skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great point. Someone like me could come along to anything good someone is trying to do and say "Hey, what about the orphans!" You do have to start where you can and with what you have - and doing one thing doesn't mean you can't do another later.

Sergey holds a special place in the world since he is one of the wealthiest ($15+ billion) and holds major control over one of the wealthiest companies in the world ($135+ billion - more than even Coca Cola). Most of us would say that places considerably more responsibility in his hands when it comes to taking on world problems. Just a sliver of his wealth can change the lives of millions.

So the letter really is an attempt at a wake-up call for Sergey. The homosexual marriage movement is wealthy, well-supported, and has a very loud megahorn. Using a public company to support a divisive political measure for already wealthy and vocal adults when there are children languishing elsewhere without a voice, just seems like a misplacement of Google's power.
Oh yeah, how could I forget lego?! What you want would probably be on http://mindstorms.lego.com/Products/Default.aspx

Regarding the Arduino boards, I have no idea. I've never really looked into them much. Others on HN might be better-versed on what to recommend based on what you're wanting to do. One of the stores near me (unfortunately in the US) has a starter kit at http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=MSAK which I've bookmarked for later. You might also want to go look on forums and stuff to find out more info, I was searching around to see what was making the bare bones board different, and there were a bunch of sites talking about it, and I found a bunch of projects on instructables too, if you need ideas: http://www.instructables.com/tag/keyword:arduino/

I love the BSODomizer idea. I cracked up during the presentation multiple times: kingpin was showing video of using it on a coworker who thought it was a real one. And I've always pronounced BSOD as "bee-sod", but I don't know. I wish someone made a pronunciation dictionary of tech terms, I hear crazy variations in the pronunciations of so many...BSOD, sudo, linux and what have you.
"...one-liners." - especially in Linear Algebra
The following looks like a good starting point, with an Arduino tutorial, a recommended starting kit, plus recommendations on tool kits:
http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/
If you're a pre-ipo startup selling pricy products to high end financial firms, then you're probably in deep doo doo now.

However this looks to me like a huge opportunity now for new startups to displace established firms, particularly for those offering essential features at lower prices. I'd be very worried if I were Microsoft.

Also I think startups offering online services and games could possibly see a huge boost in their subscriber base if the doom scenarios play out and we have large numbers of formerly employed people with a lot of time on their hands.
You don't need as many tools as you think
> How many companies got shit term sheets because Perkins had to finance a boat that can never be fully enjoyed?

Probably none - VCs invest very little of their own money.

More to the point, who cares it can be "fully enjoyed"? Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don't get any benefit from how much someone else enjoys something.

I do, however benefit from the development and practice of amazing technology. Heck, I benefit from folks who do honest work on something that someone else values enough to pay for with their own money.
My point is that the trademark registration process is VERY simple. There is not much you can do to commit fraud. You fill out a simple form and submit your name and supporting material such as logo to a search. If the search, based on the category of goods and service you select, is deemed not in conflict with already registered product or services, you get the nod and you are registered.

The whole point of the registration process is you are paying the USPTO a fee to do a search to avoid conflict. Yes, there is an assumption that you are not applying for something you know already is registered by someone else. But the point of the search is a safeguard for this.

I am very interested to understand the details of the fraud aspect of this claim. I am also interested to see how the USPTO's paid search process didn't catch the conflict.
In Italy you can get unlocked iPhones (no locked iPhones here)... for ca. 750 US$, btw...
UCLA Mathematicians Discover 13-Million-Digit Prime Number
Maybe ThinkComp and Hubert Chang can start a company together, "The Real GoogBook".
My [very strong] advice is not to do a live demo DURING YOUR POWERPOINT PITCH. You'll absolutely need to do a demo at a later point (perhaps even immediately following your pitch presentation), but what we're talking about here is a very specific piece of performance art: a carefully-tuned, 15-20 minute presentation which is usually presented in front of a group (either a formal group of angels, or a smaller group of VCs). For this presentation, you want as much control as possible, where NOTHING can go wrong.

You can deliver 200% of the value of a live demo in a CANNED demo (or screen shots of a demo). There is no time spent moving between screens, no chance that a bad connection or temporary glitch will make you look like an idiot, no chance that Murphy's Law will rear its ugly head.

Think of this as one of the [very important] communications pieces in your arsenal. You'll also need an elevator pitch (60 seconds, max, no slides), a business plan (so you know what your business is all about), an executive summary (which is what the investor usually reads), handouts to leave behind after your presentation (these are NOT your slides!), and, increasingly these days, a short (5 minute) video, which can be uploaded to the angel's or investor's web site if you're asked to submit your materials that way.
This law only holds true for very broad catagories of technologies e.g. use of fire, hydraulics, electricity, radio, genetics, atomic power, nanotech, etc.

If you try to apply the it to something more narrow you run into the problem that many specific technologies come in and out of favor depending on market conditions.
If a VC cares only about the problem and solution, what does that say about how much they want to invest in YOU? Not much. Most early stage investors (like me) have no choice but to 'bet the jockey, not the horse', because we are betting on YOU to take something that barely exists and go to the ends of the earth to make something of it.

In a later stage deal, such as a private equity acquisition, we're investing in the existing company: its cash flow, operations, customers, etc. The CEO is less important, because we can get rid of him/her if necessary and put someone else in. Is that the way you'd like us to think of YOUR deal?
You could ask other VCs. (VCs love to talk. And, it would help you to talk with them when you don't want money from them.)

Heck - you could ask these VCs what they want. If they ask for something that you don't have, you can ask how producing it moves your biz forward.

It's generally accepted that you shouldn't build technology that won't be needed when it's ready, so why would biz artifacts be any different?

All that said, does your current biz plan satisfy your needs? If it doesn't, how much is that costing you?
A search engine who claims to be neutral yet have social-political bias is never a good thing. The word from the top filters throughout the whole organization, if you don't want to loose your job you have to believe what they believe. Therefore if you are working on search, you are going to be biased towards your your company policies (beliefs), wanting to please your superiors, and keeping your job.
OK, that's a point. What about the BSDs?
Google employees should be careful to not mention that they are "Jew, Muslim, Christian, etc". If they want to keep their jobs they need to align themselves with company policy.
So it's not just me then. I found it pretty much unreadable.
Here are two very practical things that are directly tied to marriage/"partnership" in the US:

- Health care

- Immigration rights

So, yeah, it shouldn't matter, but it does.
Von Neumann used to prove theorems in his sleep.

So sleeping did not impede him working 24 hours a day. It actually helped.
For all of you who are worried about your stock price: don't forget to consider what effect this has on Google's culture. From a business perspective, if you look only at the external effects, taking this stand probably does weigh out to a bad idea. But the internal benefits of employee loyalty and a culture of tolerance might outweigh that, making the blog post justified even from your strictly financial perspective.
And my point is that they aren't doing this to maximize the public good under some moral calculus. Google has nothing to do with AIDS orphans in Africa.
California politics directly influence Google's employees. Would I want to work for someone who refused to take a stand on whether I could visit my partner in the hospital?

Second, although AIDS orphans are tragic, a general "we support AIDS orphans" blog post would be considered rhetorical and would not get garner much additional support for AIDS orphans. However, voting is coming soon and Google's position on this will change votes in CA.

Third, yes theoretically I suppose that Google is "spending an enormous amount of Google brand and influence" ... but practically, they're spending ten minutes of Sergey's time to write a blog post.

Google is not going to lose business -- you can't use the Internet without seeing their ads. I also doubt that its brand name will be tarnished much -- some people may despise the move, but a lot of others will like Google even more (including myself). Many companies already provide full benefits to same-sex couples -- isn't this already publicly affirming them?
He could start small with something of the scale of Lawrence's first Cyclotron.
If I needed some other job, I think I would want to be a captain or crew on a mega-yacht. Looks like they have a lot of fun (swimming with whales!):

http://www.symaltesefalcon.com/log.asp
> US dollar gone by 2025 -> USA gone by 2025

I was with you right till the end. The thing about property is that it doesn't go anywhere. It is all still here. While credit will be hard to get, it was similiarly hard to get in the past. Other countries are not in a perfect position to take the "superpower" status away from the United States. China is too closed (currency, politics, etc), Russia is turning back to communism, France can't keep there own people happy, Iran might start an arms race, the EuroZone has there own problems, etc. Considering everyone else, the US for the most part is pretty stable.
http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/

http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/socratic/
Where does this guy think WYSWYG editors come from and what does he think happens under the hood?
You're forgetting about Google's employees -- would you want to work for someone who refuses to take a stand on whether you can visit your partner in the hospital? Someone who provides full same-sex couple benefits in name only?
I'm not sure that 'marginalising' is the right term but but I agree with the concept. Often, in attempt to be neutral there's a tendency to assign equal weight or validity to all points of view. This is often the case when you have an approximately 50/50 split (eg creationism/evolution in The States). But if you think that an objective truth exists (a right answer) to a fundamental moral/practical/scientific issue, it feels a lot like pandering.

A way to try & look at it from a position where you see something as this as an undeniable truth is to imagine a debate in a different time or place. Equal voting rights for women/minorities was once controversial in the US & Europe, How HIV infection occurs is controversial in some places currently. Would you be able to give equal time to all positions in these cases?
The idea of an automated fast food place sometimes wants to come back.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030801/1345236_F.shtml
If you can reduce McDonald's --or any fast food place's -- costs by X% and/or increase its throughput by Y% by an automated robotic means, you may have a golden business or start up opportunity.

It seems like it should be feasible...
From the plaintiff's website: "Inventors of 'The Facebook,' the first universal face book at Harvard University."

"Think Computer Corporation today filed a Petition to Cancel with the United States Patent and Trademark Office regarding Facebook, Inc.'s registered trademark on the term "FACEBOOK," after Think Press was denied the right to advertise its upcoming book, Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era for trademark reasons." http://www.thinkcomputer.com/corporate/news/pressreleases.ht...
He can take the helm or push some buttons to trim the sails when they're on open water, but I doubt Perkins is the guy navigating harbors and docking it. With a yacht that big it takes a professional. Their crew is 20 people!

And while I've certainly never been on the Maltese Falcon, with a boat that big it seems like there wouldn't be much difference between a motor yacht and sailing yacht, except the sailboat heals over a bit and you save a lot on fuel.
You need a certain level of karma before it becomes a issue. I think it's 50. Possibly 100 or it's 50 and then you can flag submissions at 100. Anyway, there are cutoffs.
Are you interested in analog or digital electronics? I started out with Atmel micrcontrollers in 10th grade and then my curiosity bloomed. Try to learn the basics of analog electronics. Everything stems from there.

I once got a fortune cookie that said "Digital components are made from analog parts." How true.
I know it's not a WebApp (at least last time I checked), but I'd recommend you go with the same product almost every small company in the world uses - Quickbooks. Everything else is just a niche player. Quickbooks will take you all the way to just before 500 employees and going public (Speaking from experience. ) Your financial software should be something you don't even think about. Quickbooks captures that model -plus, every accountant/bookkeeper in the world knows how to use it.

If you are dead set on having a webapp, and are planning on growing, the elements that people are looking for, books that are SOX clean, online expense and Purchase Requests, can be found in products like Netsuite.

Our company went the QuickBooks->Netsuite->OracleFinancials route. And, no matter _how many times_ I go through that routine, OracleFinancials _always_ ends up being a pain to deploy - no matter how much we pay the consultants to make it "smooth, pain free."
This boat is a great advertisement for progressive taxation; under more extreme progressive taxation Perkins would still have the biggest boat (which is all he really cares about), it just wouldn't have be nearly so big or wasteful =P.
Project Runway Nature Calls
Click Here to see more details
Terminator The Sarah Connor Chronicles 2.04
A software glitch causes Cameron to forget who she is. She goes missing from the Connors and is taken in by a street kid named Jody. Cameron and Jody end up at a halfway house where Cameron meets with a social worker who uncovers some of Cameron’s distant memories.
Perhaps secretly tilting all search results towards pro-gay-marriage websites would have been better?

Of course they could also pour millions into campaigns. But I don't see why they should have to - they chose to make that statement in their blog, and maybe prefer to spend the millions on other things. What is wrong with that?
I don't believe anything FOX News publishes. Any reliable news source verify this?
It's 5000 word treatise on name dropping.
FactChecking Debate Number 1
Wow, what bullshit. It is not about the number of couples who might be affected. It is about fundamental human rights. Sure, it doesn't matter that much if somebody adds a certificate to their relationship or not - but to make it illegal is more than that, it is a public statement against gay relationships. It is a stepping stone towards hatred, intolerance, discrimination and all sorts of nasty things many people don't want to have in the society they live in. If you start to compromise on the rights of one group of people just because they are a minority, you open the doors for compromising on the rights of all sorts of people, just because they are a minority.

AIDS orphans in Africa is a completely unrelated problem, so your throwing it into the discussion is a cheap strawman argumentation. Also, not everybody agrees with Lomborg. Also, are you sure Google is not doing anything for the cause of AIDS orphans? They might have donated money and stuff.

Also, how much money has it cost to draw up the proposal for the anti-gay-marriage bill and organize the ballot? Why was that money not spent on AIDS orphans? Why were there enough people annoyed about gay marriage to warrant wasting a lot of public money on that useless debate? That seems much more scandalous to me than somebody wasting a couple of minutes to write a blog entry.
I have a 3 and half year old son. I am certain "negative feedback" works on him. I have not measured how less effective it is than positive feedback.

In general, my wife and I try to use positive feedback as much as possible. But if he knows he is doing something wrong or we remind him something too often, negative feedback is a pretty natural thing to dish out. He does learn, I am certain of that.
Your argument is just plain old stupid. Not bad, not poor, just stupid.

Because there are big problems, one should not solve the small problems? Because I know of aids, I should not give a dollar to the local begger?

Please stop this bullshit about aids orphans in Africa - it's just propaganda by the charity organisations who want you to give them money. Children are children everywhere in the world. Those aids orphans are not abandoned by Africans - every human being has the nurturing instinct. Neighbours are not letting orphans starve in Africa. Africa does not NEED you to solve this problem - it is a large problem, but it's not a critical problem.

There are WORSE things, but they are not sexy. There are men who work their entire life shoveling coal for hardly any money to survive, but nobody cares about them. They are not cute, they are not small, so they are abandoned.

Don't let those charity fat cats shape your perception of where help is needed. THINK first! And everyone cannot fight the same battle, we have to diversify and fight different battles. So if you see someone doing nothing, then ask him to do something. If you see people already helping in one way, don't try to make them do what you are already doing, otherwise all these other problems will get ignored.
Yes only unlocked iphones exist here in Italy, the price is 500 EUR for 8GB and 569 for 16 GB. You just need to perform a fast "activation" step via iTunes inserting your data and the phone is ready to accept any kind of SIM.
Political spectrum image via statistical analysis of cosponsorship bills
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-sci-prime27-2008sep27,0... has the original news story.
Multi-line lambdas: Reia can do them... why can't Python?
Perhaps the mention of the Holocaust would speed the descent towards Godwins law in any rebuttals to his blog post ;)
The original original story is at http://mersenne.org/m45and46.htm
The name is in honor of a Danish mathematician that invented Queue theory. A key component earlier in the life of telephony. How to man switchboards and the like.

The telecom connection is via Erickson that invented the language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._K._Erlang
To me, this boils down to a few simple points.

Should Sergey have posted this on the official company blog? Probably not
Do I support his position even though I'm not gay? Sure do.
Are people blowing this way out of proportion? Absolutely.
I would also like to learn electronics. You might also enjoy checking Adafruit industries: http://www.adafruit.com/

She has a lot of fun DIY electronics kits. I figured I'd use them to learn soldering and stuff, so I ordered some.

Also I still dream of one day creating a sleek case for Minti MP3 with 3d printing and beat the iPod with open source hardware.
I think Gillmor jumped the shark with his breathless overwrought discussion of Twitter a few months back. Does he have redeeming value? Maybe there's a need for Fake Steve Gillmor?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/11/the-blood-brain-barrier...
Well, that's not strictly true. What Erlang does is make the knowledge of a niche that does know how to do that - telco switch engineers - available to the masses. I think even Erlang advocates sometimes for get that it's not new - it's been a serious production language for years now.
I haven't read that blog before, but now scrolling down through some recent entries, it's all very clunky English. On the other hand, the person writing it is named Ernst-Jan Pfauth.
The simple answer is that Guido doesn't entirely approve of functional programming. Look at the FP features stripped out between Python 2.x and 3 for example. This IMHO is a mistake; the race is on now for OCaml to mature quickly enough to be there waiting for the current generation of Python FP people who'll be looking for an alternative when Py3K becomes mainstream.