skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would guess that their research only shows that light can be bent around a simple object like a disk or sphere, and not an arbitrarily shaped object like a tank or ship. I don't think they'll have the technology in the near future to create a metamaterial that bends light around any sort of vehicle or non-trivial object. In order to bend light around an object, the metamaterial needs to be anisotropic, meaning the index of refraction changes throughout the material in three dimensional space. While this can be done in the lab with a simple object, it would be incredibly difficult and expensive to produce an anisotropic metamaterial that would hide something large and arbitrarily shaped, and the methods to produce or mass produce such metamaterials are still a long way off. This is especially true with visible light, where the metamaterial must be built on the nanoscale.

In any case, this is still an incredible breakthrough. It hasn't taken them too long to move this technology from the microwave spectrum to the visible light spectrum, so progress may be fairly quick. Especially considering the huge amount of money the military is probably sinking into this for obvious reasons.

Here is some of the original metamaterial invisibility work on the microwave spectrum:
http://www.ee.duke.edu/~drsmith/cloaking.html
I actually worked in this lab for part of a summer writing a ray tracer to test these concepts. Maybe I should have stuck with this stuff...
I think this is very important for the entrepreneurs who say "I will make millions and retire when i am 40". Once we start our business, it is really impossible to retire unless we want to sell the business or go bankrupt. It is a one way trip to Hell, which is Heaven is disguise.
It’s Cucumber Time, Baby
> It's a build-buy decision, right?

Exactly, but the entry level DB2 and Oracle solutions are not super cost prohibitive and time is money. We're talking about a pretty low man-hour investment in futzing with MySQL before you'd have been better off calling an IBM rep. If you're doing some popular free web app maybe you can stick a "powered by IBM" icon in the corner and get the stuff for free. Remember those?
Denmark is a tiny country, its 1/10th the size of california, they don't need much oil. Yet look at it, it took them close to 40 years to kick the habit. This is why its so disingenuous when candidates focus so much on offshore drilling like it's a solution to all our problems.
It is true that watching something on computer doesn't give you the same experience as watching it on TV, but it wrong to assume that everything on the Internet will be watched only on computers. I don't watch movies/shows from the Internet (example from Hulu) on a computer, rather I watch them by connecting my computer to a TV.
I think the Danish oil production in the North Sea at least covers our own consumption, so the 0% probably isn't far off. Not that the oil in the North Sea will last, of course.

Norway has larger oil-fields in the North Sea and export quite a lot.

The 99% from the Middle East in 1973 is probably a journalistic exaggeration - 99% from outside the country would probably be correct (the oil in the North Sea was found in the 70s).

Oh, and we burn a lot of coal in Denmark. It is not all rosy.
Go to www.acrobat.com and use Adobe's free ConnectNow service which is far more elegant than those other solutions and free if it's just two people connecting.
Implementasi MYOB - 5 :Tahapan Proses Impor
Membuat File Data Baru
Shale oil and tar sands are a joke. Maximum production will only ever be a drop relative to super-giant field output. You get poor energy returns due to enormous inputs of natural gas and fresh water and the intensive refining requirements. The ecological horror of these extraction methods alone means they will never scale. The impending scarcity of natural gas will nip shale/tar in the bud right quick, anyway.

In about three different ways in your post you said "Don't worry, somebody will figure out a way to deal with these big problems sooner or later." Do you realize that is a very childish mentality? Adults prepare for the future with the means at their disposal.
Facebook’s Redundant Ad Rating System
Yeah, we demo'd to Jason. Haven't heard yet about round 2, though I suspect the long silence means bad news. Based on his article, at least we got most of the basics right, though I think we failed on the crucial one, of getting across why our product is really interesting.
The World's Billionaires
Entrepreneurship Advice from Marc Hedlund, CEO of Wesabe
The FAQ doesn't even contain the word 'Exchange'.
I use Kohana primarily. It is an excellent framework supporting only PHP5, with a great ORM engine and extensibility. It's fast, efficient, and organized.

Their community isn't yet as strong as CodeIgniter's, but it's growing rapidly (2.2 just released!)
Go Perl, go!
MVC vs. PAC
What bandwidth addiction will cost
Interesting facts about Denmark: Percentage of their energy requirement that can be met by wind power: 18%. Percentage of conventional power stations replaced by wind farms: 0%.
Why Twitter Hasn’t Failed: The Power Of Audience
Philosophy of Work (CD Baby, Derek Sivers, Tim Ferriss)
IPhones-Macintosh computers become apples of hackers' eyes
If PHP remained at the same place, and Ruby went up, JavaScript, which in most cases comes along with those two languages should have remain at the same position and not going down.

Let alone, Python and C# which in many cases used for web development.
10 dollar gasoline will result in more efforts towards alternative energy. Yes. It will do so if the 10 dollar gasoline is a result of taxation. It will also do so if the 10 dollar gasoline is a result of supply and demand. If you want expensive gasoline, you'll get it eventually.

I'm not sure why people don't understand that.
I used to use google alerts initially. But now I have switched to subscribing to the feeds from news.google.com and blogsearch.google.com for custom search queries, along with subscribing to competitors' blogs and forums. This should cover media coverage, new features and customer reactions.

I do not monitor for downtimes specifically, as any major downtime will anyway come up in the news/blogs.

But if you are very much interested you may sign up for website monitoring tools like site24x7.com (has a free version) or pingdom.com (no free version) and monitor their downtime too. Some of these tools check for web content changes too. You can use it to track changes made to specific pages of your competitors' website.

I hope you track references to your product/service too, as you need to respond quickly to customer reactions, both positive (with at least a thanks) and negative (apologize and fix the problem).
Actually, the coal was one thing I was wondering about. The statement was 99% of energy, not 99% of oil. That can't possibly be true with coal in the picture. Note that in this case the exaggeration comes not from a journalist but from the Minister of Energy.

It sounds as if the kernel of truth here is maybe that Denmark produces more oil than it consumes. But I would be shocked to hear that Danish oil is produced by Danish rigs and transported via Danish pipelines to Danish refineries. Rather, oil from Danish territory goes into the same global market as all the other oil, and the Danes buy oil the same way (and at the same price) that everybody else does. So the Middle East bit is a red herring.
Improving the iPhone’s Contact Management Product
Pythonic CSS
Apple's Safari operating system is the basis for internet browsing using iPhones...

The Web OS is here. :)
The End of Credit Card Consumerism
Birth, death and shopping: The rise and fall of the shopping mall
This is shamelessly linkjacked from here:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

But in any case, this one's worth a look too: http://langpop.com :-)
Defcon "Warballoon" Finds 1/3 of Wireless Networks Unsecured
I don't know about you, but it has me thinking about making a porn site for Kafka enthusiasts.
Speedy Anagram Algorithm in Ruby Explained
What are you trying to say with the 0% stat. If I were going to use more wind energy, I wouldn't just shut down a coal plant and throw up a million wind turbines. I would just add more wind turbines as our energy needs grew. So ideally you add a lot of wind turbines to mitigate building a new coal burning plant.

You will probably always need things like coal plants because they are very efficient and always work. You probably build a hybrid of wind turbines and gas powered turbines that are very adjustable. On a good wind day you you use less of the gas turbines and on a bad wind day you use more of the gas turbines to meet demand. The coal (or nuclear) plants are the base upon which you build your solar or wind system.
Is it me, or has there been a plethora of poorly-reported NYTimes articles on HN lately?

I won't tear into this one save this: oil is fungible. To say no energy from the Middle East is misleading. They buy their oil on the open market like everybody else. (Now they may produce more than they consume, but heck, its not like that supports the headline.)
Ah, cool. Hopefully they're adding support for all Rack-based apps and not just Sinatra. That'd be sweet.
So this theory kind of screws over the popular startup mentality, right? A friend of mine got $500k in financing for his startup, so he basically only has a year. He can't afford to be patient...
Eh, not much value in this article. Really, you take a fantastic set of tools like symfony, and shrug it off with a one-liner like "over-engineered?" Lousy and unfair.
You might be surprised about the number of database "experts" who have never heard of Postgres. They know about MySQL because Slashdot uses it, and they vaguely know about Access, tho' they've never used it and don't know what it's good for.

Sharding, for instance, is a hot topic right now but "big iron" DBAs like myself are completely mystified... Isn't this just the partitioning/shared nothing feature that we've had for over a decade? (Answer: yes of course it is).
What blather. Two points:

(a) oil is fungible. Fungible, FUNGIBLE.

(b) offshore drilling, will help, and nobody is proposing that it is a solution. Nuclear and solar electricity and better batteries are the solution. Drilling our own oil resources will help us while we get there.
Apple's Rotten Decision
Csrf-magic: Wizard CSRF Protection for PHP
This reminds me a of a joke: A boss walks into the accountant's office and asks, "How is the data looking?". To which the accountant replied, "How would you like it to look?"

And reminds me of the Hillary Clinton primary campaign on how it kept redefining "winning".

Sadly, the methods are very stupid (see http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_d... ). They use YouTube as a search engine (eh?) when something more specialized like DZone or SourceForge or even delicious would be better. They use only one query and counting mentions of it, hardly a measure of real-world popularity.

Some better metrics: number of new projects written in a language. Number of servers hosting sites written in a language.

Anything really. Google hit counts doesn't cut it.
Denmark is a net exporter of oil and natural gas. We import coal because its a cheaper source of energy than oil, so it makes sense to use coal rather than oil in power plants. But I believe that Denmark is a net exporter of energy at this time. Our oil is running out, though, this is why we invest in other forms of energy like wind.
Tactics is how you implement strategy.

Your friend's tactic can be to produce within a year something that either has enough revenue to carry itself further (not easy ;) or that shows enough promise to raise a second round on.

If I understand Godin, he warns against a tactic of trying to sell the company within that year. It happened before, but as a plan it's like moving to Hollywood with a strategic goal to become a film star within a year.
Click refresh a few times for the full experience.
I think the two views are compatible. The message I got from Seth here is to take the broad, macroscopic view; if your first startup fails, don't quit, try again. And again. And again, if need be. Be patient.

This essay was good, but I thought Ira Glass presented a related idea in a much more powerful way here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE. Depending on where you are in your career/startup/creative life, this 5 minute clip of Ira Glass could be the most important thing you watch all year.
I disagree that drilling will help. The key point of the article is that it was a cultural rather than a resource based shift that helped Denmark become energy independent.

I read a recent estimation that America has enough oil for 3 years at it's current rate of consumption. Unless consumption is dramatically reduced drilling is just going to tap out a resource that would be best saved for a real emergency.

Europe has been coping with smaller more efficient cars, and driving habits for decades. American can too.
Your comment has the feeling of a moral judgment or a best-guess seat-of-pants decision, ie, that since Europe has been coping with smaller and more efficient cars, we can too.

I've always found myself too ill-equipped to make decisions on how markets can or should operate (that is, unless the market is obviously broken, in which case somebody must do something)

So I take it you're happy we haven't drilled any of our resources, haven't built a refinery in decades, and haven't built a nuclear power plant since the 1970s? That we continue to _not_ reprocess spent nuclear fuel? That due to these policies our oil output now is the same as it was in the 1940s?

I'm trying not to badger you, but are you saying that because we've basically forbidden the energy markets to work efficiently inside our country, energy prices are going high, and it's a good thing because maybe the culture will shift like Denmark?

Couldn't you just picket or something? Seems like a terrible waste of American's lives just in order to make the culture more to your liking. And please don't argue that the culture must change because energy is so scarce -- it's a circular argument.
I don't like any of those colors. Some are too dark, and others are too light. I think the color should always be #c0ffee!
I know the benefits, they just don't seem to be accepting new business now or over the past few months.
I have always wondered what I should do with this piece of information.

All it means is that if you want people to implement your idea in an open source project, send a patch. Ideas don't get the project anywhere, nor does endless discussion. Shut the fuck up and write some code.

It's even on a T-shirt: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2388/2162805091_44ece496b7_m....
Yes. And I asked him about it; he is more of a math professor, and this was an engineering activity.
If TechCrunch had 13 pages of posts about MY startup (or any startup for that matter), it wouldn't be failing either.
I hate the RIAA as much as the next guy, but I have trouble buying that a 16 year old didn't understand copyright infringement.

That's a Junior in HS!
I wouldn't look too far into the number "ten years" and think it applies to every single startup. Obviously, this isn't true, and I think he's using it more as just a way of saying "it takes a while."
10 fascinating Googlers
Denmark has a population of 5.45 million people; or, about the size of half of New York City plus one of the burbs.
8000 New Followers on Twitter in One Day
Might be a bug, might be a hack, but it worked...
The Noncompete Ruling Won’t Change Anything, Anywhere
Offshore drilling won't really help. It'll take nearly a decade to get operations running, and our best estimates suggest that it will supply ~1% of our daily oil demand.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/otheranalysis/ongr.html

"The projections in the OCS access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030."
Cockroach porn? Just kidding... I found that for myself, Kafka is best in small doses. When I read a lot at one time, I found myself laughing at the absurdity and wondering why Kafka didn't "get a life".
I'm surprised the IOC didn't put a requirement for a live broadcast into the contracts with the broadcasters.

Putting it out live on a separate channel would probably make sense in terms of segmenting their audience for advertising purposes. I guess since they depend on raw volumes of viewers, instead of necessarily on quality of viewers, they have to push people to all watch the same thing at the same time.
"Don't get hung up over the idea... The only thing that really matters about The Idea is how you (and your partners) feel about it. If you can’t stop thinking about it for weeks on end, get up out of bed to write down brainstorms about it, and don’t get tired of working on it, that’s the right idea. If you have to convince yourself to keep going on The Idea, that’s the wrong one."

In other words, "the idea doesn't matter... but the idea matters".
America is a continental power that has 7 or 8 cities with a larger population than all of Denmark...

That's not to say we can't learn from their model, but its more of an urban planning context.
Yugma http://yugma.com Free Basic screen sharing abilities. And it's cross platform
SpeedyRails shared hosting's 60MB per mongrel isn't a whole lot of headroom.
So your position, and I see you have a doe report, is that "drilling for oil does not help oil prices"

The nice part about this is, once you accept the logic (or lack thereof) it makes total sense why we haven't drilled in the last 30 years. You see? Drilling for oil doesn't help supply any. Why if we had drilled 30 years ago we'd still be in the same situation we are today.

I wonder if the doe could make some estimates on other commodity prices 30 years into the future. I'd like to get in on some of that action.
Of the 3 only the first is actually secure.

All current 'something you are' systems can be fooled - and they can be copied without you even knowing it (fingerprint is very insecure for example, since you leave them everywhere, same for dna. Iris systems can be copied with a telescope.)

'Something you have' system are flawed because it's too easy to loose the item, or have it stolen. Or the item can be duplicated (often very easily, sometimes not so easy).

Only 'something you know' is secure because it can never be taken from you or copied without your knowledge.

Hence we have passwords.
From Spolsky and Co: https://www.copilot.com/
Why would the IOC ever do anything good for the "end user"? They solely exist to make lots and lots of money. NBC offered them lots of money, so why would the IOC turn that down?
"Seems like a terrible waste of American's lives just in order to make the culture more to your liking."

He clearly said that the goal was energy independence, not a change in culture. The change in culture is a means to that end.

Drilling offshore now isn't worth the potential environmental damage or the sacrifice of the future value of that oil when it becomes more scarce. I don't think that oil is enough to tide us over until we don't need oil anymore, especially since the oil will be sold on the global market. It will barely lower oil prices in a decade. Are those sacrifices worth it? I don't think so.

With or without new offshore drilling, we will lower our energy consumption by necessity from now until we're off of oil. It will be too expensive to continue on our current course. The current focus should be on solutions that will make that transition period less painful, not on solutions that will make us use more oil and further our dependency on it.

I agree with you on all the nuclear stuff.
The close geography of the twitter team to techcrunch (or vice versa), and the fact they often attend the same parties seems to have a lot to do with the coverage volume(?).

Maybe it would help if you were based near them and hanged out a lot with them.
Look at the trends in electricity consumption per capita in California since the '70s versus the rest of the country. California has been about flat, the rest of the country has increased substantially. Energy efficiency is a hell of a lot cheaper than drilling or nuclear, and there's still a hell of a lot of low-hanging fruit.
Ask HN: iPhone Development Resources
I've got a couple of applications I plan to build for the iPhone. (I mainly plan to use them myself; diet/caffeine tracker and the like.)

However, I don't know of any good resources available for iPhone development. All the books I've found deal with Jailbroken iPhones, not the newer 3G. Can anyone here recommend some sites, or even better, some print books that will still be relevant in the 3G world?

Thanks for your time!
"Are those sacrifices worth it? I don't think so."

What sacrifices? I won't use the term "straw man" but I'd at least like to humbly suggest you've made a whole slew of assumptions about what might or might not happen. Most of these I take issue with.

I'm not crazy about oil. Personally, I'll be happy when we're off it. But, like I said, I don't sit around taking my personal feelings and try to control world markets with them. Seems kind of, well, presumptuous. If we can drill for oil offshore, and it's there, and we need it, I say have at it. There are all sorts of _possible_ dangers and warnings, but the markets indicate that there is a real, tangible need that's not going away.

Hey. I can pay for gas at 20 bucks a gallon. Not crazy about it, but I'm not letting it change my behavior. The people impacted are third world countries -- mostly the poor. I would think that "screwing the poor to make the world a more pretty place for me" wouldn't be much of anything to be proud of.

Note that I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, just trying to figure out where the limits of your argument lie. Would you agree with the statement above? Or would we immediately move into a wealth redistribution discussion?
California legislator proposes to tax porn to offset the "harm" it does
What's so bad about foreign oil?

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-stein8-2008aug08,0...
We did; got dinged for having already launched. :)
> Seems kind of, well, presumptuous. If we can drill for oil offshore, and it's there, and we need it, I say have at it. There are all sorts of possible dangers and warnings, but the markets indicate that there is a real, tangible need that's not going away.

The environmental dangers of oil drilling are more than possibilities, and your dismissive tone doesn’t aid your argument. The current supporters of increased off-shore drilling are spinning up its positives and spinning down its negatives as a craven political ploy in an election year which coincides with oil prices higher than they were a few years ago, and general economic instability.

Off-shore drilling is not going to solve our current economic crisis, nor is it going to bring down oil prices to any substantial degree—maybe the price will dip a few percent in 10 years when the oil starts flowing.

> Hey. I can pay for gas at 20 bucks a gallon. Not crazy about it, but I'm not letting it change my behavior. The people impacted are third world countries -- mostly the poor.

Your implication is that off-shore oil-drilling in America is the best way to help the third-world poor. That is absurd. (And hyperbolically casting natrius as some kind of heartless first-world imperialist doesn’t help your argument either. It makes your comments seem like trolling.)
Massive US Naval Armada Heads For Iran
The entire article is a great example of laughably bad clueless tech journalism.
The point is that the combination of the three is the most powerful and secure. To copy something-you-are, they have to have access to you or things you've touched. To copy something-you-have, they have to steal the object itself. To copy something-you-know, they have to trick you into revealing it (phishing) or guess it. Requiring all three makes things that much more secure.