skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i don't know, i'm a little conflicted here because really, really, i know this is gonna sound stupid but the best way to get good is to make a lot of shit and then, after you don't feel weird about what you made, you show it to people who have taste (or that you value) and get critique.

I think you should design the way that you ______. Do you code? Apply that mindset to your design. Do you just hammer something out or do you try to improve it? Do you look for inspiration from other projects on github? Do you look for inspiration in orthogonal things like architecture or nature or industrial design or _____. Apply that to your design. Apply the same standards from something you're passionate about to your budding design work, it'll show. The more you make this your process the more your design will be your design.

as with all other things, there's a whole lot of cargo cult design where you toss in a grid and you dutifully build up some crazy type hierarchy or you use appropriate fonts or just plop down a müller-brockman layout or a tschichold page proportion or three sizes, two weights of helvetica neue, etc. You can convince yourself this is "correct," but sometimes you're just going through the motions. I've made a ton of absolute crap but sometimes i make something and i'm like "oh wow, that's an actually appropriate use for a grid, man what a total cock up that other project was."

It's very easy to make and parrot the current zeitgeist (just look at forrst), but it's hard to go out on a limb and try to make something that comes from you. It's even harder to make it something that other people will see and say "oh neat, i like that even though it's a little weird," and that's what practice does to you, but it doesn't come overnight, it takes effort, like anything worth doing, like programming or cooking or sports or _____.

The things that make you great in design are the things that make you great in any other field: passion, curiosity, exploration, failure, practice, communication and critique. all in great quantity. this is the moral you see on hn a lot, so it's like preaching to the choir, but go outside your comfort zone and try to make what's in your brain; it's a humbling and rewarding path.

i don't want to knock the post, it's fine, but also keep in mind that not everything needs to look like a startup website. I'm tired of friendly blue all the time, i want to see new designs, i want to see people going on a limb. I guess what i'm saying is: this is design for conversion sake, not for design's sake, and those are two totally different pots of gold.
Hearing a multi-millionaire yammer on about a $25 per year fee is pathetic. You'd think that he'd support Yahoo! for charging for their software. Besides nobody forced him to get the premium package and upload his photo library.
Chernobyl's Tragic Legacy
Recommended reading: "Rework" by Jason Fried and
David Heinemeier Hansson, and "Getting Real". Both by 37 signals-the ruby on rails guys. Best of luck!:) trust me, they are well worth the buy...
> There's been alternative engine development for almost as long as there's been the combustion engine, and nothing yet has made an impact.

That's not actually true. There have been an enormous variety of "impacts" from alternative engine designs. It's just that the engines that made the biggest "impacts" aren't "alternative" any more.

External-combustion engine: prior to 70 AD (aeolipile).

Internal-combustion rocket engine: 1200s.

Steam turbine (impact-turbine steam-jack): Taqi al-Din, 1600s.

Piston-vacuum steam engine: Newcomen, 1712.

Separate-condenser vacuum steam engine: Watt, 1765.

High-pressure steam engine: early 1800s, although maybe we should assign the credit to Hornblower, 1785.

Stirling engine: Stirling, 1816.

Otto engine: Otto, 1861 (or maybe some Italians in the 1850s.)

Two-stroke engine: Clerk, 1881.

Atkinson-cycle engine: Atkinson, 1882.

Rotary engine: Millet, 1889.

Diesel engine: Diesel, 1892.

Progressive-expansion turbine: Parsons, 1897.

Four-stroke diesel engine: Diesel, 1897.

Combustion-gas turbine: Elling, 1903.

Pulsejet (used in buzz-bombs): Karavodin, 1907.

Monosoupape, used in the Sopwith Camel: 1913.

Liquid-fueled rocket: Goddard, 1926.

Turbojet: Whittle and von Ohain, 1930s.

Ramjet: Leduc, 1936.

Turbofan: 1943.

Wankel engine: Wankel, 1954.

I've omitted minor changes like turbochargers, nozzle shapes, fuel injection, continuous-jerk camshafts, and so on; even though they're very practically important, I don't think they represent "alternative combustion engines". I've also omitted designs that haven't seen widespread use.

Now, from this, it looks like nothing has happened for 50 years. That is an illusion. The Atkinson engine only became significant in the last decade or two; Wankel's device only became significant in the 1970s; the ramjet didn't become significant until the 1950s; steam turbines went from a curiosity in the 1600s to the prime mover for much of the world's economy today, but it wasn't until Parsons' redesign that they really mattered.

Over the last 50 years, many new heat engine designs have been created: nutating-disc engines, thermoacoustic engines, the quasiturbine, scramjets, Stelzer's engine, the fluidyne engine, Sarich's orbital engine, the IRIS engine, and now this "wave disc generator". It's too early to tell which, if any, of these will turn out to be useful in the long run — at least as useful as the Wankel engine was in Mazda’s cars.
So Bing is now entirely some sort of anti-trust hedge that doesn't need to succeed on its own? That is one impressive twist of thought.
anyone have a pdf of the scribd/have a way to get it without getting a scribd account?
Do you tend to use it everyday or only on the days you are having a hard time concentrating?

And while we are at it, any other great anti-procrastination/focus apps or tricks you have found lately that work really well?
YC applicants, let's keep in touch 
Lets help each other be successful! I mean it! "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich." -PG

"the main indication of impending doom is when we don't hear from you." That means if we keep in touch and update each other on what we're up to everyday we can decrease our chances of dying and become rich! :)

Being a startup founder can be very demoralizing, but you'll feel so much better if you knew that other founders are going through the same thing. It seems a lot of the YC applicants (evident from the YC Wompt chatroom) are naturally very supportive and helpful toward each other. That's the kind of community that the YC network has (except better). If you didn't get accepted into YC, you won't have that supportive community. I'd say, let's update each other on a daily basis and geek out! Create an account here and include "yc" in your username so we know we're from the YC applicant list: http://rantfoo.com/signup/. Post a ramble (not a rant, unless you're emotional for some reason) to share what you're up to. We can share other content with each other too, aside from things about our project.
Nobody wants to give up their sweeteners or fats & oils. So they try to find a problem elsewhere.
I vastly prefer these busses to air travel for routes like New York to Boston. Lots of space, lots of comfort, Internet, power, nobody groping my body (at least not anybody in uniform), don't have to undress or wait in long lines, and probably 10x more eco-friendly.
> Take a cup of flour from 1914 and a cup of AP flour from 2011. Place them side by side on the counter top. Tell me how they are different from each other.

Have you actually done this? Do you really expect someone else to be able to do it? You've managed to come across as really patronizing but I can't tell if you actually have a point.

I'm no expert on milling technology, but I imagine today's flour is finer (just from the numbering system: 0, 00, 000, 0000 — I assume the finest flour in the system originally was 1!) but do you expect any other differences?

> Highly refined, protein and fiber reduced, extended with fillers and soaked in sweeteners.

Extending flour with fillers is illegal now in the US, and it wasn't illegal in 1914. That's probably one big difference. It's just as "protein and fiber reduced" now as it was then (as the original article points out!) and it's not "soaked in sweeteners".

Likewise with the oats. What was oatmeal like in 1914? How do you know?
> If we had any other major language in the browser, even c++, it would have died long, long ago. We wouldn't even be talking about it today.

This. JS' success is because of lack of alternatives. It's astonishing that some people actually advocate JS.
I don't know what the CDD says about non-Google search engines, but I will point out that Bing is in the Android Market. Exactly how much more open does Google need to be to competitors' products and services?
The whole problem is that this sw only gets used once every 6 months.
Navy Solid State Laser - lases boat
Is this related to the libav/ffmpeg dustup from a few months ago? (see here: http://lwn.net/Articles/433347/ )

Seems to be a lot of drama in the open source codec space, and I'm really not sure who is on what side or what the issues at stake are.

Anyone care to explain what's going on?
Send me an email: Paul@thestartupfoundry.com and I'll send you a PDF tomorrow.
There maybe a huge informal sector within Facebook. My older sister tells me she goes to Facebook to see pictures of merchandise from her friends before going to their house to buy stuff.
Okay, so how do you and I make money on both these types?
Well, at least its functional.
I and another computer science student spent an entire semester internship just trying to get Globus properly installed and configured in the CS lab for one of our professors. It (the cluster computing software infrastructure of Globus) was a ridiculous sprawling mess of poorly integrated components. I've gone through both Gentoo and Linux-From-Scratch and can honestly say it is easier to assemle the parts for an entire operating system than to get Globus working (at least that was the case in 2008). I could see a definite need for a lightweight solution with a simple install package, but I wasn't in the position to write one.
Yes, it looks like the admin of mplayerhq.hu sided with libav in the fork and someone on the other side got pissed.
Staffed by who? There are actually some user facilities for materials synthesis--the problem is that if someone is making someone else's material instead of working on something that they're interested in, then I don't think that you're going to get the same level of productivity out. Also, materials synthesis takes time and running through lots of dead ends. When I was a grad. student, a postdoc from a collaboration would drive in to our lab with powders she had made--try to grow a crystal for a week (sleeping for maybe an hour or two a night on a floor in our office) and then go back to her home institution and come back in a few weeks. That just doesn't work--you don't have the responsiveness to be able to figure out what dead ends you're wandering down...Imagine if you were writing code and could only run it once every few weeks. Now, imagine that it was thousands of lines of nontrivial code and you're trying to debug it that way...
A carb is a not a carb. Sucrose is composed of equal parts glucose and fructose, while starch is pure glucose. Fructose and glucose are two different 'carbs' and handled much differently by the body.
Wasn't the average life expectancy lower back then? People were retiring earlier...
I guess this shows that marketing-people shouldn't write code.
A Very Short Introduction to MapReduce and Hadoop
My lab has a SEM. It costs $50/hour to operate. I have been led to understand that most of that cost is to cover if something goes wrong (which means we can't lower the per hour cost by having more people use it).

Think how much more expensive coding would be if it cost $50/ per compile (or hell $10/per compile).
Interestingly, Galileo disproved the incorrect doctrine that, ceteris paribus, heavy objects fall faster than light ones not just with “reference to experiment or other experience” but by logically refuting Aristotle’s reasoning:-

SALVIATI: If then we take two bodies whose natural speeds are different, it is clear that, [according to Aristotle], on uniting the two, the more rapid one will be partly held back by the slower, and the slower will be somewhat hastened by the swifter. Do you not agree with me in this opinion?

SIMPLICIO: You are unquestionably right.

SALVIATI: But if this be true, and if a large stone move with a speed of, say, eight [units] while a smaller move with a speed of four, then when they are united, the system will move with a speed less than eight; but the two stones when tied together make a stone larger than that which before moved with a speed of eight. Hence the heavier body moves with less speed than the lighter; an effect which is contrary to your supposition. Thus you see how, from your assumption that the heavier body moves more rapidly than the lighter one, I infer that the heavier body moves more slowly.
I started taking the megabus from Cleveland to Chicago in 2006 or so. It was kind of ridiculous how much better and cheaper it was than any other way of getting to the places it went.
This is a technology I've been following for a while, its the solid state laser system (as opposed to the free electron laser that is targeting a megawatt). In littoral combat situations this capability could adequately defend against gun boats, and it would be pretty hellish on pirates in Somalia as well.

The news however is the ever increasing power available in semi-conductor based lasers. These are made by Northrup Grumand as part of the JHSSP [1]

One of the investigations in the DARPA program is a 'backpack' laser which could replace a sniper rifle with a device that would not require a spotter nor any ballistics calculations.

It will be interesting if we get cheaper bandwidth out of this work as well, reducing the number of repeaters needed to get a signal through a trans-oceanic able would be an improvment.

[1] http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-maritime-laser-navy-clos...
The Bolt Bus from NYC to Boston and back for $30 round trip was one of the best decisions I'd ever made. Clean, quiet, and room enough to get my work done along the way.
I implemented a rather nice C++ pattern matching facility for productions of context-free grammars in my undergraduate thesis project (http://www.grailplus.org). It is able to do some really fancy stuff and I think that is one were using C++ then one could use some similar techniques for creating list comprehensions. Here's how I envision it working:

First, the variables used in the comprehension would be defined locally, with the right types.

Second, we would need an overloaded template function, named something like "constructor" to abstractly represent a constructor for some arbitrary object. Here is how the constructor function works: for N arguments, all taken by reference, it allocates an array of N void * pointers (or sufficiently large slot sizes + proper alignment to hold any pointer type), and returns a pointer to the first slot in that array as some member in an instantiated template, where one of the parameters of the template contains all the info of the types of the constructor parameters. It also initializes each slot of the array to be the address of the local variable passed in to the constructor function by reference. So, if the following is my setup:

int foo;
float bar;
constructor<std::pair>(foo, bar)

returns an object of type Constructor<std::pair, Slot<Base<int>,float> >, where the object contains a pointer to the first slot in the array. This type and the array contain all the info we need to construct an std::pair<int,float>.

The comprehensions would likely require an new iteration mechanism. This was the case in my thesis project, as a cursor-based iterator, while being able to represent the iteration aspect of this, is unable to fully represent the pattern-matching/destructuring bind operations. The tricky part is to make it so that one can advance multiple loops in sequence.

When we know that we can enter the body of the inner loop that would normally represent the innermost loop in an imperative implementation of the same operation being performed by the comprehension then we can use the pointer table to bind values to local variables, and then use a compile-time created function from the Constructor type to yank out those values all at once, impose the proper types using a cast on the void * pointers, and then construct the thing we want to add into our final list.
Ver la reina del sur capitulo 30 Online
Replacing the convoluted multi-party email forward with a dynamic document would be nice.
Yes. However lets consider this: If it meets 80% of the population's 100% needs then its good enough for me. Imagine a ~60% or so reduction in co2 emissions world wide. Sure 20% of people still need their big trucks, but at least not everyone. Not to mention shaving 1000 pounds off the weight of the car not only gives fuel gains, but lowers power requirements to move that vehicle. Now I was going to say... take that, combine it with tesla's engine, and now you have potentially a long-range vehicle, a vehicle that can already do 300 miles on a charge and potentially a gas engine that can charge it up so you get a nice and unlimited mileage as long as you refuel.

Not to mention cheaper cars!!!!!
I wouldn't discount a company because they're competing with Google. There are a lot of companies that have competed with Google and have successfully out-competed them (likewise, there are a lot of companies that Google has acquired after failing to out-compete). You should look at Kayak on its own merits -- if the folks there are giving you a good offer, and you think the company has a good chance, then go for it.
Eh no. The only thing easier to rebuild than a Rotary engine is maybe a VW air cooled flat-4. Also the RX-7 wasn't Mazda's first rotary car.
http://placekitten.com/ is superior
I gotta ask, why 333 characters?
Apple hiring away PR execs from Nintendo, Activision - rumor
New Vehicle Engine 3.5x More Efficient Than Combustion Engine, -90% Emissions
Here come Ads on Google Maps (API)
True. I wonder if the same would apply if this disclosure/terms were placed as the header with something along the lines of "by continuing to read this email you hereby agree to the following...", similar to TOS on websites.
Gang colors are basically like Tech T-shirts and Military patches. Framing works both ways :D
Videos de motos
Javascript hack weekend: Unique projects to inspire awesome hacks
While I've said pretty much everything in the article to my friends and co-workers over the past several months... I'd still say at this point it qualitifes as FUD.
Why does he write that in BOLD at the end?
You're mixing language definitions and implementations. You're comparing software that was created by big companies with software created by small teams or single developers. I think good commenters can do better.

BTW you're implying governments are funding over-priced journals people outside of prestigious institutions cannot afford. Even though that's true it's not the way it should be.
Find a good way to get the real data - and sell it for lots.
The fundamental problem with social networking as it currently stands is that the advertisements are a distraction rather than being synergistic with the sites workflows. I used to use facebook to communicate with second-tier acquaintances (before realizing why I didn't really communicate with them in the first place)

If I want to buy something I have a pretty good idea of what I want (hard to draw thenwindow shoppers to an online store). That being said I will go and search ( google, not a social network )
The Wave engine has been posted about before, but I still find it an intriguing idea, especially for something like the Volt that uses gasoline only as a generator, so it's able to run at an optimal efficiency. This type of engine is, seemly, perfect for that kind of application.

I find it interesting that this modern engine is actually significantly less complicated than the 100-year-old engine it's replacing. It seems that technology is often about refining ideas to their simplest form rather than getting more complex (e.g., the Atom is a much simpler CPU than standard x86 processors)

It looks like it's going to be several years before it's commercially viable.
It's a bit strange, if you read the follow on thread the person who presumably sent the email claims he did not make any legal threats, and his email was merely "abrasive".

http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/2011-Apr...

http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/2011-Apr...

I have no idea where the right or wrong in this lies.
Could you elaborate? I'm getting into Android development, and I'm wondering what I'm missing that's in iOS.
You could have seen caste (in 1st para), unless you wanted to willingly suppress it.
In the article they mentioned an old greyhound promo of $99 for 99 days of unlimited travel. Anyone know if the us equivalent of eurail passes exists? Or the modern bus equivalent?
thanks. that's a great list btw.

I guess I was specifically referring to car engines which, aside from the Wankel, are the same basic idea (pistons turning a crankshaft) that's been around forever. Yes, the technology has improved out of sight, and there's been a number of significant innovations like you've mentioned, but I've never seen anything outside the piston/crankshaft paradigm take hold.

About 15 years ago I was able to tour the Orbital Engine workshops and have a look at their stuff and chat to their engineers. At the time (mid 90's) they had developed a two stroke car engine they had running in a bmw. The engine made more power and torque, used about 20% less fuel and was about 30% lighter than the one it replaced, yet nothing ever came of it. [0]

I'd love to see this stuff happen, but I think the problem lies not with the technologies but rather that manufacturers are too conservative

[0] bloody hell, I've found one of the cars and it's on the market at the moment http://www.carsales.com.au/all-cars/private/details.aspx?seo...
Surprisingly, almost everything Adams talks about is what is learned at the worst schools in the drug game. Obviously not for everyone because (a) it's illegal, (b) often violent, and (c) not generally well-regarded. But at least there's precedent for this type of education of the B student.
Http://www.fileserve.com/file/EUaZ6Xc
I'm quite fond of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's quote, "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

(And my mistake, didn't see doron's earlier post.)
Staffed by scientists and engineers, I imagine. You can get some pretty sophisticated parts built by foundries. At one point, making a microchip was prohibitively expensive. Nowadays, when you create chips basically by coding them in high level synthesis languages. Spinning a chip does take weeks. Obviously when a process takes longer to carry out, with high iteration cost, careful methodology is called for. Simulation and error checking software becomes valuable. Heck, once upon a time computers themselves were massively expensive, among the most expensive machines built. Computing wasn't born cheap. Mass production and decades of technological advances made them so. Machines for combinatorial science may someday be more effective than graduate students.
I have heard from a friend in the hotel business that the majority of the leads they get from Facebook are from Facebook messages (meaning friends telling one another about the hotel). The other efforts they've made with advertising and marketing have pretty much fallen flat.
This is not about you & me.