't need to worry about accidentally provoking an election).

Canada has not passed its own DMCA, and I think it's highly unlikely that it will.
How long did it take you guys to develop the app? What are your overall thoughts on iPhone development?
> As an aside, is this something I would have gotten some exposure to if I'd been a college grad?

You might have had some exposure to the subject, but probably as part of other problems, i.e. not under the name Computational Geometry. For me, the most valuable thing was learning that this was an actual field with a name, which gave me a starting point for self-study.

Also check out Computational Geometry in C, Second Ed., by O'Rourke. It goes into more low-level implementation details (the first book I mentioned is a good high-level introduction to reasoning about geometric algorithms, so you should read that first).
New "Jim" Maintainer
As an aside, I think that picture of Gates is downright creepy.
Thanks to whomever modded the title. Saying 'WOW' just doesn't compare with describing why something is interesting.

The movie for the Eclipse project is incredibly beautiful. It's amazing to see so many people working so hard and so consistently on something.

My wish? A visualization, like this, of the wikipedia project -- all or parts of it.
Decommodify your product
remember, this was for december 2007 which is probably the best revenue month for a gadget blog. i wouldnt be surprised if the average month was around half that.
Engine Yard is quite pricey. Is there anyone here that uses them that can vouch for whether they are worth the cost or not? They certainly talk a good game and have some amazing people working for them, but that doesn't always translate into results.
yeah, for your age, you don't need an investor until you need lots of servers. So get lots of users then investors will be easy.
If your improvement, for example, takes it from 100 n^3 to 30 n^3 operations, your odds of being accepted are very low.

I'm not sure I'd go that far. There have been many papers published which make improvements in the constant factors in FFTs, and a few others in areas like integer factorization and primality proving.

What matters is whether the work is exciting to other people in the field -- an improvement which is inconsequential in one field could be groundbreaking in another.
I'm super liberal, I just wanted to see the AfD for it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

This got deleted because, if you read the "keep" votes, the only arguments were that (a) it had been nominated for several awards, and (b) that it got lots of traffic. Neither are strong arguments.

It definitely didn't help that the blog was conservative and wikilawyers tend either towards shrieky Green Party turboliberalism or, worse, Paulbotism.
Here's a variant:

savemyass.com
That's still a lot of operating capital for whatever other ventures you wish to pursue. Figure $300K for the year... not bad, not bad at all.
Edit: Oh hell, they deleted some of the keep arguments. I think they deleted keep arguments by people with recently created accounts, or which were not formatted properly.

I am absolutely certain of this. For example, my keep argument isn't there. I don't remember what it said, but I do remember that I posted one. Also there used to be significant vertical scrolling.
The monthly "social alarm clock" thread is always entertaining. Let's do it again!
I enjoy life much more now that I work in computing than I ever did playing video games... Which is probably what lots of teens would define as "enjoying life"... There's this popular misconception that work and play are opposites and I find that really sad. I don't see a problem recruiting teens for a job if that's where their interest lies. There's lots of wasted potential out there.
See [[Wikipedia:Other stuff exists]]. They think of everything! =)
>Every state in [0,0.5] was turned into a state in [-0.5, 0] and similarly (0.5,1] -> [0.5,1].

I hadn't heard this version, but it doesn't make sense to me. So these microscopic worlds each change when a quantum event occurs? If they can change, then why not think that there's only one world, which changes when you measure something? It's a lot simpler and seems to handle everything that this theory does. Of course, if they don't change, then we're in a microscopic world with a precise configuration at any given moment, and every observable has a value, and Einstein was right, and we wouldn't observe Bell's inequalities. But we do, and anyway, the whole reason we postulate this stuff is because we think that things in our world (you know, the one I'm sitting in, microscopic or otherwise) actually evolve according to the wave function.

BTW, if your picture is Bohmian mechanics, then you only need one world, where every particle has a well-defined position all the time, and these evolve according to the wave function. These different possible histories are epistemically possible because we don't know what region of the wave function the particle currently inhabits. But that's not a continuous infinity of worlds, microscopic or otherwise, unless you're just using the word "world" that way.
Indeed, but we need the right kind of microcurrency.

I thought this would happen some time ago when there were rumors that the us postal service would start offering email services. They would be an obvious candidate to offer something along the lines of djb's Internet Mail 2000 http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
iPhone development is fun and easy, once you get past the horrors of Objective C. They have a really nice SDK.
I agree - it seems like their products have so much potential but they are not improving upon them, not taking advantage of the whole "release often" paradigm, which in my opinion is easier to do with SaaS. Maybe easier said than done though....

With Google Sites for example, users are clamoring for features, in fact there seems to be a consensus on which lacking features are most important, yet no word or ETA's from Google.. I got a response back regarding the premium edition of Google Sites, seems like the only premium feature available now is that each user gets extra 500MB disk space.. For $50 / user, thats hardly "premium" in my opinion, unless I hear otherwise.
Some Thoughts on Widget Installation, Timing, Communication and Ethics
statistics have shown that most of the facebook apps are either useless or fad. From a startup standpoint, you want to build apps that has acceptance and at the sametime monetized the service. I dont see that happening in facebook platform. Iam very positive users would be willing to pay for good apps on iPhone
I believe MSFT improved upon this since - you can call stored procs through an ObjectDataSource. So, as long as you have your tiers set up right, you could just rely on CRUD in the db back-end.

You know, maybe they are using mono for .NET on Amazon..which is not the road I want to take - too much setup, maintenance, and uncertainty.

The shared hosting comes with a drawback - most of these shared hosts are black or white - either all linux or all windows. If I want to run php scripts, or a C++ process, I am stuck - unless I go with a VPS or dedicated, which brings up the cost to $50+, at which point one might as well go with Mosso or EC2..

Btw, if anyone wants to split Mosso with me, please PM me.
Some wise words from Mr. Taleb
you should contact a lawyer and put everything on paper ... you will form a company and company will own all the stuff (including domain) - you and your partner will own the shares of the company - it will also say how to split the revenue and who will get how much if the domain is sold out - it will also say about the other exit strategies ... so don't worry, just do it legally with good lawyer involved.
They aren't very straight-forward.. vs LAMP: free = free :)
but... I like the tools.
This is great stuff. Will get it into infochimps on the next update.
Disclaimer: I've never used Greasemonkey (now an Opera user) and have only spent a few minutes trying to figure out how it interfaces with the browser. I know my way around JS though.

That said, after doing some testing I think your issue is that the page isn't completely loaded before the addEventListener is called. Changing the addEventListener line to a simple element.onclick = function(alert) triggers an error in the browser; so does trying to ask about the element's onclick function. Putting in an alert box in place of the addEventListener line pretty clearly demonstrates that the page is still loading when the code is being called on the links. Firefox is a little touchy about that.

I'm still working on it, lemme see what happens if I wrap up your script's initialization section into a document.onload, or something similar.

Edit: Also, elements are being returned as XPCNativeWrapper objects [http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XPCNativeWrapper]. I'm totally unfamiliar with those; maybe that's interfering with the event attachment somehow?

Edit: Yeah, looks like it. I wasn't sure, so I had to test, but references to elements from directly inside the code body get the XPCNativeWrapper objects, which provide protection for some properties. But, code called from a setTimeout doesn't get those objects, and gets direct access to the elements. Not sure how to fix that right since I've never encountered that before.
Classic: Software Development Cartoon
Any one has a good website for macs?
This just makes me think of the loser/villain in Grandma's Boy.
I agree. Most universities are unable to hire top talent because they don't have the funds to compete against the industry. Companies should start understanding this dilemma.

Maybe develop a program that allows select employees to split their time between teaching and working?
"What a lovely grain of sand you are... Too bad you're lying on a beach."

I was just struck by how elegantly and simply those few words got such an important and fundamental point across.
I love it. "Computers know calculus, everyone knows calculus, you've got to learn calculus."
Of philosophers, David Z. Albert and Ted Sider have written popular books that explain difficult problems in a pretty clear and funny way.
The 10 Coolest Steampunk Gadgets Ever
Submitted because of the first entry of the ten... it's the steampunk Model M IBM keyboard found here:

http://steampunkworkshop.com/keyboard.shtml
I really enjoy ObjC, but maybe that's just me. Anyway, thanks for the ~good news.
This is great advice, thank you. An only extra question... being a single person means that I can't do more than one or two development projects at once, but at many times clients ask me to (and I have to tell them I can't, I'm already busy, etc). Do you think it's a problem? How do single contractors handle this?

I guess it's a lot easier if you push yourself as an independent programmer, as it's reasonable that a single guy is already busy at the time you call him... but as soon as you introduce a company name I think the expectations change. So that's an extra reason to follow your advice.
On the other hand surely that is an excellent visualization of thankless dedication and becoming something bigger than yourself. "Individuality is a bourgeoisie abstraction." -some crazy maoist postman (seriously).
I remember old Dracula movies, where they would find Dracula in his coffin then put a stake to his heart and hit it with a mallet.

Microsoft must be looking at Snow Leopard like Dracula looks at that stake when he wakes from his unholy slumber and realizes too late that his bloodsucking reign of terror is over.
When it comes to sensitive issues like drinking, smoking, and other drug use, self-righteous supper-nannies feel free to throw truth and manners out the window.

Shame on all the students who accepted the administration's explanation for their callous action.
about half of those are action figures.

action figures != gadgets

steampunk is cool though.
It is always good to be reminded how formidable a problem communication often is.
This is all well and good. A product that people will buy because of brand (an iPhone, say) is worth more than one people buy because of what it is (a generic smartphone, in this context). So brand is a good thing to strive for.

But there are other "decommodification" techniques that don't work so well. The same thing that gives you that great apple goodness is the reason we're all suffering with DRM, vendor lock-in, and senseless incompatibility. These are all just variants on the same theme: don't make things simple for the consumer, force them to "choose" you over your competitors.

On the whole, I'd rather live in a world of commodities than brands, honestly.
Hi fromedome. Thank you for your submissions. Good to know you are not a bot :)
Wow, that's one hell of a crazy page I did not expect to find on HN.

Al gore is responsible for $4 gasoline, because he and hippies like him control big oil, or something like that.

Also CO2 is essential to life, plants need it and so on - absolutely true. But that doesn't make that page any less crazy.

I myself don't know to what extent sun spots are responsible for global climate change. I would not be shocked if it turns out it was mostly the sun.

But it just might be us. And if we can find a way to turn our CO2 emissions into algae, or drive on electricity from nuclear plants, then we don't have to worry about running a giant experiment with the planet we live on.

Maybe we're not responsible for global warming, but why take the chance?

And Al Gore is not responsible for peak-oil, or the farm lobby fueled insanity that is bio-diesel.
I can speak about development practices in the financial community if you're interested. We generally use java and perl for everything. Very little of it is web-based but it might be good insight into an environment where the main priority is money and quality is of considerably lower priority to simply getting the job done.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216769 may provide more context for this comment. Thanks.
How to Make the Web More Social
> On the whole, I'd rather live in a world of commodities than brands, honestly.

Of course you would! Commodification is good for the consumer, not the producer.
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+1 for studying database design/normalization. I took a class on it and the analyses of performance on different queries for different organizations was something I probably wouldn't have understood just by reading a book. Understanding how it works will also give you the courage not to be a slave to other people's recommendations; sometimes you want to duplicate data for performance reasons, but you have to make sure to manage that in your control logic.
Yup. Also done in the name of education.
Multicolored Keyless Entry System
Your ages will be a strike against you; expect problems with that for another two years or so at least. It's not a fatal strike, though, so definitely give it a shot. Apply to YC. Above all, keep building.
Why not do "Ruby sans Rails" instead? You can keep the Ruby experience, but get all of the lower-level request/response experience you like.

Ruby is a good language for CGI programming.
I knew about Web Developer's Ctrl+Shift+S (disable all styles), but I had no idea about that built-in style disabling. I just tried it on Gmail and it was quite...interesting...
Another way to decommodify is being original and to have good design
That's a really good question and one that I had as well. The main problem for me up until now is finding info on web programming that does not mention Rails.
Better yet, don't end your URLS with ANY extension. Params are ok (kinda) but extensions are so 2005.
Constant-time factors matter to everyone working with finite resources.
You don't have to be in the valley to build a successful Internet company!

Boston, NYC, Boulder, DC, Philadelphia.. all have current hot startups. There is money to be found too in these areas; more in the valley of course...
Once you begin focusing on brand, you are embracing the path of a commodity--it's a defensive posture that subtracts from quality and identity.

Anyone can buy branding and in among commodities, that is the only hope. Identity and quality, however, must be built in.
Cubicle 2.0
Microsoft’s Yahoo Offer: $8 Billion Stock Buyback; $1 Billion for Search
Ask YC: Opinions on PowerDNS or other DB-backed DNS servers?
I'm in charge of a web-based interface for adding and removing DNS entries for virtual hosts.

Right now we're using a kludgey system of having a webserver hit an inetd script that copies and fills in a template zone file, rsyncs it across servers, and reloads named. This is slow and somewhat unreliable.

It would be nice to be able to write to a MySQL server with slave or two instead and simply have the changes show up in subsequent DNS queries.

PowerDNS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerDNS) is one such server, which can use a variety of backends including RDBMSes. Do any readers have experience with this or a similar product? If so, what is the reliability and resource-intensity?
If I had to guess I would presume the OP has not done a formal analysis of the algorithm. This would undoubtedly be the contribution of the professor/researcher assuming the analysis proves it is an improvement over prior algorithms. This analysis/proof is certainly worth being a second author even if it is not a contribution to the algorithm itself.
What would really bother me with that business model is that you are highly dependent on your Google rank. You can lose all your revenues instantly if you are removed from the index or outranked by a competitor.
It would be nice to know what the algorithm is for the movement and location of developer names, since that isn't made clear on the project page. It seems to have something to do with the average location of the files when they light up and start flying. If that's the case, what's the algorithm for the location of the appearing files?

Without knowing some of the finer details of what is going on, I find it to be more entertaining than educational. Can we learn something other than a general idea and appreciation of the activity that went into a project?
I'm not so sure wine is a commodity like he says. Well, some wine is, the kind you buy bulk from the guys who make it. My father in law gets the stuff for around a euro a liter or something, and it's actually pretty good for table wine. You can certainly taste the difference between good and bad wines, and different varieties, with a bit of experience. That's in Italy, though...
You've been aggiorned, Mr. Kothari!
Google Drives Towards Microsoft and Adobe With Gears
I think this is dead on. The OP should look towards publishing in a conference proceedings. In CS this is much more common than journals and his odds of getting it accepted are probably much higher. You nailed the top conferences in this area. However, these are still quite competitive. Perhaps the OP could be more specific about the area where he made an improvement and experts on the forum can try to suggest the best places to submit it.
Ask YC: Your most interesting bugs / bug fixes?
I ran across this Reddit story:

http://www.reddit.com/info/6n7k3/comments/

And enjoyed both the article and the commentary on people's own bug troubles. Do you guys have any of your own stories (preferably as detailed as possible) about bugs and bug fixes?

This has to be one of my favorites:

http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
Congressmen Stop Pointing Finger at China for Hacking | Tech Jaws
Whats the url of the "gadget blog"?
Well I tried to spill too much in one thread. You have no idea what you are saying because you are judging by one thread. I have studied neutrinos intently and I hope the LHC will reveal more about them as a building block. But go ahead be a hater, I can use you for fuel. btw if those are big words I am sorry.
It would be very interesting to to see the yearly profile and time and effort invested to determine the effort/reward ratio for blogs like this.

People are unlikely to provide such information on public sites (if at all), but it still would be nice to see.

I ask this as I dare say you could scrape certain ecommerce sites to automatically feed a blog based on a theme e.g. gadgets, and for little/no effort thereafter get a supplementary income source if you so wished ...thinking about it, there are probably many already doing this?
Thanks for all the feedback. As a regular Hacker News reader, I am thrilled to see my post here!

Hexstream made a great comment about the wasted potential of teen years. It echoes what PG has said - boredom being the biggest problem in high school (or even college for that matter). Kids are getting smarter every generation (really true - IQ is going up world-wide), yet they don't feel challenged. Tapping that wasted potential is a huge opportunity, leave aside the "doing good" aspect of it.
I wrote a long-format response to this essay on Jottit: http://lies.jottit.com. It's kind of too long to make as a comment, hence this pointer.
Here's the MTV version of what I am talking about. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6uKZWnJLCM and keep on hating rather than debating because the fallacy works!
The first time I saw this on reddit, I realized the Good Days were over. I think that was in late 2005.