skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interactive Map and History of the Electoral College back to 1789
Learning how to reverse engineer a Windows USB driver: the Luxeed LED keyboard
Open Document Format made national standard in Sweden
The Project That Tracks Big Projects
Differential Cryptanalysis
Every successful design breaks at least one "rule". Because information is retained when it's distinct from the norm. Talent in design consists not in following rules but knowing when and how a rule can be broken.

IBM's logo is way too busy. Apple's original logo has too many colors and isn't serious enough. GE is almost antique. UPS has that dull brown.
In Search of Wisdom: What is the Root Cause of Inequality?
Engineering Windows 7 : User Interface -- Managing Windows windows
Amazon Kindle 2 on its way
Perhaps it's difficult because it's inherently hard to completely transfer ownership of an idea. Suppose you have a great idea and you have a track record of great ideas to back it up. You offer to sell me your idea. Maybe the idea is the key to solving a famous mathematical problem or a novel approach to cure some disease. Problems:

1 - How do I know that you have a great idea if you don't tell me the idea first, in which case you can't sell it anymore.

2 - If you "sell" me the idea you still have it, and you can sell it to others (just like software).

That doesn't mean that ideas are worthless. It is possible to have an 'aha!' insight that is extremely valuable to you. There are lots of things that are extremely valuable to a person (meaning that you would pay a lot to keep them if you had to) but completely worthless others because they can't use them.
When Your Brand Blows Up
That sounds like a valid point, but bear in mind that a lot of research has been done on the IEM's (more credible than Intrade), and they are more predictive than polls.
That is a great insight. An idea is not just some "eureka!" moment. It is a synthesis of little ideas into an implementable concept. Case in point: genetic algorithms. These are based upon Darwin's principle of natural selection, which itself, the memeticist Susan Blackmore has called "the best idea anybody ever had". But sucessful implementation of the idea of natural selection by way of genetic algorithms means finding a real world business application for the principles involved, no easy task. Finding the right business niche for a mathematical idea is half the game.

*The Fountainhead</> says it best regarding great ideas:

"Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded. But thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to cook their food, to light their caves. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had lifted darkness off the earth."

"Lifting darkness from the earth" - that is what entrepreneurship is all about really I think.
Thank you. I actually did this same simulation (I have the Python code if you want it), and got about 80% for Obama -- this was a couple of weeks back.

I sent it around and people rightly pointed out that the states are definitely not independent. The most interesting thing you can do with this is figure out what the implied dependence is.
Agree, I have the same problem with my backend apps. Maybe php5's error handling should do the trick - but haven't migrated to php5 yet anyhow.
CNN's Citizen Journalism Goes `Awry': False Report of Jobs Heart Attack
still works for me.
Well, that may be true for truly random processes. I don't agree with the comment about athletes. Winning gives confidence, confidence can improve performance.
ZigBee module with 32-Bit ARM Processor
ZigBee module with 32-Bit ARM Processor - high level of integration
Mark Cuban on How to Get Rich
Should I use XMPP for my startup's messaging system?
The [web] startup I'm working on will need a user-to-user instant messaging system of some sort. A system that allows users to have lists of contacts, and then send messages back and forth, with a little presence information. It will need to be web-based, but relatively simple (like Facebook Chat, for instance).

My startup currently already uses a very simple and straightforward daemon (in Python) to facilitate real-time push to web users (uses Flash client-side).

XMPP would tackle all of these things well, since that's what it is born to do. I could run an ejabberd server and go from there.

However, I'd need to extensively modify/configure the server to match the requirements of my startup. It's been done (Chesspark has invested themselves in this), but I worry that I'd spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to mold and maintain a jabber server to match the requirements of the site. (I'm a sole founder.) A few requirements:

- Use the database for user accounts (easy)
- I'd like to make wider use of users' contacts throughout the site as part of the site's featureset; the information about contacts must be equally easy to retrieve, edit, and manage without going through the jabber server
- I'll need to make sure the messaging system isn't abused as a free-for-all: Messaging should be a core part of the site's experience, and we'll want to have good controls for reporting disruptive users, filtering explicit content, and the like. A lot of that is supported by the ejabberd server, but it could be difficult to integrate sitewide without delving into its internals.
- It needn't be complex; the messaging system should just be a simple tool for users to communicate. Facebook Chat is relatively simple in that respect.

Since we already have a push-notification mechanism to our users, I feel like it would be a lot simpler to forego XMPP for now and just roll out a site-specific solution. K.I.S.S. is a strong motivator here; integrating an XMPP server into our site would require a big investment into learning the internals of the server. I could always add a gateway to XMPP if needed down the road.

Granted, this is what XMPP was made for. I've read a lot of Metajack's posts about how Chesspark used it throughout their site, though they've used XMPP as a core part of their architecture.

Should I go with my instinct -- keep things simple and reuse our push architecture to add the messaging system, or should I dive into XMPP and try to mold it to the requirements of the site?
akes perfect sense under the Evolutionary Psychology framework. If something bad is happening around you, you should be trying to overfit the data to avoid your demise. Assuming an escapable, cataclysmic event as a fitness function - only those growing paranoid and neurotically "connecting the dots" are going to make it out alive to breed again.
Part of the reason green tech will have a hard time rising independently is the market it works in. The energy market is very non free-market and as a result of all the tax grants and government intervention.

So, I think it is hard to say that green tech should be able to rise above on it's own without some gov spending.
Hi -- there's a little info in the second half of the page here:

http://www.directededge.com/getstarted.html

With a link to the API at the bottom:

http://webservices.directededge.com/

Where would you have expected to find that information? If it was unclear for you it probably was for others too. Feel free to email me if you have questions.
Ideas by themselves aren't worth much until they are applied to a particular situation. They act as coefficients in a production equation - good ideas enhance production and poor ones diminish it.
Ideas are worthless: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

Of course they are not, just it does not exist "I could get rich with the right idea". It's a matter of passion, ideas, ability to create things, ability to be flexible and change what you are doing while you are doing it and so on.

After all the ability to adapt to the users requires a process of idea creation. So just "an idea" is worthless. But a whole team without an idea will eventually create one, it can go without one (not one, a good team will have a lot of ideas, both bad and good, and evolving, and so on).

Edit: proof that ideas are not worthless, people that have a lot of good ideas are more likely to get hired and earn more money. Good ideas are also a form of advertising, people with interesting ideas created blogs with a lot of readers, and so on. It's hard or impossible to create a market for ideas, but are not worthless at all. Also some kind of works like 'interior designer' sell ideas: paint this wall red, put this here and so on.
The "stock" for Obama is at 67.9% on inTrade. Could make 42% on money risked if you're right.
I disagree. I think prediction markets are better because people are risking money. Of course they adjust based on sentiment and other external factors, but I do think it's superior to traditional polling that has significant sampling and measurement problems.
Getting there. I still need it to be water proof before it is enough of an advantage over paper books to overcome the ephemeral nature of ebooks. I'd love to carry my fiction around in a more compact form when I go sailing, that would save a significant portion of my duffle bag space, but "water happens" (or pop/soda spills). Once it is waterproof I can read in a pool too!

Get me a sealed unit, capacitive touch screen, inductive charger, wireless data interface (wifi or bluetooth) and I'm ready to go.

I'd also prefer that a larger portion of the physical size be given to the screen, so either grow the screen or lose bulk.
Hit the jump for the rest!

What?
Start simple, run it as soon as possible and wait for feedback, you can switch to some other solution at anytime if people will like it.
Trying to make *faircompanies (www.faircompanies.com) worth it over the long term. Working on a new version of my site to make it more interesting to people that want to find out about how to change the world.
thanks =)

I own it (an older edition) and use it. It's well-thumbed. It helps a lot, but not the whole answer. You prompt me to use it more, thanks.
How long has the first kindle been out? Less than a year? How long?
The Virtues of a Three-Headed Business Plan
1. NDA or trust

2. exclusivity clause

One role of patents is they conceptually wrap up an idea, so you have a "thing" to sell (know-how must be supplied too - you're hired).
Amazon Kindle Redesign Shows Its Face
How Cisco Tried to Make Routers Sexy Using Social Media
Definitely don't invest that much time so early on. You will start to get an idea of future needs quickly, and then you can judge whether you will want to or need to make the change.
Xtc — eXTensible C
Guy Kawasaki says "Mumbai is Crowded"
1. Get a job 2. Save money. Wow, what insight. Though I think this could also be titled "How to Get Diabetes."
The Seeds of the Next Big Thing Are Being Planted Now
Conditional independence FAIL.
Roll for Initiative: advance straight to Godwin's Law.

Let us never speak ill of Hitler ever again.
Some reasons why I left the ACM
ideas vs. information:

- "inside information"
- info that can be worked out, but is not obvious (scanning the numbers got Warren Buffett started)
- knowing where the gold/oil is
- a new method that is cheaper/better than before
- an opportunity that's not obvious
http://orbited.org/ <- python server providing a TCP proxy to the browser.
http://js.io/ <- open source protocols for javascript. Has an XMPP client(at least part of one)

It may not make short-term sense for you to use this.
Monte Carlo simulations is what they used to work out the odds of sub-prime defaults in their CDOs.
As other have pointed out, this is silly because the states aren't independent. There's no way Obama is going to lose OH but win IN, for example, although probabilistically speaking there's some chance.

538 models the dependence along demographic lines, so that demographically similar states, districts, and counties are assumed to vote similarly.
Was the Yahoo-Google Deal a Ploy To Weaken Yahoo?
his arguments that there aren't shortcuts are good (not original, but still good).
xmpp is not difficult to deal with, give it a shot and let us know if you need any help, we've done lots of xmpp stuff. -the guys at imified.com
3. There are no shortcuts (here's to you MLM slimers) 4. Know your business inside and out 5. Read about your business every day (i.e. become the smartest guy in the room) 6. Cash is king 7. buy & hold without flexibility is for suckers 8. be patient
Nice review of the industry and challenges of building a company to create an mmog.
Mark gives good advice.

1. Have the discipline to save

2. Find an area you are passionate about and invest in yourself to become really really good

3. When the opportunity presents itself, make good use of it

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” Seneca
Samsung X550 Unlocked
The Samsung X550 has both an external display and an internal display. The external OLED display located on the front cover of the phone has a resolution of 96 x 96 pixels with 256 colors (8 bits). It displays the time, date, new messages received, and calls among other things without even having to open the phone.
Question : Why have I heard of this guy? Really, why?
You are confusing simple with easy.
Mark Cuban on how to become an innumerate tool: http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/35949.html?thread=516461.
my aunt and other rich people i know always shared 'pay yourself first' , my aunt and uncle used that money (after 5 years) to get bonded in order to build their first stadium.
Obie Fernandez: (MSA Series #2) Cooperation and Reliance
Trends and Countertrends
It's so funny watching you guys talk about how worthless ideas are. Maybe the relationship between starting shitty web companies, obsessing about hits, ads, and freemium accounts, and thinking ideas are worthless tells us more about the kinds of thinkers who start shitty web companies then what ideas are worth.

Most ideas suck. Those ideas are worthless. A few ideas are very valuable. Those ideas are the things that change the world. Just because all the ideas in your network are worthless, doesn't mean all ideas are worthless. The idea that ideas are worthless is worthless, it omits relevant extreme cases.

I think what people mean when they say ideas are worthless is that they don't have the vision or intelligence to sort through a pile of ideas and sort out the good few from the worthless many.
Yes, that's more or less what I said in the linked posting: ideas are non-excludable goods. To some degree you are right that they aren't rivalrous like physical objects are, but they do lose their value when they are widespread. A social-news-voting site isn't that hot an idea any more. It was a few years ago.
Geez, do you want fries with that? :)

But seriously, I agree about the bulk. I don't need mine to be waterproof, just be able to let me read PDFs (including password-protected PDFs). A color screen would be good too.

Let me plug it into my Mac and manage my own PDFs. That's all I need.
We're using PHP5 and the exception handling is better, but interpreter errors just kill the process, full stop. We're writing watchdog processes just to monitor the nightly batches just so we have better information if one of them goes haywire.
It just means that the full post isn't visible on the overview page of the blog.
Almost, November 07
I don't think all ideas are worthless. But I do think all ideas in the Fountainhead are worthless.
Epson Stylus NX400 All-in-one
Whether it's printing book reports, driving directions, recipes, birthday party invitations, or photos the Epson Stylus NX400 is the convenient and easy-to-use all-in-one that delivers superior results on plain, photo, and specialty papers. Thanks to Epson's exclusive ink jet technology, the NX400 delivers high quality prints at remarkable speeds.
Again, PageRank as an algorithm (not including all of the other elements of Google's search and ranking) is trivial to implement. You can do it in a couple hours. It's been implemented dozens of times and is even included in text books as an example these days.
I apppreciate that Microsoft is looking at this, but they don't seem to be aware of most other window managers. They've identified "problems" that others have long since solved.

For example, Microsoft finds that maximize isn't good on large monitors and wants a way to zoom less in one direction. They also want this to be possible with minimal mouse precision.

If you look at Window Maker on Linux, a single feature solves both of these problems: you zoom by double-clicking the title bar with modifier keys. So what you're clicking is big (minimal mouse precision), and you have 3 options: Shift for horizontal, Control for vertical, or logically Shift+Control for both.

And if you look at a Mac, while Cocoa's default is to zoom full-screen, apps are encouraged to define an "optimal" size for content that can be quickly toggled (between the user's last custom size/position, and the optimal one). This is literally one click to make the window look exactly right.
Wasn't the same accusation leveled about the Microsoft / Yahoo deal that fell through? They thought Microsoft wanted to beat down the price of Yahoo and then try and get them to sell their patent portfolio?
A) Because he's such a mavericky maverick that he actually OWNS the Dallas Mavericks

B) Before that, he made a bunch of money in software.

C) I'm fairly sure there is some rags-to-riches tale in here as well.
He owns the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. Hence the blog name.
the next "big thing" is not going to be a website of any kind

sell me a car that gets 120mpg and costs less than 25k, you have the next big thing

sell me solar panels that can erase my utility bill for $5k installed, you have the next big thing

make a website that connects me to people with my interests and lets me comment on news, and you will be eating ramen

ETC
The End of Banned Books Week: Obscene Odes
I find it interesting that he reverse-engineered the data stream rather than the driver's compiled assembly code.
Another strong point he makes is that you can find the right opportunity during times of uncertainty and change in markets (such as now).
Hilarious, but it's hard to be right all the time.
Sold grocery bags as a kid, sold a small computer company to make his early millions, owns the Dallas Mavericks, flipped Broadcast.com to the boners at Yahoo.com for billions, started HDNet, owns various movie production companies and distribution channels, helped produce the movie The Smartest Guys in the Room (awesome movie about Enron), ran and sold a hedge fund, angel investor in many many things, prominent blogger, and most recently made a godawful awful trade for the unbelievably overrated Jason Kidd.
i keep waiting for the gmail+gears hook, so i can use gmail offline. than google apps starts to become the MS Office killer.

anyone know what i can do to get gmail to work offline?
Oh dear, I can't resist.

Bueller? Anyone, anyone?
Diversify and hedge. Name of the game. People I work with have seen their 401K's eviscerated. Mine is more or less OK, because it is "heavily weighted" into money markets, which are safer than equity markets. The "rule of thumb" for people in their 20's and 30's is to have 70% of the 401K in equity markets. I didn't follow that, and instead reduced my position in equities and increased my position in money markets, when it came to my own 401K. Now I am more or less OK while my collegues are scrambling to sell.
If they can ditch the DRM and drop the price of the ebooks I'll start considering a purchase. I do like the look of the e-Ink.
It's not illegal to implement a patent that you don't own. Part of the whole "deal" of a patent, is that in exchange for exclusivity of it's commercial exploitation, you have to reveal it for other people to examine and experiment with. So it is entirely legal for someone to take a patent, implement it in a lab and screw around with it.

You can't start selling it though, or exploit it in any commercial way. Google might have a case against you if you implemented their patent and had ads on the resulting site, or used the search feature to get traffic to something else you were selling, etc.

It used to be that manufacturers searching for a new product would review all the patents that had expired that year, looking for a good idea that was never executed or marketed correctly. I think it is evidence of the complete brokenness of the current patent system, that no one bothers to do that anymore. If a patent doesn't describe anything anyone would ever want to do, well enough that they can take the patent as instructions on how to do it, then it is not a patent.

I think most software and business method patents are worthless. They are not only bad in the sense that Stallman and other anti-patent crusaders hate them, although those guys are correct, they are worthless in that the business or individual could get more return if he had the $7,000 to $15,000 he spent getting the patent in hand.
I can't read about the semantic web anymore without the "ditching the semanic web" ideas from inamidst being at the front of my mind. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320989)

It seems like RDF in theory is fantastic, but it's still so irrelevant in practice after so long in development, that more effort should instead be going into interpreting content that already exists. Maybe I'm just impatient, but I don't want to wait for the content creators to all start using tools requiring them to structure their content--I think we can develop smart enough tools to interpret unstructured content more quickly.

In the long run we should definitely attack the problem from both sides, but for the time being, let people create content however they want, and leave the interpretation burden on those seeking the information.
Well - the 68% is not really a percentage: it's the price of a contract which will pay 100 to the owner if Obama wins. It's the market's consensus of what the probability is, so yeah it's a percentage.
Given that the state-by-state percentages are also contracts, it seems that somebody with a little bit of time on their hands, and some programming smarts, could make a little money doing some arbitrage between the state contracts and the overall contract.
Look for the guy with a hammer
Free space optics is hardly new. It's very directional and short range, which eliminates many of the benefits of wireless.
I do reviews for a client and might be interested in taking on another. You can see my contact info and some of my code at http://github.com/darius.
because he went from nothing to become a billionaire.
Look into the research done on 'Hot hand' in professional basketball. I had a university professor in psychology/computer learning that did some research in that field.

Maybe in a sport like football or hockey where you can make an outstanding physical effort confidence comes into play, but for an individual basketball shot the evidence is strongly against hot streaks.
Some thoughts:

Will the cost of maintaining the hand-rolled code exceed the cost of working with XMPP tech (and subsequently benefiting from an existing community and proven reliable code)? Hiring someone for an existing standard, for example, means less legwork documenting and codifying your own system.

What rate of feature growth do you see, if any? Whatever solution you choose now, assumptions will start being made against it in future code, and they will slow down a switch later.

One way you could research this further is to do the bare minimum test case of both techniques in isolation from your other work. You won't have the "but I have to consider x" in the back of your head, doing it that way.
Inequality and the Sergey Brin Effect
It's not extreme at all if you base your life on honesty, respect, and moral integrity.
I think what they mean is: business ideas are worthless without execution.

Edit: Added "business", which is what I meant in the first place. Sorry for not clarifying.