skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't need an arbitrary environment.

I can imagine having them used as killer bee guards for indoor use - even if they're helpless outdoors. Well to not only think of weapons usage - they could be used for lots of tasks indoors (painting walls/ceilings for instance :D).
Open source API for sensor/application/geolocation data logging
GA data is delayed by a day, but if you adjust the date range manually, you can see the data that has come in so far. Not guaranteed to be complete, but some data.
You can mentor someone else's kids. It needn't be formal.
Few days left for early bird admission to MassChallenge 
Only few days left for early bird admission to MassChallenge startup competition with $1M in prices http://www.masschallenge.org/. If you are going to apply let me know if you need endorsements.
No, I don't see them as competitors. Amazon will leave the tighter integration with the desktop to others. Amazon's strength is the backend. They don't want to have to provide technical support to tens of millions of users.
23-year-old donates US$1M to support Waterloo student entrepreneurs
The benefit of language experts and pedants has been to slow the rate of change in language. As a result we can read Shakespeare and other historical work in the original. It could be argued that this is itself an elitest point, especially about Shakespeare; however the ability to access the past without special training means that historical knowledge is not restricted to the elite.
You can be up and running in just a few days to weeks if you just start doing it on your own. You dont need to go to school. There are some fundamentals of computer science that would definitely be useful like basic algorithms and data structures that may take longer to learn but are still doable. Taking a single language course at a community college might not be a bad way to start though.
>>(Step 1: Cut image quality) Page load time dropped from 24 to 12 seconds.

Wow. I had no idea that could make such a difference. I suppose the issue was with the low number of threads set in the Apache configuration. The server was spending its time sending out static content when it could have been doing more important things? I signed up with S3 to serve up my static content to keep that load off my server. I should probably be using CloudFront instead though.

I'm interested in looking for a backup host just in case. I currently use WebFaction and I love them to death -- but I'm worried that under incredible stress the shared hosting won't hold. With Linode, do you start from scratch with a blank OS and just install everything you need from there (Apache, mod_wsgi, etc. kind of thing) or do they have preset installs? With WebFaction I can select a particular setup and I'm up and running in minutes.
Most common “Y2K-style” bugs today?
Khan Academy for Two Year Olds? I Guinea Pig my Own Kids
Isn't this the natural progression for a big data company these days? ... At&t, search company, im sure the list grows.

Fortunately I left Facebook b/c all the high school kids that I had nothing in common with kept cluttering my wall and friend requests queue.
For surveillance above crowds, within a couple of years if not already IMO.
Node.js is low-level enough to do some protocol things fast enough PHP can't. I can imagine building a load balancer or proxy to PHP. Yes, it's probably not the best solution, but it could be done.
Dear cavedave, this is an official notice to remind you that "You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair" as per the Terms & Conditions. In your blog post, you have linked ryanair.com in the sentence containing:

3. You go to their terms and conditions here and see they do not allow linking to their website

Please kindly unlink or be prepared for further legal action.

I will be sending you an email as well.

Thank you,

EAM Associates
IMHO, our setup is easier for normal people and our UI is simpler. And, it is totally free -- no "suggested donation" to get your license key.
Is it my impression or this device produces energy and water? It apparently works with seawater and, since its exhaust is hydrogen and oxygen that will be recombined in a fuel cell, the end result will be solar power and desalinated water.

I believe this alone is almost more interesting than the power output.
Being able to pop into terminal, create a directory and a PHP file, then run node-php to get a test server running in this new setup is an efficient way to try code out. If the built-in PHP web server were standard this would be less useful.
Yep, every time I go to a political event my friends tag pictures of me there. I could untag, but I figure it'll still be in FB's database somewhere.

The same friends would freak out bad if government agents were taking the photos.
Why shall i need an app while its given a system feature?

BTW who knows what new OSX features will bring, new file system for better sync for air, a new pure friendly UI? Who knows...

And i don't like apps that depended some other major competitors than my environment.
In a free market, there is no such thing as "too much" of a given class of workers. A free market corrects for a glut of N by making the expected failure rate of N too high, or the capital available for N too low, or both.

Bubbles can affect this dynamic temporarily, but eventually they always pop, usually leading to a temporary condition of too little investment in N. Believe me, it was not "cool" to be a dot com founder in 2001.

But in the long run, this cycle averages out such that free markets don't have long term misallocations of resources.

Whether the system we currently have can be described as a free market, though, is a question for another day.
Yeah except in Britain apparently because the Tories buggered up our rail system so badly in the 90's we won't have a decent other option, even by then.
Thanks! That was my first lesson in how inspiring constraints can be -- we didn't have the resources to make a good client UI, so we put it on the website instead.
Microsoft has replaced the awful IIS-like web server that used to be part of Visual Studio in the most recent service pack with IIS Express; which seems to eliminate most of what you're describing (it was definitely a pain point for quite a while though):

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdevtools/archive/2011/03/14/enabl...
I'm not saying you should pitch in a suit today, but I am saying that picking a domain name on the basis of projecting that you spent money on it today is like wearing a suit used to be. That's why I called it an old argument. I'm also not saying that this would be a bad choice. There has been much talk of someone spending $350,000 on a domain name, and one of the interesting arguments in favour was that the domain could easily be resold if necessary. You can't do that with a suit.
I think your dates are a bit off. 40 years ago the Beatles had been together for years and then broken up; 40 years ago is 1971.

We did land on the moon more than 40 years ago, though. Our last trip there was 39 years ago.
Great Depression Essay
Writing about the Great Depression is an excellent topic for your history paper. In fact writing the Great Depression essay is an excellent source of learning about the Great Depression of 1929. This essay will educate students on the causes of the depression and many more.
The Struggle in Finding Problem/Solution Fit Part 1
IPhone 5 delay increases odds of 4G
Yeah, they need an attachment to pick the ball up and start again. I'm sure they're just dying to get rid of the slow human component of their game so they can play faster.
Yeah... no linux is a killer for me. Can I get a notification or something when there is a support for linux?
Energy Department cuts costs for firms to license patents
Also see #18: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

Statistically, if you want to avoid failure, it would seem like the most important thing is to quit your day job. Most founders of failed startups don't quit their day jobs, and most founders of successful ones do. If startup failure were a disease, the CDC would be issuing bulletins warning people to avoid day jobs.

...

Most startups fail because they don't make something people want, and the reason most don't is that they don't try hard enough.
Recall the article opining that Amazon will be giving away Kindles to Prime members by November 2011 (so far, price drops are on a straight line to $0 then, and when asked Bezos said "oh, you noticed?" and smiled). Maybe they are gearing up for an iPad-type model, laying the groundwork for users buying into disparate parts (streaming video, cloud storage, ebooks, etc.) so when the convergence arrives millions of customers will find themselves already living a ubiquitous Amazon life.
Indeed. That used to be said of eolic energy (wind power). For example you can see a cost breakdown in 2005 here:

http://www.mnforsustain.org/windpower_schleede_costs_of_elec...

I believe the energy costs are now competitive (but wind still cannot serve as "base" power), but my yet-unresearched hunch is that solar is still at the same stage that wind was: only viable due to the massive tax breaks.
> "Anyway, am I missing something here?"

At this point, it looks to me like Amazon is going to offer an Android device in the not-so-distant future. They're quite clearly following the Apple/iTunes/iPod strategy: "Get the software pieces out there and performing so integration with the final hardware is seamless and painless".

So the fact that it duplicates some parts of existing software doesn't much matter. What matters is whether it's a focused and refined first-party solution for that eventual device.

It simply isn't competing for the people who know about and downloaded and set up an account for Dropbox/Grooveshark/etc. It would be the built-in feature that's sitting there waiting for you, automatically integrated to your existing Amazon account and "Just Works".

Also, the small size seems (to me) to be a beta sort of limitation. I'd be surprised if the final hardware launch doesn't include an upgrade to 50 or more gig of space just for buying the hardware.

So, yes, it really is just a sort of Grooveshark/Dropbox/iTunes-Cloud-Sync sort of solution that doesn't knock anyone's socks off via the feature checklist. But if the integration with the final device is tight, I don't think that matters at all.
A YC app video
And the feed operator in Perl6: http://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/day-10-feed-oper...
I suspect this 5GB quote is a "fake", since there is no need to actually "copy" a song to the User's virtual drive, rather add a pointer to a copy already available on their platform, that is, if 1M users are buying a popular song, there is no need to clone this song million times, right?

Having said that, since there are smart people working on this platform on amazon, I am sure they don't make a physical clone, which raises the question already mentioned above, why limit to 5GB?
Show HN: load.io a weekend project to track hits
New Evernote Web: Redesigned Interface, Expanded Note Sharing Options and More
Insofar as the iPad is essentially an MP3 player, yes.
The infamous SCSH Scheme shell "Acknowledgements"
I think in the article you confuse old grumpy guy with experienced guy who does not know how to interface with people.

Old grumpy guy to me is someone who is unquestioning in his own views. Does not care if he's wrong and does not give the least shit about what you think or how the world is changing. "Get off my property!" while holding a shotgun sums up this guy nicely.

The old grumpy guy you talk about in the article is someone different. Nobody's going to groan about scalability unless the message is delivered in an antagonizing way. In this case it _is_ the fault of the messenger.
The write up on it:
http://openmymind.net/2011/3/29/tracking-hits-with-load-io-a...
It's a good idea in my opinion, although if possible I'd rather they be more aggressive with their time frame. By 2050 we may already have reached Peak Oil. If that happens we may not have enough left to run cars in the city anyway.
Where to get Startup Coverage
I agree with you. It seems to me that having a startup currently is the new making a rock band. A few get super rich, many makes a simple living or side living from it, and many just fail miserably. It's life... They could all just do standard work in a office or be taxi driver, and contribute more "easily" (more predictably, but possibly with less gain) to the economy, but life wouldn't be so interesting then :)
Abandoning a book doesn't mean it is treated as garbage. You may have made the conscious decision of not pursuing the marketing of a book for any number of reasons. That is just part of your rights as an author.
Show HN: My imageless one page website, thanks to CSS3
I recently rebuilt my website as digital business card, which serves a simple purpose: Say hello, then point people in the direction of the places I inhabit on the web.

At the time I was playing around with the HTML5 boilerplate and Google web fonts, and it inspried me to try to implement the logos of the sites I link to with CSS rather than images.

You can view it at: http://colin-gourlay.com/

You'll need a modern browser to see the effects in action, but if you're still using IE6/7/8,I hope you can still appreciate the degraded appearance!

Is it effective? Are CSS + custom fonts not quite up to the challenge of simple image replacement like this? Am I just not doing it effectively?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Doesn't seem weird at all, I think. Solar just barely passed breakeven in the last decade, unless you factor in subsidies. I notice that for a random zip code in Maine, http://bpsolar.cleanpowerestimator.com/bpsolar.htm shows that absent federal and state subsidies, you'll save only about $4600 over 25 years with their default settings. It's phrased as saving $36K, though, due to subsidies and interesting presentation. :) But BP Solar really wants you to buy solar panels, of course.
Clickable link: http://colin-gourlay.com/
There is no cap on music purchased from Amazon MP3 (going forward). The cap is on uploaded files, since there is no way to link your uploaded copy of Bad Romance with my uploaded copy of Bad Romance and know that they are the same.
I originally wrote this in January, 2010 here on Hacker News in response to Marc Cenedella's blog post:

http://www.cenedella.com/job-search/leonardo-da-vincis-resum...

I reposted it on my blog yesterday in anticipation of Leonardo's birthday on April 15.
Of course; Dropbox uses the same mechanism.
I can't quite see how the title, the start and the end of this article tie together. Too many buzzwords and name dropping are definitely a bad thing.
I have always wondered if a quadrotor could be set up to harvest wind energy. I'm imagining it propping itself up against a tree or something and letting the wind blow it's rotors to recharge. Does anyone know why that won't work?
The original written by Leonardo da Vinci is here:

http://www.cenedella.com/job-search/leonardo-da-vincis-resum...

The site also took an extremely long time to respond for me, which was kind of amusing given the content when it finally did load:

> I know how, when a website is besieged, to shard data onto the cloud, and make endless variety of mirrors, and fault tolerant disks and RAIDs, and other machines pertaining to such concerns.

You should consider using some of those "secrets" on your own site. :)

Edit: site seems to be responding quickly now. Must have been a momentary blockage in the tubes.
Behold The World's Largest Photo Ever Taken Indoor: 40 Gigapixels of Awesome
Ask HN: Where can I find studies that link office plants to productivity
As part of a cost cutting measure at my workplace we've just had all the office greenery removed. In it's place we've got nothing but drab grey walls to look at.

If anyone knows of any papers that have been written that link office greenery to increased productivity could you post them in the comments. This way I might have an argument to take to the Higher-Ups about getting the greenery reinstated. Thanks
I look forward to reading his online book. There are quite a few interesting books from the 60s on this topic, including Paul Goodman's "Compulsory Miseducation" --- which you can read online at http://gyanpedia.in/Portals/0/Toys%20from%20Trash/Resources/... --- and A.S. Neill's Summerhill, and Dennison's The Lives of Children. All three offer a formal framework for addressing this topic: how we learn and develop is a psychological matter, not one of grades, nor figuring out how to fill a kid's head with facts. Contemporary work on cognitive and psychological development (unintentionally) corroborates this viewpoint (as far as I can tell, which is part time research, since full time I write code).
Here's my major beef with what's happening. The real metric of business success is whether you have a positive impact — on your industry, on your community, on (in a small way) the world at large. That doesn't always mean starting your own company. Most of the time, in fact, it means becoming part of a company that you love, with a purpose you believe in, and people who you can't imagine not working with.

Might be true at large, but my FAVORITE thing about communities of hackers is that hackers are principally CREATORS. The reason I left a 9-5 to spend more time with hackers in the startup community because this community self selects the flavor of person who sees problems with the status quo, wants to fix them, and has the power to exact change (usually through code).

In contrast, most of the general populace is in "cover your ass" mode, which is why the author is probably generally right when he says, "Most of the time [business success] means becoming part of a company that you love" -- but not right for most HN readers.
You're quite a bit early. Or perhaps, 559 years too late.
The old saying

Out of the frying pan, into the fire

seems perfectly applicable. Although it originally implies that matters get worse, it's colloquially used to indicate things don't get any better.
American Express ‘Serve’ Versus PayPal: What’s the Difference?
If you have 200GB of music, you have 195GB of crap.
Are you not allowed to bring your own plants in and care for them?
But you'd probably be quicker to get nginx up and running - so I was wondering if there were any benefits beyond a nginx/php-fpm setup
> It used to be almost your entire life was taken up simply
in an effort to survive ; now most of us work 40 hours per week
and it takes care of all of our needs .

...as well as the whims and fancies of the super-rich. If income disparity wasn't so high, I believe most of us would get by working significantly fewer hours per week (which could likely exacerbate some of the problems he mentions). The complexities in government that he mentions act as proverbial rocks in the stream, diverting wealth disproportionately to executives, lawyers, and bankers and keeping those "kids" busy.
I agree with the second statement, but I actually disagree with PG on the first one. Trying hard doesn't necessarily mean quitting your day job.

It can mean doing a day job to support your family whilst working on your project in your spare time.

Using the reverse logic, most people that produce something that people want will be earning enough from their project to quit their day job. PG's observation doesn't imply for me that quitting the day job has to come first.
>where one would even begin if I wanted to take my weekend Arduino project, and turn it into a commercial gadget

I have no actual experience of this, but ... Personally I'd do some research with the patent literature and see if you can find a patent that covers your device. Espacenet is the easiest of the patent dbs to search IMO, use ECLA/IPC key if you can. If you can't find it then consider patenting it.

Once you have spent time establishing the patent situation you can move on.

If you have patent protection then look and see what you can find close to the product that has actually been sold, if nothing then find a few companies that manufacture devices that are as similar as possible and hit them up letting them know you've got a patent (or pat pending) and take it from there.

Or, are you thinking you want to design circuitry, get necessary certifications, build out cases and advertise and market (b2b or b2c) for yourself?

>"it's a great idea"

Great ideas don't necessarily make great products. But don't let that get in your way, have fun!
Good point. That might be possible.
Did you ever present this as a resume to a possible employer? If so, what was the response?
Ask HN: Chicken and Egg Problem
Hi,

Need some ideas on solving the chicken and egg problem. How can you get enough traffic towards a community based website. Any examples as to how startups are dealing with this situation today will be very helpful.

Thanks
"Nocera's leaf is stable -- operating continuously for at least 45 hours without a drop in activity in preliminary tests -- and made of widely available, inexpensive materials -- like silicon, electronics and chemical catalysts."

So semiconductor grade Silicon is readily available and easily manufactured in a third world country? Or will they have to buy the finished product from first world countries? If they do, where do they get the money? Unless they can build it themselves - and it doesn't sound like they can - how will it help them?
The design is nice, but why don't you go completely random with the URLs for the stats? Either make the URLs guessable (1000, 1001, 1002, ...) or list them so that everyone can see them properly or make them unguessable. This way, it seems sort of private, but it isn't at all, because it just increases 2 digits within the URL.
Amazon's storage plans are expensive compared to Google's

Amazon

5 GB	(FREE)

20 GB	($20 / year)

50 GB	($50 / year)

100 GB	($100 / year)

200 GB	($200 / year)

500 GB	($500 / year)

1000 GB	($1000 / year)

Google

20 GB ($5.00 USD per year)

80 GB ($20.00 USD per year)

200 GB ($50.00 USD per year)

400 GB ($100.00 USD per year)

1 TB ($256.00 USD per year)
And how do you plan to keep him from watching porn all day long?
Yes I would be allowed but quite a few people want them back so I'd rather try and solve the problem for the entire office rather than just for myself.
Origins of IT Outsourcing and the Next Gen IT Outsourcing Models
It probably all depends on opportunity cost. If it will take you three months to build something shippable, by all means, be damn sure somebody wants it. When the cost is not sleeping for two nights ... meh, just do it.
No, he played portal.
As usual, causation is not correlation, and consciously deciding to take your children out of public schools and either homeschool them or put them in an alternative school show's a significant amount more involvement in your child's life than is the norm.

Also, that study was produced by an organization, (http://www.nheri.org/) that is specifically dedicated to producing studies about homeschooling. The titles of their reports all allude to defending the idea of homeschooling, and they put out guides to putting it into practice. The children for the study were "almost 12,000 home-school students from all 50 states who took three well-known standardized achievements tests", which aren't required for children to take, unless possibly if they live in Iowa or California. It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that poorly performing homeschooled children would not take these tests, since they have nothing to gain from them.

For what it's worth, all the anecdotal evidence I have from growing up and knowing a number of home-schooled children, it's certainly not guaranteed to work better than public schools, and I've never met an intelligent, thoughtful person to come out of it. Not that amazingly smart people can't result, but I've never met them, and I feel like that's the attitude you're up against. I hope there are more and better stats, because presenting ones like yours above will only steel the negative opinion of most people towards homeschooling.
Its using a BSON ObjectId, but I hear what you are saying. thanks for the feedback!