skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... While your first name appears on your posts, there is no password and no friending. So unlike Facebook, the notion of limiting private content to a friend network doesn't exist. In the future, the app will be able to intuit relationships based on whom its users spend time with regularly because it collects data constantly. ..." [0]

I'll take a stab at the vision. If you can get a lot of users the tools to give away key emotional & identity information freely you might just be able to take on Facebook. This might explain the valuation & choice of the mobile platform and why the pedigree of the founder (ex Apple) matters.

A consumer device to share information easier for undisclosed "X" use for "Y" clients. The key part of the vision is the generated information, location, a users connections, the verified identity of the user and money. A mobile phone is for all intensive purposes a credit card. These raw functions are made possible by the mobile device and the front and back-end software.

[0] 'Ex-Apple executive takes on Facebook with photo app', AP ~ http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/smartphone-apps/exappl...
Color: Breathlessly Overhyped Piece of Crap
meego is developed in the open... but obviously its not an option yet.
Agreed. It almost feels like we're being herded into indentured servitude. Share a song you like? That'll be $40MM please. "Can't pay? We have this hole we need dug... On Mars... I hear it's cold there."
"iPhone controlled, resistant to multiply-lethal radiation doses (as best I can tell)"

Would be a critical question, anyway.
Uh... Parrot drone range... 50 meters??? Does that answer the question?

The robot that they're using? 1 kilometer range. Radiation and environment sensors, stereoscopic cameras, sample collection arm... all radiation hardened...

http://inhabitat.com/japan-sends-monirobo-robot-into-nuclear...

The reason they aren't using toys is cause its a toy.
I think Paul's point was that they all had something impressive to show off by Demo Day. Perhaps the reasons the batch did so well was because they had a good system to exchange information (Convore). But also because Paul has enough experience mentoring startups to know what needs to be done and when.
On path to making a simple recommendation engine
This is a pure marketing move. I can run Windows applications on Mac OS X using ["Bootcamp","VMWare Fusion","VirtualBox"] however that doesn't mean its a positive experience. I think the same will be said of Android apps on the PlayBook.
Hugs From Libyans
> What's a Fed Chairman to do?

In Australia, inflationary breakout led to the "Recession we had to have". Our Reserve Bank governor quite brutally broke the back of inflation in the late 80s to early 90s [1], culminating in an early 90s recession. With a quite conservative monetary policy we've done quite well since then.

(The mining boom has been a free kick though).

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/news/Opinion/How-the-recession-we-had-...
Music and the Language of Feeling
lots of positivity and good feedback on Forrst. Not a lot of cutting each other down you see elsewhere. Great community so far. +1, good luck.
"I just dont have the time on my hands to do it, so I need someone..."
I'm personally opposed to this worldview, along with all the praise to "talent". I don't see it as natural, but requiring practice and dedication. From my point of view, "everyone has a purpose" is actually harmful because people will hop on from one thing to another, looking for their "purpose", when they should be making it all along.

But I don't think "everyone can make their own purposes" is as catchy.
A grumo of News Anchor
If you invited me over for diner and then pulled out a photo album, I would leave. The concept is cool, but photo sharing is over hyped.
I think people are railing against their lobbying and fear-mongering which made such absurd amounts legally possible. That they made the tools, not that they're using them.
With all the bubble talk, DHH to the rescue
The money, part 2: paid accounts that allow you to hide the implicit activity track that you never asked all these strangers to record. Dont have an account? Too bad, your face is out there on everyone else's phones.
Actually, being from Denmark, this is one thing that annoys me about a lot of Americen advertising. It's awfully obnoxious and in-your-face.
Activist Investors Turn to Social Media to Enlist Support
The parent is actually correct. From the original paper:

The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:

C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?

Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A's object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be:

"My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long."

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as "I am the woman, don't listen to him!" to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks.

We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?"

/end quote
Judges don't have a problem with absurd penalties. US Judges routinely hand out multiple life sentences served consecutively. Or life sentences for victimless crimes.

It doesn't matter how the law was written take something simple that anyone could understand like the Interstate Commerce Clause. Now put it in front of the supreme court all of a sudden growing plants in your closet is interstate commerce. Even though the person had no intention of selling it, let alone out of state. The law will be contorted by those in power to serve exactly what they want to do.
Considering how quickly the US military was able to deploy and utilize their flying intelligence drones in the area this week, I expect that extraordinary circumstances cut the amount of required paperwork extraordinarily.

Also, these AR Drones aren't up to the task.
Disabling Dropbox's Haxie
I think its high time that the RIAA should be referenced by its members rather than the face-less acronym.

Imagine how much it would hurt someone like Sony if each time a bad article, comment or story reached the masses it had the words representing Sony in the title.

The largest and most influential of the members of the RIAA are the "Big Four" that include:

* EMI

* Sony Music Entertainment

* Universal Music Group

* Warner Music Group
There were two Duke Nuk[ue]m side scrollers.
This is really a lot of fun, and could even be a great tool for teams that are brainstorming ideas. I also love all of the feedback you are getting here and your receptiveness to it. I look forward to seeing how it grows. Nice work!
Even if you had a continuous wifi connection, they only fly for about 10 minutes before the batteries run out.
Great site, but I would lose the Courier. Might just be my preference.
Are crappy startups Wall Street's fault?
I'm reminded of the nerd response to iPad.

I don't have a dog in the hunt, but the idea behind Color is interesting. It could crash and burn but I'll reserve judgment until I see normal people (non-nerds) engaging with it.

Meanwhile, the vehemence is weird from everyone, especially Gruber. I wonder if he would have posted the same entry if Color had a Lonely Sandwich video.
Came here to say that. The iPhone seemed to be okay at using AGPS indoors but my Droid X fails miserably if I'm not outside. Good luck figuring out where I am, Color.
That's a poor excuse for bad defaults.

The canonical way to use git is by the git syntax. Many (most?) people don't build scripts and aliases around it. It works just fine when used raw.

However, I'm with Peaker in that losing your working copy is enough of a nuisance to deserve an interactive prompt, just like 'rm' prompts by default. Confident users could always disable the prompt with an environment-variable or .gitconfig flag.
Not much with Limewire stealing $75t worth of music from them.
corollary: ONE entity cannot have three priorities.

If you have to answer to three departments equally you CAN have three priorities. That's what managers are for, to turn those into 1. Lots of companies still don't seem to get this.
Happy Birthday Mac OS X
I bet it's highly susceptible to non-lethal radiation such as short microwave bursts. I'd bet you I could take one of those things out with the parts in my microwave and a small capacitor.

Also, since we're dealing with nuclear technology there is going to be lots of EM shielding, wifi tends not to work so well with shielding in place. Especially large amounts of water.
Why UPS Is So Efficient: 'Our Trucks Never Turn Left"
You're right, but DOS emulators are usually configured to run at a slower speed than the host CPU. If not, the games usually run very very fast :-)
"If "worship" means anything it means..."

Whoa, there, stop right there. Meaning flows into definitions, not the other way around. Worship can mean many, many things, and when specified by the author (as it seems to be reasonably, if implicitly, done here) unless they're trying to do something really stupid like redefine worship to mean "purple", you pretty much have to take the definition as given.

Declaring "No, the word worship really means X" does nothing to counter the original text, nor does it further your understanding or anybody else's. As evidenced by the fact that your second paragraph strongly suggests you were too caught up in enforcing a wrong meaning to even see the point, as "all beliefs are really the same" is very contrary to what you are replying to, which is a discussion on the very different results that different beliefs can have! And I would note, at no point in the quotation as given did the question of "truth" come up, it was simply talking about beliefs and their results. (Right or wrong. I'm not defending it per se except inasmuch as I'm suggesting you completely missed it. The full context may contain the idea of truth of the belief, I don't know.)

Similarly, to use another example I've seen more times than I can count, logically defeating religion requires substantially more than to simply declare that "by definition, faith is belief in something that doesn't exist" and QED your way to victory in the next sentence. Not everybody uses the term in that way, and all you can do with wordplay like that is preach to the choir, you'll convince nobody who didn't already agree with you with that sort of thing.
Hacking Frequent Flyer Programs (video)
Definitely. My goal is not to substitute the book at all.

The only reason I'm posting these solutions is that I can compare answers with someone else who is also working through the book. Hopefully, by reading each other's solutions (and providing corrections), we can learn even more than if we had just worked through the book by ourselves alone.
I haven't seen the ideas page, thanks. I found 2 ideas of mine there :)
That'd be this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_RQ-4_Global_Ha...

It took a decade to develop and has been in use by the military since 2006. Its easy for the government to use what its already got, its very hard for them to start using something brand new, no matter how good it is.

But you couldn't be more right about the AR drone. I can't even get it to work in the back yard from the front. I think the point was, with all of the cool robotics floating around today, why isn't there a lot more of it at the reactor site helping out?

As for the government shortcutting paperwork in extraordinary circumstances, I think our performance after Hurricane Katrina probably best illustrates how we do with this:

"Hundreds of firefighters, who responded to a nationwide call for help in the disaster, were held by the federal agency in Atlanta for days of training on community relations and sexual harassment before being sent on to the devastated area. The delay, some volunteers complained, meant lives were being lost in New Orleans. "
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/1...
Is this a pretty up IRC?
Eye-Opening Visualization of RFID Fields (video)
No law can fix stupidity, individual or corporate.
So You Wanna Be a Senior?
what time of the day did you submit it?
Authors@Google: Salman Khan
Ask HN: Transitioning from small projects to...
larger, more broadly used websites?

I'm a designer/developer. I've launched several small web apps, for myself and for friends. But they have all been the type of sites that just a few people might visit on a given day, and almost never concurrently.

I want to start coding bigger, better things, with many more users. What do I need to learn to do this, if anything? (I typically employ HTML/CSS, PHP/MYSQL, and jQuery. And I just have a $10/month dreamhost account.)
I have plenty of Texan friends on Facebook that have either lived here or visited. The point is still the same, really - this seems to make it easy to poll your friends for information. Quora is more about getting a community-approved answer.
Burned by Twitter, Developers Launch Distributed Microblogging Service
And... you've essentially discredited windows, linux, and os x.
And rightly so; as far as these cases are concerned the RIAA is merely a PR instrument. The plaintiffs are the record labels, not the RIAA.
My impression was not that it was unstable/feature incomplete for tablets but that they didn't want anybody trying to port it to phones, where it is completely untested.
This seems like the kind of armchair quarterbacking that would be proffered by someone experiencing the world exclusively through a Boing Boing RSS feed. We might as well ask, "Fukushima -- where are the 3D printers?"

On the other hand, this post is exactly what I envisioned when patio11's NYT essay called for Americans' "expertise in bringing the situation at the nuclear facilities under control" in place of donations.
I'd just like to add my data point here: setting up a vendor account in the App World took less than 24 hours and was much easier than Apple. I just had to fill out a web form, email (not fax!) in some documents, and they emailed it was ready the very next day.

Obviously, YMMV. But they may be improving.
I don't think they want anyone touching it until Ice Cream (3.1), when the Tablet and Phone "forks" of Android are merged together as one.
Lots of denigrating comments, but its not a bad idea for use in search and rescue.

A big problem rescuers were having was simply being blocked by so much debris. Nearly impossible on foot to navigate some rubble. Also, its slow. Imagine a team of rescuers who had a set of Parrot-like drones they could carry and launch from their backs. They would be able to immediately survey areas in their immediate surroundings that might be very difficult or dangerous to get to on foot. If something is seen via drone that looks like it might hold survivors, then they can start concentrating on that. This could have been done immediately after the earthquake and tsunami with the commercial Parrots available on the market. With drones specially designed for search and rescue, imagine longer flying times, better durability, better nav and recognition software, etc. But that wouldn't have prevented today's drones from being immediately useful, had they been available and trained for.

I do take issue with the author's comment: "Japan has displayed a special sort of organizational paralysis in this crisis". I wish he would clarify this. I've been watching NHK every night, reading a lot, reading what patio11 has said, and talking to friends in Tokyo. Their response to this collective set of disasters has been organized. There are over 200k people in shelters, being taken care of. Meanwhile here in the U.S. we couldn't mobilize for days to help people in one city, New Orleans. In Japan, everyone seems to have done what they train for since birth. The loss of 10,000+ people is horrendous, but it would be much, much worse if Japan wasn't as prepared as it is.
Humans are natural born problem solvers and we can't deal with not having any problems to solve.

It seems to make sense for people to continue working after getting rich, presumbably in a position of responsibilty, to give us a regular set of fresh chalenges. e.g. Steve Jobs doesn't quit even though he is extremely rich and also ill, he feels a responsibility to that position.
The BrandFinance Global 500 List of Most Valuable Brands
Chrome; Win7 x64; 2.4ghz duo; 4gb ram
September, huh? Well, if we get into YC, we'll definitely have something up by then. Good to know we have some real competition.

Hmm, now you got me wondering if there's another way to go about this because our strategy is pretty unique...
And now you can't socially complain about those concerns
This article confuses some things but try it. I didn't get it at first either but it's a great idea and crazy easy to use. If you have tons of stuff spread out over multiple social networking sites, there's no easier way to search through your own online history. And our histories are just going to get bigger and bigger.

I can see the privacy concerns but you can select which platforms you want (or don't want) Greplin to have access to, so that's not such a big deal to me. For sites people use professionally, for organizing projects etc this is a great tool.
That's only true if you want someone to watch a movie exactly once and not think about it again.

Sowing confusion creates a ton of follow-on merchandising opportunities in the form of special editions, additional cuts (directors cuts, unrated cuts, extended editions), explanatory books, etc because the people who enjoyed the movie will want to continue to learn more about it.

That kind of narrative vagueness allows people to fill in the missing bits with their imagination, which is a very powerful way to get people to like something.
Being a businessperson I really don't understand the recording industry's strategy.

They know that their industry is under heavy disrpution and that their old income model is increasingly obsolete. Thus they need to innovate and find new sources of income, while milking their old sources for all they're worth. This much everyone agrees on, including the recording industry.

They have done no innovation, and I can't point to any serious attempts. They must have seen this coming but it took Apple and their Itunes to implement a system that actually worked. Before Itunes there was no easy legal way for me to download music. The recording industry did nothing. At the same time they're using their resources to alienate their customers as much as humanly possible by suing them and harrassing them at every turn. Not a day goes by where I don't see some kind of bad press for the industry, ranging from articles like this to takedown notices on youtube.

Go to the local mall and ask the cool kid who hangs out with the cool girls what he thinks of the recording industry. He'll tell you that they're bloodsucking maggots because he's seen the same articles and takedown notices that I have. And he'll tell you that there's noway he's giving them money, and that you shouldn't either. He's the opinion leader that all industries need to be friendly with.

A whole industry whose best idea of making money is to sue their customers needs to seriously rethink their strategic stance.
Is this another sign that we are entering a Web 2.0 bubble? You bet it is!

37 signals is sending an awesome message to the community; one that emphasizes that you don't need millions of funding and that net income is your #1 objective as a business owner. Make more money then you spend. End of story.

I love the message.
David,

I find DFW's perspective interesting but overly didactic.

The above was not meant as a takeaway or summary of what he wrote.
I have an invite... can't find your guys' email address though. =(
The bubble affects the companies that are trying to get a piece of the bubble. The runups in the telecom industry was due to them moving into laying fiber optics spurred in large part by Global Crossing flying high.
Except that it is more formally the negative of the expected future loss of the company as a present value; it takes into account the probability of a given income in a given year, not the best case scenario.

I would say the probability Facebook is making much in PV terms 166 years in the future is very low. Facebook has such a high value now because they have lock-in for their users; a user has a lot of Facebook friends and so can't make a unilateral decision to leave the platform and still have access to the value having their friends on the platform provides - and so that limits the threat to Facebook right now from competitors. However, there are still significant threats to Facebook longer term, and some of those threats could open Facebook up to threats from other firms with smaller costs that Facebook can't easily transition to compete with profitably long term.

Facebook therefore has very good prospects short term, but this position is still relatively precarious and the probability of maintaining as many users and as much revenue decreases progressively into the future - the probability of high revenues continuing after 50 years or even 20 is so low that it is not worth taking it into account when working out the intrinsic value of a share, and profits in the near future make up a much greater proportion of the total 'area under the integral' (i.e. future profits).

Formally: v = -E(L_{total}) = integral_0^infinity (integral_(-infinity)^infinity (l * P(L(t)=l)) dl) dt
where v is the intrinsic value of a stock, E(L_{total}) is the expected total loss of a stock in Present Value terms, and l and t are bound variables used for time and rate of loss, L(t) is a random variable representing rate of loss at time t, and P(L(t)=l) represents the probability that the rate of loss at time t is l.
Indeed. Today in The Australian there was a story about laundry hands on offshore rigs being paid ~$420k.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/laundry-sta...
Steve Inskeep on NPR, liberal bias, and O'Keefe
How the Comodo certificate fraud calls CA trust into question
I would not have paid $1 to view it.
Blackberry firm Research in Motion hurt by tablet cost
At this point I don't know why anyone would want to market their product with DNF, especially in regards to launching.
I'm fascinated by this Photo-Sharing-is-tip-of-the-iceberg tidbit:

"A few feats of engineering brilliance hide under Color's slick surface. How does the app determine who's in the same room with you? Not with GPS, which is flummoxed by floors because it can't distinguish vertical distances between people. So Nguyen's team taught Color to use a phone's lighting and audio sensors, stitching their signals together with the sound and light environments of nearby devices to determine which user is where--it's almost like a bat's senses."

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/technology-photo-app-...
The Raven Myth
Is photo sharing this generation's equivalent of the mandatory family Kodachrome slide show?
Yes, but they recently opened an office in Palo Alto: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101201005807/en/Grou...
What is this all about? - Our website is officially launched.