skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: If you think ideas are not worth a dime then post yours here
This is probably one among the most cliched discussions but more often than not people just escape it either by talking in favor of it or against it. If someone seriously thinks that ideas are not worth a dime, then that idea should be out in public without any fear of being copied.

I personally think that ideas are more than a dime, unless it's an outright clone. And I am not saying it because of the fear of being cloned or copied; I am rather saying it because discovering/inventing a useful idea is so rare. So it's the scarcity which makes it valuable and not the fact that someone might steal it.

EDIT: Important point missed. The discussion applies more to the people who can implement their ideas on their own.
This double pot evaporation system is not new, it's ancient. I can clearly recall seeing antique market photos from the 19th C clearly showing the double pot cooler throughout the middle east. (can't find reference sorry.) It works especially well in hot dry climates where you can have extensive evaporation. It doesn't work in humid or cold climates. What's needed in North America is a return to the root cellar, and external cold sheds or window boxes for climates that fall below freezing. Again this is not new technology, but was widespread in the 19c. (again, it is amazing that I can't find any image references for window box cold storage.)
This is going to sound strange, but from personal experience, it sounds like you need to move on.

It almost doesn't even matter what you move on to. It doesn't even matter if it's with the hottest tools, or if it's with the worst tools in the stack. What matters is that you've stopped learning. And almost by definition, anywhere you move to from here, will be different from here - and thus, will give you a chance to learn.

Don't wait until you've found a "perfect mentor" to move. Don't do what I did, and kill your time and energy waiting for the perfect opportunity to move, learning nothing when you could have been learning something. Each thing you move to will give you a little more opportunity, a slightly different perspective. Sometimes you'll even take steps backwards by mistake - but that's OK. Turns out that you're learning from those too. What's important is that you keep moving.
Mozilla And Google Going After Browser Memory
A Backbone.js demo app (Sinatra Backend)
I used this book to get me started: http://www.amazon.com/Android-Developers-Cookbook-Building-A...

Enough examples to get you on your way to building something interesting. I did have to refer to Google's docs when trying to use newer features or to get a more technical grasp on what certain things did.
I'm exactly the same way.
Also, since this is hacker news, how do we know that someone isn't creating new accounts to sway the poll one way or another? Only way to tell would be having access to the poll results and votes logged/audited.
I wonder why this code composed as

$('<tr></tr>').append('<td></td>').append('<td></td>').append('<td></td>').appendTo('#zebra-table');

Instead of:

$('#zebra-table').append($('<tr><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr>'));
You can skip the TechCrunch article and go right to the source: http://startupgenome.cc/
I'm often drawn to greyed things, as they're different...not sure how prevalent that reaction is, but its at least a counterweight to overlook.
Don't do that: google might leak them somehow.
It's enlightening to notice, though I'm not sure it's much of a curiosity - IIRC the Latin comes from Norman French, and they ruled English speakers for a while, so everything Frenchy was marked as more refined.
Greylock launches new $160M funds for Europe and Israel
I've love to be able to see / sort by rotten tomatoes score as well.
The Perfect Server - Fedora 15 x86_64 [ISPConfig 3]
We Spanish people had been using evaporative cooling since dogs bark.

Botijo(spanish version is more complete):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botijo

Other methods that people used was making deep holes on the ground( > 30feet 10meters under ground level). Old houses in Madrid have (now sealed) passages and cellars under ground. They were used as pantries(in some cases they had snow with straw that lasted for months, now some are used for winery, but most are closed and owners only realize they exist when they remodelate their homes.
My first reaction is to simply write all the powers of -2 (1, -2, 4, -8...) and simply brute force each of 1-10 to find a solution for how to write a particular number. I think this is what the OP replied below as "looks right", but I think thats actually simply one form of base 2.

The definition of writing something in base n is that you are expressing a number it using n unique values for each digit. Using these digits, there is a way of utilizing the space maximally to write any positive integer which is the above method of packing the values. Simply using n unique values and having each digit #d represent the power n^d.

For base -2, using -2 unique symbols is clearly nonsense. Assigning each digit a power of -2 and allowing for symbols 0 or 1 for each digit is actually just base 2, exactly like how gray code is base 2. It's interesting that its a form of base 2 that has an implicit sign-bit, but its also somewhat strange of a property since it ends up with twice as many negative numbers as positive numbers for any set number of bits.

Microsoft should clearly hire me.
This may not be the answer you are looking for, but (good) mentors result from actually doing things, not vice versa. Just f%^%ing do stuff that interests you and learn whatever you want to learn, without waiting for permission or validation.

I once wrote a blog entry on a somewhat related topic at http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2010/12/answer-to-will-you-me... . HN discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1994998 .

If it helps ease the pain, I was an enterprise sw dev well into into my late twenties, before I reached the "WTF am I wasting my life on this crap" moment. In the days of widespread internet access and Amazon, the only limits to your self improvement and leveling up are within you.

My suggestion : take one item from your "want to learn" list and get really good at it. That process will open more doors (including good mentors). "Asking random strangers on the internet for mentorship in everything" (to quote strlen) is unlikely to result in much progress.
Hacker news digests

In its current intended use, a reader has to poll the HN site for interesting topics. This is frustrating because it's not very efficient, unless you had advertisements on the site... This is a pull type of access to information.

The feature I would like is an information push option. It would be the possibility to subscribe to a digest with a point threshold I would specify. I would for instance specify a threshold of 100 so that every day I get a mail containing HN titles with urls of posts that passed 100 points.

A more Simple and efficient variant, from HN perspective, would be to provide an alternate display to new, like new50, new100 that is like new but shows only posts with more than 50 points or 100 points in the order it reached that threshold. This would be a way to get the best of HN without the unpleasant feeling I could miss any of them if I don't check the front page frequently enough.

Make it new+ new++ and new+++ with hidden point threshold values that you may adjust to get dayly, weekly or monthly ~40 best ranked posts holding on a page.
> Certainly they're not similar enough to cause confusion for anyone under 40

blow me, hipster scum. :-)
Opera Mobile 11 is updated for Android with a twist
Opera Mobile 11, one of the best browser for Android, has received an update that brings several changes including increased stability and speed in page rendering.
Here are some of the reasons why I voted to display comment scores

1. HN is a great community and imo members should be treated as responsible adults.

Comments that are "(a) mean and/or (b) dumb" are a problem. However, I think that the people who make these comments are going to make the comments regardless of whether comment scores are visible or not. After the visibility-change, I didn't see any positive change in comment quality (but I've wondered if comment quantity has increased)

Obviously, this is a subjective assessment. For everyone who believes as I do, I suspect that many others believe that they have seen a qualitative improvement in comments.

Regardless, I think that it will be great for HN to self-police itself as a community of responsible adults (and responsible teens) instead of assuming that HN is an immature community that needs to be protected from looking at comment scores.
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2. Hiding comment scores skews the scores. Some people have said that they don't upvote comments because they don't know what the comment's score is.

OTH some populist comments (or comments from popular members) are going to get insanely high scores because upvoters don't realize that the banal comment's score is already much higher than what it should have been.
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3. Visible comment scores are a simple and great indicator of what HN feels about the comment. imo this is a very useful indicator for everyone on HN.
Very interesting video. There is also a good Radiolab podcast about this research with respect to cities.

http://www.radiolab.org/2010/oct/08/
I've had this idea of giving every person I meet a quarter. Naturally, this idea is worth far less than a dime.

But seriously, my real idea is that expressing quality with monetary terms is silly.
There is income tax and sales tax in many states. Should intellectual works be taxed more than other things?
It really depends on the originality + depth of the idea. If you think of something like "a cool social network", then yeah, it's worth (less than) a dime. But if your idea is a somewhat detailed version of Google's search engine algorithm, and you're the first one to think of that, then it's probably more valuable than what the cliche prescribes.

Personally, I believe that good ideas that result in successful businesses are worth keeping to yourself, as long as you plan on making something out of them.
You make a decent emotional appeal.

However, the hard facts we are dealing with today is the aftermath of the Baby Boomers. Normally, when we deal with population graphs, we see a huge base of young, a smaller base of young adults, smaller base of mid adults, and a small/pinnacle of elderly. It's supposed to taper off into a long tail.

Instead, we in the US (unsure about other cultures and areas) a huge bulge around 55-65. Social programs are meant to subsidise the elder through the younger. However in this situation, there's not enough younger to pay for the same care the elder have been receiving. So you either raise the age cap, or reduce service. And, AARP makes sure the second choice doesn't happen.

And about the food quip: back in 2000, the global food output was enough to feed 12 earths of people, yet people still died of hunger. Overall resource maintenance and allocation is the bigger, and unsolved problem.
execution matters, being first to execute is often an advantage, ideas without execution are worth no more than thoughts, but if you plan to execute on an idea then keeping it secret so others with more resources, speed, talent are less likely to execute on it first has (some) value.
How to import M4V into iMovie with M4V to iMovie Converter for Mac?
I didn't say it had to be run at a loss, that's a false dichotomy. A sadly prevalent attitude, though.
You can scale prematurely in different trajectories: customer development, product development, hiring, etc.

An example could be hire a salesforce before having a paying customer or to hire middle management with less than 15 people. On the product side its for example spending lots of time on a scalable backend before even having the user and payer identified.
The Mona Lisa Curse (video series)
+1 for getting GOOD at SQL.

Regarding PHP I'm a little mixed. I started my programming career on LAMP so I wouldn't be where I am today without it. But looking back, I sure wish I would have started "properly". A good MVC framework, an intro to the command line. I'm not blaming PHP itself. Case in point http://kohanaframework.org/ (which i eventually discovered a year in..)

Rather imo it's just way way too easy to learn bad practices as a n00b programmer in the php community. You really really need to know where to look and assume the quality respectfully. if you google stuff as i did you get "scripts" that 9/10 are terrible but you don't know any better. what is the "script" for comments on my blog? Anybody have a "script" that lets me run a facebook clone?

Aww man what times!

I guess the good thing is I have a fuller perspective. I was the ultimate spaghetti coder and now I know exactly why and how that's bad, real bad .. I'm also pretty decent at sql because I wrote everything natively. B)

I'd say rails just because I know it and it forces you to learn the command line, MVC, and OO. php is good when its properly OO MVC but what n00b knows that? I sure as hell didn't =p
Really? Why? Do judges talk to each other about what companies are time-wasters and base their judgments on related smalltalk? If not (and I assume the answer is no, despite my relative lack of legal knowledge), then what has Samsung or any other company to lose besides a few dollars?
Book Your Home Away From Home On Your Next Singapore Travel
This is why if I learn a second language, I would want it to be Ilaksh - it's an a priori philosophical/logical language. I wonder what kind of effect learning a language like that would have on my ability to reason.
Hiding scores to reduce arguments seems like a very crude and inelegant way of solving the problem. You solve one problem but effectively render the scoring system useless in the process.

Surely there is a better way of solving this particular problem, though I'll be the first to admit that I can't think of anything clever.
1/ Calculate which mobile subscription on the market would be cheaper based on your mobile activity of previous months. Needs a way to keep track of hundreds of subscription rules and way to easily scan and OCR paper invoices and/or pdf invoices.

2/ Offer free salary calculations. Charge employers for sending paper salary slips (PDF versions are for free) and employment related and legal counseling. Also offer free self-service portal for employers and employees. Barrier: requires a lot of knowledge of local employment, fiscal and social security regulations. Reward: if you can break the barrier you'll probably be the first and make a killing.

3/ Offer a service like square with the distinction that once a cent is converted to a online cent the entire history of that cent's online usage is freely accessible (radical transparency.) As soon as the cent is withdrawn that history will be lost of at least will be frozen for ever. This way when I want to accept a payment from you I - or my application - can scrutinize the history of the cents you offer me. If there's something in the history of a certain cent that I don't like - example: it's been used to buy X, Y or Z - I'll reject that cent. Other people can step in and tag transactions or even a party in a transaction in a certain way so that I can configure my application to reject those tags. This simple mechanism introduces a new negative feedback loop in our economy that we don't have but need in our economic system.
An idea is a starting point. If you were to have a race to success, having an idea would put you farther down the road than starting without one.

That being said, the idea is worthless if you don't actually start running. Building a team that can run much faster might eventually swamp any gains you get from having a good starting idea. That team might also discover a new path that leads to a new and much better goal, therefore leading you to choose to abandon your original idea.

A bad idea can ruin a good team by having them run in the wrong direction for too long.

You seem to believe that people don't value ideas enough and therefore are testing them. You will often get free ideas from people who can't or have no intention to run with them. This does nothing to prove they have no value, they simply have little value to that particular person.

I think the idea vs. execution argument is the hacker version of the nature/nurture question. For most things that matter, both contribute to varying degrees.
Another quick question: is there a country that would like to conduct an attack and make it seem like it is coming from the country that is the answer to your quick question.
I'm currently commuting from Oakland to Mountain View by car nearly daily, and it takes between 35 and 60 minutes door to door each way. I don't really mind (I enjoy driving, have a great car, and listen to music, CNBC/Bloomberg/BBC, audiobooks, etc., or make phone calls), but it would be nice to be able to drop by my office more spontaneously -- doing one roundtrip in a day is fine, but two would be horrible.

I'd prefer a 1h driving commute on interesting/high speed roads (i.e. interstates at off-peak hours, or something like HWY 17) to a 30 minute public transit commute or stop-and-go driving commute.
I like the idea, but how would you scale it with more users (and therefore more votes) on the site?
So rather focused on my current company for anything to be fleshed out past the hand waving stage. Here are two that I would like to tackle but don't have the resources for. Both games which are not my field but which my daydream is to setup a small indie games company for when I one day do an exit and have some money...

First one is along the lines of a tower defence but instead of attackers you have a crowd wanting to protest. The 'people' are quite good sim's in that they should behave according to research - lots of people crammed in are more violent than a widely spaced crowd. You, the player, will get different scenarios - protecting a visiting dignitary, policing a conference centre, a town square etc. etc. an obviously your level ups will be increasingly heavy duty riot control equipment: vans, water hoses, helicopters etc.

Second one was a sandbox type game like minecraft or dwarf fortress with the addition of seriously mega threats. For example a dragon living in an area that cannot be defeated without either building and planning serious defences (over a period of days or weeks) or massive co-operation. Games are either too formulaic or immediate - but there are lots of people prepared to work on long term construction projects in these kind of games, would be interesting to tap into that.

I still think execution is 90% of the battle with an idea and I am going to have a crack at both of these given half a chance. Don't think either of them are million sellers but far too many games are clones of one another and it's good to introduce new concepts
I have seen a good number of people solve this problem by literally doing it - i.e. contribute to an open source project in however small a way, look for jobs which actually do interesting things.

The unfortunate truth is that most people do not have time nor motivation to become a mentor. Even then they will only spend their experience on someone who you could argue does not need a mentor.

It is much easier to find someone who will be willing to point you gently in the right directions in a new Job. There are lots of companies who are very friendly and willing to accomodate one or new newbies. In six months time, you will find yourself in a different place - somewhere better I hope
This is a bit like saying, "If you want to get better gas mileage out of your car, walk." Switching to Go would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If you like Go, that's good, but people who are using Ruby and Rails presumably like those technologies. It's unlikely that somebody would choose Rails based solely on a mistaken assumption that it has the fastest possible runtime.
My take on it: volume = thickness; frequency = position around the ring, lowest to highest going clockwise, starting at the bottom.

It seems the volume is relative to the track's volume though, so some are quieter than they look like they would be. But I could be mis-hearing that part.
Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara Wallpapers, Release Date
Zindagi Na Milega Dobara is the upcoming film directed by Zoya Akhtar and produced by Farhan Akhtar and Ritesh Sidhwani under banner Eros International Media Ltd, Excel Entertainment. The movie stars Hrithik Roshan, Katrina Kaif as Laila, Farhan Akhtar, Abhay Deol, Kalki Koechlin, Ariadna Cabrol and Naseruddin Shah. Katrina Kaif is a new character played in the film with Hrithik Roshan. Katrina Kaif in the film ride a Royal Enfield motorcycle. As the molten iron of the crew and is ready to fly to Spain next month for this adventure film, the cast gathered for a photo shoot in Mumbai. So there was Hrithik Roshan, Katrina Kaif, Farhan Akhtar, Kalki Koechlin and Abhay Deol all in the mood for fun Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.
It is fascinating and somewhat shocking to me that in the large applicant pool that you would be able to recognize a substantial number of applicants on the basis of their HN handles.

Does this really happen? My gut tells me in a pool of 400 or so applicants you might recognize about 40 handles, with a recollection of comment quality in about half of those. Which is to say, comment quality has bearing in about 5% of applicants and virtually always positively.
From what I gather, scores are still used to order comments.
>or poll a group of users that you are familiar with and respect highly

I'd be interested in seeing the results of a poll with just the top 100 users* participating.

*http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Actually, one of the most productive programmers I know at Google is a Virginia Tech alum...
Lockheed Martin detects 'significant' attack on information network
It took me a few days to appreciate the change but I think hiding scores and consequently taming kharma whoring is an improvement.
Single page: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/business/29groupon.html?_r...
I'm basically a lurker as well (< a dozen comments in 3 years probably), but despite the increased difficulty in identifying the best contributions to a discussion, I still overall feel I and the site both are better off without the comment scores visible. The quality of discussion has improved so drastically that I'm ok with the fact that it's harder for me to visually dissect the wheat from the chaff.

The site was better with scores 2 years ago than it is now, but given the options at present, I'd stick with pg's decision.
I's not an all or nothing package, I mean if you have blogs and articles, you will need the traditional URLs, but if you have a single page application, then you need hashbangs, there is no traditional way of achieving this, let's say all your content is rendered and you have a tab view on your page, and you want to make sure that if your page gets reloaded, the user would get the same tab opened, you have no better way of doing this.
While you are telling that, I also get the impression after thought that yes, less aggressive or provocative comments have happened since the points are not displayed anymore. It's just a totally subjective impression, of course.
seems good. but one of the best features of a console app is to simply copy/paste some sample session...

they only have one screenshot of the calendar...

i installed it in ubuntu and am still fiddling with the website looking for how to add tasks.

Also, as guy who sent some humble patches so that remind, pscal, can work with exchange file formats and pscal can download holidays from google calendar, I'm questioning if that shouldn't only be a front end for remind.
Well, there are people buying fake Gucci bags, knowing what they are. The consumer is not deceived, although the trademark is broken.