skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is one of the dumbest ideas I've heard. WiFi has a typical range of 32m indoors and 95m outdoors. With a range of 95m, each access point would cover 0.0283385 km^2. The lower 48 states have a land area of 7,663,941.71 km^2. So, we'd need over 270M access points to cover the continental US. But that's an underestimate since you'd have to have a lot of overlap given that if you put two circles next to each other (oo), you would have gaps. So, you'd probably need around a billion. Also, remember that you'd have to run power and data lines to all of them (very expensive) and pay for the power (hey, a billion devices using as little as 10kw per year would cost a ton). It just isn't a feasible project. Heck, to provide indoor coverage you'd need around 10bn. WiFi is barely a decent idea in the densest of cities.

Now, if you want to propose that the US use the spectrum freed up by the discontinuation of analog TV in a few months for free nationwide wireless, I'll listen. Those signals can go for a hundred km! That moves it from being a stupid proposal from someone who doesn't understand how radio works to something really workable. Now, because of power limitations in battery operated devices, you'd have to place sites every few miles like cellular operators do, but that's still going to make it a matter of, say, 50-100k sites vs. 10bn.

But wait, wouldn't that just make the government another wireless carrier? Pretty much. Maybe the government could do it cheaper, but I'm not so sure I'm into that. I mean, carriers are already competing hard core to get wireless internet to people (all of them are around $60/mo). Would the government be able to roll out an entirely new network just for data cheaper? Would it be more effective?

If we've concluded that WiFi is a ridiculous proposition, then people would have to buy equipment to use with this new technology (whether it be WiMAX, EV-DO, HSDPA, HSPA+, or LTE). That's the real appeal of WiFi, the idea that we already have the equipment for it. Anyway, we can already buy that equipment from carriers. Would we get it cheaper from the government? Likewise, we can already get service from carriers. Would the government be able to provision it cheaper?

There is the case to be made that wireless is a natural monopoly and so you see efficiencies by having one regulated (or government) operator rather than having competing companies duplicating each others efforts in building a network. However, the government isn't going to compete with them directly. It just won't happen. The companies have invested hundreds of billions in developing networks.

So, I think the best we can hope for is that the new white-space created by DTV is allowed for open use (ala Google's push).
Ken McLeod: All Your Firewall Are Belong to Us
The purpose of a resume is to score an interview; this resume almost seems like it's trying to replace an interview.
I think the idea of a German atomic bomb was an even greater concern for Einstein, and for others.

The years leading up to WWII were very, very complicated. It's unrealistic to claim that your hindsight (or anyone's) is 20/20 with respect to what should have been done.
I joined Bell Labs in late 2000 and quit in six months of joining... I guess those weren't the best days for the labs or Lucent
Revisiting Google’s Python Style Guide
A laudable goal, but if you managed that do you really think your senior management (or at least the mgt in most companies) would agree? They'd think they're not getting value for money if your only "working" 2 hours a day.
I agree, this video was a lot better than I was expecting.
Well, the UAW doesn't want to accept parity with foreign auto-maker wages. The article states a $3-4 disparity, but it's really more than that due to the great benefits accorded to UAW workers.

While I generally like unions, in this case no matter how much bailout money the US auto-makers get, they're headed for bankruptcy unless they can bring their labor costs in line with those of foreign firms. UAW, if you're listening, you have two options: get off your rump and drive the wages up at Honda and Toyota (unionizing their plants) or resign yourselves to never having any say in anything ever again.
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Its on Scribd

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8857889/Visual-Image-Reconstructio...
Your post was definitely cool, but I felt you weren't one-sided enough ;-). Maybe you could provide a link to Trogger? Is it still in development?

As a piece of advice, I would recommend very strongly that you get people's email even if it makes registration a two-step process. That way, if anything happens, you can generate temp passwords and email them with an explanation that Facebook terminated FBConnect, but you're still good!
Tell YC: Reminder, today is Spouse 2.0 day
They have earned it. The terrific unsung entrepreneurs in the house. Spouse, parents, siblings whoever has helped you pull it through.. Lets celebrate the day for them, with them. :)

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/note-to-start-up-founders-take-your-spouse-on-a-date/
Who said respectable investor means Silicon Valley?
NASA trying to avoid end of its human space program
I've also read David Allen's book -- excellent stuff. So far I've found his method of using a Someday/Maybe list to be extremely freeing (though I must admit that the list is growing ridiculously long). I've pretty much got the "get everything out of your head" part down, now I need to work on the actual "getting things done" part. :)

If you use OS X, there is an excellent app built around the GTD methodology called OmniFocus (if you also have an iPhone, there's also an iPhone app that syncs with the desktop app). Both are very well worth the money.
* plants bomb and runs to the vi side
American auto companies cars cost, on average, $2,000 more to make than those of foreign competitors.

Until that difference is gone, they will never be competitive. They lose $2,000 of quality or features and are expected to be competitive? Yeah, right.

In any other industry this would force a company out of business, but for some reason we think the automakers deserve our help? If an iPod was $50 more per unit to produce than a Zune they would never be able to compete and the iPod would fail because they are losing $50 worth of quality per unit - whether that quality is gone from the software, hardware, or both, it would be impossible to compete.
In the letter he suggested that it might be used to cause significant damage to a port. He had no idea that it would be (1) anywhere near as destructive as it was, or (2) small enough or light enough to drop from aircraft rather than only being used in either naval warfare (where death tolls would be much less) or as a fixed weapon acting as a disincentive to invasion (building them along some border so that an overland aggressor would surely be destroyed--essentially, a much more powerful minefield).
Markus said as early as 2006 that he was spending "hundreds of thousands" to build out his servers/storage.

He's been scaling up instead of out. Which is cheaper up to a certain point and then it becomes a lot more expensive.

The image of some guy running this site off a couple of servers tucked under his desk is pretty far from reality with PlentyOfFish. He's probably spent $1 million+ dollars on his "few" servers by now. Still impressive to be sure, but nothing like the way it's portrayed.
I should send this to people at work, probably call me gay. :)
Amazon's search is pretty darn impressive
I find chrome has a few problems, firstly it can start to perform very badly when many tabs are open - a bit buggy, and secondly it does not display as many pages correctly as firefox.

All in all I love the speed of chrome - but reliability of firefox is still a very big + for me.
Seriously, it is becoming taxing to read through the comments when on certain topics (global warming, for one) some users show a complete lack of civility.

I would rather just be able to say "this person is rude and unpleasant, never show me their comments again".
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MAKE: Blog: PET bottles reused with style
Thank god. Heres to hoping that Obama never gets around to bailing these industries out either so that they finally declare bankruptcy and let the market work out its own (significantly more efficient) solution.
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Senate Rejects Auto Bailout Despite Intense Negotiations
What kind of passive income assets would you recommend?
Watch survivor gabon episode 13 online
I have no cookies for googleapis.com, so no the Google cookie does not come with it. It's just the JS libs.
Among many other things, solar energy technology is on an exponential curve right now with a ~2 year doubling time. Remember computers 20 years ago vs. today? Most people were surprised at the increases in computer price performance, but not those who understood Moore's Law. The same thing will probably happen in solar energy. Try to look surprised. :-)
Yes, it is. At first, I thought that maybe it's because Linux hackers weren't stepping up to help with the development efforts, but then I started wondering how many Windows hackers helped out with the Windows version.
Animata
With the 38 hours free at work... You really shouldn't waste these valuable hours. Ideally you have a job that challenges you enough to fill your time... but in any case. < < <<USE THAT TIME>> > >

- Write a book about a cube dweller in your position that on lunches and in down time he is saving the world with a team all controlled from his work PC where he is doing "nothing". Apparently that might be an untapped market judging by the response here.

- Find a problem at work, solve it, sell that.

- Create a community or site/product for one of your hobbies, even it is is knitting.

- ???

Morale of the story is, find a way to build something of value with this time. That something might help you, your like minded peeps, or even your company (although you might have to get reinforcement externally before you sell anything internally, I find this route works best).

Just do it son! And don't feel too bad if you try to contribute and it is knocked down. Have everything as dual purpose for your own and possibly your company's good. But make sure it has some of your own in it.

You have the power to create value.
Whoever you talked to is probably on this list:

http://www.orrick.com/practices/corporate/emergingCompanies/...
Ahh, but with a 25% tariff on your side that $2000 is well within the bounds of your cushion on a truck or SUV.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3155
I need a day and a New York Times blog post for this?
Tokbox!
My first line sympathizes with the truth that denying yourself is detrimental.

In my next bit I am suggesting that you do not need to sacrifice your "deeper needs" (to use your language) in order to have a meaningful family life. Further, I am suggesting that there are auxiliary benefits to the particular technique that I propose.
Cappuccino 0.6 Released
I don't think he was saying that a big Series A was good for YC. He was just offering evidence contrary to the authors point that VCs weren't investing.
GDP isn't a useful way to analyze bubbles. Bubbles are asset price inflation significantly above the trend line.
Security and Obscurity: Does Changing Your SSH Port Lower Your Risk?
IIRC they didn't have too much done yet when YC started. They did have a lot done by the time the A round happened, though, because they'd done an angel round in the interim.
+1. By title alone I would have never cared. Only because it's here in HN did I click through to these comments and based on yours I decided to actually watch the video.

It's a 9 min talk by Clay Shirky basically praising the hacker spirit.
City and Suburb: A Time for Reshaping
Crisis blows £250m hole in leading UK university funding
I'm glad you asked this, now I won't feel so bad about doing it.
So this is sort of like Flex, but uses JavaScript modeled after Objective-C?

Edit: I'm checking out the demos... this is sick. Silverlight won't kill Flash/Flex, Cappuccino will.
I drink while I'm coding pretty routinely. I can't really tell if it makes me any more productive but it definitely holds up the programmer stereotype.

There is also that sense of urgency that you have to get stuff done before you get to drunk...
Now the party's over, will the young really pick up the tab?
Play-by-play reporting on bailout politics is not really hacker news.
These types of post are the reason I spend hours on HN. It is variable reinforcement really- the really great posts come at pseudo random intervals (make n a random number and assume you hit a great post after n clicks, then reset n). And then you become addicted.

I just hit n. I can finally go to sleep.
Mohamed El-Fatatry: Torvalds of the Muslim world
Max Wedge
This site has a killer collection of mopar muscle cars for sale, check it out.
I love you guys
573,000 jobs lost last month and people want to dance on the grave of a MAJOR national industry?? This not good news for people like me who worry things are gonna get a lot worse before they get better.

Anyway, with all that capital just floating around it should be a snap to recreate a heavy manufacturing based industry. Maybe those free market geniuses can make it as awesome as the financial industry or the health care industry.
Also see the same article in the WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122902532265099095.html
health care costs per vehicle are between 1000-1700. We collectively, and the auto industry in particular, are at a big disadvantage until these costs are brought under control

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070227/A...
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Seems to me, that the auto industry is paying for the mistakes, made by congress when it came to the Wall Street bail out.

The financial industry got a blank check for 700 billion bailout almost overnight w/o any questions, they produce nothing tangible, and there is nothing preventing another bank from replacing any of the big ones. Its an industry that scales easily.

The auto industry on the other hand, is getting grilled left and right over a measly 15 billion. The money comes with a ton of strings attached. Even though unlike the financial industry they produce a tangible product. And there are no other competitors waiting to fill the big boy's shoes, because it takes billions to scale.

So it seems to me that the Congress is being penny smart and pound foolish, they give away vast sums w/o a second thought, and then turn around and penny pinch when it comes to a tiny amount.
what automotive startups do you have in mind that can even scale within 5 years to the same level of production/employment as the big 3?

And you can't say Tesla, because they don't even make their own cars. They just slap their parts onto a Lotus Elise shell.
The executives and the union bosses, sure. But the people who are gonna suffer the most are the 1) run of the mill workers, 2) the contractor subeconomy, and 3) the rest of us

In a good economy, sure let them fail. Though I find the lack of consideration and compassion for the human pain this would cause pretty appalling. "Yea, lets optimize them away" is not an attitude we need more of in this country.
It may not lower your risk, but it can lower your annoyance level.
Auto industry jobs will only be lost due to lowering demand, which won't change with or without the bailout. For one, American car companies won't disappear. Read up on Chapter 11. They'll be restructured. Some layoffs may occur, but they need to anyway, otherwise this bailout would only forestall the inevitable. The only way American car companies can compete long term is to get down to similar cost basis to foreign ones, which means their cars have to take a similar amount of man hours to build.

And if they did fold, people won't just stop buying cars. They'll just buy different cars that were made mostly here in America, which employee the same number of people to build that a viable American car company would.

It's easy to say bailout = jobs, but that's sadly just not true. In the long run it won't save any, and it will cost a fortune. If it's done right, it will ensure viability, which means loss of jobs. If it's not done at all, it will mean restructuring and/or a shift to Japanese cars which means the same loss of jobs.
I don't think its the amount so much as who it is going to.

The republicans are itching at a shot to break the backs of these unions, and this is their golden opportunity.
The trick is to have 5 kids; each about a year or two apart. After the first 10 years, you have bootstrapped a built-in babysitting system, lawn mowing, and house keeping, you name it...its a lengthy bootstrapping cycle, but should pay off well after 10 years unless they all turn out to be spoiled brats ;). But, hey, all start-ups have their risks.
Aww.. if they do they're probably using c++
It's not about lack of compassion. It's about whether or not it will really save jobs.
Ask HN: When is a startup not a startup?
How do you know that a startup has come out of the startup phase? More importantly, how does a startup know that its not longer a startup?

a) time since it was established
b) making sales
c) hiring more people

No single criteria seems to yield the correct answer. It may take a startup years to launch their product, there are companies that make sales, do hirings and even make money yet classified as startups.
They just slap their parts onto a Lotus Elise shell.

The body is not the hard part.
brilliant and they used a very old mac for it!
How Many Bodies Exactly Is CBS Interactive Trying To Hide?  Try “275-ish.”
Clay Shirky is a very insightful thinker about the technology impact on society, and his presentations are top notch too.

If you want the essence of the insights he has to offer, see his TED talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPQViNNOAkw
I'm confused by that statement. Do you really mean that IT gurus won't get too old or burnt out on re-leanering new stuff every few years?

I am 40 and have been programming since I was 12; almost always on the bleeding edge. I can assure you that there is a point of being "too old".

Unless you are quite a different person that I, I highly suggest you keep maxing out that retirement account. ;)
Yes it does ;-) "Star Diaries" was my favorite book as a kid.
Answer: it's faster
Dude... it's Google
You can't just juggle the variables like that because there are discontinuities and nonlinear effects. Industries interact with each other.

What is happening to auto is mostly caused by 1) the financial crisis making credit scarce and 2) a huge drop in demand (30-40%) that no industry could sustain

For a "elderly and weak" patient such as auto, this is too much. Fine. But what happens if auto goes down, which the OP is celibrating? What other weak or newly weakened sectors does it take down with it? Btw, chapter 11 is the best case, it could go chapter 7. We don't know.
Ask HN: Review my site - Shiftpop.com
Shiftpop is a live video aggregator that's been running as an open beta preview for a while now, we're trying to figure out if people are interested in using something like this, and if it's going to be possible to monetize at some point.

http://shiftpop.com

Any input would be appreciated. Thanks.
I've seen a few posts about Objective-J, Cappuccino and 280slides. Very cool stuff, incredible work guys.

Unfortunately, I haven't really found any deep technical information about Objective-J or Cappuccino. I've read about the what and the why, but I'm really curious about the how. Anyone know of any resources?
What were you expecting? Things were always going to get worse before they got better. This is the restructuring of a global economy that had become far too reliant on debt. More companies and industries will go under; more jobs will be lost. Remember, the employees may not have chosen the company strategy, but they chose to be with that company.

I will dance on the grave of every company and industry that dies now because it means the restructuring is working. Nobody is putting them on life support. Nobody is saying, "It's okay you royally fucked up." They're dying, as they should be.
Here's google's answer as a comparison:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22The+Triumph+of+R...
"With TwittrRatr you can distinguish negative from positive tweets surrounding a brand..."
Perhaps for you. For others, its about putting abstract ideas and free market worship ahead of real people and real consequences to these abstractions.
Well, it wasn't caused by those factors, only accelerated. They've been struggling for a very long time. Toyota is sustaining the drop just fine. If GM had Toyota's good will, brand image, and cost basis, they would be too. They need that to compete in the long run.

And they've done a good job of working on lowering their cost basis over the last 5 years, along with the Unions, but they've still got a long way to go and are progressing slowly. Without serious oversight in the bailout it's just throwing money down a well.

Or so goes the theory. You can choose to believe it's wrong (and you may be correct, it's a complex issue) but it's disingenuous and mean-spirited to say that the people against it are happy about job losses. They're happy that a bill that they believe is throwing money down a well and only delaying job losses didn't pass.
For some, probably. But I think most people these days aren't free market ideologues anymore. Even Alan Greenspan isn't.
Toyota/Honda/Kia/Hyundai/Nissan and friends could scale to replace them, especially given the current meager demand. Those guys already have lots full of cars they can't sell.

They won't have the same level of employment (or at least salary) because that level is what makes the big 3 unviable. But that contraction is due one way or the other, and the market will make sure it happens whether there's a bailout or not.

American car companies are simply paying employees more than they're worth. Guys are getting $70k a year to pull levers. You can't spend $15 billion to correct that.
My implicit point, exactly.

I'm working on a memetracker system that will pull in related data on the fly to spruce up the memes. Google proper's been all but useless to me. Youtube's search api has actually been a great last-resort way to get related images. Meanwhile Amazon looks like a pretty good tool too.
404 not found, and bennorthrop.com redirects to lunarpages.com. Mirror?
phew... Now I can code happily all day knowing that 30 years from now I'll... play video games! I thought those days were lost to me.
Turns out there's a time for everything.
it is harder/nastier work and often deals with fecal matter

Sounds like programming.
Why not work part-time on it, then once you get a bit of traction, then look for investment?

I mean... if you work 8-6, what do you do from 6-12? Just a thought...
Did you see this previous blog post? It talks a little about the "why":

http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2008/12/08/on-leaky-abstractio...