skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Advertising is a bug in the human brain. It turns out dropping names, unfounded associations, and weak arguments is enough to get people to buy things. As long as we're easily swayed to spend money like that, advertising will stick around.
Quora vs Google; Who will win the race to organize the worlds knowledge?
Part 4 of great Series on Social Search. Quora and others aim to re-organize the worlds information, and Google looks to be displaced sometime in the near future.
>Especially after someone figures out how to dupe (duplicate) items in-game.

Does WoW have duping problems? I was under the impression that it was the particular way D2 handled items[1] that allowed duping, not a necessary part of any game.

[1] Probably at the time, the trade-off for being secure would have been unacceptable performance and/or database bloat.
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I don't think improving on the current system is the way to go. There are too many fundamental mistakes. The entire system desperately needs an overhaul.
New Frontier: Diablo 3 Creates Market to Buy and Sell Items for Real-World Cash
Emulator snapshots help the initial bootup time

Run adb install and adb uninstall from a command terminal to get a little bit faster deploys.

We almost never run the debugger in Debug mode, we run it in Run mode (any runtime errors you can debug later from the stacktrace and how you got there)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4842612/how-do-you-save-a...
It's a small fraction of the real economy, but a large and growing fraction of waking hours. It's hard to measure the consumer surplus created by high-quality entertainment, but it's clearly enormous if people are willing to devote multiple hours per day to TV (or, if they're in the demographic you mentioned, games and the Internet).

If that activity is <.25% of GDP and ~5% of waking hours, it might imply that our measurements are out of whack, not that it's insignificant.

Plus! The rise of online dating might cut into the cosmetics market, by reducing the necessary baseline of attractiveness. If people meet their mates when they're standing in line at the grocery store, looking good in the grocery store has a direct, positive impact on lifetime happiness. If people meet their mates on OKCupid, it's okay not to care too much about personal appearance at other times.
Duped Stones of Jordan were so prevalent in D2 that they introduced a mob (Diablo Clone) that spawned only when those duped SoJs were sold to merchants. I look forward to D3's dupe economy :)
Ableton in Berlin is hiring C and Python developers:

http://www.ableton.com/jobs
I also don't think it's particularly hard to do the x,y frame setups either. Just start by drawing boxes on a piece of paper. Figure how things interrelate, make the code, tweak the margins.
Why is this better than encrypting a text file with my idea written down and sending it to myself via email?
In my experience, the battery life in most phones is fairly disappointing at the moment. I imagine that this would be a major hindrance to the usefulness of a projector. The increase in efficiency that this lens provides is great news but actual power consumption would be a more useful figure than a percent improvement. How much power will a small projector consume compared to a typical LCD screen?

Personally I would be much more excited to see LCDs with reflective modes rather than projectors. These would alleviate battery issues, solve the problem of screen clarity in direct light, and also ease eye strain. I'm keeping my fingers crossed :-).
Qwiki is looking for backend, android and devops engineers in SF. We are currently using Ruby/Scala for most of the server side code.

We are developing a platform to allow people to experience information in a compelling manner(visual, audio, story). We need your help to deliver this experience to the world. There's a lot of interesting challenges(text mining, media processing, scalable and performant services) to be solved.

feel free to email me direct at t at qwiki dot com.

http://www.qwiki.com/about-us
http://www.qwiki.com/work-here
Maybe this can lead to a homogenization in the sales tax across states ? Or is that too optimistic?
WiFi 802.22 can cover 12,000 square miles
I launched a fake call API (http://www.fakecall.net/) to help polite introverts exit unwanted conversations or meetings. I need someone to make a nice app for it ;-)
Minority rules: Scientists discover tipping point for the spread of ideas
You are right.

This is one of the reasons why this concept site is a tiny, tiny idea saver, that may save a couple of rookies along the way.

I can't see custodly in a defense case just yet.
> (He agreed to speak after Forbes‘ poking around Twitter, > Facebook and the Brown Directory revealed his name.) B

this is the most important part of the story
Interesting.

Some of the claims made seem to be strange. Adding in additional choices is fine, dealing with multiple choices is fine, modifying each page as you give it to the user is fine, you're just adding in additional assumptions, which, when wrong would completely ruin your test. Similarly these results would completely ruin a bandit algorithm, because it relies on a much larger set of assumptions then a standard a/b test.

One quick example: You lose temporal independence and you are testing X and Y. For the first 15 rounds, X's metric is 100 and Y's is -100. after that, they are reversed. With an epsilon first gambit algorithm with N=15, the algorithm will simply choose X forever.

That said, they are an very interesting set of algorithms and it'd be interesting to see how brittle they are in practice.
LG Optimus 3D - Review and Photo Gallery
The complexity seems like an opportunity for the Hacker community to build an open source, web-based tax computation service. Set up a WikiTaxes Foundation to pay for the servers, devise a simple API, publish sample code for various languages and there you go, complexity dealt with in one go.
Hang on a second... You use MS SQL Server and don't follow the practices he describes in this article? Why on earth not?

SQL Server is just plain awesome at this stuff. Schema is all scriptable (it even prompts you to let it script itself if you mess with things in the modeling tools). That means that you get automagic change scripts that tuck nicely into source control and are just waiting to be sucked in by your automated build and deploy system of choice.

Procs and everything else are all just scripts, which get their own files. So just like you have individual files for all 500 of your classes, you'll have 500 .sql files for those procedures. It's not difficult in any way.

It sounds like you ran into problems because you inherited a system from people who went out of their way to mess things up. Messed up things are hard to work with, regardless of what technology they live in. Try not to blame the database for the fact that you can build ugly things with it.
Launch is too strong a word, as is MVP, but I threw this up on a server last week:

http://tabengine.com
I think the main problem with this approach is that different parts of your stack have different requirements. One part of your stack might require large amounts of RAM for efficient response times, but may be used infrequently, for instance. With a separate server, you can scale that part of the stack independently. If the whole stack lives in every server, you must sacrifice performance or money for that consistency.
Chicago, IL - Braintree

We mostly work with Ruby/Rails. Our team is talented, our practices are collaborative (pairing, agile), we work on challenging problems (high availability, quality of service, scaling, security), and our devs have 10% time to work on whatever they want. Developers use and love our product. Although we mostly work with Ruby, we also work with Python, Node, Java, .NET, PHP, and Perl. Braintree is profitable, you'll have standard benefits (health/dental/vision), 401k match, ample vacation, an above market salary, and stock options.

More about our people, practices, and software: http://www.braintreepayments.com/inside-braintree/how-we-bui...

Apply at http://www.braintreepayments.com/braintree-careers . If you know somebody who might be a good fit, we'll pay you $10,000 for a hired senior dev referral.
Step 1: Make getting good items so frustratingly repetitive that players start paying other people for getting those.
Step 2: Instead of trying to fix that part of the game decide to monetize on this?

Talk about game designers selling out badly ...
SEEKING WORK -- Boston, MA or remote

Full stack web developer, browser Javascript all the way down through the stack to DevOps stuff. I'm most effective in Python, Javascript, Java, and Go, in about that order. I've used most of the NoSQL DBs, Flask, Django, Celery, Node, jQuery, Amazon APIs, etc, etc. My increasingly outdated resume is at http://www.njl.us/resume/
I jumped into Android development about a month ago, and after a slow start its really been fun. I hated Eclipse at first, but it gets a lot better with time.

The emulator though - don't bother. The author is not exaggerating about several minutes to load. Just buy an Android phone and debug on that, or you'll spend more time cursing at the emulator than coding.
Well, if you were a PL/SQL dev, you'd be making the same complaint about the complexity of J2EE. I've no experience of working on systems where performance wasn't an issue :-)
If you buy a console just to play dragon age... 460/120 = 3.83. A console with 3 games: 580/360 = 1.61.

Edit: edited out stupid "on par with movie" comment.
With all due respect - your service as it exists is completely useless. You either need to be prepared to go to the court to testify for other people or you need to provide reliable, court-tested technical solution for trusted time-stamping.

Basically consider this - if the push comes to shove and someone is getting served C&D letter or worse yet getting sued over their idea, how exactly does your service help them? Or even how would you use in such situation, since you said you built it around your personal need?
Quest TOAD

http://www.quest.com/toad/
LOLz, I wrote my comment at the same time as you. Want to co-found this project?
I launched Coffee & Domains (https://www.coffeeanddomains.com) for domain name registration and management.

It has some decent traction so far and the current users seem to really like it. I'm currently working on an API and iPhone app to try to make it even more appealing.
They want it, but they're not going to get it. In any case, for the time being, app store revenue is minimal compared to device revenue; last year the whole sector took under 2 billion dollars in sales globally, only a third (less sales taxes etc. in some cases) goes to the operator.
This has very little to do with projectors in smartphones (or anywhere else), and what the article says about projectors in smartphones is mostly wrong.

Look at the title of the Alps press release. "Alps Develops and Commences Mass Production of [...] Lens for Optical Communication Using Wide-Angle Laser Diodes". Optical communication. This thing is meant to be attached to a laser diode and a length of optical fibre, not built into a projector.

Yes, they do make a throwaway remark that "the lens is also ideal for high-brightness projector applications". Whether that's true depends on whether it happens to be the exact aspherical lens that a given high-brightness projector application requires. Maybe it will be for someone. I wouldn't bet on it.

The coupling-efficiency figures cited by the article (taken from the Alps press release) would not be the relevant figures for a projector application. Alps do not appear to have provided any figures relevant for a projector application. One obvious reason for that would be that they're just talking about projectors as a throwaway remark and don't have any particular application in mind.

So far as I know, no palm-sized projectors use Peltier coolers. In fact, I'm not sure that any projectors use Peltier coolers. The Alps press release talks about Peltier coolers, but only in the context of optical communications. In any case, it seems unlikely to me that an improvement in efficiency from 0.73 to 0.68 is, in itself, going to make much difference to whether any given application requires cooling hardware.

The article suggests that a smartphone device might be able to project a 60" image. Making very optimistic assumptions at every point, I think that would call for at least 9W of power consumption even if you're happy for the image not to be very bright. This is not going to happen in a smartphone, no way, no how. (And that's ignoring the very substantial laser safety issues.)

The article suggests that even if this lens doesn't make super-bright smartphone projectors feasible, it might be useful for slightly larger projectors. Well, anything's possible, but the whole point of this lens is that it's extremely small, and for any projector that doesn't have to be squeezed into the tiniest space possible (and even for those that do) the difference between one of these lenses and a slightly larger one is unlikely to be significant.

(Disclaimer: My employer makes small video projectors that use laser diodes. I am not, in any way at all, speaking for them.)
Its not that we are willing to pay that either, but we just dont have much choice as most electric cars arent capable of decent ranges yet and/or cost huge amounts of money for not alot of car.
Internet Explorer users 'have below-average IQ'
I happen to work for Facebook, and a large fraction of my friends and family are expatriates. A place to easily keep in touch, share photos of kids, chat with abuelita, all that boring stuff, directly improves our quality of life.

When I recommend Linux for my friends, the top two "programs" they care about are Skype and Facebook. After that, maybe Youtube.

As for the ads, yes, that's a source of revenue. If that is a dealbreaker for author, well, I had that opinion once myself. Then I graduated high school and worked for a very interesting advertising startup, learned about the origins and practice of it and how it grew up alongside print, took advantage of and sped up the development of new technologies, etc. I don't expect to convince anyone but advertising is itself a worthwhile problem.
Whether a branch is private and therefore can be rebased has nothing to do with whether there's a copy of it on the server. I push my work-in-progress to the server often for backup purposes anyway. If I want to rebase, I just push -f.

I can't think of why that would be a problem, but if someone objected to push -f on a private branch, I'd just make a new branch with a new name and push that. And if that were a problem, I'd just find another server to push -f to and only ever commit to master on the official server. But these are silly workarounds. Why make things harder than they need to be?
If you have proof that you had something working before a patent was filed, you are saved I think.

Still, legal issues are hard to crack... we should just keep thinking on how to avoid lawsuits and patent trolls.
How long from first line of code to launch? And what were your expenses for that time?

In other words, what was the bootstrap amount you needed?
"The more ads people see, the less they'll click. And then the whole system blows up."

Do you really think so? Read up on priming ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology) ) and tell me if you still think so.

Advertising works. Even if NO ONE CLICKS, it still works (brand advertising is still the lion's share of advertising spending in the world).
San Francisco, CA - Omada Health Inc - Web Developer
We're a brand new startup applying the principles of social-web software to the treatment of a real public health condition (diabetes). We've gotten some great feedback so far (and some funding) so now we just need to build the damn thing (well, a prototype at least).
If you consider yourself a smart developer and want to work in the health field (because hey, it's up-and-coming and making a difference is fun) please shoot us an email!
jobs@omadahealth.com
Facebook likes to hire entrepreneurs (successful or not -- you've learned a lot (and that rhymes (and now we're triple nested))). Anyway ...

Hit me up with your resume at apansari@fb.com and see if there are any positions that are interesting to you on our careers website.

You are demoralized right now -- all entrepreneurs have been there when our pride and joy fails. It's okay and it will be better.
Oklahoma City, OK

Programmer Analyst - University of Oklahoma

Looking for .NET / Web dev / SQL experience.

https://jobs.ou.edu/applicants/jsp/shared/position/JobDetail...
Anyone hiring in Toronto? (I see one, but there was another thread a couple of days ago where it was suggested that companies are having trouble finding people in Toronto... so I would expect more postings here if that were the case.)
Inbound text messages with my SMS API
Nexmo is an SMS API to send and receive SMS.With Nexmo's long virtual numbers, you will need to set up a CallBack URL for inbound to which we will send a request for each incoming message.

http://nexmo.com/documentation/index.html#mo
I soft-launched Flixxed (http://www.flixxed.com) which I like to call the "illegitimate love-child of Groupon and Netflix".

I've been meaning to post it as a Show HN, but I guess I've hesitated because it's pretty basic. Please let me know what you think and sign up if you like movies.
I created a website that allows people to create their own trail mix, visually (so you can see what it looks like before you order) and then buy it.... http://www.trailmyx.com
I released Drop and Give Me, an android app that does fitness challenges and bodyweight strength training measured with your phone. http://bostwick.github.com/DropAndGiveMe/
Other reports of this story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2818847 <- This has all the comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822935

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822162

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823776

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823808

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823947

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823949

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2827618

In addition, it's just paraphrasing a report from PC World.
Very interesting. How many ad impressions do you generate during an hour of web browsing? 100? 500? That's $0.10 - $0.50 of revenue at a $1CPM.
It also assumes that the distribution remains constant over time, an assumption that is, well, wrong.

But that's not very interesting. What's interesting is if it's still useful regardless, or if there is some sort of modification that would improve it taking that into account.
Great idea, I'm a web developer and would find it really useful for demoing client projects before launch so they can point out anything they're unhappy with. What have you used to create it out of interest?
Why Autodesk is buying Squid Labs spinoff Instructables
Few Comments.

1. The most important thing to think about and say is the market share, fragmentation, monetization issues. Article doesn't pay enough attention to this it, but it still drives why we do what we do. (save, the author was egged on to make the app by their users).

A paragraph would be useful. Perhaps something like.

Fundamentally, Android is the platform you have to be on to defend the turf. It generally wont make a lot of money, but you have to be there to protect & project mind share. Additionally, it is the dominant mobile platform.

2. Development Tools.
You can use IntelliJ Idea. Its a Mature Development Platform, and gives you many options. The article doesn't make any strong arguments against eclipse. The installation/getting started was more involved, but personally, it took me an hour or so, so I don't think it is a big deal. It is useful to separate opinions from facts. Personally, I use emacs bindings in all my editors, and Eclipse is pretty nice to me in general.

3. UI Design Tools
This section is written in a way that projects inaccurate information. It implies that you have to use XML as opposed to using a Interface Builder interface. This is not true - there is indeed a drag and drop interface akin to IB in android. The author mentions it as a preview tool. Indeed it is also a design tool.
I would have if boundary changes had not made my vote moot in terms of getting him reelected
Alright cool, but when is it enabled by default so we can take advantage of users not needing a plugin anymore ? Does google have any plan there ? Seems to take forever since i first read about NaCL in 2009.
Interesting experiment. I had been wondering about this. I have also been thinking along the same lines as Florian about 'Find Friends'. I have certainly had some people appear there who I am aware of (e.g. neighbors) but we don't have any friends in common and they aren't in any of my email accounts.
Not all states use the same methods for generating revenue. My home state of Florida does not collect income tax. Instead we tax sales and hotel rooms to better capture tourist dollars. Florida and say North Dakota would find it difficult to agree on a unified state tax code.
So you're saying that, for example, google uses bigtable because they don't understand rdbmses?
I launched Radioline, a Mac app to listen to FM stations and Internet radios.

It's on the Mac App Store:

http://itunes.apple.com/fr/app/radioline/id448958286?mt=12
Just a side project...

TextbookCentral (http://textbook.asia)

Used textbook website with every course from each of many universities, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong only.
Maybe a delegated voting system, as discussed in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2484995#?
That sounds like a bit of a bandaid fix for a history of bad practice. Why not, instead of forensically trying to rebuild scripts for changes, just save your change scripts as you change things?

You end up with the equivalent set of scripts in source control, but it seems like they'd be a lot more readable (they won't be all lumped on top of eachother and out of order, etc.). Is there another advantage to what you're doing that makes it worth deviating from the "best practice" way of doing things? Is, for example, the -merge functionality something that you use on a regular basis to roll backward?
Great points. If you exercise solid controls around your database operations, you "can" have a the same level of version control as you do on code outside of the RDBMS.

But "can" isn't the same as "will" -- in practice, there are practical issues that make this painful.

The other point is that using advanced Oracle/DB2 features to accomplish things means that you need to keep some RDBMS high priests around. That means lots of money.
Do you have collaborators ? Did you take care of everything or did you outsource some tasks to freelancers (for instance, design, etc.) ?
Extreme scepticism expressed when this story was submitted four days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813705
Sure. But assuming "necessary" is a problem even when put in that context. It's trade-offs and cost-benefit analysis. The benefits are easily seen from the business side. The costs may not be obvious. A couple of days for an intern is just the start. There's the support over the entire product lifetime, and that's going to get worse and worse as time goes on.
Yeah but that's a total nonpoint.

Are you arguing we should all use COBOL and every other stupid-ass approach, as well?
Put the Popular/Public Tools box on the homepage. If you want to appeal to geeks skip the marketing and go right to the value. If I came across your page arbitrarily and not because you asked for feedback I'd have never clicked into it.
I launched http://practicalinterviews.com, where I'm posting my interviews with entrepreneurs, business owners and creative folks of all sorts. I'm still working on my recording setup, to say nothing of my interviewing techniques, but at least it's out there. :)

P.S. I'm looking for interviewees, so if any of you would like to discuss your newly launched apps, let me know.
When you click reload on the captcha, it just loads an iframe with the captcha text in a div. (div#slog)