skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any idea that is simple enough to pop into your head and is simple enough for people to understand in a sound bite is simple enough to have occurred to thousands of people.

Most truly world-changing ideas are a bit more difficult to arrive at, communicate and/or implement. These are not so worthless. Of course, these usually are combinations of many ideas and take real work to figure out.
Here is some actual economics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

For many things, creating artificial property is a good solution, but it is of course a compromise more than real property ever will be, due to its nature.
Knowing Emacs, it can probably be convinced to generate all kinds of brackets, HTML tags and so on, based on what major mode is running.
No, I'm not saying they are rare. I'm saying this:

1. Everyone is capable of having a billion-dollar idea

2. Not everyone will actually have such an idea

3. Such ideas are still a dime a dozen because even if only 10% of the world population has such an idea, that's still 700 million such ideas. That's a lot.

4. It's difficult to prove that an idea was a billion-dollar idea and the only way of proving is likely to either execute very well, or someone else executing on the same/similar-enough idea

Let's try to do some off-the-cuff statistics.

Let's assume the average person has 1 useful idea per week. And the average worldwide life expectancy is about 50 years. That makes 2608 useful ideas in their lifetime. Let's say a hundreth of a percent of those ideas are billion dollars ideas. That gives us roughly 3 billion-dollar ideas for every human in their lifetime.

So that's not very much on an individual basis, but using the same stats for the world population gives us roughly 7 million billion-dollar ideas every week.
Energy cornucopia?
Totally agree, it was not meant as total reduction to that point, though I now can see how the title reads that way...
Blogcast WordPress Migrator
Very nice, I never noticed your comment but I'm glad you posted this and followed through. I had something like this in mind and added it to my to do list after reading the same article. I'm glad you made it available first. Cheers to you!
Ask HN: Flying all the way to CA & the USA, what to see?
Possibly will be coming over around next July for about 2 weeks.

Purpose of the trip is to check out some Unis in the USA for me, but will also be a holiday for my family -> 5 of us including me, with a 10 y/o girl, 15 y/o boy and me at 17.

Interests:

- would love to be able to see whether I would like it if I lived here/went to uni in the US (as opposed to Australia) -> so getting a feel for where I might live/work

- checking out some unis near SF

- holiday stuff: aquariums (I hear Monterey Bay is good), adrenaline stuff (theme parks, skydiving, etc - never done skydiving, parasailing etc but would like to, though not urgent)

- sports (skiing, snowboarding, water skiing -> haven't done these much, but would enjoy them)

Ideally would make sure that there is always something 'fun' at each of the places we go, so not just long scenic drives with a bored 10 y/o girl.

Would consider going to other places too if we can fit it in, not sure whether 4 days in SF would be enough, then 4 in NY, 4 in Florida?

What would you suggest, I'm a bit lost.

And to give something back, if anyone is looking to come over to Melbourne, tell me what you're interested in and I'll see what I can think of.
For long exposures, depending on the exposure time, the people could just walk away to avoid excessive ghosts. In one of the pictures (7th pic), one could see a translucent backpack, which in fact suggests long exposure.
PopCap could go public in 2011
ha that's difficult to disagree with, but you know what they say, one man's trash....
I'm not sure I follow the point of this site. You've the idea of well respected reviews & resources of a site like Rate Beer or Beer Advocate and put it into a location aware environment, yes. But I fail to see the usefulness of this over looking through the beer available by my local breweries on those sites. They do have indexes of breweries by locale which provide the same functionality with a few more clicks. The only thing I see here is a really obnoxiously styled page competing with two juggernauts of really good content.
> I apologize if this seems harsh but I am highly skeptical that someone who is "not a developer", and by this I understand you to mean that you have never done software development in your career, is qualified to design large systems and networks.

Don't sysadmins and network admins design large systems and networks? Sorry, but programmers don't have a monopoly on technical complexity.

> As for likening developers to "contractors who pounds the nail" that tells me that you have very little understanding of the nature of software development.

Is that not the point of the argument he is arguing against though? It seems to be saying that "Developers pound the nail, and pounding the nail is the most important part".
Serious question: is there any application that could possibly resist revealing it's information if it's working ram is written to memory?
That looks really good, does it work OK on Heroku?
I would say the value of an idea is inversely related to the difficulty to execute the idea. The idea for the million dollar homepage was extremely valuable because the execution of the idea wasn't too technically difficult. There are plenty of freelancers who could implement that idea. Same with the idea for ChatRoulette and Groupon.
If an idea is really difficult to implement, such as a better Google, then the idea is much less valuable than execution.
This looks like a very cool project Stephen. I thought it would have been nice to show a side by side comparison of with and without CssUserAgent.
No, in the graph, the green line is pulling the red line up - this is exactly what Taubes says is wrong because the delta is so small. The blue line is a red herring because that's no longer the maintenance weight.

Taubes is saying that kind of precision in calorie counting is absurd, so can't be the explanation for other people that have constant weight over decades. How could a person on the blue line have eaten with such a small margin of error?

It's incredibly difficult to eat a constant amount. People generally eat to satiety, and that changes with weight. The hypothesis Taubes puts forward in the book is that increased weight causes one to eat more, not the other way around (which is conventional wisdom). So the question is, what caused the weight gain (fat storage)? Taubes argues in the book, it's carbs and insulin, not dietary fat.
Excerpt:

Pfeffer's work recommends a few simple steps you can take to increase your power: (1) be visible; (2) emphasize the aspects you're good at; (3) make those in power feel good about themselves; (4) if you must point out a mistake by someone in power, blame the situation or others; and shower those above with flattery.

Bottom line: worry about your relationship with your boss more than you worry about your performance.

If true, it's just more proof that I have no future at BigCo: I hate office politics.
Does that actually go anywhere or is it like all their other official channels of communication?
Necessity is the best teacher. Get a VPS from someone like Linode, invent a project and run it all yourself. You'll learn a ton just getting Apache set up and running.
We can get some idea by looking at the vast body of works created when copyright was significantly limited compared to today. While there may be a handful of "artists" who wouldn't end up creating works if they could only profit from them for thirty years instead of a hundred, that is likely insignificant compared to the new works created by building on prior efforts.
> Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.

-Einstein

If there's one thing working in software development has taught me, it's that simple != easy. Simple ideas are usually the best because you can build so many other ideas on top of them.
Awesome stuff. Hope this gets big enough to warrant some further action from Google.
I always called the iPhone the Newton ][

The iPad is the Newton ///, something interesting because, unlike the original Apple ///, this one is a huge success.
Okay, I would have worded the copy 'the fastest way to share files simply' or something like that.
Yep, taking a look at a modern x86 core in 32nm (and 22nm is just around the corner), the x86 decoding is now just a tiny part of the core. Intel has been been picking low-hanging fruit and not trying particularly hard to make things very low power. The current area of work is GPU integration with CPU on the same die (see Sandy Bridge).

Consumer electronics is driven by volume & price, so all we are really seeing is small, low power cores becoming acceptably fast for mainstream computing.
Once he can show that the simple version can be questioned, he opens room for further questioning.

If you want to call the simple version of a theory into question, present the simple version of the theory. Don't obscure 90% of it. Taubes doesn't present the version I described because the version I described is pretty hard to question. Has Taubes shown us that we need to question the theory that 7.5 extra strips of bacon each day will make you fat?

Also, no one believes that traditional calorie counting is perfect. It's a good first approximation, but there are corrections to be made. You've identified one - you can't absorb 7200 calories in a single day. But then again, I never heard anyone in the nutritional mainstream claim that Thanksgiving dinner is what is making America fat. They just make claims like, for example, 7.5 strips of bacon/day might make you fat, and 7.0 strips of bacon will keep you fat but not make you fatter. (Substitute cookies for bacon if you want.) There are others, many of which are already well known. Pick up any sports medicine book to learn all about them.

As for "designing a solution to obesity", we already have the solution for the vast majority of people: eat less and exercise more. Taubes is trying to sell books by misleading people about the theory underlying that solution (i.e., ignoring 90% of it). It's hard to see how that is helping us get to a better solution than what we have now.

And I don't think that his portrayal of conventional wisdom is that far off: we have entire industries based on shaving off a few calories from our desserts, and many people seem to believe that if the fat slobs would just park at the far end of the parking lot and walk another 100 feet they wouldn't be fat.

You seem to be confusing mainstream nutrition science with people hawking their own wares. Modern medical science, in the form of an about.com calculator, says that you burn about 2 calories by walking 100 feet.

http://walking.about.com/library/cal/uccalc1.htm

It might not be exactly right - maybe it's 1.5, maybe it's 2.5. But it's a good first approximation, and so is calorie counting.
Do we really need more fanfics?
Well, I have used Scholar pretty extensively and I'd say that most papers are available somewhere without db access when clicking on the 'view all'. I think it depends on the research field though, I've been using it mostly for CS and EE related papers.
The idea is, most beer drinkers have no idea who their local breweries are - this site presents them right on the front page. Even if you know where your local breweries are, if you visit another city you might not know what their local breweries are.

I'm not trying to 'compete' with Rate Beer or Beer Advocate. I would rather use their reviews, but they don't make their information available via an API, so I had to add my own reviews.
I think the comments here miss the bigger picture, which is that the command-line is the most direct and eloquent way to directly interface with a computer for many advanced tasks. The gist is that you tell the computer exactly what you want to do, in no uncertain terms, with supporting information, all in one fell swoop. After that, everything else is just syntax.
As a vim user, I very much lament the fact that there's no good way to run an interactive shell or REPL in vim. The screen hack, Conque, the vim-shell patch, etc., don't match Emacs' REPL functionality.
Emacs, Vim, IntelliJ IDEA, Xcode, BBEdit
A factor of 5.

A typical improvements for microarchitecture is a factor of 2, spread between different units. For example, we could speed up full word adder (most common roadblock for higher clock frequency in current CPU's) by 10 percents, add scoreboard that allow us to issue 1.3 instructions in average load, add bypass logic that allows us to cut delay by 1/5 (5 cycles for pipeline) and we get 1.11.31.2=1.72 of our previous speed.

I assume that ARM already have all those fancy bypasses and scoreboards. So how would they get that 5 times speed up?

I think it will be true for some special cases, like Javascript interpreter or video decoding. I bet on JS.

It is hard to speed up a mature architecture by five times.
True, interesting coincidences! Since I just recently joined HN, I haven't had much opportunity to bump into non-programmers (and programmers) who are also interested in psychology. Though this is a bit off-topic, I'm glad that posting the article (The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People) could bring around all sorts of people. Nice to meet you!
Isn't this part of the plot of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
Ask HN: Would anyone be interested in a search engine specifically for code?
I often use google to find source code documentation like method signatures, identifier spellings, or usage notes. This results in:

1) doing a google search
2) selecting the page to go to
3) finding the content on that page.

The goal is to cut the steps down to just a search that returns example method signatures or identifiers matching the search query with the options to click through to the page for more information. It would also be a goal to selectively index well made sites and cull all the junk that google returns.

It's very basic right now and doesn't have a great deal of content indexed, and is not fast, but I'm curious if this would be useful to anyone else, or what other features might make it more useful, or if everyone is just happy using google, or their IDE.

Here are some example queries that the site has results indexed for:

* "python glob"

* "jquery ajax request"

* "c printf"

* "html dt"

The url is http://codeandtools.com.

There are VIM style shortcut keys for navigating results. j/k - up/down, i - expand info section, v - open selected in new tab, / - new search.

I've been using it mostly in Chrome.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! Thanks HN!
clickable: http://codeandtools.com
Are you a coder? Where is your billion dollar application then? If one is so capable of building something, why haven't you built XYZ and sold it for many millions already?

The reasons already given - any execution HARD. Executing correctly is even harder. Executing correctly and better than the next guy is even harder still.

To further your example - you are saying the architect who makes the drawings are worthless and its the contractor who pounds the nail that is the real builder.

Not at all, in fact the architect is part of the execution chain. The just idea part would be the thousands of people that may drive past a river each day and think 'wow, a bridge would be great here.' The architect takes that idea and executes.
main site back up
He now sells it at 1000% mark up.

People really pay $30/can of 4 Loko? Isn't the point of it that its cheap and get you smashed, not that it tastes good? Or has that much really changed in the ~3 weeks since I've finished college?
What about

http://www.google.com/codesearch
"Basically: The product of a human being's work is rightfully his property."

It is. But a product of a human being's work could be ALSO my property when I bought it. Of course there is some restrictions of the right that society gives me with this property to make possible for the authors to earn a living, but this restrictions should be limited in time, and this time reasonable, like patents 20-25 years. It is not for the majority of the people of any country, just ask them. In a real democracy people create the laws, not the right holders(who are mainly publishing companies, not authors).

"Well, how is it good for the public to move Horton Hears a Who or Sports Illustrated into the public domain? Much less Waiting for Godot."

It is good for the public to have films that are masterpieces like Charles Chaplin's, or Orson Welles's, the kind of genius that are atemporal.

Isn't important that works of Stefan Zweig, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Auguste Rodin, Richard Strauss, Richard Feynnman, Isaac Asimov and hundreds of others authors from different disciplines are not going to be public domain in our entire life because the American congress continue extending copyright indefinitely as the lobbies order?
Great idea - would just require some sort of moderation in that format though. I'd much rather manage my own list of domains to blacklist. A crowd sourced one I fear could be exploited and prevent me from seeing content I'd otherwise like to be able to find.
I think games will be where WP7 will shine, Microsoft has the best game and media development APIs out there for any platform, and there are many many developers who've been building high quality games for Xbox and PC who could move to the platform a lot more comfortably than to iOS which requres OpenGL or to Android which sounds like a mess to have to deal with divergent hardware.
Close enough. :)
Finding the hit points of secondary rays will still have very bad locality of reference unless I've misunderstood what you're saying.
The work is not "forced" into the public domain. It is, unilaterally, hold off from it. Without copyright (which is granted by the government) the work would be in the public domain the moment it is published/given to someone else.
Can't you just accept that it is in fact, somewhat comparable? I mean, you just compared it yourself.
Interesting. As in a toggle to add/strip the classes back off again?
Agreed. Although I have an interesting perspective. I have founded a company completely hosted in the cloud and my father is a mainframe developer who has worked on airline and credit card systems. I'm in a never ending Cloud vs. Mainframe debate. With that said, I don't think the mainframe is going away anytime soon but I can see why people seem to favor the cloud.

Unpredictable growth and cost doesn't fit well with the cost of a mainframe. Credit card companies and airlines KNOW they have to handle billions of transactions and investing in a very expensive piece of equipment makes sense.

Thats not the case for a lot of companies though. Especially those using the SaaS model. The cloud is attractive because of the usage model. You pay for what you use.

I wish there was a way to make the power of mainframes more accessible to new companies.
Disclaimer - I work for MSFT but my day job isn't related to WP7 in any way.

I had a bit of a minor hit with an app I wrote (see http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/11/windows-phone-micro...). For a couple of weeks, that app was #1 in the paid tools category and #35 across all paid apps.

As someone familiar with the Microsoft stack (C#, .NET, VS, etc), I found the going pretty straight forward. If you're familiar with the Microsoft development stack, you should probably have a fairly easy time getting used to the platform. If you're familiar with Silverlight (which I wasn't), you should find it very easy indeed.
Nothing. In fact, everyone does this at least to first order; you need to do bundles of primary rays at a time to take advantage of their spatial (and thus, memory access pattern) coherence. The problem is that the secondary rays are not a uniform grid like the primary rays, and they could be pointing any which way, depending on scene geometry.

What you can do is attempt to group up a bunch of secondary rays that appear to be pointing roughly the same direction (e.g., if their primary rays all reflected off the same flat, specular object), and do them in a batch, exploiting their spatial coherence. Whether the process of finding coherent secondary rays is less costly than just processing secondary rays in the same order as their primary rays, again, depends on scene geometry.
It seems to me that the ideas that you call valuable (ChatRoulette, Million Dollar Homepage), are recipes for shooting stars: they become popular overnight but have little staying power. By contrast, dumb me-too ideas (Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Zappos), when executed well, can create lasting businesses. Does anyone have counterexamples?
In that case, as "one thing that Vimeo did really right", yes, that works :-)
This is not just about the underlying fundaments and how the core is implemented, but also about the inefficiency of the x86 ISA.
Those are all inaccessible to normal people. How about:
Video Phones (Facetime, Skype)
Minority Report style interaction (Kinect)
Padd from Star Trek (iPad)
What else?
I saw a sous-vide being advertised for about $300 from Costco; so surely more people are becoming aware of it!
Certainly, but you don't have to go as far back as that for an example: just compare the drive letters in Windows to the lack of them in Unix.

It works very well in Lua's favour to stick to just the C library given the desire to use it in embedded computers. However, it's valid to wonder why a basic feature supported by 99% of computers is not available out of the box; you judge things based on what's available now, not the past. I should think the C library would be quite different had it been designed 20 years later.
What do these logos have in common?
Not for that sort of size. Light intensity drops at inverse square of distance, reflected light intensity falls off at up to 1/r^4. I suspect a combination of massive floodlights and long/multiple exposure.
There are as many people alive today as have ever lived in the past?
Gorgon Stare - Surveilance to 'See Everything'
He also started https://www.djangy.com/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ev2zb/i_run_thathighco...
For what it's worth, I still use Google all the time, for a wide variety of uses, from extremely specific programming questions, to vague "should you take painkillers when you have a fever?" type questions, ranging across pretty much everything, and I have not noticed any decrease in results quality or had any trouble finding what I wanted.

You do need to know how to ask, but if you know how to ask, Google knows how to answer very well indeed.

I wonder if this new "Google sucks" meme is manufactured by some competing interest. I know it sounds a bit conspiracy-theory-like, but there have been many articles over the last few months repeating this theme.
Interesting, I didn't know about this. Thanks for sharing. It seems to index only code? I would rather search docs than raw code most of the time I think.
Execution requires 2 or more ingredients.

If your a fantastic ideas guy, and an incredible evangelist - you will win.

If your a fantastic designer, and incredible sales guy - you will win.

The execution is the final baked cake, once all ingredients have gone in.

So in order to be a great execution'ist, I'm afraid you can't just be a good coder, you have to also be a ideas guy/designer/evangelist/sales guy/marketing guru/etc.
UGG Bailey Button Triplet Boots 1873 Sand
Even after reading the text version, wondering how come these caves were not discovered before, especially after such a military focus on the region.