skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks Mike, that's helped me see where I need to focus my attention.

I was looking at direct webcam recording, but was going to add that later. But given your comments I think that is a must now, to enable quick and seamless video comments and feedback.

Regarding music teachers paying, I mentioned in the other thread to Matt that I may be thinking more towards making it free for teachers, charging students per course, and taking a percentage.

Re mockups, I am creating html mocks, but I'll look at the quick prototyping mockups so I can pitch to various music schools.

Thanks for the advice, you are a true gent!
Hacker News has been an education for me about how many people don't realize that WordPress will destroy their server without caching.
If we agree that eventually (within 15 years or so) all phones will be smartphones and that almost everyone on earth older than 10 will own one, you can see why I'm still bullish on RIM and MS. A relatively small number of companies (Apple, Google, RIM, MS) are fighting over a huge market which will grow from millions today to hundreds of millions to billions in time. Managing to capture or hold onto even 10% of that market will pay off handsomely.
we currently offer only a hosted git & svn option for scm. we definitely plan to offer integrations with GitHub in the future, because we think their service is awesome and we understand that a lot of businesses have already chosen them as their scm provider.
Why on Earth would you want to do that?

You should go for HTML5, when you need stuff that can't be done with HTML4. But we're talking about not adding anything new, just translating to HTML5 something that worked perfectly well in HTML4.

You wanna be hip or something? That's so lame.
Oh absolutely, at some level 'quality of life' benefits always have the property that if you are in danger of not making your numbers for wallstreet you can quickly shut them down, just giving an internal measure of control over one part of the profit/loss statistics.
Clicked on link out of curiosity. Immediately lost interest upon discovering it's US-only.
({ ... }) does this too. (Is this GCC-specific?)
Please don't wait for 3.0 for scripting, using it in unstable has been very effective for me.
A constitutional amendment penned by Lawrence Lessig
E-mails show the Government was very involved in "voluntary" 6-strike plan
A great, free, HTML5 implementation of FreeCell: http://worldofsolitaire.com/?optionGame=FreeCell
It costs money. The kind of people who use it probably have adblock installed. It's not surprising that they would cancel it, they are a company driven by profit after all. I don't think there is really much to explain. Maybe once it had utility as a way to earn good will among developers, but presumably they don't care too much about that these days, given how little competition and how much brand recognition they have. (Is Steve Yegge is still wondering about that 'arrogance' thing?).

Every time you perform a normal Google search be thankful for all the people who browse the internet without adblock: they are subsidising you.
I second him. My entry "ref=kung_fu_panda" impacts a mysterious star somewhere in Messier 36.
Thanks. It seems like these two options are way behind Google Search. Maybe there is opportunity here to build a pay service for developers (like to find implementation patterns, common bugs, etc.).

Anyway, I just want to express my disbelief with this google decision: Google is synonym for search. All kind of searches.

Meaning if Google cannot provide good search for open source code then something is terribly wrong. When can say everything about Google and some failures of Google, but they are very very good in search. And, they want to be around for next 15 years, they must not lose on that front (even if it is just "open source search").

Anyway, I hope DuckDuckGo or some other search engine will try to do something here...
So, crashplan and backblaze don't work for you? The previous poster has a problem with them because he is running on an embedded Linux platform that has chosen to omit support for an useful system call from their kernel.
28K is an indication of nothing if they don't know what your product is about.
That's my point. Users don't want two different UIs. If Metro can't scale up then it will never be an appropriate desktop UI
Turn Investors On: How to Look at Your Startup from an Investor’s Point of View
That's what I really like about Google. A company with too many products just hanging in there making losses is a company with a low morale. I think accepting the loss and shutting down low performance products is very important.
Well, kinda... making them glow is just being a bit fancy. And you need a light at a particular wavelength to get them to glow. I assume they inserted Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP).

The traditional "Hello World" that I learned was to insert a functioning lacZ plasmid into a mutant E. coli strain that had their lacZ gene damaged. When you do this, you introduce a functioning lacZ gene into the E. coli, which will cause the colony to turn blue in the presence of X-gal. It is a nice and cheap way to do screens... but it isn't nearly as cool as glowing super-bugs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_white_screen
When I see this page http://www.dcmntr.com/app-profile/dcmntr , it gave me the impression that the Discussions table is something like a forum, and people can comment. But i didn't see an editor box or something for people to post comments..
Signed up, no problems.
Just keep in mind that MySQL doesn't scale easily. Master/Slave relationships get tricky to manage. I've only had minor experience with this, but it was enough to know to avoid it.
Apple already spent $750 million on the iCloud building alone.
"Yes, we added two million items into a list in 1.28 seconds, with a networking layer between us and the server. Just saying... "
Same here with code search. Why write code that already exists? Code Search helped me find exactly what I needed for a few open-source projects I worked on.

Google Buzz was dead before it launched.
Actually, it looks like Fred Wilson did an example here: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/10/liquidation-analysis-continu...

Note that his example does not show a multiple on the liquidation preference, and it doesn't show how the early employees can get screwed even when the founders do well. But it's more realistic than Suster's infographic.
I agree, at this point, unless it is a demo of a game engine, there isn't much point of posting it.

Additionally, the lighting algorithm in this demo is horrid, you could never make a dungeon crawler with any sort of realistic lighting the way it is setup now. Notice how the light goes through walls if the textured face is facing the light, but is dark if it is facing away from the light. (Meaning they it isn't a more complicated algorithm for some sort of radiant lighting)
We'll build proper search functionality (and display it prominently) soon.

As for the tags/streams metaphors...it's good to know that this is the problem we've suspected it is. We have some ideas on how to fix it. Just need to make more hours in the day. :-)

I've heard the queue feature request a few times, and we're mocking up some ideas to scratch that itch.

Thanks for the feedback! Glad you're enjoying the site!
A Rational Approach to Fashion
Your assumption is incorrect. Upgrade eligibility date is not the same thing as contract expiration.

AT&T is allowing some customers to upgrade after one year instead of two if they cross a certainly monthly threshold on their phone bill. So, you may be eligible to upgrade on November 22nd, but you're still going to pay a hefty early termination fee if you canceled your account.

The reasoning behind this plan it to thwart people exactly like you (which I am).
This was a great, easy to read and understand tutorial.
And the advantage of going with WP7 is that it keeps Apple and random patent trolls from coming after you since Microsoft indemnifies OEMs against software patents. Not to mention the estimated fees are only about $12 to $15 which weakens GPs argument that cost is a big factor.

The OEMs and carriers do lose the freedom to develop a UI skin (which delays updates) and load always-running and uninstallable junkware though which might count for something against WP7.
I find it very interesting that most of my hacker and tech friends feel almost no attachment / connection to the Occupy Wall Street movement. I wish I better understood why.
Yes. I don't include the trailing semicolon in macro definitions, because I expect the macro to be followed by them:

MACRO(foo);
As with all hardware predictions, I'll take this one with a grain of salt.
It may warrant its own 'Ask HN' entry but I will piggy-back on that thread.

What are the books that one should read if one wants to start bio-hacking? Programming and CS books were discussed here many times: K&R, SICP, Corman etc, but what about biotech/life sciences?

I've tried some O'Reilly books like "Perl/Python for bioinformatics" but they are really for biologists trying to program, not the other way around.
Does anyone know what type of equipment they have? What about consumables (enzymes, tubes, etc...). I'd love to try a few things at the bench, but would need to know what to bring.

I'm a bit curious though as to whether or not they should have an IRB or some sort of rules about what types of experiments can go on there...
definitely good advice. part of the reason we decided to post today was to try to get a larger user base and figure out what services they're most interested in. we plan on keeping our initial beta groups small, so we can work closely with our users to figure out what services they love, what they don't really need and what we can add that would improve their experience.
Alternatively you can go to Google+, right-click the search bar and select "Add As Search Engine..." You can then change the keyword to "+" or "plus", and do the same thing.
On that subject, anyone know of good blogging software written in python?
Sorry about that. There's a good chance we'll never go outside of the US.

I'm really looking for anyone's feedback on HN, if you care to comment!
Man, this is an awesome contribution. ASCII art in the comments and everything.

You clearly put a lot of work into this, dude. I gotta shake your hand, let me see, uh... Dirty McDingus?

You know what, on second thought I'll just post a comment on HN. But, uh, thanks. We're cool, though. I'll just be over here.
Since other people have been nitpicky in the comments here, I thought it might be worth pointing out that this assumes an 8-bit byte, so it's not general. ;) Remember, 8 bits is just a convention.
Thanks for the feedback!

I think you're right. Our recommendation system has seemed a bit weak, especially for new users - I think we're going to bury this somewhere as a Custom option rather than emphasizing it as one of the four major streams.

Orienting new users is probably our biggest challenge at the moment, and I think our product's biggest weakness. We have some solutions in the pipeline, but we still don't have an elegant solution to immediately connecting a new user to friends. Any ideas/suggestions?
“A billion customers in the world,” Dr. Paul Polak told a crowd of inventors recently, “are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses...”

How about $7 eyeglasses? http://www.zennioptical.com/?price[from]=6&price[to]=8
The Apple Color Cycle - How Apple gets us to covet the colors we scoffed at
Here is a scottish accent demo, seems fairly good http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z8K6VMw92U
I would definitely not base any sort of important business function on any free Google beta product without seriously considering the difficulty of migrating upon shutdown of said service.

I assume that a major criterion for Google shutting down a service is low usage. For them, that constitutes failure. Very few people were using Notebook, Calendar Search, Wave, or Code Search. I'm sure it's fairly simple to calculate the cost benefit of devoting even minimal resources to a product that 1. doesn't make money; and 2. doesn't substantially make the web better for some minimum threshold of people.

Google is one of the richest companies in the world and could afford a lot of things, but that's not justification that it should.

You're right that there's an interesting tension between starting/failing fast and getting people to trust that a product will stick around. But I don't actually think that's a big part of the calculation for most people. When Google releases a new product, I usually go either "Ooh, that sounds awesome, I'm signing up for the beta immediately," or "Not interested, moving on." I rarely go "I'm not going to use this because it probably won't get enough users to last."

I'm glad to hear that going with startup technologies is going well for you, but the danger seems just as big. Startups fail all the time, and you have no recourse afterward.
Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
Did gym and Gibbs in the wake.
All mimes were the borrowers,
And the moderate Belgrade.

"Beware the tablespoon my son,
The teeth that bite, the Claus that catch.
Beware the Subjects bird, and shred
The serious Bandwidth!"

He took his Verbal sword in hand:
Long time the monitors fog he sought,
So rested he by the Tumbled tree,
And stood a while in thought.

And as in selfish thought he stood,
The tablespoon, with eyes of Flame,
Came stifling through the trigger wood,
And troubled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and though,
The Verbal blade went thicker shade.
He left it dead, and with its head,
He went gambling back.

"And host Thai slash the tablespoon?
Come to my arms my bearish boy.
Oh various day! Cartoon! Cathay!"
He charted in his joy.

Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
Did gym and Gibbs in the wake.
All mimes were the borrowers,
And the moderate Belgrade.
GitHub search is pretty good - it only searches code that's been hosted (or mirrored) on GitHub, but that's a LOT of code.
I wish I could provide a strong opinion on a solution good for I/O. I'd need to do research and it's probably what you've already covered, from the sounds of the conversation already here. If I were faced with the decision knowing what I know today, I'd use some queuing system RabbitMQ or other AMQP protocol with a pool of DB servers sucking up requests and processing them. You can maintain a synchronous response with the requesting server via some frontend code (Python w/ Django or Node).

With this setup, you can easily throw more DB instances in the pool to grow with your needs. The frontend should be able to handle as many requests as needed (especially Node which has VERY lightweight threads, I hear). You'll just need to reduce the turnaround time via the queue.
Too bad Google can't do the opposite of acquiring a company for things like this. Google Code was incredibly useful, it'll be sad to see it go.
"A billion customers in the world... are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house."

Interestingly, this article doesn't even touch upon the real challenge: It's not in mass producing these items at low cost; it's in gaining widespread distribution to those one billion customers -- across different countries and cultures, to thousands of groups of people each motivated by different things.

Motivation is key. It's hard to figure out what motivates people, and it differs enormously across cultures. You could have the most effective $100 house around, and you could even have a way of distributing the physical product to hundreds of thousands of people living in poverty. But what happens when no one wants to live in your house -- because, as it turns out, your house is foreign, not cozy; it just doesn't feel like home.

Does that seem like a silly example? It's not. The poor are not as easy to figure out as some people think. Understanding their motivations -- immersing yourself in their cultures and understanding what they really want, what really drives them to make certain decisions -- is the key to good design.

And, unfortunately, it's an aspect of good design that's not easily scalable.

Obviously, there are pockets where you can start and grow from. But saying that a billion people are waiting for $100 houses -- as if the only issue is designing that damn thing to get the price down! -- strikes me as not being the best way to begin a dialogue on poverty alleviation.
Hi Mike. You are making this thread really interesting. Can you give us some feedback on http://www.tringify.com? we are still in beta phase, but would love to have some feedback.
the london hackspace is trying its hand at PCR and algal biodiesel
Yes and no. My understanding that most bottled water is re-packaged tap water which is sold at a markup. A number of people miss the functional aspect of bottled water which is that you are going from point a to point b and you want to drink something on the way.

As it turns out, the data collected supported the hypothesis that a significant fraction of the bottled water drinkers were of this category (not drinking it because it was 'better' but drinking it because it was water convieniently packaged for transport in a single serving). The result was that removing bottled water simply lead to substitution of other beverages which were not 'water' but were convieniently packaged.

A lot of folks suggested carrying around a drinking bottle or mug so that you could refill it at various points. And, giving free water bottles to people, that did meet some of the need (not sure how widely that program was tried).

A proposed solution that was never even tried was to have Google bottle its own water on site (very eco, very doable) and stock that. This would have satisfied just about everyone except it didn't pass the 'saves money' test, which was, ultimately the basis for all of the changes.

And it is always the responsibility of management to manage their costs effectively. Generally the debate was around the true cost vs the ledger (dollars and cents) effect.
You may get away with having some forms of caching. Using python won't help given you have no caching.
That is a gcc extension. The construct as a whole has the value of the last statement executed within. Usually an inline function is preferable since it achieves the same thing using only standard syntax.
This is the thing I don't understand - my wife owns a Windows Phone, and it's a pretty great phone. It's fast, it has a decent selection of apps, it's quite pleasant to use. Yet, you look in the stores and it's completely marginalized.
If you want to learn more, you might hang out at the DIYbio list - most of the BioCurious folk post there.

http://groups.google.com/group/diybio
Reminds me of a trick from Java Puzzlers- it works exactly the same in C:

#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
http://www.google.com
printf("Hello, World!");
}

(Of course, if you have syntax highlighting that label followed by a single-line comment is easier to spot.)
I offered some thoughts, but not sure if it'll be helpful. Gave it a good swing though!
Bump! I ran into them at the local Maker Faire and got some DNA extracted. Will be taking the synthetic bio class starting tomorrow!
It's not just the quality of the platform. Look at PalmPre for why that's not the most important aspect. There are lots of complicated reasons why a platform becomes popular or not.

Also, there very much is an aspect of trust involved. Apple and google built up a lot of trust in different ways in providing excellent experiences to users. Apple with OS/X and the iPod. Google with gmail, search, maps, chrome, etc. When presented with the idea of an iPod phone or a google-apps phone a lot of people had enough trust to buy into it. As those platforms have matured that trust has only grown.

MS has the opposite problem. MS has built up distrust with its previous, clunky iterations of windows mobile, and it hasn't built up sufficient trust in its ability to even deliver reliably. The problems with the Kin, Zune, and Vista haven't helped.
it is more like the whole humanity is continuously trying to win a Darwin Award. One can imagine galactic version of http://www.darwinawards.com/ where aliens laughing at human race frantically trying to once more increase [under the "domestic /independence" sauce] production of fossil fuels instead of just harvesting free solar and wind energy. Stupid as stupid does.
But if we learned anything from the desktop wars, we learned that one company can very realistically come to dominate large portions of the market. The opportunity for a monopoly definitely exists. Not that I want it, but it's eminently possible.
We don't need the specific organization to survive thousands of years in its original form, we just need cryonics patients to be passed ahead peacefully to another organization in the event of failure. But yeah, religions are an example of something organized lasting thousands of years, under historical conditions.

We haven't yet had a chance to experiment with things under conditions of universal literacy, the absence of much armed conflict, and other amenities of the modern world. Certain things (fashions, cultural memes) seem to get replaced quickly under such conditions, but that doesn't seem likely to extend to something like a trust fund.

Cryonicists certainly have more motive than the average person to promote stability, literacy, and nonviolence.
This construct does not depend on byte order since both sides are using the same (unsafe) type-punning.
So, in 2005 I was involved in a company that thought "man, it would be great to build a search engine for source code". I even started putting together components for it, such as a model for finding text inside of larger documents that had statistical properties similar to code, auto-detecting the language, so you could find code snippets inside of blog posts.

However, by the time we got organized enough to actually do it, Google Code launched, and had this really awesome code searching feature, that everyone considered to be "more than good enough" and "comprehensive, as Google is indexing the hell out of stuff like this".

But, now, Google has now determined that that wasn't sustainable, and has shut down the project. Which means that both our company, and any other company, that thought it had a sustainable model for running such a project, and at this point would probably be "pretty awesome", never started, and we are all suddenly thrust back into 2005, unable to search for code.

This... (I now emphatically point at the previous paragraphs) is why I don't like Google very much: they have such large resources available to them that they tend to just swoop in and offer an unsustainable service at a loss, training users that "things should be so free it hurts: in fact, they must be losing money on every use of this" (Google Voice being a great example), thereby stifling innovation by people who can't possibly undercut that.

Note: this isn't even a problem specific to Google... startup companies that get VC money tend to also cause this problem. They get tons of money, offer a service at a heavy loss while they use that burn time to determine a business model, actively knowing that they are operating at a loss in order to get users as fast as possible from other people who might try to get them.

Of course, the result is that the company usually either totally implodes (typical of any startup) or, even more insidiously (for the projects that actually becoming successful, even quite popular / common), come up with a business model so ludicrous that the users actively revolt against the entire concept of the service...

... and, where do they go? To some other free service offered by another company that managed to get equally large sums of VC money because they point at that other company that had hundreds of millions of users that just failed because of a bad business model, something they will know how to fix (in a couple years or so, once they get around to figuring that part out...).

:( I liked Google Code search, and I'm going to miss it.
If your site is only a blog, then you really should only be using Jekyll or Hyde to generate it. Having a backend is pretty overkill.