skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Err, I b0rked the numbers:

36.8kwh/gallon of gasoline yields 1.2kwh/mile @ 30mpg, four times the electric version. If the energy comes from combined-cycle coal plant (50% efficient), then your advantage is two times. The comparison with nuclear, hydro, etc is difficult to make.

The best advantages are the ability to be energy-independent -- on a personal AND national level. An electric car will be zero-polluting for its entire life (no catalytic converter needed!) and, with fewer moving parts, can last longer.
Here's the problem with tiny "personal computers" like the iPhone. They are only for consuming content, not for creating it. Basically, it is like watching TV, except in text form.

There's nothing wrong with that, but people use their computers for more than just mindless content consumption. Even the "average joe" probably plays a 3D game from time to time, or send emails to his family, or whatever. Anything like that is painfully impossible on such a small device (at this time anyway).

So while the iPhone is great for looking up someone's phone number on Facebook and then sending them a "hey lets get coffee" text message, it's not so great for anything more complicated than that. And even the most casual computer users need to do things more complicated than that. (This post would never have been written from a phone. The same goes for delicious bookmarks, and everything else Web 2.0.)
After looking through the News.YC source, it seems that almost every single closure that's created on the fly refers to one of the above types. (I think you could exclude conses, too, to make it even simpler.)
I'm sorry - but is this a joke?

Out of the 11 items they brought, $4873.92 overall, 8 of them, $4136.94, seems like totally unessential.

I was expecting something where the bulk of the costs consisted of salaries for X days/weeks of work. But instead the bulk consisted of a trip to the WWDC, tons of ram, and icons?

Maybe this wasn't the point of the post, but it seems like they totally missed the point of building an application...or at least the point of a "How we built X for $Y" post. But it seems every single one of those posts are totally inaccurate - one where they built one for $10k (but had 9 people working on the project!), one where they built a site for $8.75 (because that's the cost of the domain - nothing else included), and now this where they built one for $5000 (but included totally unnecessary items).
Here's a piece of it that we did opensource. An Erlang pipe implementation. It acts as a FIFO for binaries.

http://github.com/mojombo/erlang_pipe/tree/master/pipe.erl

The performance ends up being quite good.
That only works if you know the little yellow dots can track you. Which nobody knew before it leaked (which was a while ago). But more importantly, its unlikely a counterfeiter fills out warranty cards in the first place. More likely, the Secret Service uses the information to track down who the printer was sold to from the manufacturer, who that person sold it to, and so on down the line, until they get a name or description. When you're dealing with counterfeiting of U.S. currency, its a start, which they wouldn't have unless they had the little yellow dots. And since it's almost impossible to get rid of the dots, counterfeiters have to work a lot harder disguising where they got their printers.
I have to congratulate these developers for creating what appears to be a very useful iPhone app on a shoestring with lots of sweat equity.

However, when it comes down to how much it cost, like jrockway said, it's not very meaningful to others. Furthermore, I'm already sick of the prospect of the pissing contest where developers say they can develop another app for even less. Blech.
Google - Viacom: No deal yet on YouTube data
name & logo are almost identical to Vimeo...
This is behind a registration barrier, and I haven't read it, but the gist of similar articles I've read was that, in certain systems (communication between neurons, for example), adding small amounts of noise can help signals to pass further. Parts of the signal that may not have otherwise been noticed may then get bumped over the threshold. (Or, in mechanical cases, by randomly canceling out inertia.)

In other words, if you scramble the surface detail of something slightly, you may notice aspects of it that might not have otherwise seemed significant. There is, of course, a point past which you are looking at too much noise to be useful.

Discuss.

(See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_resonance )
I find it akward she believes they are not familiar with the ways she is suggesting. I was expecting something more impressive but then again who would share information like that?
This might be the tipping point for getting a 360 as well.
pg's essays aren't written at a grade-school level.
Data 'chunks' are easier to remember
And? Just because something is explained simply doesn't make it any less true.

As I suspected, it seems that there is not much more than a simple dislike for 37S behind many of these comments.
I think it was a pretty good article. If you think an item was unessential, well, you can do the math, subtract it. It was a pretty good round-up of how they did it. You may make fun of the icons, but a lot of businesses outsource these days, and they decided to outsource that. If it was something that would just have delayed them, then it was the right choice. And it illustrates just how cheaply it would be to outsource that sort of thing.
I strongly recommend finding a good layout designer. The site really comes across as something a programmer did for fun, rather than a site for people to have fun. It's all about "I made these" instead of being about your players or the games.

I'm also a little skeptical about the name Vying and the TLD (.org)... neither strike me as fun. They both seem very hackish.

Is this a solo project?
I installed it today. I see a 512k Adeona app in my processes list. I assume it's running ok. Other than that, it's pretty invisible.0

I hope to never be able to say I've really used it...
I agree one way to fix it is through design.
Not a single item in that list belongs to "Development" category. But since he's writing about non-development spending categories, why not include a cost of chairs, tables and pencils?

Also, when I flag shitty content, where does this "flagging" vote go? I'm using it as a missing downmod feature.
Yeah. I also like how people stopped writing software, the kind that actually takes skills and time to make (and customers to bill for), and switched to free "apps" that seem to take as much time to build as time required to blog about it.

Notice how few open source developers, those who produce tons of actual software, blog very little. That's because they're busy coding, thus not much time left to "share their experiences while coding". How many active Linux kernel devs have popular blogs? Yet those are the kind of people that can actually say something interesting.

I don't hear much from devs who're working on next gen. Apple stuff either. Only "iPhone app devs" and "google engine app devs" and other "app devs"... Damn "apps"...
Does anybody here have experience with both the iPhone SDK and Android SDK? If so, any thoughts?
In France, she'd be called la renard. Hunted, with only her cunning to protect her.
"Philosophically, I don't want to get as obnoxious about advertising. I'd rather the site have a more adult (mature?) community. And, I'd rather focus on more obscure (but great!) games where possible."

There's a difference between crass promotion and essential information. I can assure you that providing good info & design is a mature concept for any project ;-)
And ironically the only one who actually made money out of this whole deal was the guy who jumped out of the ship at the early beginning...
I think 37S is pretty cool, generally like their message, and love Ruby on Rails.

However... there's something that gets annoying about their writing style and "aren't we clever" attitude (intended or not, it starts to sound that way after a while) after a while.
Google to Reveal Youtube Viewing Details to Viacom
Yeah, sometimes I wish I could add some descriptive text to submissions as you suggest. Perhaps I should just add a comment after submitting?

Did you ever have a go at writing text adventure games?
I'm kind of curious to see what kind of approach would be used in more modern programming languages. Ideas?
Dnsenum - Step 1 pentesting tool
Great hack, always wondered how the tape was used as a recording device.
You're exactly right. They paid the third founder $700,000 to go away after their Series A. Smart, but I actually didn't respect him leaving his friends out to dry and forcing them into awkward conversations with their investors. I guess that lesson is make sure your founding team is committed before you dole out the stock certificates :).
iDrama: The Race to Jailbreaking iPhone 2.0
You misread; I didn't wish for his death.

He's also not just a messenger - he's the source for many attacks on the design community, particularly Flash.

I could consider his views if he had any fairness to them. But he doesn't. His views are lazy and incomplete.

It's like a guy who "publishes a song" which is nothing but the C scale played over and over and then spends the next 10 years criticizing Rock & Roll. He might be considered a conceptual artist. But would you really call him a music guru?
First, the article is actually a PDF. http://www.sophos.com/security/technical-papers/mac-data-the...

Some of these are of pretty questionable utility in the case of physical data theft -- if someone has already stolen your laptop, they can extract the hard drive and read it directly. An automatic logout with password after a couple minutes isn't going to help much.

The important ones are to encrypt the personal data filesystem (which alone will cover almost everything but physical theft) and the swap file (which will make sure passwords in memory aren't swapped to disk in the clear). Also, note that encrypting the entire drive is counterproductive, as it would provide a large corpus for a known plaintext attack (and probably make booting really annoying).

Not that any of this is Mac-specific, of course.
I did. Very nice, low key affair. Lots of interesting people to talk to, but not the Startup School crowd. I can't quite put my finger on it, maybe because people were interested in the tech part, but not a lot of startup talk. Quite a few NYU people.

Their facilities are great, exactly as advertised.

And, of course, I got to meet Joel Spolsky, perhaps the best part of the visit.
Remote Code Execution Through Intel CPU Bugs
I generally advise people to play games that involve some randomness, like poker, gin, or backgammon, before moving on to games without. The reason being that almost all of life involves decision making in situations with some random factor, and humans are ill-equipped by biology for this. Most decisions that don't involve some unknown are relatively easy.

Go might be better for programming specifically (since randomness isn't a factor) but programming is a subset of life.
News stories lost on iPhone day: what did you miss?
this is going to upset the ISPs - a lot of their bandwidth and no money
Interview with the Gears on Rails team
i love when the competition shows up to spec out the place and they make him put a GovWorks hat on.
Yes, of course. I think I unintentionally tied advertising with community. I meant them as separate objectives.

Some sites run annoying advertising along side the games while you're trying to play. I won't.

Some sites seem to cater towards children (as far as site design, graphics, etc), I'd rather appeal to adults.

And, some sites focus very heavily on established games like Chess and Go (which I think are great), but I'd rather bring attention to lesser known games. Although I also plan on having more established games, I just want them to be a smaller part of the mix.
I call bullshit: this is like saying that people who don't have teaching credentials have no business teaching anyone anything, or without barber's licenses cutting hair, or programmer's licenses writing code.

Note the experience of the psychologist who tried the experiment of getting himself committed by impersonating a schizophrenic to doctors at the ER, who then took quite a while to get released: all the patients knew he was sane, but the doctors, once he had been labelled, were very hard to convince otherwise.
"In their own words": political videos meet Google speech-to-text technology
An excellent point. Far more useful to focus on knowing something's strengths and when it is relevant than dismiss it entirely.
Congrats to the Standard for at least acknowledging that iPhone coverage has been all-consuming these past few days.
Any article about that psychologist who got himself committed? Sounds interesting.
What's with all the hating? I can see where constantly seeing "How we did XXX for $YYYY.YY" can get a little tiresome, but they also serve a purpose. One, they're insight into what sort of expenses a venture like this takes. Sure, you have some expenses that most people would discard, but then you just get a lower number.

Two, it provides knowledge and inspiration to people out there who have yet to start their ventures. Not everyone wants to be a linux kernel coder, some kids out there might want to be iPhone software developers, and this article tells them that even a teenager can probably do it over the summer with a little sweat equity and some money saved up from a job. These kind of articles make entrepreneurship less of a mystery, and thats a good thing.
I'm the author of this blog post, and I thought I'd respond to a few valid points that have been brought up here:

- The reason I wrote about and actually itemized cost is because, well, you don't see much of that at the moment. People like Paul Graham say that a startup can be funded with $20000, but what does that really mean? What's the nitty-gritty?

- I didn't include things like pencils and chairs because everyone has pencils and chairs. I wanted to touch on what and where we had to spend to get this particular app going. Your results may vary; surely if you're doing a game you'd probably need more art assets, etc. The point is not that oh, we did this for so little money, we're so great - it's a personal story of how _we_ built an app, and to embolden others that hey, it's doable. That's why I linked to the Guy Kawasaki post at top of this article - it inspired us!

- TX is probably trolling, but I have to dispute the idea that linux kernel devs don't share their experience. Sure they do: it's in their well-written code and comments. We're closed source, but my partner will be posting about technical issues and speed wins for iPhone development soon, and there will be more to follow when the iPhone NDA lifts. Our app may seem simple, but if you could open it up you'd find an elegant tourbillon - it wasn't thrown together in the slightest.
Linked list recursion: A smidge of functional programming in Ruby
She mentioned a couple of nice ways to monetize, but most of them can't really be taken seriously. I was expecting more as well.
It seems like the program would be overwhelmingly data-driven. Once you decided how to structure your data, most of the rest of the code should come easily. Then, just write a parser and go.

One of these games was one of my first programming projects as a teenager, and I'm sure they have a lot of nostalgia value for other people here too.

This is also worth a look: http://lisperati.com/casting.html :)
These suggestions are really laughable. Sure, the advertising model makes sense, but that isn't exactly rocket science, and that's only one suggestion.

Charging for ad-free service never works -- advertisers want to target the very people that would pay for to such a service. If you're an advertiser, you want to target people who are willing to pay extra for a convenience -- the exact people who would opt out.

My favorite example of the author's ignorance: #9. Can you imagine what would happen if Twitter sold its email list? Many of the Twitter users that I know are skeptical about the service, and it looks like the users in general are technically savvy -- all it would take is a really bad PR piece to start a mass exodus.
If that's all that is wrong with 37S, I'll happily continue reading their stuff.
Personally having been to WWDC a couple times now, I'd think that it wasn't all too inappropriate to include in the cost. It is a very useful resource for pretty much any Mac/iPhone developer, and I know many who consider the sessions, the networking, and sitting down with engineers to talk over things to be worth more than what they paid for the conference. And to be honest, I don't think they missed the point much by including the cost of icons as well. It's part of the application. Some may do it in-house, others will pay for work. To not count it as part of the app is fairly unreasonable...what else would you be doing if you needed icons? Making your own? (Not always the best idea, and for some will waste more time for an inferior set of icons vs. just buying a decent set.) And well...if the RAM helped them be more productive, then so be it.

Maybe I would have had a separate "Optional costs, but ones we really thought were justified/important for what they gave us" category for those three that people seem to be taking the most offense from. Sure, you and some others may not be interested in spending $600 on icons or $3000 on a trip to WWDC because you don't need it for whatever reason, but many do. In fact, I'd say that would apply to a lot of apps on the app store now where I know/know of the developer(s), since I saw so many of them at WWDC with MacBook Airs.

It may be inaccurate to you, but I don't think it's that far off. Everyone's different, and this is just one case I don't think is that unique.
Prototype UI autocomplete Using Ruby on Rails
Apple sells one million iPhones 3Gs
Oh thanks for the link, that looks pretty cool.

For some reason it reminds me of _why's mini dungeon in ruby:
http://poignantguide.net/dwemthy/

I used to love writing my own adventure games in QBasic. I found that using stuff like GOTO's was actually a pretty good metaphor for moving between rooms.

Now that I think about, an Object Oriented language would make a lot of sense.. these adventure games are basically made up of objects that you interact with.
Because it would take about 15 seconds for you to find the answer by yourself by invoking the aforementionned command.

Seriously, here's the first DESCRIPTION paragraph of man sftp:

sftp is an interactive file transfer program, similar to ftp(1), which performs all operations over an encrypted
ssh(1) transport. It may also use many features of ssh, such as public key authentication and compression.
sftp connects and logs into the specified host, then enters an interactive command mode.
On a sidenote, a teenager wanting to be an iPhone developer over the summer would probably want to subtract a couple thousand dollars from that figure, since Apple does have a student scholarship program for WWDC that provides college students with free wwdc tickets (whether you pay for travel/housing depends on where you live/which college you attend as individual programs may reimburse you for that up to a certain amount).
"... I did. Very nice, low key affair. Lots of interesting people to talk to, but not the Startup School crowd. I can't quite put my finger on it, maybe because people were interested in the tech part, but not a lot of startup talk. ..."

Because they are showing only subset of being an entrepreneur.

Joel likes his hires to be smart, get things done... and cautious. Maybe it's some hangover of his past training? It means your next step forward will be safe, less chance of failure. The downside is well fed Lions who might kill for a living but have yet to learn or worse forgotten how to hunt for themselves.
My buddy went for a 3 mile run listening to pandora on his 3g Iphone yesterday in albuquerque. It didn't drop once.

I bought a phone from sprint specifically to listen to Pandora in my car. I can't get it to play a single song stationary in my driveway.

oh well :(
> Most decisions that don't involve some unknown are relatively easy.

Apparently you don't play go.

I play games for entertainment, not to mimic reality. Games with chance as a significant component aren't necessarily more entertaining than games requiring significant skill.
I don't know what languages you know, but it seems like one could put together something surprisingly quickly in Python. You could go the OO route, or just use dictionaries, e.g.

stairwell = { descr:"You're in a stairwell. There are footsteps echoing from above.", exits=[('up', rooftop), ('down', basement, locked=True)], items=[scrap_of_paper] }

This is not actually very different from the approach taken in the Lisp link.
What I do like the 37s approach is they make money, and yet it is still (presumably) a nice place to work.

Normally with startups, things can be fun, great, but sooner or later things settle down (get bought, have to be profitable) and thats when the best intentions go out the window, 37s seem to see this as a lifestyle. I admire that.
I've never heard anybody complain that Go was too easy.
Does anyone know if it will be restricted to US?
There is plenty of unknown in Go.
I meant more decisions in life in general. Go is certainly not easy.
$297.98 - Emergency RAM. For a while we had to parse a 12gb XML file. Every day. Louis got 8 more gigs for his Mac Pro overnighted out.

I'd really like to know what the hell this 12GB XML file they needed to parse multiple times was.

EDIT: The developer replied here: http://gifterapp.disqus.com/how_we_built_an_iphone_app_for_4...
and don't print the "Pelican Brief" on it
Good and simple program. I used to use WinFTP_LE but this one is where it's at for free Windows FTP tools.
A couple of examples of this library being used:

Dynamic raindrops: http://www.nokola.com/RainDrops/
Image resize & email: http://fluxcapacity.net/fluxtools/
Addressing someone like a tardy child (I'm not mad, just disappointed) is a reliable way to inflame the discussion. I don't think I will respond if you phrase any further replies like that.

The claim that "dynamic typing is incompatible with performance" is considerably stronger than what I said (and I would contend belies an imprecise if not misguided notion of "dynamic typing"). That being said, for people interested in using a mainstream platform to develop their applications, the JVM offers a number of extremely productive "dynamic" languages none of which perform as well as Java across a broad spectrum of activities. I think you will find it telling that the engineers at Facebook (who are world-class) chose to implement this system in Java.

Optional type annotations are a wonderful idea and I am optimistic that someday the tradeoffs we mark around performance and convenience can be granular and addressable at a lexical level in a single file. Until then, the mix of a JVM scripting language and code written in native Java calling each other trivially is pretty damn close.

Now I invite you to write a similar system using SBCL, if you enjoy debugging inexplicable concurrency failures. Or maybe you'll use Actionscript 3? I hear it has optional type annotations. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go work for the Man on dreary accounting software.

Fail.
That was the article that got me into Go in 2002. I list in and some other recommended Go resources here: http://www.davidsj.com/post.php?id=A72_0_1_0_C
Ah yep, dictionaries are pretty similar to objects in this sense. Mostly just a matter of notation.
I often use dictionaries as a poor man's object.

It could be kind of cool to have proper objects with methods to interact with them. You could use code reflection to figure out what verbs are supported.
> It's all about "I made these" instead of being about your players or the games.

Thanks, this is a little hard to take, but it's good advice. The focus should be more on the players and the games.

Yes, this is a solo project.
Hey! Thanks for submitting! :)