skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it's especially helpful if you're a boxing fan like i am ;-)...

I saw a chipin.com widget on there during the last event... to help cover the cost of the broadcast(50$).

Worked out pretty well...
Tango EV solar-charging at Googleplex (video; just posted; 1:14)
This is Tango #2, owned by Jorg Brown [pronounced "Yorg"]. Jorg is seen in the video. Two more videos of this car are here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=307373
This is a great video, but I don't think that it qualifies as hacker news. I love humor as much as the next guy, but that isn't what I generally come here for.
Overcoming Bias: Politics isn't about Policy
It might just be a silly gut reaction that putting stuff in your body could be bad, but how can we really know, honestly? 'Safe' is obviously a relative term. How safe do we need?

We have very incomplete understanding of cellular and molecular biology (much less than, for example, the circulation system, which the glove uses). Where harm can be potentially averted by the use of drugs for medicine, it makes sense. But where harm can be potentially caused by the use of drugs for recreational activity (of which sports are an example), things seem much more morally ambiguous.

You have to draw a line somewhere. At some point, the increased risk is simply too much to ignore. And when you have a highly competitive situation like professional sports, it is, I argue, immoral to tempt people, by competition, into doing something potentially harmful to themselves. Voluntary recreational drugs are one thing, but in competitive sports, I argue that we should try to keep training methods and substances as safe as possible. I think, in general, if, by competition or incentives some other method one induces a class of people to risk inflicting harm unto themselves, one is doing a moral wrong.
example: mashable
It's a law. If the law passes, it's by definition legal.

It could potentially be unconstitutional (perhaps granting this much non-reviewable power to the Treasury Department, an executive branch agency, violates the separation of powers), but I doubt it. Considering all the other power grabs that the executive branch has gotten past the Supreme Court, this one ranks fairly low.

If you're pissed off about the bailout, contact your legislators. It's their job to stop things like this, and they won't do it unless they know their constituents are really, really pissed off about it.
Arrrrrgh, got here too late.

Any chance I get one? jonas at codeazur.com.br
The secrets of doing agile offshoring with success
Having done at least one thing that I thought was "impossible", I now expect myself to do the impossible ever after. I don't give up without trying, anyway.

Everyone should do something impossible at least once in their lifetimes.
Ask HN: anybody going to SF Beta tonight?
Hi! Anybody going to SF Beta 2.6 tonight?
huh, I didn't think it would be a social lesson, I was expecting something more along the lines of: use compilers and high-level languages and don't care what your object code looks like
Pandora radio fights unjust royalty hikes
Ask HN: how to push to a live site?
So I've read a fair amount of books and links on the internet describing how to scale stuff. Something I haven't come across are general strategies on pushing to a live CRUD site without taking it down. Can anyone point me to resources that I've missed, or perhaps just tell me?
I use my iPhone primarily as a phone. You know, when I want to still be able to communicate with other people while I'm away from my computer. Do you really want to be that attached and dependent on computers?

Looks like society is really turning in the direction of science fiction novels.
We do the exact same thing at RescueTime, FWIW.
This is the second TechStars company to be acquired, right?

Congrats!
Congrats :) Looks like the competition is pretty much nowhere to be seen.
Google Android is all about advertising
awesome! congrats ... was a great place to launch
I'm not a fan of Openmoko, but you make a good point. There ARE options for people who want them. The cell phone market is more open now than it ever has been in the past.
so much self pity...
Will you fix the flashblock thing?

It might not be a problem to your target audience but (due to general abuse of Flash on the internet) I and many others keep it on all the time.
Why not YC Summer 09?

EDIT: I'm stupid, ignore, I thought Winter 09 was a full year from now.
There's also some solid insight in this short video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BwatxQwgNs
Could you define "push"? If it what I think you mean, you may want to check out some of the deployment chapters in the documentation of rails, django and other frameworks. They're usually not too bad at explaining how to get from dev to live.

SVN also has some documentation on their site, and I imagine git would have something similar.
Hi,
Would you be able to share some of the books and links on the internet you have been reading that describes how to scale web services?
Clever video nails developer dilemmas
Hecl runs on Android, too:-)
I think there will be more than one dominant device. Someone will want big phone, someone will prefer small laptop. Or maybe something completely different will come, something like rollable ebook reader?
But also less essential.

Which is more important (for one person), 4x$25k or 4x$250k?

I would argue 4x$25k - as that is enough to go independant - miss capitalising on one revenue source and you are toast. The person with a single $250k income stream may never bother looking for the other three opportunities that are out there.
It's quite a nice design: light construction, good layout. Also, they're claiming to integrate riding modes and wifi into the bike somehow, which was our idea, so it must be good. :-)
If he is doing weight training, work = mass * gravity * height.
But is it really, tho'? I mean, why are so many of the Olympic gymnasts teenagers? Even without drugs, their bodies are wrecked after a few competitions. No-one has a problem with kids doing this in regulated competition; why should anyone care that adults want to do it just for lifestyle choice.

Another interesting point is that society has no problem either with women dosing themselves with artificial hormones in support of their lifestyle choices, whereas enhancing male characteristics is considered wrong. Why do you suppose that is?
I'm really digging that iBear thing. Obviously, it needs to be ironed out a bit, but I think it has tremendous potential.
Chrome gives me this warning for this site:

The website at www.digitizeit.de contains elements from the site b.l-a-c.cn, which appears to host malware...

and the link for more info on the site:

http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnost...
It's terrible! The new layout is most certainly not conducive to my sheep-throwing.
"Tough titty said the kitty". :-)

If this individual elected to pursue his PhD work instead of carrying on with google, then he hasn't a right to complain that he is not getting the "recognition" he feels he deserved.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60302
Now that was just silly. No Fortran elf is going to have variables with legible names "Shamrock" and "Rainbow" and "Misty_Morning_Dew".

Try shmrc, rnbo, and mmd, and make sure that mmd is an integer.
Yes, I am writing this on my Asus EEE 1000H. It is a good device, basically a small size laptop with 1.5kg weight, only without DVD. Performance is perfectly ok for office work, email, browsing, video playing.

I suppose the guy is writing about Asus 901...which is a bit different device..only 1kg weight, but with smaller keyboard and smaller disk space. AFAIK, performance is similar to 1000H.
The best description of the fed bailout
Time for Disqus to release a Wordpress competitor, ie. a new open source blogging platform.
You can know what you want without knowing the word.

For example you might be thinking "I want to go to that website that is kinda like hacker news... but a bit more mainstream... and it has a little alien logo." You would know the website if you saw it, and if you could remember the word "reddit" your search would be easy. But you might not know that word.

And the search kinda works anyways:
http://www.google.com/search?q=hacker+news+with+alien+logo
It depends on your usage pattern. I take the train to work and always get a seat, so by carrying my Eee I recover an 40-60 minutes a day.

If I had to stand up on the train, an Android phone or an E71 (or at last resort, an iPod) would be a much better choice.
Jesus, guys, hire a design firm. This thing looks literally painful to use.
Hmm, site's down. Could it be HN overloaded a server? Is this the beginning of the "hack-effect"? =)
Nice. I was thinking about a similar idea recently (judging from the other sites that have been posted, many have had this idea). I wanted to focus on specific games though. If you go to a forum for a college football team, such as buckeyeplanet.com, hornfans.com, or texags.com, you will notice that for each game they create a "Game Thread". I wanted to build a system for gamethreads, since using phpBB, vBulletin, and other forum software doesn't seem to be the best solution for a series of one sentence commentaries on what is happening in the game. If you could nail down this feature and promote it on message boards for each team, I'm sure people would use it. I think many message boards have trouble managing the volume of traffic and small posts on game day. Good work!
That's not true; many parents have misgivings about putting their children in situations likely to harm their body (gymnastics, or football, or hockey, or extreme sports), or despair of other parents injecting children with growth hormones or steriods or pumping them full of creatine. Many adults are wary of those around them doing amphetamines or cocaine. Many women worry enormously (and hence avoid) potential health effects of HRT or the birth control pill, as it is associated with many reproductive cancers among other diseases. Many men avoid steroids and testosterone; it causes problems with the heart and circulatory systems, and it can make you bald.

Surely the magnitude of fear people feel with regard to drugs versus activities is higher. This is probably instinctive: they are a lot of things one can have put into one's body, and throughout evolution, most were pretty bad. But the drugs and training regimens and lifestyles are not in principle distinct. To the extent we can have equally complete knowledge of their effects (which we probably can't), we should judge them the same.
If you happen to be using Ruby, then Capistrano (http://www.capify.org/) is awesome.

I imagine there are similar solutions for other languages.

Worst case scenario, you can roll your own. A very basic trick is to use symbolic links on your server - deploy the site to a new folder, and simply point the symbolic link to the new folder when you're done.
try "mashable"
Took myself down for a few minutes installing analytics. Just the plain old dumb effect I'm afraid :D
"I agree. If I founded a YC Company, or any other startup, I'd look at Omnisio's story and think about duplicating it."

I'm not saying I don't envy Omnisio's trajectory, but YC (and any other investor) has a vested interest in investing in companies that DON'T follow this path. They want empire builders, not build-to-flip folks. Not that Omnisio built with that in mind-- I heard them talking about a lot of long-term stuff, so I'm pretty sure they were building for the long term and just got a great early offer.

"It's just so incredibly important to take money from people are in the position to help you reach liquidation (if that is what you want)."

I've heard many times that companies get bought-- they don't get sold. In practice, I think having experienced folks in your corner helps (especially with setting price and terms)... But not nearly as much as having a company worth buying.
Canon VB C50iR Network camera PTZ Color Zoom
Canon VB-C50iR Network camera from Canon Provides a compact all-in-one PTZ network camera solution for high performance security monitoring. Set-up is ultra-simple and an array of advanced functions enhances efficiency.
>repackaging that one thing you're doing

I'm saying that the one thing 37signals does is making and selling productivity web apps. They've managed to find a great synergy between selling their "real" product and their marketing - which includes their blog, conferences, the "37signals way" - and they are talking about selling the byproducts of their marketing.

My point is that this isn't necessarily always a great strategy. If you're making plastic widgets, I'm not convinced you should spend effort on selling "working with plastic" e-books.
A 'best of' would be really cool, and good for people new to the site.
Any questions?

yes. okay you have sold me on the hardware. can i get one, then contact a wireless vendor and get a service plan? or will they tell me that i have to use a authorized device? astoundingly i have never owned a cell phone
The iPhone doesn't lose luster when it acquires imitators. Far from it. The release of Android is a big, free benefit for Apple's marketing.

The release of Android will inspire approximately 3e5 articles comparing the new phone with existing phones. And which is the existing phone that will be featured in every single one of those articles, cast (once again) in the role of the current gold standard for smart phones? It'll be the iPhone. Because stories with Apple in them are exciting stories. And because, from the market's perspective, Android is an obvious derivative of the iPhone -- except for the parts that are derivative of the Blackberry instead, like the hardware keyboard. (If RIM is lucky they might rate a mention in the fifth paragraph of these articles.)

There will now be a big P.R. effort to define the entire smartphone industry as an epic battle between iPhone and Android. Which can only benefit both platforms, because the amount of downside to losing a bit of marketshare to your direct competitor is more than compensated by the enormous potential upside of growing the entire iPhone/Android niche of the industry. Remember, iPhone may be a hugely successful product, but it's still only a tiny percentage of the installed base of phones. There's a lot of potential customers still out there. Customers that might be drawn in now that they have a range of iPhone-like devices to choose from.

The only way that Android would be a terrible blow to Apple is if it clearly and obviously kicked the iPhone's butt. But it doesn't. There will be a lot of little details that will lead some people to prefer one phone over the other, but there's nothing game-changing here that would cause me to abandon the iPhone. The big difference that folks here on HN notice is the openness of the software platform, but that might not actually be a competitive advantage -- and, if it does prove to be a huge competitive advantage, it won't be one for long, because Apple could eliminate it in fifteen minutes if they really wanted to. All it takes is a policy change.
I don't see this device being a "must-have" device like iPhone is.
List of cognitive biases
"Pseudocertainty effect — the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes."

May explain why most people stay employed.
I think bear.com should be free soon. Maybe lehman.com.
Dan Grigsby on applying Social Engineering and Spikes to the business side of your startup
You can use any GSM provider you want. AT&T and T-Mobile work fine on it. You can also use a prepaid plan if you want.
Yeah, when are we (I've got one too, still working on getting the Mokomakefile system working on Solaris) going to get a decent software stack for the thing? Leaving it suspended overnight shouldn't kill the battery.
Peer pressure is the reason you use Facebook?
Sure. My company would reduce the transaction costs and help find people who prepare food for you.
What's wrong with having servants as long as you can afford it and are paying a living wage?
Great job :-)
Not sure how any of this will help anything.

Let's think about 9/11. Say a hijacker's mood was detected to be "will cause a disturbance". Well, now they have to prove it. He isn't carrying anything illegal, he has a valid visa, etc., etc.
My company uses mostly Perl for the server-side logic of its platform, and we're very happy with it.
i am still laughing. that is the funniest thing i have read in a while
Where did MIT go?
Am I going crazy or did MIT used to be labeled and colored dark gray on Google maps?

All the other universities in the area still have their own special labels.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=mit&ie=UTF8&ll=42.358163,-71.090984&spn=0.026385,0.054245&z=14
Wow, an article about the bailout that's actually relevant to hackers ;-)

Good surprise.
Author admits that he hasn't heard back from any party involved. TC has a very high standard for investigative reporting...
1. Automated pet feeders:
Add a scale under the food bowl and a scale where your cat/small dog sits to eat, throw in a webcam (and a mic to hear the crunchy sounds) and an embedded board to control it all and dish out the right amount of food and find a wealthy pet crazy audience who wants to see a graph of their pet's weight/consumption over time.

Have the 'community' compare breeds eating habits + figure out different eating patterns + types of food.

The deluxe model could have a speaker so you can voip to your pet loving sounds to help them digest. Partner with some of the GPS collars (and collars with accelerometers to figure out overall activity) for a full online profile of your furry obsession.

2. Bird feeders:
Capture some really closeup pictures of birds gorging themselves on your delectable food. Have a solar panel on the top + an embedded wifi board that can email pictures of cute birds eating their food to the customer.

Do it high res enough to know if a bird comes back the next spring. Email when food get's low. Create a community that shares the pictures + might even track a bird or two once they know that the reflective solar panel equals a great meal.

Have a deluxe model that weighs the bird as it stands on the perch. Add a mic to record their gossip. Give them a facebook page.

Find rich bird crazy people to pay $2k for it.

3. Networked scale:
Much like the pet concept, this would be a $500 scale that, barring dropping 20 pounds overnight, can detect you + update you on your health. It can tie into a weight watchers site, as well as play shower music.

You get a weekly email of a graph of your weight with motivational tools.
Greg Mankiw's Blog: Oops
Commentary on the Financial Mess by several economists
Thank you for your comment. I thought I was the only one that read this post as "more ways to keep milking money from the same suckers."

They already cried foul when Google did a product that was slightly similar to Campfire. Now, I'd love to see their reaction if someone decided to "repackage" one of their products on their own.
Capistrano works great for non-Ruby sites too! Our site is in PHP and it was easy to get cap working for us. We also use github.com so the site essentially pulls from there, which means we can also rollback in case we ever need to.
Google Android G1 has 1GB monthly download cap, 6K/sec throttle after that
Apple Extends Non-Disclosure to App Store Rejection Letters
Just 'cause it's not obvious from the comment: webwright is one of the RescueTime founders, so he knows what he's talking about here. ;-)
Youtube had a third founder who pursued his PHD as well instead of being involved in the daily activities. Apparently he was still a consultant of some sort. But at the end he cashed in a few millions when the company was acquired.
Unless perhaps your plastic widgets are Legos.
I was thinking about making a business out of it, but then I was worried about potentials for freaks and lawsuits. It's ok if it's just me vetting people for me personally (and I know I'M not a freak as a customer, so that's half the battle =P)
ShareThis To Acquire madKast (Techstars Acquisition)
I'm turning 30 this year (eek). My first "computer job" was as operator/programmer for a school district in the East Bay, while I was still in high school.

While I was there, over the course of a few nights I wrote, in COBOL, a program that would read in the digital punch cards on their mainframe and a set of variables passed to it, interpret some codes in the data for the embedded variables, and then spit out a temporary static digital punch card for the next job being run.

It was challenging because COBOL doesn't understand strings; I ended up using some horrible hack involving the Unisys string/unstring system calls.

13 years later, I'm starting to build a business on doing impossible little things for companies. It's kinda fun. Stressful, but rewarding. :-)
Seriously?

iPhone has 1% of the market, they've got another 79% to go before we're even in the ballpark of antitrust.
Trivial enough to be useless.
I have one: Do you actually like using the phone?
How Lessons from the Dotcom Bust are Helping VCs and their Portfolio Companies Today
Nokia N96 A Pocket PC OR Cell Phone
This Black-colored handset of Nokia N96 will work over an Operating System of Symbian OS 9.3 of S60 that will further support a dual-band HSDPA to proffer worldwide coverage. It will be launched with a colorful TFT display of 16M colors over its 2.8 inches wide screen.
The more important question should be - why is politics about electing leaders? Why is it not about policies? I've always felt that the French, British and American systems of "democracy" fell far short of any real democracy. My best term to designate these systems is "representative despotism" - where you elect your tyrant for X years.

I much prefer a system like that of Switzerland, where there is no concentration of power into a single person, no commander in chief. Instead, there is a council of seven people who have to work together to implement policies which are directly voted on by the people. It is also a system where anyone can submit a policy to the vote (they just have a to get a significant number of signatures to put it to the vote).
Guys, please stop posting old stuff...
The G1 seems like a mixed bag. It doesn't appear to excel in any capacity, and it has some big drawbacks - no headphone jack, slow browser, basic media player, etc. Adding to that the fact that it's only available through T-Mobile's sketchy network, and it doesn't seem like the kind of product that will set the world on fire. It's good that Google was able to get a phone out for the holiday season, but I'm thinking that Android's story will play out more in 2009 than this year.
To be fair, there is value in both editing and variety of presentation. And it can even be measured in dollars, if this article is anything to go by.
Vanity presses are risky that way. These days I think print-on-demand is the way to go for small runs like that.
The bad news for Disqus is the just added a feature to their plugin so that comments are now stored both locally as well as on disqus.com

This "bad news" was reponsible for a lot of folks switching to Disqus. We were waiting for the feature for our blog, and switched within days of its release. I don't think many serious bloggers are willing to put their community history into the hands of someone without knowing they'll be able to get them back out. So, I don't think this can be viewed as a bad thing, no matter how things shake out--that's just a big batch of users that would have never been Disqus users, if the feature didn't exist.

And Disqus does have the pretty clear market lead...but they will need to keep innovating rapidly to keep growing that lead, particularly in the interim as ID lives in "private beta" while the WordPress folks do whatever it is they're doing with it.