skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If none of these ideas captures you to the point where you can make the decision on your own, you might want to wait before starting a company.
I looked at the top of the article, expecting to find:

By: Ron Burgundy
All the former finance employees are going to have to do something else on their blackberries...
"Producing complete and useful documentation is a huge amount of work"

One would imagine such documentation already exists in one form or the other. I suppose their developers get trained somehow other than reading the source. In the end, if it is too hard to provide documentation, they can always open up the small parts of the code that implements such interfaces for others to use.
You sound like Michael Cera:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAV0sxwx9rY
The only sport I care about is so often left unrepresented :(
Not looking to start a company, just looking for a fun weekend project to hack on. I've got some thoughts on which one I want to take on, but it never hurts to get some feedback from the community.
I was hoping for a programming language for writing software using only a microphone and speakers.
I don't like C++, but ESR's reasoning here is faulty. C++ was not meant to be elegant; it was meant to run quickly and have some OO. It succeeds at both of those.

The hard part is writing and compiling it. The syntax is bad, the language features are easy to misuse, and the compilers are slow and don't give good error messages.

But the main reason to hate C++ is because allocating your own memory and figuring out what type variables have is a job for the computer, not for the programmer.
That's a really good point. It's much more efficient to centralize alternative power production than to decentralize it in a bunch of cars.
Adding a bunch of "what ifs" to justify your choice of language is not a good argument technique.

"What if your manager is paid by Sun to only advocate Java?" There's no way to argue that, but it doesn't matter, because it's irrelevant.

Pick the langauge you want to use.
Wonkette's Debate Drinking Game
What's wrong with C? Essentially all the speed-critical code on your system (think: the kernel, stuff like openssl, libpng/libjpg, audio & video codecs, MySQL, PostgreSQL, ruby, perl, python, php, apache, nginx, memcached, ...) is written in C, and it works great.

Everything you've mentioned has crashed on me from time to time due to memory allocation errors. C is not a great langauge. It is assembly langauge with sugary syntax for loops, and a preprocessor that whines if you try to add a double and an integer.

The advantage is speed. The disadvantage is that programs written in C are only correct due to luck.

Oh, and the reason all of the above are written in C is because there is a common misconception that you have to write "system software" in C. You don't but people think you do. So they do.
Key Step to Space-Based Solar Power
H.L. Mencken said something like:

For every complex problem there is a simple solution... and it is wrong.
A Shadowy, Wet World of Squirt-Gun Assassins
Fedora @5: How a Community Approach Works
I would run an experiment to figure out how long it would take me to get tired of sleeping with gold digging models.
This is basically the message that Tim O'Reilly delivered at the Web 2.0 Keynote in the spring - we need to focus on the hard problems: http://tinyurl.com/6zahvu

That being said, the beauty of a democratic society is that everyone has a choice of how they want to use their ginormous geek brains, and the beauty of a free market society is that eventually the big problems will need big solutions and money will flow to those who come up with them.

There's also a bit of the same argument that the kids in my high school algebra class used to make to our math teacher. "Why do I need to learn this, when am I ever going to use it?" The answer is, you need to learn algebra, so you can learn calculus, so you can learn differential equations, so you can build a model that will predict the paths of hurricanes more accurately and potentially save millions of lives. The Web 2.0 building blocks we're creating today might lead to better global communication networks, which might enable scientists to better share information, which might lead to a critical breakthrough that helps to prevent millions of malaria deaths.

I do love this post, though. It's good to see Dan back in his old FSJ form.
I'm really curious to see what happens with this. Obviously, Microsoft wants to match (and eventually outdo) Google in the advertising market, hence their desperate attempts to swallow Yahoo.

Unfortunately, I don't actually think an acquisition like this will pan out for anyone -- neither Microsoft, nor the customers. Mind you, my commentary is purely armchair speculation, but I really can't see how this will put Microsoft on any positive track. Without a doubt, after attaining Yahoo/AOL, everything will receive some sort of (unnecessary) overhaul to better integrate it with their business. This could, in turn, anger a hell of a lot of users of services that Yahoo provides. As well, I can see AOL disappearing into MSN, and Yahoo being refocused and shrunk to merely a marketing sector of Microsoft. Everything else will either be discarded, sold off, or overhauled on a massive scale.

Perhaps I'm completely wrong about everything, but I don't like the direction this is going. Also, this is all very speculative to begin with, since it relies on a very significant sequence of events.
[Windpower] accounts for about a third of all new electricity production.

No. Here is the Wikipedia quote: "Wind power accounted for 35% of all new U.S. electric generating capacity in 2007." (Emphasis mine.) Capacity is not production. Capacity-factor helps us understand how much production we can expect from a given capacity. Here are the capacity-factors of two recently-installed wind turbines:

http://www.hullwind.org

Sept 25, 2008 Hull 1 Hull 2
660 KW 1.8 MW

Total Generation - kWhs 10,262,150 8,127,391

Days Commissioned 2464 877
Hours generating 39,050 14,050
Capacity Factor 26.3% 21.5%

Hull 1 is a turbine that was built to replace an older one that -- as frequently happens to wind turbines, but has never happened to a nuclear power reactor -- had been destroyed in a storm. (http://www.hullwind.org/history.php) Being destroyed in a storm further hurts lifetime capacity-factor.
The "ownership of bugs" problem is one reason that it's nice to work on OSS platforms. It's nice to be able to debug down to whatever component you or a co-worker has decided to blame things on to realized that it really probably is your code.

Co-workers who publicly and loudly always blame components they didn't write is one of my pet peeves. (I do it to myself, and usually know I'm wrong. :-) )
The Common Lisp loop macro
Yes, we should be Santa Claus and give them presents. I'll turn elsewhere for a serious debate. If you think that's the only way the government could help the poor, or that the big-wigs who caused this mess will just vanish as their companies are bought out, you've got another thing coming.
Wake up earlyish, work in a small garden office with the windows open and the crisp fall air streaming in, break for lunch on patio with my wife, read a book, go on a walk in the countryside.

I dunno. I think I'd like it, though.

I'd still work on things, but I feel like the pressure would be released, so I could work on indie adventure games and not have a nagging conscience telling me to do something that will make money.
I do want to write my novel. And create a board game. And a stop-motion animated film. And take up painting and drawing. And travel a lot.

Wow. In the meantime, I'll pack up here at the cube and head home. Then I'll come back Monday and do it again. Yayyyyy.
http://xkcd.com/137/
I didn't need to sign an NDA to write OpenMoko apps.
Summary: Information exists in the Universe. Apple claims that gathering it and telling others about it is illegal.
Access to Programmers Is a Necessity for Agencies to Design for the Web Correctly
The biggest issue is that at a startup your whole brain is focused on what you're building. If your personal life gets involved, you'll want to make sure to make time to do other things. You don't actually want to talk about your startup all the time.

If you work 12 hour days at a startup, you probably don't have time for much else at all.

If you're a normal person who thinks that is unsustainable, you can find time for a normal life along with working on your company. That's the case whether your obsession is your kid or RockBand.

Maybe I'm the exception the proves the rule.
My bad, thanks for the explanation.
Forget Being First, Just Be Different
For all our talk about wanting to be first to market, this post makes a pretty good point, too.
we're a web-based startup, and we decided not to support IE6. why?

because we're more interested in delivering a rich experience and useful functionality to our customers than debugging someone else's code. yes, i said it. fixing bugs in IE6 amounts to working for microsoft, and if you have a complex website, it can amount to half your time or more. all this for one browser, with a declining 25% of the market.

and honestly, is that 25% the 25% that's going to be interested in our product? unlikely. so we said screw it. now we have twice as much time to work on the front end. magic.
I'd work for the political party you started in point 4.
And unlike SuperCollider, the syntax isn't shite.
The site I'm in charge of (a small local radio station, about as far from the early-adopter crowd as you can get) now only has 19% of its visitors from IE6, with 53% using IE7. (For completeness, Fx has 20%.) For the next iteration of the site, I've made the decision to end IE6 support.

We're a tiny organisation with very limited resources (the web team consists of two people and we write and edit the content as well as taking care of the design and development, plus other jobs in the station) and we can't justify spending insubordinate amounts of time supporting this ancient browser with an ever-declining share of our visitors. We'll make sure it isn't completely broken in the blasted thing, but users of that obsolete version will just have to live with design glitches.
The analysis of "trust" is a good start, but passes over one of the more difficult points: that although trust is a "never-ending process", it's not always easy to keep the legal arrangements in line with the latest situation. Put simply: even though you trust someone now, write the contracts as if you don't, because the day may come when you won't. (Take it from one who learned the hard way....)
If you've worked in music programming languages it does. One of the major problems with the widespread visual programming environments (Max, Reaktor) is that they mix signal flow and time flow in often unclear ways.

In ChucK you have different "shreds" (threads) where you advance time explicitly by doing something like:

1::second => now;

That makes the flow of time between different elements very clear and in theory (though not always in practice) it's sample accurate between different shreds. Durations are an ordinal type in ChucK, so you can also do something like:

1::minute / beatsPerMinute => dur beatLength;

And then do:

for(0 => int i; i < 4; i++)
{
spork ~ snare();
beatLength => now;
}

Where "snare()" is a function that plays a snare drum sample and "spork ~" spawns a new shred to play that sample (where time is advanced independantly).
I need to disagree: the syntax of a language does make it hard or easy to read. Anything with postfix syntax is going to be strange to the uninitiated. Lisp's parentheses everywhere is going to be daunting to many, at least at first. Heavily stacked pointer/array operators in C require "language lawyer" personnel in some shops. Perl regexps can be quite cryptic. APL? Fuggedaboudit!

The author doesn't quite go far enough, however. As you point out, how you use a language is significant -- moreso by a factor of 3, I'd say. But the choice of language clearly doesn't have zero influence on its readability.
The financial crisis explained and a plan proposed which would not fleece the taxpayers
A beautiful tribute, but what's up with the title? What would it mean to "solve a legend"?
The site builder but oriented around plugging it into other sites. You create something like Weebly but focus purely on letting other sites give it to their users (for profile pages, or entire sites). Charge for the service.
I'm a fool. If I'd bothered to look it up first, I would have remembered that the actor model was integral to the invention of Scheme. See Sussman & Steele, Scheme: An Interpreter for Extended Lambda Calculus (AI Memo 349), 1975 (the first link at http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html). From the acknowledgements:

This work developed out of an initial attempt to understand the actorness of actors. Steele thought he understood it, but couldn't explain it; Sussman suggested the experimental approach of actually building an "ACTORS interpreter". This interpreter attempted to intermix the use of actors and LISP lambda expressions in a clean manner. When it was completed we discovered that the "actors" and the lambda expressions were identical in implementation.
You should have start doing long time ago... savings (China) vs. "deficits don't matter" (USA), being the biggest creditor in the world (China) vs. being the most indebted nation to foreigners in the history of the man-kind (USA)... production and underconsumption (China) vs. spending on credit and overconsumption (USA).

Your situation is bad exactly because you are not paying attention to this how to build an empire (China) vs. collapse one (USA).
This is strongly false. Utility scale flywheel systems can store massive amounts of energy, and can do so quite cheaply.

So can compressed air. If you look at household electricity usage, an enormous amount is taken up by refrigeration, and air conditioning. Much of the rest is taken up by appliances: washers, dryers, that sort of thing. Finally there's heating and lighting and electronics. The major energy expenses are now transport, which we're trying to address, stuff, which is hard, and air travel, which will have to be scaled down because it's polluting the environment like crazy.

http://www.wattzon.org/gameplan.htm
Pittsburgh's AlphaLab to host SuperHappyDevHouse clone on Oct. 2nd
because at the end they are all begging for tax payers (this would be you...) money?
The actual DevHouse Pittsburgh site http://devhousepgh.org is down ...

If you aren't familiar with SuperHappyDevHouse see http://superhappydevhouse.org/.
Utilities only burn coal when they have to. It's a soot laden nightmare.
Not only is it irrational, it's also a URL with about 10 digits more precision than you would need to create a circle with the circumference the size of the known universe accurate to the size a single atom.
Twittering the Debate: Amateur Pundits Plan to Sound Off
User-generated science: Web tools are beginning to change the shape of scientific debate
> What exactly do you want to do about the "entrenched poor"? Give them presents?

No let's give them to multi-billion corporations and banks. There is no capitalism in the US anymore. Bad decisions at the corporate level are not being allowed to be punished by Market. Instead Market is manipulated, so we all get punished. This my friend is called SOCIALISM. Even freakin' swedish don't bail out their business. This nation became a parody of values it used to represent.
How to sniff out disease: Doctors may soon have a new diagnostic tool in their kit bags
Windows Mobile 7 phone release could be as late as 2010
Wow, thanks for that. That was really interesting.
Adweek: Media buyers still hesitant about highly targeted ad campaigns
I'd do the same thing with my life that I'm doing with it now. I'd just like to do it in a slightly more modern apartment that doesn't contain a futon. That's about it.
I would love to see the spread incorporated in the gameday picks
How is being different different from being first?
My respect for him just had the beating of its life.
Asymptotically. We have three problems: power capacity, power on demand, and power portability. Renewable energy sources can solve the capacity problem, if our energy consumption goes down through efficiency and changing habits (in particular, if we stop flying everywhere...). The main thing we must optimize for is energy per day versus cost.

Power on demand is another major problem: we need to supply a 'peak' of power when people demand it. Renewable energy wavers during its production, so we need to store some proportion of its energy somehow. The main thing to optimize for here is energy capacity versus cost, assuming you can get the power out fast enough. Efficiency also factors in, though not hugely. Anything over 50% is ok.

Portable power is most problematic. We need an energy source that's clean, but that has a high energy density, measured relative to both weight and volume. Solving each problem leads to different possibilities.

For example, if you solve the weight problem, but it takes up tons of room (hydrogen), you might be able to power airplanes. You can also power trains.

If you solve the volume problem, you can easily power automobiles and two wheeled vehicles. (for example, hydrocarbon fuel cells work pretty well here. We're trying to make compressed air vehicles that will work well here)

If you have solved the low cost and efficiency problems, and it doesn't weigh too much, you can power ships, in particular, container ships. If the fuel is buoyant you can make a double hulled vehicle and store the fuel in it. (compressed air works very well here).
I'm not sure if memory usage statistics scale linearly, but I'd be interested in the results from a more "modern" test. I am not sure about anybody else, but I always have 2 browser windows open (1 for "work" 1 for "junk") and each has an average of 12 tabs open at any time. That's 3 times the test amount.

(for reference, my Safari (Mac) with 24 tabs uses ~700mb)
If you click "more links" below the first few main links you'll see search results with URLS
I'd teach. Math, science, or computer science to high school aged students. I really think teaching is fun and fulfilling, you just don't get paid well at all. I'd also read a lot.
$100K/yr is really not that much now. I mean if you think about it the only difference between 50K and 100K is a slightly bigger house, a slightly better car and a slightly better vacation. A lot of programmers make close to that already
These designs are quite silly. In fact the best location for a solar updraft tower is in between the forest floor and it's canopy. In fact, there are already billions of implementations of concept, taking advantage of the entropy differential between the strata of forest biospheres: trees.
The USC loss highlights something to me: It was hard for me to tell what information was being displayed. I totally missed the news on that game (fail) so I saw USC in bold and assumed they'd won and didn't know what the big red box meant.

Maybe I'm just a space cadet and that's not actually confusing, but I found it unintuitive. I'd bold the winner after a game has been played and maybe make a note in smaller type below that the prediction was the other guy. And keep the red box.

Anyway, interesting idea.
You're going to start a city with $100K a year? You must have mad city-building skills.
It's in my self-interest to rob you if I can get away with it.

It's also in my self-interest to strong-arm my way to a monopoly and charge more than the efficient price.

It's also in my self-interest to prevent workers from obtaining bargaining power.

It's also in my self-interest to start a weapons manufacturing company and make campaign contributions that will increase the probability of wars taking place.

Seriously, it's not like anyone here needs to be convinced about the power of capitalism. But not even Adam Smith was so naive as to think there was nothing wrong with self-interest, or that it always worked out in favor of the public good.

Sheesh.
My question was, if you could get that salary without working, what would you spend your time doing?
Utility scale flywheel systems can store massive amounts of energy, and can do so quite cheaply.

Yet, electric utilities use lead-acid batteries, instead (providing ~30 seconds of backup power).

If utility scale flywheel systems are cheap, why aren't they being added to nuclear power plants (so those plants can be used more-effectively for peak power)?
This is just part of Larry Ellison's talk about cloud computing, it was made to keep shareholders happy by downplaying the hype for cloud computing, it's not about the technology itself.

Larry Ellison doesn't like cloud computing because despite all the benefits of this advancement it would turn his companies business models upside down. Oracle would lose large amounts of money because they rely on massive licensing deals and expensive maintenance (assuming they go SaaS).

They have developed an independent unit to build out their on-demand efforts, just as Innovators Dilemma recommends when faced with a disruptive technology.

But the market is still to new and if Oracle made a major shift toward it, it would cannibalize a large portion of their profits. Therefore dropping the share price.
Quite honestly, the most freeing moment in my life was when I realized I had already "solved the money problem". That is, I knew I could be happy and could survive doing exactly what I was doing. Every decision since then has been an effort to do more of what I most liked doing (and conversely less of what I didn't). The only problem now is how to find time to do it all.
Propose away!

Here's another: How many hits in the top 10 do you get? I get 5.
I actually used it a few times when Google didn't deliver and ddg delivered better even if not pefect, impressive.

But I am not a fan of the design or the name.
Skype to be integrated into Asterisk PBXs
I all truthfulness I wrote the post in part to see if anything written in the seth godin and 37signals style, no matter what it is, gets voted to the top

(ftr...brandnewlow did not submit it because he thought it was good, the test would have been flawed if I submitted it myself)
Cool - what are the main use cases? I mean, looking at the common kinds of things people would create with ChucK, is it much better than the alternative tools, or just better for the people who have programming oriented minds?
That's exactly my point! They won't vanish, so bailing them out is not going to cause them to stick around. They'll stay either way.

Basically I'm saying that hoping we'll get rid of bad managers is a bad reason to be opposed to the bailout.

If you have ideas for what to do for the poor post them. I don't. But I do know that keeping some companies alive will do more to help people then giving the money to poor people will.
At Amherst college, 1% of first-year students have landlines, 99% have Facebook accounts
Look Ma No OS (On Squeak and no OS)
Again, you don't realize what the bailout will mean to the companies - they will be gone! Kaput. The US will own them. They just won't renege on obligations is all.

BTW: Why do you exclude the gov from the market? These days the fed owns all sorts of things, maybe they'll make a profit.

Look, again, I'm not saying that the bailout is a good idea. I'm saying your stated objections to it were poor and based on "it's not fair" rather than analyzing what the effects on the economy might be.

I don't really care about fair or not: I want to chose the course of action with the best effect. We can debate which course is best, but I hope we don't have to debate if that's the proper thing to debate.

Sigh, this conversation is reminding me too much of reddit, and it's partially my fault.
Hey, it worked on SimCity!
The Anti-Mac User Interface (Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen from 1996)
There are similar things. Here's a lisp-based one,

http://commonmusic.sourceforge.net/doc/cm.html
I did indeed play too much SimCity as a youth :-) Perhaps I will share my plan for starting a city in a future post. I'd like to find out if the HN community thinks it could work.