skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried a number of cities, your own home of San Francisco, my own of Cambridge, UK as well as some others I'm familiar with like Bangalore and Tapei. I was very disappointed that the San Francisco guide was of far worse quality than the Cambridge guide for example. I would have expected since the company is there, you might have something interesting to say about the city. Apparently not.

The list of events is worse than useless, it's cheap and tacky. For example, the events for Bangalore lists events in places such as Shanghai and somewhere on the Indian coast over 500Km away, as well as events tourists couldn't possibly be interested in such as agricultural machinery expos. You just can't do this sort of thing by pulling events unfiltered from external sources, that just doesn't work. Full stop. I want a sensible listing of events that I can filter by my interests, each one with a map of the location and public transport details.

The issues you have can't be fixed with copy editing. You simply can't produce a guide to a place you've never been, and you really shouldn't try. This talk about covering a "long tail" of destinations depresses me. Leave that stuff to wikitravel, you should be producing a polished commercial product. At a minimum you need to at least have had one person representing the company visiting each place you produce a guide to. You aren't in the business producing a general purpose guide, you're in the business of knowing everything there is to know about a city and giving people a decent interface to filtering it. Quite frankly, I don't see how you can do that without a team of people going to a place for at least a month.

Some features I'd pay for:

* Suggested itineraries for days, based on a database of places and activities filtered by my interests and biased by predicted weather.

* Some sort of more/less detail slider for each page enabling me to customise the text.

* Complete and up to date public transport listings for the destination, cross referenced with the events and places I've chosen to add to my guide.

Above all, if I'm paying for something that costs about the same as the rough guide I want something at least as good quality as the rough guide. You aren't going to get that with wikitravel and creative commons photos.
We're totally committed to making the guides better! The more specific issues you can cite (formatting, the destinations you tried, etc) the better we can do to fix them. Do you know of other resources that we can poll for events that maybe we've missed?
Given the corrupting environment in which they work, I don't think being "open-minded" about solicitations and temptations to be a good thing for a politician, especially when it leads to breaking commitments.
cool, borderline spam though?
On the other hand, users might be pissed off that the videos they upload are being changed.
I have yet to test Spore, but I must admit that I am really a bit concerned about this. I suppose ultimately Spore is a product that will promote Creationism, and it targets kids.
Too bad the custom shoes are only for women and children - I'd like to put a picture of a PCB on shoes.
Ya I agree, still though, it's borderline. So viewer beware of AD + Flash.
$700B is the tip of the iceberg. With Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, US taxpayers are now on the hook for paying off $5T in mortgage bonds. And add to that the unknowns on AIG's balance sheet which may run into the trillions as well.
Aw, man. Don't make me bang my head on the desk.

You can't do this by polling free information from the web! Tourists aren't interested in when the next Linux user group meeting is! You need your own list of events updated from local knowledge. Half the interesting stuff is only advertised by people handing out fliers on the street. That means you need to pay people to gather this information for you, which has the knock on effect that you can't cover the whole world, just the bits of it to which lots of tourists go. Isn't this already obvious to you?
The government is buying overpriced assets (mortgage bonds on homes bought for 2x the inflation adjusted norms and corporate junk bonds) whose market value has dropped so much that they made the balance sheets of financial companies negative. Their solution was to move them to the public's balance sheet. Perhaps the real asset prices will rise and the financial companies will be wishing they didn't sell, but who are we kidding? The folks on Wall Street will be vacationing on their super yatchs as the American taxpayer is buried in the debt of their bad investments.
Tivo takes software under a free licence, redistibutes it, and takes every step possible you can't do the same thing. We see the same thing with some android handsets. Open source is freedom and creativity, we need to protect that freedom, if not, open source will die. Stallman understands this.
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Good point. We actually had the beta label in there, but somehow it got dropped out when we did our final QA. We'll get it back in there.
Great feedback, you make some very good points. This is, after all, what a beta is all about - to get out there, learn as much as we can, and iterate iterate iterate.

Thanks for being brutally honest, this is just what we want to learn!

Dave
Cloud Computing: It's the destination not the journey that is important
Physics the Next President Needs to Know
Paralyzed People Control Computers with Their Minds
10+ years ago I remember a young amputee visiting our class to show a prosthetic device that had fingers she could move with her thoughts. It is really exciting to see the quantum leap the brain-computer interaction field has taken in that time. This can be done without any brain implants as well.
58667 digg-orig.html
14585 digg-orig.html.gz
58560 digg-noegg.html
14524 digg-noegg.html.gz

61 bytes.
Maybe the world was a better place if everybody overestimate people's intelligence. Evolution and long necks should be a hint.
"...we spent the next 8 years playing Starcraft"
Heh. Reminds me of my friends and I falling into it. Somehow, I can't help but think Starcraft could be a useful if crude litmus test to divide people into social groups. I wonder if there are any entrepreneur focused lan parties...
I thought it read $40, total, for the whole weekend. Right? http://indystartupweekend.eventbrite.com/

When compared to the Ruby conferences I've priced, that seems dirt cheap.
In the UK the House of Lords was supposed to represent the interests of the nobility, but that's no longer seen as a desirable goal anyway.

The House of Commons necessarily can't see any further than the next election, at most 5 years out. The House of Lords is full of people who know (or used to anyway) that any problems they create, their own grandchildren would have to sort out. Regardless of anyone's feelings about heredity, that was a very valuable capability and it has now largely been lost.
Oh really? What new medical breakthough has resulted in all the boomers living to 120?

Once you get the breakthough you can change things.

It's not like there is a switch: if you were born before date X, you will live an extra 50 years - it's a continuum, it's very easy to tell average lifespan by looking at the other people who live right now (remember them?).
It's not the size of the military that's the problem. Salaries are dwarfed by the cost of the equipment and supplies to wage expeditionary war.
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What you are experiencing is called 'science'. Normal science has around a 95% failure rate, great science is 1 in a million or billion. Most science is 'the grind', collecting, considering, developing minor things, most of which end up to be wrong. It is hard work, it is challenging work, and 5 years from now, you will either be part of something, or you won't.

If you think science is or could be otherwise, I think you are basically just fooling yourself by being completely unaware of history. Science isn't 'hacking' something together and making it work, it is finding the answer, not just 'an answer', but 'the answer' and even then 'the answer' is likely to be shown to be wrong by someone else. Knowing and learning what is wrong is as important as finding what is or could be right.

It sounds to me from what you say above that you want to be some sort of freelance creative computer consultant more than a researcher.

btw, no one needs another google, not because google is the best or anything, but because the model of centralization and massification has reached its potential and fails for too many people.
When you don't know where else to look, eBay is a pretty good general purpose solution:

http://shop.ebay.com/items/_W0QQ_nkwZsimQ20earthQQ_armrsZ1QQ...
The user experience failure of the T-Mobile G1 Android
The traffic charts quoted are perhaps page views, which the new design in urban baby website forces because otherwise new comments are not seen. I.e. the data that says that the community remained in urban baby could be an artifact.
Like they increased the retirement age all the other times life expectancy increased?

For this suggestion to be convincing to me, you need to add some new variable. We've already had massive increases in life expectancy on an insolvent system and nothing was done about it.
"Anticipate obvious questions and have intelligent answers ready." Does that include putting the answers in the presentation? I suppose their might be some that wouldn't really fit there even if they were predictable though.

Otherwise, I'm not sure if intentionally withholding them until the QA part is a good way of looking stupid or smart...
My initial complaint is that its kind of expensive. Travel books at my local bookstore (that I can buy the day before I travel) generally cost less than $20.
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Interesting.

In the U.S., the House of Representatives is specifically supposed to represent the taxpayers while the Senate represents the states (as you noted) For those of you concerned with runaway spending, the founders specifically charged the House with the pocketbook.

What happens, however, over time the House begins to realize that while you don't have taxation without representation (unless you're DC -- long story) you sure as heck can end up with completely disproportionate representation to the amount you are paying.

Or in other words I can get taxed $1 and you can get taxed $1 Million and we still have the same representation. To me this feels more like a prison system than a progressive one. If you proportionately had representation in the "House of Taxpayers" according to how much skin they had in the game, increases in taxes would amount to re-districting, and would be done with the utmost care.

Very interesting idea. On first glance, I like it.
In the comments: "To use the auto-translate feature, you need to have the English subtitles/caption file uploaded to your YouTube video. "
Spore isn't supposed to be a scientific simulation, it's a form of entertainment. Programmers tend to prefer their games to be strictly rule-based simulations, but that's not necessarily what the target audience want and it doesn't equate to good game design.

I'm not saying that Spore is perfect, just that it's very easy as a game developer to get carried away with stuff that you find cool, only to find there's no game there.

The irony is that Chris Hecker is pretty much the man who popularised (and evangelised) the use of simulated physics in games. Virtually all papers on inverse-kinematics in games reference his essays.
Ok, never mind then; ticket type just confused me.
ASK HN: I need a Linux desktop and programming workstation. Any advice?
My budget is $1500, and I will use this as my main workstation for web development, publishing cross platform software (financial, mathematical, and data analysis), programming with Eclipse, Netbeans and the occasional Glade, experimenting with multicore programming in languages like C++, Java, Erlang and Haskell, experiment with NVIDIA CUDA programming in C, number crunching, database development, data mining and simulation software (both writing and running) and finally, regular office productivity (OpenOffice, Gimp, etc...), including substantial photo editing. Well, that's a lot of stuff, but I'll do each of them to a certain extent.<p>I'd like to get a Velociraptor (300GB) as my boot disk, and a larger disk for media files. This cuts my budget for a powerful quad core like the Q9550 though. I'm trying ECC configurations (I want 8GB of RAM) as well, on server boards, but the motherboards are double the price and so is the ram, so I can't get the 10000rpm disk. Please help me make a decision of what's really important and what components would you select.
Weebly (YC winter 07) scores 1 million users, reaches profitability
"There are no bad regiments, only bad colonels" -- attributed to both Napoleon and Ulysses S. Grant

Whether it's the kids or the system that's "at fault," a system designed to help kids should adapt to help them even if the requirements for that change.
I would say Bush snatched the opportunity presented by 9-11. Before 9-11 he would not been able to do a tiny part of the damage he did. Come on... Iraq was not caused by 9-11: 911 only made an invasion based on doctored intellige possible.
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Mythbusters Takes on the FAA
Did you not take intro chemistry? Because I'm pretty sure it's illegal for your intro chemistry teacher not to play you that song.
Does Nature Break the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
Whatever It Takes?
On the general topic if words matter in politics -- my answer is "no"

Actions are all that count. People are a fickle bunch, and it's an old trick to sound good on TV and then do whatever you feel like -- as long as it's complicated enough to the average Fred that he's not going to get pissed.

That's true for both parties. Look to how people act in the past -- it's a good predictor for the future. (Aside from 9-11 type events)
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If you find it necessary to point that out, then you missed the entire point of the post.
We pioneered the goon/ling 2v2 strategy ;p. I didn't let myself bring my Starcraft CD to college.
ha! thanks man (or gal)
not what i meant, but i like the sentiment.
do you know if its possible to find emulators? or even the machines themselves?

thanks!
Thanks I already have the book! but does anyone in YC know more sources I can go to?
Campaigns in a Web 2.0 World
A two hundred-word blog post about a commercial version of libraries with an affiliate link is not a good post.
This article is pretty well linkbait. Following up to the actual post by the MS team reveals Linq to SQL isn't being killed--they're just choosing Linq to Entities as their preferred solution.

"We are listening to customers regarding LINQ to SQL and will continue to evolve the product based on feedback we receive from the community as well," is not remotely the same as killing Linq to SQL.
> George Bush has taught me to evaluate politicians by their actions, not their words.

To me his words, actions and the results were all pretty consistent. Only the scale of failure of his presidency was a surprise... And the fact that he was voted in twice. You sound like you may have been one of his 'x2' voters. If this was the case it doesn't present the best credentials to be lecturing others on candidate selection.
I wouldn't call the spate of articles on 3D printing and mass customization Spam. I wrote 2 of the five that have shown up recently and they were efforts to help share info on manufacturing technologies with a group of hacker with the hope of fostering some new ideas. While some items on the list may be old news I took care to highlight many that are currently flying under the Radar (Spoonflower & Xoddo) to name two.

There were other posts highlighting the RepRap project and an honest question about what one would do with these technologies. They stayed on the board because people were interested in them.
There is no presentation. No powerpoint, no projector, none. This isn't a business meeting. You walk in and they fire questions at you. You respond as best you can and realize that your only ability to steer the conversation is with the responses you give.
It seems to me that this allows Myspace to identify owned content but does very little in terms of monetizing that content. How often -- really -- have you watched something on Youtube and said "Geez, I'd like to buy that!"

All this appears to do is to provide some ammo to the copyright holders that the technology exists to deal with takedown notices efficiently.
Oh, I totally agree. I was just being pedantic over the numbers.
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Congrats. On a side note, venturebeat is full of funding announcements today, kind of a counterpoint to all the sky is falling stuff from the last two weeks. Good companies seem to be thriving.
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Awesome work. The p word is one of the most beautiful.
Reverse Engineering CAPTCHAs [pdf]
You absolutely can say those things about The Big Lebowski, The Watchmen, The Wire. It's not a slippery slope. If you're good at building stuff, you enjoy doing it, and it's sane to be scared of competing enjoyments --- especially when, like a game, they suck hours away at a time.
Reacting, Responding & Initiating
Dissecting Yammer: Building for the Enterprise
No; I'm on the west coast now. But I'm glad Boston VCs are thinking about this topic.
Congrats Weeblers
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Twitter, Services and LuckyCal at OpenCoffee Cambridge this Wed.
I upvoted the comment, and definitively agree in general, but of course there's no rule without its exceptions. Half-life for example was very much designed by comittee, and we all know how that went ;)
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Aspects of Design Quality
<rant>
i'm not sure why anyone reads this blog. it's not the least bit creative (negative humor is second only to fat jokes in terms of lack of originality). and does anyone here feel good after reading posts like this? does it improve your day in any way? do you feel better equipped to change the world after a visit to uncov?

there is so much negativity in this world already and, if you're really craving it, i'd suggest reading about people fleeing for their lives in the congo and think to yourself that those people may never experience a day in their entire lifetime where they feel safe -- a feeling we take for granted.

investing negative reading time on a stupid rant about some guy getting a college degree and worrying about a job when CS people NEVER have to worry about jobs, is pathetic. now, if he were a 45 year old career factory line worker who just got laid off, then perhaps he would have a reason to pen such a piece.

if you think that, in some way, uncov plays an important role in your life, helps you to become a better hacker, improves your relationships with and respect for other humans, and makes it easier to face each day, then feel free to demote my post to prove me wrong.
</rant>
[video] Interactive Touch Sensitive Mirror
What Ray Ozzie Didn't Tell You About Microsoft Azure
Fee Consumer Product Reviews - ListOwn.com
Will Amazon be moving into Printing on Demand (including 3D Printing)?
Another VC How-To Site For Entrepreneurs
Rethinking Investing pt 2 - "If you don’t know something the rest don’t, don’t gamble."
Apple's Unibody MacBook: The Review
> I try hard not to conflate the merits of a programming language with its "community"

Why? The merits of a programming language in today's world boil down to the quality and support of libraries and frameworks, which basically means "the community."
Now, after you posted the comment, you can go ahead and read the whole presentation.
That's really great. I've got all my relatives using that now to build their websites. It's good to know Weebly will be around for a while :-)
I don't mean to be rude or obnoxious, but out of curiosity, who is Seth Godin and why are his posts often on HN?
Linux admin IQ/trivia test
Dual Boot Windows Mobile On iPhone
Needle Removed From 3 Year Old Boy's Lung
No major artwork was created by a committee.

Actually, William "The Princess Bride" Goldman argues in his famous book about screenwriting (Adventures in the Screen Trade) that all movies are created by committee. He lists a bunch of people that need to do their jobs correctly in order to make a movie any good, starting (obviously) with the screenwriter and the director but also including: The cinematographer, the casting director, the designers and costumers, the film editor, and the composer. To say nothing of the producers, who need to come up with sufficient money or the film doesn't get made.

Goldman makes this point in the course of lampooning the "auteur" theory of criticism, in which entire films are attributed to the genius of one person -- usually the director. It's because of those auteur theorists that we tend to speak of "Hitchcock's" North by Northwest, ignoring the fact that a lot of that film's genius was contributed by Cary Grant, to say nothing of Bernard Herrmann.

A great example is Star Wars, which as we all know sprang from the brow of George Lucas. Except, of course, for the parts that were actually created by Ben Burtt (sound designer), John Dykstra (FX supervisor), Rick Baker (makeup artist), Ralph McQuarrie (production illustrator), John Williams (composer), and Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch and Marcia Lucas (film editors). And that's just scratching the surface.

A game on the scale of Spore is also, inevitably, created by committee. The question is whether you can keep the committee on the same page. It sounds like Spore's team had some struggles, which had to be mediated, and which were ultimately resolved in a way that isn't quite to my taste. Which is not to say that the enterprise is a failure. It's sold a lot of copies, and no doubt many people are pleased with it. I played with the creature creator, and it was very cute.
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I can see this as something more viable for a site like LinkedIn where the inherent nature is building connections to establish a professional presence in your industry. But Facebook, albeit desperately in need of a profit model-a site that more or less manifests Seinfeldian experience that is "much ado about nothing"?

No.
If your read the old copy of his page it was much harder for an average voter to understand. So some staffer "cleaned it up" but there is no evidence he changed his mind on that topic.
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Coworking Roundup
This rant had very little to do with the actual Android UX, and was mostly whining about bad customer service. Not that bad service is excusable, but it doesn't have anything to do with Android itself.
Me too. My father-in-law needed to create a website for his church. He asked for my help, I showed him Weebly, and that was it. So what I'm saying is, thanks Weebly.