skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Promising start. My mum is always on at me to send her the pics of my daughter that I put on Facebook. It would be cool if I could grant her access to my Facebook folder (at the moment I accomplish this through dropbox) but your product removes a couple of steps. Will certainly keep an eye on this one :)

Have you seen http://theopenphotoproject.org/ ?
InclindedPlane, When I thought about this a few years back I bought a Zeno-Basel watch from Switzerland, Late last year I saw the price of my watch shoot up 50% in month due to the Swiss Franc/US Dollar exchange rate.

I don't want to tell anyone what to do, but it is important to say that quality products have a history holding their value.

The statement about the same rich people can purchase the high quality items. This is wrong. People today have more purchasing power and buy more cheaply made expensive things things. People have more money today in the US, but we also spend more with 4 cars, running shoes, $3000 TVs

Will the things you buy have any value in years to come? Does this entire situation of demanding cheaper products decrease the value of an engineer.

There is nothing wrong with the consumer demanding sustaining value. And price is not necessarily a cost, it can be an investment.
This was much fun too read. What I really would like to know is how book stores will look in 20 years? It seems the author sees her store more as a hobby and is not really concerned about the future?
Startups: What’s Your Wow Factor?
I you don't have a burning ambition to help someone ... anyone .. yes IMHO that makes you a 'bad' person. Stockpiling mountains of money that you can leverage to make even bigger mountains of money is not admirable in my book unless the end goal is to then use that to help the most people that you can.
If anyone is interested in the sound of this there is something similar over on this subreddit:

http://reddit.com/r/askscience
Actually we have! We're in contact with Jaisen Mathai to integrate the OpenPhoto project ASAP.

Thanks for the feedback we're going to integrate easy folder sharing as soon as humanly can! :)
Having Fun with JavaScript and Skype Emoticons
Packman's scoring is based on collecting items and is not time dependent.

The author does not bring completion time into this at all. He reduces (a still NP-complete subset of) Hamiltonicity to the question of whether a Pac-Man level can be completed without dying.
During the initial learning phase I wasn't as enthralled because who cares what $this->someFunction($variable) means? I'd say I put in around an hour per day for the first month and then once I got the hang of it, probably 2-4 hours per day after that. I made sure to take off programming at least one day per week so I wouldn't get burned out considering I was working full time too.

So, I'd estimate around 150-160 hours. I should've kept track. I plan on learning ruby later on this year and I'll be sure to keep a record of that.
I'll admit I was initially turned off by the title of the post . It's really "buzz word" heavy -- but I checked out the YouTube video demo anyway and this is a great and much needed tool.
Any YC partners who wanted to do this could set up a parallel not-for-profit or charity. That organization might benefit from some of the easily scalable benefits of YC (say, providing access to the YC alumni network), but would be independent. It wouldn't even necessarily need to be funded by YC partners - there are foundations which might be interested in partnering with an organization like YC to fund this kind of thing.
On traveling and being offline
> ACTA as a treaty has been ratified

hg clone acta

> the legislative part of ACTA has not been ratified

chmod +x acta/acta.sh
Laptops are Dying and Being Replaced with Location-Specific Devices
Nice idea and beautifully implemented, you just gained a new user. The "moving between services" is the real killer feature, imo.
Symantec suspected source code breach back in 2006
'Uncompetitive degrees' to be axed
I like it.

It did however take me till the last 30 seconds of the video to actually get how this would be useful to me.

Need to play with it to get you more feedback.
Smart-Ad
I am the only one that gets a time-out when trying to download the app?
This is only a very basic dimensional model. It will not handle more sophisticated Business Intelligence reporting where serious comparitive KPIs are required.

You would have to hand build seriously comprehensive scripts to handle issues such as time dependency of attributes, hierarchies, navigational outliers.

If all that your business understands by BI are lists of data from the source or simple aggregation of current data, this is fine.

If they wish to analysis the historical data accounting for scenarios where the business process has changed over time this won't do.
Well not everybody has got an iPhone. Our chat app works on any modern smartphone.

iMessage implements reply all indeed, but only if your friends are on iPhone too...
But not if they were on craigslist in the beginning and apparently there are buyers. From what it seems to me, he just tries to be the fastest buyer rather than taking things that can't find buyers
Camden Taxi
Take a taxi to Camden if you’re looking for a fun time out with new things to see, day or night
Do you recall using non-microsoft software from the same period? I don't mean the university software like Mosaic. I had an Amiga, and there is very little that seems well designed to me about Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 compared to AmigaDOS 2.0.

They may have spent large sums on well designed software, but as far as I can tell this did not have the intended effect.

I owned a DOS machine in the late 80s. The interface was tragically poor, compared to just about anything else available. Stability was poor as well. 10 years later, I bought a Windows 98 machine, thinking 'oh surely Microsoft has worked this out!'. Alas, it featured a rather limited, poorly thought out interface and had all the stability of an inflatable boat on the high seas. This is to what I refer.
If developer salaries grow out of proportion to the value they create (which IMO has already happened)

WAT?

Top software developers are very well-paid. No complaints on that one.

That said, the value-add of a good software engineer (not a "rock star", just 95th-percentile, which is average in some communities, e.g. functional programming) is easily half a million a year.
As a research who has worked with graphene. I would like to point out that Graphene oxide and graphene are two very different materials in terms of properties and synthesis.

The graphene oxide mentioned in this article tends to exhibit weaker electrical and mechanical properties than graphene oxide but is much easier to synthesize than conventional graphene, and so a future with graphene oxide products is not as far as away as one with real monolayer graphene.
Je vis au fin fond de la Champagne-Ardenne, et je dois avouer que ma passion (autodidacte) pour l'AJAX me rapporte pas des masses. C'est pas évident ni motivant de chercher du boulot sans disposer d'un BAC+5.
Les boîtes qui fonctionnent comme 37signals ne courent pas les rues ici...

D'ailleurs si jamais y'a quelques lecteurs francophones d'HN dans le coin, qu'ils n'hésitent pas à me contacter (et plus si affinités ;-))
Send me the blog post when you get around to it. I considered writing software the same as creating a machine. It allows us to access/construct the things we need.
Wait until we get out or geolocated mobile app too!
How much did that freelancer cost (approx.)?

Also, "Hero + 3 below" just works, I suggest changing the front page to that layout for greater impact.
The term "social enterprise" is used in many ways, and doesn't seem to have a clearly accepted legal definition. Without clarification of what you meant, it's difficult for me to comment directly on your suggestion.

However, with that said, I'd just like to emphasize that I'm certainly not criticising for-profits. I'm saying not-for-profits are different, and have a whole different set of advantages and disadvantages than for-profit enterprises.
Pip - make any program a filter
It's a bizarre stretch to compare sports to those important communication media.

Facebook connects people. Television can inform. Movies can inform.

Yes, video games are almost as useless, but at least the consumer is actively involved... I love sports when people play them. When they watch overpaid idiots play them and obsess about it? Not so much.
> One guy inspired MILLIONS to make a difference.
> Another guy is making a difference to MILLIONS

Well there are obviously no right or wrong answers here as we are both guessing but I'd say that Bill Gates has accomplished both your first and second points.
They've found a way to reach mindless sports consumers... so what?
Does the article write realize how silly it is to say "If the FAA was around when the Wright Brothers were testing their aircraft". So what came first the plane or the regulations?
5 Links for Developers and IT Pros 1-27-12
Rework passes 200,000 copies sold
Yes, millions of people direct their money towards sports... that doesn't prove they're useful. If only those 'soaring revenues' were directed towards something useful, like improving the lives of people who are lacking materially.
Banking startup 22seven: an observation, a complaint, and a suggestion
swombat gave a talk on how to get on TechCrunch/Lifehacker/etc in one of the first HN London meetups. [1]

And I believe his first point was: follow up. I can't remember exactly what happened, but he basically emailed [TechCrunch] with a follow-up email after a period of silence, and the blogger got back to him with an "Oops, mea culpa, slipped my mind".

It's not clear from your post, but did you try just reaching out to them again? Maybe a blogger directly, instead of the tips@ mailbox which might be inundated with way too many emails...

[1] http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/java-jee/how-to-get-on-techc...
I just had a look at Freelancify and registered, and I'm amazed that you did it all in 12 weeks learning Ruby from scratch. Kudos!

Based on your experience, how do you think learning materials/tutorials could be improved for people learning from scratch?
Entertainment is fine. However, sports are vastly overemphasized at almost all levels of our society, to the detriment of more important goals.
I'm not a fan of the vast amount of time people waste on anything.
Hollywood does not report profits on many of their films.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/07/08/hollywood-applies-cre...

Google around and you'll find tons of articles on famous successful films that "never turned a profit".

Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings do this as well. They use VERY creative accounting to mark up overhead costs and hide profits.
That's pretty fast. Yeah.. once getting past that initial learning curve; it becomes a lot funner.
The Faculty Project - Top University Education, For Free
Page 5, line 9:

The documents also demonstrate that Defendants did not extend an offer to an employee of another Defendant without prior approval from the candidate's current employer, regardless of whether the candidate applied without being solicited first.
> I don't know how you could calculate the cost of Gates' misdeeds in a way that people would agree on, but I find it entirely reasonable that some people feel that the harm far outweighed the giving and that some people feel the opposite.

That's interesting. From my perspective of growing up with computers in the 80's and 90's, Microsoft was a net positive for the industry.

They took a really fragmented and immature industry and helped push it to the mainstream and helped allow computers to be a part of pretty much everyone in the first worlds life.
Well, that's what you might guess from the title and from the first half of the article where he posits that Apple _could_ buy Hollywood if it wanted to.

But then he goes on to say that what they _should_ do is to buy a bunch of distribution rights so that they can offer true a la carte TV programming.
Every time I buy a computer that has microsoft windows release 'x' installed which I then wipe to install Linux I subsidize Bill Gates' ability to be a philanthropist.
We haven't followed up, and I agree contacting a blogger in person is indeed what we should do. In between we figured out that being on the front page of HN (even for the wrong reasons) would at least make a bit of noise, help us get some ideas and feedback on the app (it looks crap, we got this) and refine our strategy for this project (or the next one).

Thank you for your feedback and stay tuned :)
Not a fair trade, and impossible to enforce. There's plenty of case law saying that a non-compete that prevents a person from making a living in his profession is null and void.

Apple and Google could be argued to be "competitors for talent", but if you work on one product at Apple and move to Google and work on something different, there's no state in the country that would consider that a violation of a non-competition agreement. To my knowledge, non-competes are only successfully enforced over trade secrets and client lists.
Launch is not an event, it's a process. One of the apps that I wrote for fun, which I did not even try to market or promote randomly got picked up by a medium sized blog and brings a steady stream of visitors now.

Of course, it will be great if you can kick the ball rolling with a huge splash on major blogs, but most of the times that's not the case.
Every society has a "1 percent" that owns or controls resources far out of proportion to their numbers. The question is: how much power will they have to shape society as a whole? It is possible to create a more egalitarian society in which the 99 percent are still able to maintain a good and rising standard of living and an acceptable quality of life.
the Group MMS feature on the iPhone (reply all) works as of iOS4, before iMessage.
Did you just write an article about the things you posses?

But you're right, laptops will be removed from normal peoples lives and become a fringe thing for developers and more technical people.
Non-Developer's iPhone App: From Idea to App Store
Hawaii's proposed online tracking law comes under fire from ISPs
MIT’s folding car could revolutionize city driving
$800

His original video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-ZgtOZJVKE

Edit: sorry, didn't get the part about the "Hero + 3 below". Care to explain?
Maybe Apple thinks that they're the best ever (and a half), and anything that is good for Apple is therefore the best for consumers.
Stanford Online Courses Postponed, Not Cancelled.
Look at revenue, not profit. The economy doesn't care how much the company profits, it cares how much the company is spending (on employees and other services).
Jet's can get 10 miles up with minimal difficulty. The problem with getting into space is you need to get 10 miles then go another 200 miles up and accelerate to mach 22.

PS: The record for a jet is 23.4 miles up, here is a good visual scale for LEO.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Orbitalal... Note: The ISS still has to burn a fair amount of fuel to stay in orbit, but it's reasonable.
> Eliminating extra traffic reduces the amount of wear-and-tear on a street, which means you can go more years without resurfacing or replacing it.

The standard argument is that wear goes up either exponentially (which seems wrong) or quadratically (seems more reasonable) with vehicle weight. Since heavy vehicle use will actually go up (more delivery) if we eliminate cars....

I've seen how other activities, tearing up streets for utilities and the like, which are surprisingly common in cities, lead to street repair. Those activities won't change if cars are eliminated.

Parking garages will go away, and major streets could be narrower. I doubt that either effect is significant compared to the road costs which have been claimed to be huge.
How can you compare it to Locker [1] ?

[1] https://github.com/LockerProject/Locker
Thank you! Without getting too much into technics in the beginning, and getting the person to get something up to feel accomplished, gain confidence.

I think that's what gets most people. That initial learning curve takes a lot reassurance that they can do it; but if they hit a wall and it takes more than 7-8 hours to get around it, a lot just quit all together.

By far, the most thorough and best written resource I used was the Rails Tutorial from Michael Hartl.
I can't disagree more strongly. Neither of those apps is successful because they look good. "Good looks" implies an exceptional attention to detail, a deep understanding of the medium, and a solid experience.

More often than not, a beautifully designed piece of software will be easy to use, intuitive, and full of surprises. It makes me want to install it because I _know_ that I'm in for a treat. And when I launch it, my suspicions are confirmed with an app that works exactly as expected without hassle or surprise. Good design is a side-effect of lovingly crafted code and a well-thought out process.
Even if the organisms were shown to swap out phosphorus for arsenic in some instances in their DNA, would that be surprising? Arsenic comes from the same column in the periodic table as phosphorus, and exhibits many of the same macro chemical properties as phosphorus.

It would be like a software engineer swapping out their optimized, say, C++ string library, for one that was less optimal but perhaps took less space or ran better in a constrained embedded environment. Arsenic might not be optimal but it's what's available, what can be used.

In the software case you'd probably be OK but run more slowly than otherwise, or else maybe you'd stumble when for some strange reason the sub-optimal string library didn't guarantee thread-safe read operations. The arsenic could similarly trip up the organism in some cases.
I've received one of these as well (UK). They told me my ISP had reported my computers was visiting sites with viruses, and got quite frustrated when I asked them who my ISP was and on which device they were reported?

Then they hung up.
Sharing with the parents FTW!

The service is looking great, and I'm glad you guys have a clear (and super reasonable at 9.99$/year) business model from the start!
I like to know what I'm doing actually matters

I wish I could give you ten upvotes. I get a lot out of interacting with the people that actually use my software. It makes things more personal and that makes me more motivated to work on a project. And the feedback helps to make what they actually want instead of having to second-guess, or build to some abstract specs.

That the project is technically interesting/challenging also goes a long way, of course, but that's not everything.

Worst would be a project that is boring and you don't know whether anyone, including yourself, is ever going to use it.
Efficient represention for growing circles in 2D space?
Fantastic post. Thanks so much for it. I decided to really dig into Ruby on Rails after Christmas this year, after thinking/talking about it for years. I was thrilled to hear that you really had no programming background—I think a lot of us are in this boat.

I watched the Lynda.com videos on Ruby, and the one on Ruby on Rails (both from Kevin Skoglund). I just watched enough of both to get fairly overwhelmed and confused, then moved on to Michael Hartl's site. Things started to click much better there—that's the best Rails resource I've seen to date.

Still though, After really digging in over the evenings and two weekends, that nagging feeling started to set in—am I actually going to 'get' this? Am I wasting my time? Is this going to take years? Will I ever get past layouts/partials? Should I just go learn PHP / Javascript / iOS / something else?

Did you feel like giving up? Or question the purpose/wisdom of learning Ruby and Rails?
James, this is in response to what you said to my last comment. The reply button wasn't showing.

Anyway, that 150-160 hours was to the point where I was comfortable enough to sit down and code away. I'm still working on the system and I'm still learning a lot. I'd also like to become a lot better with css/jquery. I know the basics and not much more. A guy on my team is a front end whiz so I don't have to worry about cramming that into my head right now.
Common Validations for Web Forms
Agreed. The article should be title "The quickest way for Apple to lose $100 billion in cash".

Also, didn't they do this already. See #pixar. Hollywood is all about content and the sooner they realize it the better they will be.
Microsoft joins hands with Dell
I have to say, I agree with your general resentment but I had to set those examples straight because they actually do not support your point.

Most of those small, boutique shops probably don't recruit a lot of people, I am sure of that. But in turn they source material or services from other small/middle-sized companies, usually in the USA. But I guess most of that designing, producing and researching is going on in the software and electronics sector though examples like Apple show just how much they outsourced to China. Also, I am not sure how much R&D you have in the automotive industry or plant construction or petrochemistry or other more "classical" industries in the USA? There are definitely a lot of strong players in those fields over here, middle to large sized. Maybe those industries would make better examples for your article?

> Anyway, does this smallness account for the fact that Germany has unique cultural products like certain varieties of rye bread, cheese, balsamic vinegar, or watches.

Austria is even smaller, we still have at least as much variety of rye bread, beer, cheese, meat products, balsamic and other foods. Hobbits would probably go to Austria for all the food, beer and wine and our Gemütlichkeit! :) You will not find a country with that many different kinds of wine and there is a HUGE market for organic food, people there care about that much more than they do here in Germany. In Austria you will also find steel and saw mills, plant construction and automation, a TON of automotive engineering and manufacturing, also weapons manufacturing and the list could go on.... I think what accounts for it is rather the history and the fact that central Europe has always been one big melting pot for different cultures and people.

But the USA, you are pretty damn heavy in the whole entertainment industry and all things IT, PC and software... and you still have Boeing, too. And the whole arms or arms-related industry!

Disclaimer: I'm an Austrian working in Germany for a couple of years now... :)
The "remember me" option on the login doesn't seem to work. Not a big deal, but just pointing it out :-)
The bottleneck they overcome (that you don't) is that they get the user to download the app. Once a user has downloaded an app, it matters much less how much friction there is to start using it. It would take a lot to turn them away from using the app at that point.
Serious biologists were very skeptical from the start : http://omicsomics.blogspot.com/2010/12/arsenic-and-new-micro...

Soon, there were lots of questions : http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/06/01/return_of_th...

I'm thinking NASA is good at space exploration, not so good at biology.
This has serious legs, martin. Well done :) A similar idea has been in my "would-be-nice" list for eons, but its amazing to see it actually work.

Wishing you great success! Happy hacking !
> 1)Germany is large too with different dialects

It's not large on US scale. And, compared to the US, it's a monoculture.

Seriously - there's more diversity in a San Jose strip mall than in a major German city. (Dialects? I've got several restaurants where the vast majority of the patrons speak different languages within 1 mile of my house.)
Apple reclaims No.1 smartphone spot in Q4
Yes, and it's not cross platform so of no use unless your friends are all on iPhone.