skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Regex web search?
Do any of the major search engines offer a way to query the search engine using a regular expression? I'm not even looking for complete regex support, even using wildcards to represent missing letters would be great, so that I can search for "Olymp*" and it will include results for "Olympics". Google doesn't seem to support this. Are the pages indexed in a certain way (ie, by word) that would make this kind of search prohibitively difficult?
DO you have both or just a desktop?
Conduit Labs at the Boston Startup Meetup
screenstream : http://www.nchsoftware.com/screen/

It is a free Windows only application. What I like about that the only software the client needs is a web browser. No ActiveX, no java, no flash. The application is basically a http server that serves screenshots of whatever window has focus. So it does not allow remote control.

It also supports video cams and audio.

Bonus points to anyone that create an opensource multiplatform clone.
Parking Garage Hacking
at Flugpo.com our developer brings his laptop in and plugs in a separate keyboard and a separate screen and basically ignores the laptop. Which seems to fit your criteria.
If there was a cost for downmodding - a downmod costs the moderator half a point, for example - there would probably be a different experience.

I'd be interested in the modeling of alternative karma economies like this.
Small form factor and all-in-one will ensure that desktops never quite disappear. Heck, the all-powerful bleeding-edge no-holds barred desktop will always have a place somewhere. Anyone who programs or creates content will want as much screen real estate as possible.

To really see a disappearance of the desktop will require a revolution in user interface and display technology. So long as we're still doing stuff that looks like working on a "workstation" from the 1990s (or Xerox Parc in the 1970's) we'll still have desktops. I guess that's almost tautological. We'll have desktops (computers) so long as we have desktops. (The table-like places to sit and do our work)
I used to use a Small Form Factor machine like this. There was a separate monitor & keyboard at work and at home. This way, I could have a way faster machine than what I could get as a laptop at work, but still have portability.
As they mentioned, laptops used to only be useful for sending emails, browsing the web, writing documents, etc.
Mobile phones are now taking this simple portable computing role that laptops used to hold, and then some.
Only problem with portability is screen space and ergonomics. Somebody needs to come up with a universal way to dock portable devices (laptops, mobile phones, etc.) to a desktop keyboard/mouse/speaker/monitor setup quickly and easily. I guess they have proprietary docking stations that do this but something standardized would be nice.
I've seen this guy speak and read Turing. Looking forward to Logicomics.
"This is probably one of the biggest examples yet of how outdated and antiquated traditional news services are."

Completely absent from the tweets and videos: what exactly happened? Why? What was the outcome? Any loss of life?

You can take your 140-character instant uninformed man on the street reactions and keep 'em for all I'm concerned.
If I were to run a service like this I would

1. Make sure I have a pay plan that really makes people want to pay.

2. Host at calpop.com

(I have a half-rack at calpop.com with power and 10mbps for $500 a month. A full rack with 10mbps & power is $800. You can buy extra bandwidth in the checkout process.)

3. Set up a Storage Area Network (san) in the rack along with the web and database servers. You can just keep adding to a SAN, as users pay you buy more equipment.

4. Buy a monster nas to backup the SAN system. I like this one:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=23027... ... Sans are never supposed to fail, but we know that means nothing. A NAS since buying a 2nd SAN would cost too much and we have a budget here.

5. Money: Banks have equipment lease plans, so even if one can't afford the whole price you can get into a lease.
I was on my way home when the explosion happened. I live about 12km away, but felt and heard it enough to comment to my friend that it seemed like a big explosion. About 5 minutes later I saw a helicopter heading in that direction, so I made a mental note to check on things in the morning.

Anyhow, to make a long story short, by the time I woke up (11-ish) the story was all over Google News. And it honestly never occurred to me to check Twitter. The first place I actually checked was blogTO.

So, maybe this demonstrates that the web has changed news, but I'm not sure it says anything about Twitter. Did anyone see stuff on Twitter before other sites?
Thanks, that was the article
So in your case doing Olymp* is actually not too difficult (thats just stemming) but doing actual regex matching accross the internets would be hard sauce. One of the traditional ways of storeing an index like this is word -> {documents}. Doing a search for a set of words is then not too expensive, however for full regex support they would have to look at every word entry. Thats just sadpanda to the max.
I don't think either of us are advocating outright DOS attacks against the spammer/phisher. I'm also unsure as to why these were modded down. Even if everyone on the list simply manually provided one fake set of credentials, the noise added to the phisher's database might be sufficient to make the endevour useless.

Right now I'm guessing that most of the hits he gets are legit from fooled users. If we were somehow able to break the model by making 99.9% of all of the info gathered worthless, they might stop altogether. In any case it would provide some cover for the people who were fooled and supplied legit creds to have a million or so bogus ones surrounding them.
I use those "laptops that are too big to be laptops" as desktop machines. I just hook up a keyboard and monitor and leave them closed as if they were a tower.

The advantages: Quieter (much), built in UPS (battery), more power efficient, portable when they need to be, less desk/floor space wasted. The only disadvantage is the lack of PCI slots if you're into that sort of thing. I find USB takes care of just about everything I need to plug in.

Haven't used a "desktop" in years.
Ask HN: Patents
I'm developing a product, saw that someone building something similar has a "patent pending" on their web application. How much of a web application can be covered by a patent? For example, all of the web e-mail clients have pretty much the same basic functionality of an inbox, folders, sending and receiving, address book, etc.

What's the limit with patents and at what point should you worry about infringing? As long as it's not identical? Or should it not even come close to resembling it?

The scope is basically a fairly simple web application, calendar software would be a good example. How close can it be before it's considered patent infringement?
Left-handed males are also supposed to die a significant amount of years earlier than right-handed males. :P

Maybe I'll be able to salvage those years if I slice off my hand.
From that essay: "It may take a while, but as long as you keep plugging away, you'll win in the end. Both Blogger and Delicious did that. Both took years to succeed. But both began with a core of fanatically devoted users, and all Evan and Joshua had to do was grow that core incrementally."

As the saying goes, great minds ...
Everyone says the service is great, but I have filled out the web form twice and no response.
Can someone tell me the difference between a tactic and a strategy? I thought that tactics were, by definition, specific short-term action points, and strategy was the big-picture long-term vision.

So then wouldn't his argument be true by definition?
The workstation (specialized high end desktop I suppose) will stay on, mostly as your powerhouse machine under the table for certain specific uses. For most applications and usage patterns, I can't see myself justifying a desktop over a laptop in the future.
Patent Pending does not equal patent issued.

That said, the patent system is so far gone when it comes to software that you can patent anything. Everyone has. If you write "Hello World", you are infringing. A web form with a button? infringing. The power switch on the computer... ok, you get the idea.

Just do your thing. In software there's no such thing as infringing because the answer to "can I make a computer do X?" is always yes if you work hard enough at it. All of the paths to X will be different.

If you are successful enough for someone to actually sue you for infringement, take this as a compliment. You will also likely have the resources to mount a defense as well.

Worrying about all of that now is just premature optimization. If you succeed, you will be sued. That's just the business climate of today's market. Cross that bridge when you come to it.
Mainstream media is far from the best, but they tend to at least gloss over the cause of the explosions, whether people were hurt, and so on.

The commentary we got from what was posted went something like "Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god."

Twitter isn't really a competitor to the mainstream media, however what it may become -- if the mainstream media catches on -- is an early warning system of sorts. There are lots of eyes on it, and the news channels could possibly keep an eye on it to figure out where to send reporters.
The 3 Loops of Designing for Audience
I suggest you use kiva.org, zopa.com, or lendingclub.com

Also, where is the cost coming from? Is it the kind of thing you could handle for a few months if you borrowed a few thousand dollars? If so, you'll be in a much better position to bargain with investors once you have more traction.
FTA:

I have a drawer containing 200 MiniDV tapes, documenting the lives of our three kids. I’d need NINE 300-gig hard drives to store all that. And what are you going to do when the drive dies?

I've got a stack of Betamax home-movie tapes that just barely made it into the digital realm before degrading past the point of playability that argues against having an archive of magnetic plastic ribbon stored in a single place as a means of preserving family memories.
Read the book. Most financial professionals (and 100% of people who believe timing the market was ever possible) are simply fooled by randomness.
I think maintaining consistent state over all turnstiles at all stations is too complicated. It requires a large infrastructure overhead. Putting the stored value on the card is much simpler and doesn't require nearly as much overhead b/c it allows each turnstile to be an independent unit that reads and writes the card.
What's sad is that the given examples just related to patents of concrete things. Now we're in an even worse bind, where we grant patents for both business processes and what are essentially combinations of algorithms (software); at this point I wouldn't be surprised if people were granted the ability to patent cooking recipes.
Theo Jansen's kinetic sculptures/creatures.
I have been on a project where the manager ignored Brooks' Law, and was well-funded enough to actually get away with it. He preferred to get lots (LOTS) of interns and first-time developers from top schools, presumably on the theory that they were smart and willing to work insane hours. But this team was also well-disciplined in writing tests and readable code, and did follow a lot of Agile processes. Pretty much every part of the codebase was accessible to every developer, and it was common to submit patches to other people's work.

So this was a good experiment to test the posted article's thesis; lots of good processes, Open-Source-like development style, giant team.

I wouldn't call the result a trainwreck, exactly, but neither do I ever want to experience that again.

It got to the point where some were openly calling for half the team to be fired; not due to incompetence but because we were digging ourselves deeper into refactoring debt every day. The ratio of "code written to work around misdesigns" versus "code that achieves something" approached 1:1, at least in my experience. At least two different frameworks sprouted up among the developers to work around each others' bugs.
disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, I'm not giving you advice, and you should talk to a lawyer.

Just remember one really important thing: letting people know that you have knowingly infringed on a specific patent increases the damages awarded to the patent holder. Never talk specifics unless you're talking to your own lawyer.
Yes! You must never have anything in writing that proves you knew about the patent. Make sure of this.

But don't worry about patents now. That's for lawyers to worry about.
plug in a keyboard, monitor, mouse, and speakers?

http://noobindex.com/setup.jpg is my setup
100% Free Love - DevilCalledLove.com
The UK's leading online DIY log cabin shop. From potting sheds to summer houses we supply Finnforest log cabins nationwide. Also avaiblible, full custom designed bespoke log cabins.
Another instance of statistical randomness taken at its face value.
Someone has to pay for it. The Olympics must be an expensive operation. What do you recommend?
As breck describes above, it's not random when you discard the data you don't want :)
Here's my humble perspective on code reachability and the fork/knife/plate thing.

Good: a library function with no dependencies, that accepts and returns primitive data structures.

Worse: a library with lots of dependencies, and a set of idiotic "data types" or "classes" I have to construct just to access the functionality.

Worst: a "framework" that calls your code itself, and requires a specific "environment" that should be "set up properly".
The short answer to how close you can be is you don't know till you end up in court. Now, for the longer explanation.

The Supreme Court of the US has ruled that patents can be obtained for "anything under the sun." Exceptions carved out by the same court are for laws of nature, maths, and abstract ideas.

So you can't patent F=ma, but things in web e-mail clients could be patented.

There is no way to tell if you are infringing without actually reading the patent claims. So until the patents are granted, you don't have anything to analyze.

Also, their patented claims do not have to be identical to what you are doing. If it is obvious to someone skilled in the art that what you are doing is a modification of what your competitor is doing, then that could also be infringement. This is why you see the language "in one embodiment" in patents. The drafters are not limiting themselves to the claimed implementation, but are trying to do a land grab that people skilled in the art would do after reading this application.

In legalese this is called the doctrine of equivalents. The United States section on the wikipedia page for doctrine of equivalents is currently accurate. You will see the standard there.
That may be the best idea I've ever heard. Bravo.
keep up the good work, guys. i use dropbox all the time and it works great for me.
This was linked from an article a day ago. The discussion is here if anyone is interested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=271967
http://www.google.com/codesearch does full regex search, but I'm not aware of any mainstream web search engine that does.
I have an almost identical setup - but a Macbook and bluetooth keyboard/mouse. I believe I have the same screen - those Samsungs are really great.

I am currently working at home - but I still unplug the laptop daily to move around. The extra screen is extremely helpful.

I have recently been considering getting a new desktop however - since I would prefer 3+ large monitors.
I've heard that it takes 10 years to achieve true mastery of any craft. He said it took ten years to "become a success", but that isn't limited to just one company. Personally, I plan on trying and failing as many times as necessary over the next 10 years until I get to be really good.
Patents are largely bullshit. The only thing looking at patents can do for a you as a programmer is to give you a nasty case of brain cloud. A few years ago, I spent a lot of time a few years ago looking at "Internet TV" related patents. Any area that might be hot is patent trolled to death, and this was certainly true for video over the internet. Best thing to do is to ignore it until people start becoming interested in you.
John McCain's Health Care Policy
Commentary on John McCain's Health Care Policy.
I want to delete this comment, but the 'delete' option is gone!
You can only delete comments for the first two hours.
I find that very odd. If today were the last day of my life i wouldn't spend it working on anything no matter what it is.

Would rather spend it with family and friends. The answer would be the same no matter what day it is.
I wish this article would have touched on gaming and the emerging external video card market.
Patents cost a LOT of money to enforce. The odds of you being sued are very low. People will be able to issue you a cease and desist order on the cheap, but the odds of it ever going before a judge are equally low. Business methods patents are notoriously hard to enforce as well.

Many big companies collect patents to have as assets. They rarely actually enforce them because it costs too much money (even for them). While your product might dance around infringing on this patent or that, the odds of anyone actually doing anything against you are very low.
Why Do People Say "Yes?" The "6 Weapons of Influence"
Google will also "fill in the blank" according to this http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/features.html

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&... matches "Olympics" but perhaps more interesting is http://www.google.com/search?q=Isaac+Newton+discovered+*&...
Sweet I will count this as a plus, since being short means statistically I get paid less. Put them together and I probably earn what I deserve... Being in a start up I currently each 0.
Top Website Usability Mistakes - 10 Costly Assumptions
On the philosophy behind Android
I'm trying to say that it's not as simple as the article makes out.

When there are wind-powered factories making wind turbines, transported to their destinations and installed by electrically powered vehicles charged by wind power, then it will be real. Until then, wind power requires massive energy subsidies from fossil fuels to the extent that it doesn't actually help much.
Exactly. The problem is not so much with foreign oil, as with oil itself. Higher taxes to reduce consumption(Economists call these Pigovian taxes) seem to be a good choice to reduce emissions in the short term, but technological advances provide the long-term hope.
It is random if you randomly select which data you don't want and keep repeating till you get a significant result!
The original iPod was an outside design. MP3 players had existed for several years. The initial perception was that it was a dud. See for example http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257...
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

But they did keep at it, and the iTunes app was a much the innovation as the iPod.

My take is that as a small player you have to be strategic. Not everything that you try (your tactics) will succeed. As to how long a new technology takes, it's worth reading "The Long Nose of Innovation" http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2008/id20080... on how long an invention takes to become a successful product. Ten years is a reasonable time frame. Google and Apple built on considerable earlier work. Google's money making innovation was their advertising model, without that having the best search engine technology might not have allowed them to prosper.
Find a way to do it yourself.

If you don't need that much extra cash get a job on the evenings or weekends. If you require a lot of money at least get a prototype out the door.
By what metric was it a huge success in 1999? They had a good product, but most people had never heard of the company. I remember having to explain that it was "kind of like Yahoo, but with good search and none of the other features", and they were always like, "well, good luck with that." (obviously thinking to themselves, "another stupid .com")
It works because the can is metal. (as the article states) it has nothing to do with magnets in this example though it goes on to note that a magnetic object would work on a wider variety of sensors.
The point to take away here is not that you should give preferential treatment to frequent customers.

The point is that some customers do actually look at the price of 'extras' and no one likes to feel they are being cheated. Charging an obviously huge markup makes you seem dishonest and makes the customer feel cheated, rightly so. Things that are obviously cheap in materials AND labor AND creativity should be sold CHEAPLY or free.

Of course some businesses have found that their target customers are completely price insensitive when it comes to the extras, and those customers end up paying absurd margins as a result.

In an age when both the bottom end of the market and the stratospheric luxury end are manufactured by neighboring (or even the same) factory in China, the "value" of an item is finally almost completely disconnected from its cost.

I wonder what would happen if prices were required to include, instead of the meaningless breakdown of price vs tax, price vs. cost (ignoring intagible costs, since it is too hard to measure them meaningfully).
Story
rtery
There are no books available yet for the iPhone SDK, as it is still under NDA (why, I have no idea!)

That said, when you download the SDK, you receive a lot of good documentation direct from Apple - tutorials, programming guides, API references etc. It's a bit more work then just picking up a book, but it's not bad.

There is probably one book from the Mac world that is worth looking at - I forget the title, but it's written by Aaron Hillegass - everyone just calls it the Hillegass book... The first half of that book just teaches you basic Cocoa patterns, that are every bit as applicable in the iPhone world as they are in the Mac world. Once you have got those basics nailed down, the Apple documentation does become a bit easier to use.
Saving a Failing Project
It seems a bit strange to compare the energy consumption of a nation which has a smaller population then Long Island. I am sure there are equivalent chunks of population in the US that could be described as energy independent, if they were to be a country ;)

Not saying that its not great, its just that it would be a challenge to scale something like that (Denmark is much much smaller then people realise).

Now if they went totally off oil altogether into renewable sources, that would be a spectacular achievement for a nationstate.
My friend at school turned me on to you guys. I love Dropbox. I'm curious. What kind of business model are you looking at? Freemium? Something else?

Thanks.
Doing Personal Computer Software Development in the early 80s
The only one that seems to be available is "The Law Complete" which is worth reading. A couple of his key laws/observations:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Expenditure rises to meet income.

Expansion means complexity, and complexity decay.

Delay is the deadliest form of denial.

The time spent on any item of a committee's agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved. [often short-handed as the "bike shed" problem]

Injelitance: mangers with incompetence mixed with jealousy ruin many organizations.
DEC System's Research Center Technical Memos
I liked this review, seems to have been so much hype over that book, which I won't be reading now (I'll wait 6 months and get a copy for 50 cents of ebay. Just something about the essence of money like this author says that does not sit well with me.