skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From reading about DF, and especially the NYT profile of DF and the creators, I get the strong impression that DF is very much being done the hard way, even ignoring the C++ aspects, and one could cut down the complexity tremendously with good abstractions and things like DSLs.

(Think the Viewpoints OS strategy - with good enough abstractions and DSLs, you can do an OS or languages in very small sourcebases; I'm still in awe of their TCP/IP strategy - parsing the RFC illustrations! http://www.moserware.com/2008/04/towards-moores-law-software... )

That would be a project worth doing.
World population of elephants: ~700000
Number of humans without access to clean drinking water: ~800000000
Teacher: "Decline agricola."

Student: "No, thank you."
Flying Machines of the 21st Century?
Ah yes. I wrote a game (text-based "sports" sim) in Python and wxPython roughly eight years ago that still has a small, but hardcore community of players. I started on a "version 2" of the game about six years ago. Anytime I want to learn a new language I try and implement "version 2" using the new language. As a result I've learned Ruby, JavaScipt, ActionScript, Scala, Clojure, Lua, Haxe, and a ton of frameworks/libraries associated with the previous languages. It's been an absolute blast, but I still haven't released "version 2" yet.
FYI a shot is actually 1.5 ounces, so half a bottle would be about 8 shots, not 12.
Fortunately for me, I have led a boring life and therefore I didn't find it difficult to tell the truth when I joined the Army.

On the other hand, I did have a friend who was told by his recruiter to be "honest." My friend didn't pick up on the recruiter's sarcasm so he told the entire truth about his past adventures with narcotics. He even told them that he has acid flashbacks a few times a year.

They still let my friend enlist(Hell, we were in the middle of a war), but it took him nearly all of his 4 year enlistment to get the Top Secret clearance he required to do his job. All of our supervisors acted like he was an idiot for actually telling the truth.
At the risk of sounding cheesy, I would work on something that helps soothe or at least mitigate the destructive effects humanity has on the planet, ecosystems etc. This could be anything from renewable energy, self-sustaining houses, solar powered cars, arcologies, biodegradable or fully recyclable materials and so on. It's a far cry from the web stuff I am working on now. I would definitely need to acquire some new skills first (which would not be an issue if I don't need to worry about money).

Also, education. Things like Khan academy are amazing, but not yet accessible to everyone in the world. Thinking about that, working on internet access for all seems like a pretty noble cause too.
Studioshell: more powershell for Visual studio
I've used Rackspace E-mail for years (formerly called MailTrust) with my own domains. It's $2 per mailbox per month, minimum of $10 per month. POP, IMAP (with push notifications) and a decent webmail client I don't use. You get an actual SLA and 24x7x365 support by phone/web/email.
There's a very important difference that you're missing. In the scam you're applying you're random machine over all possible results. In the sabermetrician example, the random machine is being applied across methodologies of picking prospects, ie bunch of different "moneyball" hobbyists trying out different stats and weights to rank players. The end result is the possibility of the discovery of a very good methodology that has found stats that traditionally are not important.
Nice.

For super quick learning, it sure would be nice to see how others solved the same challenge. Just a few suggestions for links in the "Your code was correct, great job!" box:

- last 5 correct solutions
- most common solution
- solution in least lines of code
- solution in least bytes of code
- solution presented by <person requested>

and if you really wanted to get clever:

- most unique (by some definition) correct solution
- most elegant (by some definition) correct solution
- you should use <this> instead of <that> and <why>
True, but the average programmer typically has to show up for work at least 40 hours a week, while "passive income" like selling off-the-shelf WordPress themes doesn't take up your whole week. It can also be done by people who don't have particularly extensive programming skills.
there was a fascinating podcast about Tesla 2 weeks ago in Studio360: http://www.studio360.org/2012/jan/27/
The problem of applying machine learning techniques to search problems (I mean "search" in the traditional AI sense that includes theorem proving and planning, not in the Google sense). To me this is the most exciting area of AI research, and it's still very much wide open.
Ask HN: What Are The Best Sales Strategies That Worked For You?
e.g cold calling, affiliates etc.
John Resig and Craig Silverstein didn't join Khan Academy to generate "mostly mediocre", "moderately useful" content until something better comes along.

I think it's important, especially with startups, to look to the future rather than to sit around judging the present.

In the beginning, Microsoft were making a limited Altair BASIC that only appealed to a handful of hardcore geeks, but later they had a computer in every office and home. You don't get there if you try to solve the world in step 1.
Online Dating: A Critical Analysis From the Perspective of Psychological Science
>> If you claim to have gotten through high school and college without at least trying weed ... I don't think anyone will take you seriously.
Interestingly, I know a lot of people in The Netherlands who have not and will never smoke weed, whereas in the USA I had the feeling that nearly everyone (especially the college crowd) was a stoner. If I were to give my non-expert experience, I would guess that about 50% of the people I met in the USA had ever smoked weed, compared to 25-30% in the NL.

I'd kinda second this. But I'd go so far to say that my experience in the US, a lot of the pot smoking happens in high school, and college was more of a drinking/party experience, I'd say most of my college friends never smoked weed in college. (yeah, we all tried weed in high school, but college was for drinking, chasing girls, and studying hard...) Yeah, we were all engineers.

And now in the "real world" the majority of my co-workers never smoked weed. You could say they're lying, but I'd guess because of my sample pool, it's more selection bias/demographics than anything.
I never liked Edison. He always came off as a simple and lucky hack; just a businessman, while Tesla was the genius and inventor the world still owes all to.
Assuming that's the flashlight I think it is (mcgizmo haiku?) - it's actually a bit of an interesting response to this question in its own right.

AFAICT, mcgizmo is one guy, who builds ultra high end flashlights. I believe his only sales channel is the aforementioned candlepower forums. He seems to do rather well with it.
HDS systems is another flashlight maker that's one guy. Not as high end as mcgizmo (they run up to about $200). He even has his own (design circa 98) website. And it's apparently working for him - orders were backed up for weeks when I ordered mine.

A few people, making a product for an extremely narrow niche.
No Podcast list is complete without mentioning Software engineering radio: http://se-radio.net

This compilation of podcasts by Skilldrick has some real good ones: http://skilldrick.co.uk/2011/08/podcasts-i-listen-to/
Especially, The Changelog and FLOSS weekly.

Also another small compilation from infoq: http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/09/archcasts
I especially enjoy On Architecture with Grady Booch: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/onarchitectu...

Stack Overflow (now stackexchange, you can find the old episodes on itconversations), and techzing podcasts are packed with wit and humor. Listening to Joel, Justin and Jason, brightens any day.

I also subscribe to Compucast: http://computersciencepodcast.com/podcasts.html and Channel9: http://channel9.msdn.com/

Herding Code: http://herdingcode.com/ and radio free python: http://www.radiofreepython.com/ are on my "to listen" list.
Light and amusing (as one would expect from the title).

I chortled at Haskell.

I'm struggling to think of a vehicular parallel to Erlang.

Maybe the Bluesmobile with the megaphone on the top? Sends messages and survives many crashes?
Heh, yep. There are many competitors in this space already and there will be many more thanks to services like Twilio. I actually learned about these services through my sister who is a high school teacher. I was turned away from the idea once she explained to me that lots of teachers use them but will never pay for it. They hop from one free account to another.
For me, the best take-away from the post is this one line:

"I didn’t care how much I ran, as long as I went out and did it."

I have seen many people starting a new exercise regime (among other things) by trying too hard and expecting quick results, and that leads to the inevitable burn out that most people experience soon enough. I've been there.

Whether it's learning a new programming language or getting fit, it's more important to keep at doing it each day than to focus only on beating yesterday's record.

Tomorrow, I'm going to put on my running shoes and go out to run. I don't care how much I can run, but I'm going to time myself for record keeping, and I'm just going to feel good that I did it :-)
Something to rival Facebook that puts more control into the hands of users. The "wordpress"/blogging phenomenon came shortly after low-cost hosting. Now VPSs are where web hosts were 10 years ago.
Lets not forget Topsy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_(elephant)
That's the beauty of Facebook, you get to find the answers to all kinds of illegal questions. Collateral information, if you will.
>> It's actually roughly 85% of people in the US smoke weed at some point in their lives, as you can see here on p. 103:

Not my family, not most of my friends.

Edit: For my circle the estimate is totally wrong, beyond inaccurate. I doubt I'm in the minority.
I hate being THAT GUY, but I can tell you with authority that the quickest way out of PLC is an Integrity Violation. The Marine Corps will work with you on youthful indiscretions like drug use. Integrity Violations? Yeah...not so much. That will get you an all expense paid ticket out of Quantico, from Reagan I think.

So...I don't know...police in California may think honesty is less than useful, but I would be careful about painting all law enforcement, military and intel agencies with too broad a brush.

The only thing one can reasonably conclude from your experience, is that there is a chance that certain California police forces could be corrupt. Which, frankly, comes as little surprise to people outside of California. Though I can understand the consternation it may cause to people in California.
Virilla: My new prototype for guessing what will go viral...
Technically it's pretty simple, as Twilio is doing the heavy lifting. I'd looked at building something similar (well - actually did build the basics - doesn't take long) but the big issue becomes monetization and such.

I guess I don't have enough business "wisdom" (guts?) to launch a pay service that offers unlimited texts for $10/month, when those texts have a real hard cash cost. $10 = 1000 texts, not counting the texts people would send back to you to say "remove me" and such.

Twilio have volume pricing - http://www.twilio.com/pricing/volume-pricing - at 500k SMS you get a 25% price break, and even at 30k messages per month, they're not breaking the bank so far on Twilio credits.

But... as this grows, what's the goal? I see 'freemium' on the TC article, but I've just signed up for sendhub, and it gave me a number, but it doesn't seem to work at all like the video described it. I've got no option to set a specific wordcode, nor is there any info on freemium pricing/upgrades.

EDIT - isn't this groupme all over again? What's the difference?
Funny, when I first heard about thunderbolt my first thought was "Cool, I can finally build my own SSI NUMA box like an SGI!".

The second thought was, gee, what if someone writes a crappy driver that scribbles another hosts memory.
Where is the obfuscation bridge covered in more detail? (I've already checked the link in Jason's email.) He says it's highly technical, maybe to some it is, but it only coves installation; not how the obfuscation actually works: how a TLS connection can appears to be HTTP? Someone might say read the source, but my literacy in that area is questionable.
How is it dishonest? It is Amazon's attempt to configure the necessary infrastructure to meet the GigaOm post's needs.
I would definitely still work on my coming SAAS product (see profile) because I know it will make a better life for other freelancers and SBO.
Go vertical, even if it's all just a web host in behind. For example "Web hosting for dental cabinets". Of course something with value added over the host may work better
Why monitoring sucks — for now
Chrome is being used now by "average people". In addition to her personal use (which I started), my mother's school system newly mandates using Chrome.

In addition to her own confusion, add mine when I'm telling her on the phone to look for the "plus" icon at the right, and it's no longer there.

I've had similar issues with Google's Calendar product UI, for example. They just change it, and adopt non-standard and to my mind often rather unobvious controls -- users be damned.

(I won't start on my parents' use of Android phones...)

TL;DR: You want market share, you'd better make sure that market can figure you out.
Short Story - A SENSELESS CONVERSATION
I just tried to find a link but have failed but, a few months ago, there was a video showing a camera-equipped quadcopter that autonomously tracked a water-skier. Not only was the flight path dictated by the course of the water-skier but the camera oriented continuously to frame the water-skier using a radio-beacon on the water-skier. The guy who built the rig had a tutorial site showing how he built the beacon and receiver.

Beyond that, I haven't much insight into how such a platform would be built but, figuring that out is what the no-worries-about-money time would be spent.
I agree that, if full employment is the goal in a free market, wages have to go down and/or capital costs have to go up.

Capital costs will rise when we run out of cheap energy, but I doubt that will be sufficient.

IMO, the ethical way to get there is through a basic income guarantee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee).

With it, minimum wages could be abolished. Then that flood of low-paying jobs will materialize, not out of thin air, but out of China. It will, likely, also bring back jobs in shoe repair and the like.
Before starting a pet project, ask yourself why you wouldn't start a "pet product" instead :)
Watch the "never talk to the police" vido and be educated
"Personally I don't own a facebook account"

Neither does anyone else.
(Disclosure: I am the CEO of Zoho)
We would invite people to try Zoho Mail. We have come a long way in the past few years, and we are investing in a ton of R&D to ensure we are world-class.

We offer our consumer edition free-of-cost and ad-free and we intend to continue this indefinitely, and we charge only business customers. This is the same policy we follow with our Office suite as well - whatever we offer free, we offer it ad-free.
Bene factum.
Thanks. I thought this was the canonical single page URL.
Of course, that hinges on the assumption that "your field" is what you're currently working in. For most people, it isn't and will never be.
Microsoft Store India hacked, database containing plaintext passwords exposed
this is just hyperbole and a bad metaphor.
Thanks, well no wonder my bottles don't last as long as I expect. (<- kidding)

Weird I've thought a shot was an ounce all these years.
Tangentially related -

I would pay for an email service with an off-site delivery for Gmail recipients. Basically, it should hold any email that is to be sent to GMail servers and instead send a note saying "You've got mail, pick it up here https://<url>. Anything like this out there?
Going into college, I had a scholarship with the Air Force ROTC program. I was honest about one specific allergy I had, and was denied my medical exam, thus I couldn't join the Air Force. I still did it for one semester, while applying for a medical waiver, and found out that several of the other cadets (especially those wanting to be pilots) had lied about particular issues. Several of those who did came from military families, who more or less knew how much you could fudge, and what you could get away with, and were open about lying about several more severe issues than mine.

Also one of my friends was rejected, because he was honest and said he smoked weed more than their arbitrary limit of 10 times in the past.
(Disclosure: I am the CEO of Zoho)
If you could take a moment to tell us what you find unusable about Zoho Mail, I would assure you we would listen to the critique seriously (and perhaps even do something about it if we agree!). You can also contact me at svembu at zohocorp com and yes we use Zoho Mail intensively in our 1400 person company.
This line made my day:

Back then, real systems programmers did hexadecimal arithmetic – today, “there’s an app for it!”
This article is a great example of spinning a disadvantage in to a feature. Short-codes are expensive and most small organizations wouldn't or couldn't pay for them anyways. Instead of sharing a short-code among their subscribers SendHub has spun the ten-digit telephone number (NPA+NXX+LOCAL) as a feature, value-add or strength in their product. Great work!
Cool Daily Deals SMS Alerter
TechCrunch profiled a company called Mind Candy recently that is dominating a market in the UK you might not immediately think of a big money spinner: social gaming for 6-10 year olds.

The money comes from subscriptions and... merchandising. Lots and lots merchandising. To the tune of $100 million dollars last year and growing.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/11/moshi-monster-madness-in-wh...
I follow a similar strategy; but for me, 98% of Facebook usage is keeping in touch with people I've known for years, but are geographically distant. They know my nickname, they know how to find me, and FB does in fact help us keep abreast of each others' lives pretty well. (Photos, life events, amusing anecdotes...)

On the very rare occasion I add someone new to Facebook (1/month max) it is not difficult to say "I'm on Facebook as Nickname. My work e-mail address is not connected, use specialized-address." It requires about a minute's out-of-band explanation, but so what? I have no interest in being friended by random strangers.
Fun idea, but by the time I made it to the third challenge, I could no longer submit my solution. I was stuck on the please wait screen. I suspect this is due to the load imposed by being featured on HN right now, but in the interest of scorekeeping, it's not clear how to revert the challenge to regain the lost time points.
As much as I love tools named after memes, I don't understand the purpose of this at all.

Maybe it's just that the website is two sentences so I don't see the use of the product. Do you plan on displaying the information by users and making a social network out of it? Do you plan on monetizing it? Was this just an application you made while learning to program Java and wanted to show off your accomplishment?

What's the story here?
I expect you will have a very hard time outdoing the bicycle.
How could you possibly do that is as interesting a question.

You want something. How do you make it happen?
Well, maybe Mark Zuckerberg does. :)
You guys could play bingo!
I think the hidden subtext behind this question is "what are the good old ideas that still make money on the web THAT SOMEONE CAN BUILD ON THEIR OWN?" At least that's a question that half of the replies answer and one that I'm also interested in answering. Most of what I do can only be done to make a livable amount of money when done at a company with other talented people to fill in for aspects of the business that can't be covered by an individual even if they had all the necessary skills if only because of the limited amount of time in a day. Any ideas for the lone wolf?
GIT vs SVN
Great tip, Sir :D. 'll adopt it right away ...
As someone on the founding team of an identical startup a year ago, I can share experience:

- This market is beyond saturated, with countless large companies competing.

- In our experience, small businesses, teachers, etc. will do everything they can to avoid paying for the service, no matter how much value it creates for them. This is why many of the other providers have an 'ad-supported' free plan - freemium is a tough route here (but I'm sure they're just doing that right now as a ploy).

- The general consensus received is 'Oh we have [Facebook|Twitter|Email|...] for that, and they're all free!'

- SMS is more of a private sanctity that people use for family and friends. Facebook, Twitter, Email can be ignored, filtered using labels and lists, and checked when the person has time. People do not want to be SMS spammed with 'We have freshly baked cakes!' 5 times a day.
There is nothing cheesy about your list.
Beethoven's Appassionata
It's only the mindset of a cult when the theory in question is not demonstrated to work or is not predicated on reason. Suppose I wrote a catapult simulator to test the validity of designs for a competition, and then my simulator ignored physical attributes such as wind speed, material strength, elevation, and weight. The physics being used have been known by the modern world for centuries, but I haven't applied enough of that theory to create a valid simulator.

I do not make any similar claim about the validity of object-oriented programming, but I find your argument as a reaction to my comment rather silly. People make mistakes in paradigms all the time. Read The Daily WTF is you want to observe how badly people can mangle code. I'm not suggesting that all your problems with OOP can be solved by using more OOP, just as I'm not saying that the chance hat a programmer will misunderstand for-loops in Lisp means that we should throw out functional programming.
Ted Nelson was saying pretty much the same thing at about the same time!
I really hope SendHub requires users to explicitly sign up before they receive mass updates. I bet a lot of your customers are going want to import their existing customer database so they can "stay in touch" and send out inane spam about their lunch special.
the visual 3d zooming and panning seems to work well enough to isolate focus on relevant parts while simultaneously keeping the less relevant stuff still visible in the background. the 2d flat track hiding environments are already available, the 3d is this one's edge.

by immersion i meant better coupling between my internal representation of the project/song tracks and how the program's ui represents it

however i probably got too exhuberant at first - i got carried away after the pretty graphics triggered this imaginary trip where i saw the whole thing like a giant construction site / sort of a space dock / giant cavern where my point of view is floating in the midst of it and all around me are these timeline beams which i rearrange amd modify at will. but reality is a bit limiting through the single mouse pointer.

another idea that sunk in since last post is that this program may be more practical as an addon ui envelope of sorts to already existing music production tools. currently only the ui seems to be the core benefit while a high quality music production backbone is a separate huge project in itself.

the ui may attract newbs to toy around, however advanced users will not switch from their already preferred environments unless this tool also has an edge in the music department
Last time people spread panic about this exact same phrasing was when Dropbox updated it's terms, it's needed to provide their services.