skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Releasing or not releasing O2 has nothing whatsoever to do with waste energy. It's impossible to electrolyze water without releasing O2.

It's great to try to make it more efficient, but this research doesn't actually do that, it just makes the equipment cheaper, but at the same efficiency.

And besides electrolysis is a terrible way to store energy because storing hydrogen is impractical (it leaks right though metal). Plus there are unavoidable inefficiencies.
Why RIM Is Screwed: Limited Market Opportunity, Losing AT&T Share, Margins Getting Worse
why don't you use slinkset instead?
Most of the ten advantages OurDoings has over the competition are related to when a mainstream user has too many photos:

http://ourdoings.com/hostingplans.html

I never said a mainstream user uploads average 3 pictures.
agreed. Mankind has always had cowards, only difference is that today we would laugh at the people who try hard but fail and fawn over those who gained much without courage, risk or merit.

"They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. ... It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so. "

from "Abolition of Man - or Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools" http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition1.h...
There are already eBay iPhone apps.(not sure if you can list items, but you can def bid/watch).
flagged because the site seems to be down...
You probably have to pay for it.
Samsung i8510 INNOV8 8GB (Unlocked)
The operating system of this phone uses the Symbian version 9.3. This makes using the touchscreen menu a breeze to use. Everything on the screen is so clearly laid out, within second you’ll be updating your contact information and taking photos in seconds.
Part-time apps developers getting rich
Back in the day, papermaking depended on a certain twist of the wrist to set the fibers of a new sheet. People would practice for years to get the proper "knack". Experienced papermakers would often "lose their knack" and could no longer do it. Whatever the mechanism, it's a real phenomenon.
Postgresql.
Only two categories of monopoly exist - businesses that use the government to maintain their position, and businesses that earn their position.

Examples:

* AT&T enjoyed a monopoly provided by the government; Alcoa did not.

* Aesthetic questions of instruction set aside, Intel is similar to Alcoa in that they earned their spot through execution (and knowing what's important; it's only obvious in hindsight that having the newest and biggest fabs anywhere trumps design in this industry.)

* Apple with iPod+iTunes. (Good)

* Google with Gmail. (Good)

* The United States Postal Service (Bad)

* Rail service through government-run Amtrak (Bad)
I don't think there is all that much correlation to be honest between firefox, and adblock.

I've used firefox for years but would never dream of installing adblock. I can see there's a sort of person that would, probably the same people who like to tell you how they don't own a TV...

Also, adblock only blocks irritating 'obvious' adverts. There's a ton of adverts you wouldn't even recognize as being adverts. "Ad-Blocking" isn't really a threat to the net.
Agami Systems Shuts Down
Anyone know what happened?
Don't be ridiculous. Ads work. People click on them. Sites make millions.
Ads are useful to the users, providing links you might not usually see.

Sure there are irritating flash popup music ads, but they are just spam.
It is fantastic to see a programming community venture between Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood take off.

Why? Because they talk about themselves a lot?
Also who picked the name ExpertSexChange. I mean come on....
Thanks for the clarifications.

>artificial photosynthesis" focuses not on carbon fixation but on the transformation of light to electrochemical energy (via electron/proton transfer).

Then why call it photosynthesis? It's not, it's photovoltaics. If you want photosynthesis you have have to fix carbon, or you're making a mockery of the term. And if you are making hydrogen directly, then call it photolysing.

Either way you are not synthesizing anything.

I didn't realize that chlorine is preferred to O2, but what does it matter? I don't want O2, I want H2, and once all the chlorine is gone, won't the sodium hydroxide work just as well as NaCl? Or is that what you mean by 'very basic environment'?

They should rewrite that article and omit any mention of solar, just say they invented a new cheaper way to electrolyze water. Applications include storing energy from solar or wind for when the sun isn't shining.

Doesn't the above paragraph make a lot more sense than the parent article?
Yahoo hiring freeze over?
Irreversible effects on female brains from soy products
"Launch, grow rapidly, be bought by Google"
(In)Accuracy of Alexa and Compete
It's a little dated--2 years old--but maybe someone can submit a link to a more recent experiment?
It's a little dated--2006. Does anyone know of a more recent experiment?
There are sites that do this for traffic and such already, http://commuterfeed.com/. Also if you wanted to do this for the subway you could just create a hashtag for your rail system. Then when ever they see a train tweet #<hashtag> train just left <station>. This would only require getting the community behind you since the infrastructure is in place. You could then use Summize to track the hashtag and populate a website so not twitter users could use it.
This article is a load of crappy overgeneralisations that don't match to any of my experiences of myself or others. It reminds me of the scene from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas where some whacky doctor classifies the "marijuana culture" as "Square, Hip, Cool and Groovy".

I can't quite fathom why anyone would vote this trash up.
Kind of a 20/20 hindsight thing too. I wish people would write these type of posts right after the startup launches.

It's very easy to bash startups and think you're an expert because you picked who would fail (the vast majority of them do). It's much harder to pick winners.
FCC spanks Comcast for P2P blocking: no fine, full disclosure
It's better than an amateur sex change.
Google would immediately be out of business if they betrayed your trust in a way like that. Besides, you're already entrusting your emails to them if you use Gmail. That's probably a bigger deal.
According to the article, Abebooks acts as a digital marketplace and does not hold its own inventory. If that is the case, why doesn't Amazon just go after booksellers themselves? Amazon offers the same service with a much wider audience, no?
There's no way ~$450,000 is worth going through what she did.
HN Show & Tell: Feedvolley
My experience with Justin.tv has shown me there is a more dangerous kind of troll who will call the police on you, prank call at all hours of the night, make prank deliveries, etc.
These more dangerous trolls are mostly enabled by the weak security in our phone system, rather than the internet.

Actually, as I write this, I realize that the solution will not be laws (although I would certainly derive pleasure from seeing these people jailed).
The real solution will be VOIP; turning phones into the internet. When you can turn your phone into accept-whitelist-only with a click, mass prank calling will be stopped. When identity can be cryptographically determined, fake calls to pizza places or the police will be stopped.

So we don't actually need laws; we just need a secure phone system.
This is not a startup, just a little pet project. It lets users skin RSS feeds with their own HTML, for example to skin existing web content or complement Yahoo! Pipes etc.

I'd love to get some feedback on this if you find it interesting. There's some more background here: http://niryariv.wordpress.com/category/projects/feedvolley/

Please keep in mind this is not a commercial site, so there may be some rough edges and missing parts ;)

BTW, I'm looking for UI input on the following: the real meat of the app is in the Customize page, especially the "Use Custom HTML" option. I have a feeling many users just create a page and never notice they can customize the HTML, URL etc. Any ideas how to make it more prominent yet keep from taking focus from the actual content?
Yeah dude, us nerds don't pay attention to Hollywood celebrities, so when a programmer celebrity arises we wet our pants with excitement
In my experience, many sellers already list their stock on both.
Wow! Congrats to Paul!

I met him at Startup School this year and it was, honestly, one of the highlights.
Microsoft's Avenue A/Razorfish Seeks Old Media Business
Federal Crypto Algorithm Info Released [pdf]
The slant of this article seems to be mostly steering people away from outsourcing. I understand the motivation, but I disagree in some cases.

Outsourcing is always a touchy topic with hackers and techies like me. Nobody likes to consider sending work offshore that they themselves either used to do, or at least consider critical to their business.

My take on outsourcing is: Don't Outsource Your Brains.

My meaning is: it's useful to outsource pieces of your business that are not core to your strategy. HR, Benefits Management, Software Testing, and Development can all be candidates for outsourcing under some circumstances.

If you're a software or technology company, it may not be a good idea to outsource development. Or, it could be a good idea to outsource implementation of the mundane, easy parts of your application after your Chief Architect has put a solid framework together, so that he or she can move on to solving tougher problems.

If you're a t-shirt printing company, then outsourcing your e-commerce, SEO, and other technical functions could be a great idea, so you can focus on making the business of printing t-shirts better.

Shoot. I am a techie, and I think S3 and EC2 are great ways to get a business started at a low cost. Because managing infrastructure is not my core competence.

It was a great read, thanks.
I use Outlook for the address book (and the calendar to a lesser extent), for the reason that pretty much every application can import from/export to Outlook. No other PIM comes remotely close. It's the only reasonable way to keep my phone, my PDA, my website, etc in sync.
I had to. Yes, I know the reason.
I use Digg but I found the recommendation engine pretty poor. The problem I had with it is it's very simplistic. If you and user X have both digged up a story, and then user X diggs up another story, it concludes that you probably like that story too because you both agreed on the first story. This tends to be not true all the time. Ideally they should try for more of a netflix-like system that evaluates why certain people like certain types of stories, but that would be much more effort to implement
The Web 3.0 Devolution
Shawn Adrian offers a quiet rant about buzz words.
NVIDIA to exit chipset business, no Apple partnership?
I really enjoyed working with Nir on this one. Very interested to hear where the user experience can be refined to make it even easier and more accessible for the masses to use.
Shoulda/woulda/coulda... Is that worth anything?
I don't pursue it to the "ultimately" stage -- it's a moderate belief, that only holds true within certain boundaries. I have no plan to skate off the edge of the slippery slope. What's more, my opinion rests on further subjective opinions like what constitutes "well-off", what constitutes "a good lifestyle", and dozens of other terms which could each spawn a debate.

That said, I think most people would agree that there is a degree of wealth at which some amount of it can safely be considered superfluous to the needs -- including the entire hierarchy, unless one must self-actualize as an airplane collector -- of one person. At that point, I submit that sizeable charitable donations are in order. (The utility of such donations is, of course, yet another debate.)
If IE6 were to drop below epsilon, it would greatly help me.
You can think your way deeper into one, though.
First they'd need to have an idea of what intelligence is. At which point they could probably write a simple AI anyway.
I like the idea of cutting the crap and just displaying an RSS feed. The themes you have there are also really nice. Nice work!
I was quite impressed with Zimbra Desktop, it is really worth a try.

The only reason I am not using it today is because I figured it would be a pain to migrate my current calendar, to-dos and address book to it, but Zimbra is the one I'd be using if I was starting from scratch today.
Top Five Best Uses of an Entrepreneur's Legal Dollars
10 Tips for Founders to Improve Their FICO Score
"The problem is to somehow convince most people that you are really a chatbot and not a human."

Er. Is that seriously a problem? I talked to one of the chatbots for about 15 seconds and virtually every response I got was poor
It looks like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are the archetypes for this guys idea of programmers. He should go out in the real world more often, or stay out of it in the case with hackers.
A blogspot blog plastered with ads doesn't ooze with trustability. I'd like to see a better source before I believe this.
Thanks! Except for the default & Gallery themes, they are all adapted Tumblr themes - the folks who made them deserve the credit :) We chose Tumblr's markup and try to support it as well as we can, to give users a large potential selection to choose from.
They bought Bibliofind and destroyed it. I hope they don't destroy Abebooks too.
The Big Picture: Large Hadron Collider nearly ready
With all of the snafus that iPhone users have encountered of late (problems with iTunes, activation woes, iPhone instability, bad AT&T customer service, MobileMe problems) there is plenty of opportunity for RIM to have a sustainable business. They may even cannibalize disappointed iPhone users.

I have an iPhone, and I like it lots, but my friend who has a blackberry can't stand using it. There's one immutable factor: There are lots of people out there who prefer to type on their smartphone with two thumbs. Enough to make a good business, especially if you are willing to learn from the iPhone's successes and failures.
This thing makes the "complex" parts of the software I write seem trivial.
I did try to not make it a hindsight 20/20 thing -- but it's really impossible to know at this point if I have a predisposition.

Also, I didn't write about the ones that I "predicted" would fail (and, not even the ones that I thought would succeed). The list simply identifies the startups that I would have invested in.
I think Spolsky often has interesting things to say about the business of programming. Atwood... well... not my cup of tea.
ABE was in the used book market for many years before Amazon and has a large entrenched base of booksellers who would be difficult to wrench away. All the more so since (speaking for myself, at least) they earned a high level of customer loyalty over the years.

In fact, they're a great example of the companies pg has been talking about recently - the ones that make the world a better place just by quietly providing a great service. They basically made the hard to find, out-of-print book a thing of the past.

Edit: by the way, does anybody know the story of how they went about amassing such a large network of used bookstores?
What does 'haze' mean in this context?
Carmack: iPhone more powerful than Nintendo DS, PSP combined
With any product I've worked on that has succeeded, nothing has ever beat word of mouth by way of providing a superior product.

With the software I work on now, every sale we've ever made has been from word of mouth.

Also; I missed you at Gangplank on Wednesday - I hear you don't make it down there much?
Do you not feel that the ability to do things online without fear of some of the recriminations you would receive in real life is also one of the great things about the internet?
Well, I'm biased (being the author of the article), but it was worth something to me for two reasons:

1. Writing it helped me think about the topic.

2. I got a chance to compliment some folks that I think deserved it without seeming overly silly.
Right on ars. The article brings up more questions than answers.

The reference to photosynthesis is indirect. I think the point of the reference is that photosynthesis stores the sun's energy and then uses it later on. And that is what his process will allow. Photovoltaics can provide energy all day, and instead of feeding the grid and getting energy credit the system can create hydrogen and oxygen gas and then use those later on when the sun is no longer out (through a fuel cell for example). The process, he is claiming will only presumably require water and some other "common" materials.

I imagine something like this could be possible. Some unanswered questions: How efficient is it, if it isn't efficient then can it scale? How expensive are the materials required? Where are the details? A paper, article in a magazine or even a web site with details. I have no idea why MIT would announce something like this without publishing first or simultaneously.

Links I could find:

http://web.mit.edu/chemistry/dgn/www/research/e_conversion.h...

http://web.mit.edu/chemistry/www/faculty/nocera.html
It won't depend on ownership. If the Abebooks subsidiary remains in Canada (which they say they will), using Canadian banks (which they didn't say, but it seems likely to me), you can probably expect the international transaction fees to remain as well.
The point is that we don't want duplicate content, even if it's at slightly different URLs.
Get Rid of Long iPhone Backups With A Simple App
All Things Pythonic - Origin of BDFL
Upvoted you, since I can't downvote the article.

Anyway, I really need to work on pronouncing a clear programmer personality. Am I a hippy? Am I a nerd? I'm so confused. I just hope I'm not a lumpenprogrammer!
I don't use any Google apps, or even have a Google account. It's not so much a matter of trust; it's a matter of usage. Google looks like a search company, but in practice they're a data-mining company for targeted advertisement.

On the whole I don't see a migration away from Exchange to Google Apps as a big win; they're both still platforms that lock you into a system that you don't control, but Google goes one step further and mines that data.

I don't mean "Google is Evil!" with that -- this is what their company is about, and it of course makes business sense for them. But for this sort of infrastructure I'd prefer not to rely on them. Hint: nobody seems to love MS, but their business seems to be doing quite well.
I was expecting an article. But a cartoon? Not as good as the classic: http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/idog.html
I agree completely. Spolsky's essays are pretty enjoyable.

But neither are necessarily qualified to actually write software anymore.
Sounds odd, but potentially interesting. Anti-troll software?

I know a few trolls, but mostly small potatoes; I wouldn't associate with the ones who affect people's lives. Anyway, feel free to contact me at magus.pwnsen at gmail dot com
Yes, but be careful to stay on Nurse Ratchett's good side.
The only reason I can see it being up-voted is maybe people want to figure out which "photo sharing" site is stuck with the unmaintainable code base...
Nice jQuery tooltip script.. improved
A non-ajax version of the popular jTip script for jQuery
I look forward to more research in this area, but note that the "female brains" in the title refers to laboratory rats, not humans. Just about everything fucks up laboratory rats; it's not the smoking gun the headline suggests.
But suppose you get a few responses that seem surprisingly good. You might think that there's a human watching the chat and responding every once in a while.

If you don't have an interest in chatbots, consider another example: targeted advertising in gmail. How do you convince people that there is no human involvement in this targeting at all?
There's a wide spectrum of behavior that is categorized as "trolling", from the obnoxious but harmless to the outright criminal. Rickrolling people on message boards and harassing people IRL don't deserve the same word.

Anyone who affects others' real lives has no right to use the "trolling" excuse. It's just unacceptable.

Also, the people claiming, in that article, to have made large sums of money from their trolling activities are lying. Trolls always exaggerate their "accomplishments" to absurd degrees, taking credit for others' "work" and blowing the external effects/importance of their trolling way out of proportion.
As I was reading this article, a song called "Most Terrible Archer" by Joy Electric came on. While it was probably not written about trolls, I couldn't help seeing the connections:

Separate your chief anxieties
Cut the cord, but you won't
Excommunicate from our society
Are you bold? You are not

Oh no
The most terrible, terrible
Archer

You among the league of militants
How little you have learned
Tried and failed to be one of the innocents
Little left of yourself

Little left of myself
Little right of yourself
In http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?article...,
the economics and the efficiency of this process are described:
"In fact, with our catalyst almost 100 percent of the current used for electrolysis goes into making oxygen and hydrogen."
This is definitely more efficient than the existing electrolysis, as the theoretical maximum efficiency of current electrolysis process is about 80%-94% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis).

I'm not sure what you mean by whether it's more efficient than charging and discharging a battery. But the lifespan of a fuel cell is potentially indefinite and it does not require recharge(add in Oxygen and H+ any time and electricity starts to flow). Further, with each battery cycle, the efficiency of a dry cell decreases.

I think this electrolysis process can definitely make a cheaper form of energy storage than, say, batteries. Even though each anode requires small amount of Platinum, but considering the long lifespan of fuel cell storage, this form of energy storage costs much less than traditional batteries in the long run (all the toxic disposal!) And even for the purposes of propulsion, fuel cell discharge is much more efficient than internal combustion engines.
Coffee shop programmer
1st Bob: What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the customer and bring them down to the software engineers?

Tom: Yes, yes that's right.

2nd Bob: Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them directly to the software people?

Tom: Well, I'll tell you why... because... engineers are not good at dealing with customers...

1st Bob: So you physically take the specs from the customer?
Tom: Well... No. My secretary does that... or they're faxed.

2nd Bob: So then you must physically bring them to the software people?

Tom: Well... No. ah sometimes.

1st Bob: What would you say you do here?
ICICI ATM Issues - 1 Aug 08 | MAKE MONEY ONLINE WITH HARRY
thank you. I'd reviewed the faqs, but was looking for a confirmation.
Hmm... when I saw this in the app it seemed like a big red flag for not applying.

Would you mind elaborating a bit on what makes a single-founder worthy?
It may seem obvious, but the main way you're going to draw attention to that link is by making it bigger.

Also consider styling "Customize" and "Create a page like this" as buttons instead of just links. They both indicate actions, not just another document to load.

Look at what firefox does when you view an rss feed in the browser. Above the feed content is a large yellow callout area with a subscribe button.

You can do something similar and offer an option to collapse the area which gets remembered by a cookie.