skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Win8 Store isn't even open to all submissions at this point. Microsoft has only issued a handful of keys to selected developers, which allows them to submit apps. Without this key, you can't even make a developer account.

If you don't have a key, you can still develop Metro apps with VS 2011 Beta and test them using the Windows app certification utility that's included to see if the app would hypothetically pass.

I suppose this limits the growth of the Win8 Store at first, but I'm still surprised that there are only 99 apps given how many keys were issued. Also, I believe Microsoft is funding the development of apps by some popular app developers for iOS and Android.
Hypothesis: this would lead to less innovation over time as VCs would start looking for less risky, more guaranteed wins.
It could be that due to the inherent lack of ability to perform this in a controlled manner it is not being looked at. I can't imagine there's a line of people waiting to be put in a near-death situation for an experience you have ~16% (?) of having, with the risk being death or brain damage.

Even if you could find volunteers, I'd like to see an institute willing to take on the impending lawsuit should something ever go wrong.
AutoRef is bringing car buying into the 21st century
> Then I will pull the results off Amazon and decrypt them on a machine which is not even connected to the network.

What? How does the machine -the machine not connected to the network- get the results off Amazon?
As unstructured data heats up, will you need a license to webcrawl?
Maybe we should take up a collection for the poor, impoverished startup CEO's who only earn $150,000 a year. That's only three times the median household (not individual) income. How do they get by!?
Open Source Social Network Built on web2py Python Framework
Why don't these people fix something that's broken? I.e. do something to Gmail or Google Reader.
I'm not an expert, but I know some of them faked IMEI/IMSI/some acronym numbers to pretend to be from the official carrier for the iPhone. IIRC, that is also illegal (as is the emergency services call in the newer ones).
So why would anyone use stylesheets less readable than the baseline provided by not having stylesheets?
That wouldn't really work. You can't just bolt on concurrency support.

IF you spend about 2 weeks working on erlang, it becomes really easy to use.

The learning curve is not nearly as steep as it appears-- its just that the syntax initially looks so alien that its quite scary.

I know the feeling, I went thru it, but it is well worth it.
I looked at the word technical and instantly knew that it was suggesting the question if I write code. I am not a coder, I am familiar with it, but I am closer to the guy trying to build a company by getting a group of coders together. The point is that nobody should be offended, in fact it is even ok to believe your technical if other techs believe you are not. Any startup needs all the cogs in the wheel to run, from the simpletons to the most advanced, and we all should embrace the role we find ourselves in and change it if we believe we were meant for something else.
Ouch. Thanks for that, it's disabled now.
Oh man... I just realised that folks might think that I created this! I didn't - I thought it was awesome so I posted it up here. Sorry if I misled anyone...
> Then you would suspect wrong

Then you're wrong about math and downvote to disagree.
In Noisy Digital Era, 'Elegant' Internet Still Thrives
I used to do the same thing he describes.
I had a core2duo in one PC and an i7 in the other. Both powered by Nvidia graphics and on 64bit OS'es.

Both Linux (arch) and Windows 7 worked without a complaint when swapping hard disk between the two. I do remember that back in the days you'd get an instant blue screen as soon as you change anything important hardware related on your rig.

The only risk factor I can see is that the hard drive might get damaged during transport.
When I was doing a lot of Windows development and upgrading laptops a lot, I reached the point that I just imaged a laptop to a VMWare image. I could copy that image back and forth anywhere I needed to work - home desktop, work laptop, work ESX server, etc.
>That is to say I wonder whether people confuse nostalgia with regret.

This is such an excellent point. This "dying patients" list greatly ignores the opportunity cost of getting to where you managed to get to in life.

Lets say I grant these wishes. I wave my magic wand and you work less. Now your memories are full of being poor, sending your kids to some shitty school, getting robbed in a poor neighborhood as opposed to working more but being able to live in a better neighborhood, going on more vacations, having extra money.

So its like saying, "I want my cake to eat it too." Well, that wasn't possible when you were younger and its certainly not possible on your deathbed.
Your Privacy Is Tested With Every Click You Make
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minotaur_IV

The lifter rocket costs $50mil, so there are few targets in the world worth throwing this hardware at.
> Perhaps the underlying societal problem is that many hold in contempt ideas too complex for sound bite summarization?

That's always been the case for most people; the difference now is, more and more of the 'most people' group have access to global audiences.
Yes! Web companies need to spend more time testing on small monitors with slow data links. The world doesn't all have huge screens and fat pipes.
i'm on the minority, but i find that the craigslist UI is pretty good. all the "flows" work pretty well and are well explained. i hope that doesn't change and that all they do is make the site easier to read.
My old stoner underachievers who never finished school still live in the same shitty hometown, got married young to the same high school girlfriend, have mental illness/drug issues, have kids who hate them, and otherwise live miserable lives.

I think the whole "be an underachiever, there's happiness in it you stupid capitalist" is something of a myth. Truth is, life is little more than trade-offs and opportunity costs. Truth is that if you want something of a comfortable life, want to not live in the ghetto, and do things like have expendable income, take foreign vacations, etc you need to give a good chuck of your life to work.
We look all over the country, but Netflix (where I work and hire for) doesn't really do remote employees, so we ask them to move to Los Gatos. Unfortunately this means we are looking at people who are already willing to move.
Good points. The main goal was to make a site that let the visitor consume great content from HN, but without accumulating the clutter of multiple windows and tabs, and without the hassle of hitting the back button over and over to go back to HN after reading an article.

For future functionality I would like to add the ability to post links to the original stories to social networks right from the UI, to mark certain stories as "watched" and to receive either push notifications or AJAX-refreshed notifications when a story you are "watching" gets a new comment or when you get a reply to a comment you have posted.
Mechanical Turk Tips for Startups
Nice work. Does it support connecting to a Replica Set? Have you thought about turning this into a hosted solution?
To those wondering about hardware differences - Just run your OS in VM. With modern processors you won't be able to tell the difference performance wise. Also, it's easy to make a backup of the image when you are wrapping up at work/home. This way, if you lose the drive or it fails - you will have a backup of your most recent work. I have seen people doing this for at least the last 10 years (I am surprised it is news).

I agree with what some others have posted about using an SSD with eSata or USB3. This really is a great way to go. I wold recommend also throwing some kind of encryption in the mix (either encrypt the hard drive or use BitLocker or something comparable withing the OS since you will no doubt be carrying sensitive data or intellectual property around.
These type of doom and gloom speculation articles are completely unnecessary. We're 5 months out and given that MS has stated that all WP8 apps will run on Win8, they're looking at ~100K apps in some form out of the gate.
insightful extrapolation of the previous year
I didn't downvote you - I don't have the rep to downvote anybody :-)

I'm not making this up. I know many good developers that do not have a math background. I know people who have a heavy math background who are lousy at development (and it looks like I'm not the only one - see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3872269)

A bit more than "you're wrong" would help with reasoned debate of course...
Have you looked at the US's defense budget? When you have money like this you don't need to worry too much about practical uses. Imagine if this money went unspent, Americans would get a tax break or heaven forbid better healthcare or something.

Seriously, a good chunk of what the US researches is done strictly because we don't question the defense budget and the contractors and bureaucrats know how to game the system and create jobs/fortunes for the defense industry.

As far as the whole "herp derp its not an icbm," well something tells me that if the Chinese had this and hit our carrier groups with it(1), we'd respond with nuclear strikes instantly. If we send 10 of these towards downtown Beijing, its nuclear war as usual fellas. I think the subtleties between kinetic and nuclear will be lost on the generals and leaders who make retaliatory strike decisions.

(1) The PRC is playing with all manner of kinetic kill vehicles and probably have a carrier killer mounted on several warships and subs, so this isn't purely conjecture
I'm not really responding to the idea of having a list; I'm responding to the quesiton of why advocacy of certain "libertarian crypto" type positions may have sort of gone away a lot lately.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a curmudgeon, but what I'm basically saying is that there are a lot of people out there arguing for inane positions, and it's drowning and/or cancelling out the people arguing for good positions. And just generally makes their lives less enjoyable.
Mutually Assured Destruction is alive and well and many countries still maintain a good stock of nuclear weapons for this purpose.
Hey, thank you for the critique. It's a rare gift to find someone who's willing to disagree + solid reasoning + references to existing work. Thank you.

In a later post, you mentioned mapping teeth with a toothbrush. That's not a trivial thing to do - without a fixed frame of reference it would not only be very complex mathematically, but also pretty unreliable.

Of course. That is why I'd incorporate a frame of reference into the design of the toothbrush. The point of the post was to quickly paint a picture of what "the future" could be like if I were given time and freedom to pursue these designs. I assumed that if anyone was interested in the details, then they'd simply ask me to provide them.

The toothbrush contains two technologies that enable it to build a map of the surfaces of the teeth you brush. #1: a three-axis gyroscope + accelerometer (e.g. same as an iPhone's). This gets me the rotation of the toothbrush relative to the direction of gravity. Now, of course, this would not be enough by itself; we also need some way of determining the position of the bristles within the mouth. This is accomplished with sensor #2: along the length of the toothbrush near the mouthpiece, there are dozens of tiny light sensors. The more the toothbrush is inserted into the mouth, the less light that reaches the light sensors. This gets you a reading of "how deeply is the toothbrush into the mouth?" which you can easily combine with "what are the current angles of rotation?" to conclude e.g. "the bristles are therefore currently brushing the front surface of your bottom-left-rearmost molar."

Light sensors are easy to work with, but probably not the most reliable way of doing this. I would look into using some kind of sonar sensor, possibly. Or you could do something as simple as "detect which part of the toothbrush that your lips are currently touching"; that might work too.

The goal is straightforward: "to determine an accurate-enough approximation of how deeply the toothbrush is currently inserted into the mouth", because that can be combined with the rotation angles to give you a solid frame of reference.

I of course don't know which technique will prove to be the most pragmatic, since I haven't tested any them yet. =) This is a solvable problem, however.

I've got to run for now, so unfortunately I ran out of time to address your other [excellent] points. But I'm not sure anyone is even reading this discussion anymore anyway. Feel free to post a reply if you'd like to continue, or shoot me an email (see profile). Thanks again!
His post is right in that he says you outsource things that don't give you a competitive advantage. But this is not necessarily synonymous with things you don't care about.

For example, our company has an email newsletter we sell for which we evaluated multiple email service providers (ESPs) and ultimately agreed Mailchimp was best. This newsletter is a major source of revenue for us so we absolutely care about it, but we know that the value we bring is the content/data in the newsletter and not the delivery and other intricacies ESPs deal with.

Ensuring the team gets paid regularly and we're not running afoul of the IRS and NYS withholding requirements is absolutely critical, but building payroll processing capabilities internally is not something we're spending time on.
If an employee does NOT publicly speak about her or his experience she or he is providing the company with less of an incentive to value his or her experience there.

The public image of a company has value to a company and if the company knows that an employee can speak out about the employee's experience at the company they will have more of an incentive to ensure that employee's experience is pleasant because to do otherwise would harm their public image and their hiring abilities.

By being silent you are creating information asymmetry(the employer knows more than the employee) in the job market which contributes to people making less informed decisions. Less informed decisions leads to inefficiency.

The mature thing to do is to inform the public to ensure that competition between companies does not stop.

By being silent you are throwing wrenches in the wheels of regulated market capitalism.
This made me go check our Clojure code base at work: including comments, docstrings and whitespace, our functions average about 11.5 lines each (and I know we could clean up some of our earlier code to reduce that average). So, yeah, I'll consider that evidence that real world Clojure is pretty tidy.
Kay's mob must agree. Their current research language, COLA, handles Smalltalk messages with Scheme methods. I haven't seen much code, but the screenshots are impressive.
Show HN: HN4D: Recent Hacker News Front Page Activity
Finally a craigslist redesign
I have always suspected the "never talk about being screwed over/speak ill of a previous employer" meme is strikingly similar to the kind of meme sociopaths would want to become "the norm".

Not sociopathy. Managerial tribalism. To be fair, you probably wouldn't want to work with a company that didn't respect technical talent, right? Well, that goes both ways. Most people making hiring decisions are managers, and therefore don't want to hire someone who seems to dislike managerial authority. Managers and executives tend to protect their own.

I agree with the "no-badmouthing policy" on job interviews. In that context, time is so limited that wasting any on what went wrong at previous companies is just worthless. We're here to talk about the future, not the past. On the other hand, that principle shouldn't have to extend to all quarters of a person's life. I don't think OP is a loser because he failed at Microsoft, nor that he's a douchebag for exposing corporate silliness. I think he should have that right.

The disquieting thing about managerial tribalism is that the good protect the bad. No programmer would argue against the fact that there are some people in software engineering jobs who don't deserve to be there... but managers have a hard time admitting that the bottom 40% of their tribe (at least) are counterproductive, unethical, or even destructive.
As does Illinois, only the scale is 1:125 million and it only extends to Pluto:

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/11386
For those that haven't yet had the chance of reading a foundational text related to Cypherpunks and Crypto-Anarchy, there is "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" by Tim May (back then a Chief Scientist at Intel) -> http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html
Totally agree with your critique, but maybe you can enlighten me.. whats the advantage of even having the post numbers? Seems like unnecessary information.
A Readable Conway's Game of Life
Yeah a directory would be great.there's so many projects that do great work but need help. Maybe there should be an app for that :)
I do not have a lack of perspective. I have been a server, a security guard, worked for minimum wage at a beagle shop etc. Now my job is much better than those jobs, but I still remember how "tough it was". It was tough in the sense that stress came from uncertainty in paychecks and in social status. But, that type of stress does not compare to being the CEO of even a small company.

If you make $100k in most cities that is pretty good, in SF or NY $100k a year means you have roommates. Do you want the CEO of a company that has the potential to make billions of dollars for investors to worry about who's turn it is to clean the kitchen?

Of course not, that is the most ridiculous thing I have ever read. It literally makes zero sense.
I would think any sufficiently senior UI/design person hasn't touched C/C++ in a while.
Best Tips On Configuring Amazon Web Services
That's a great idea. Now you've got me thinking... Initial hurdle is I'm in Europe, based in Switzerland and kickstarter T&C require US citizenship. Looking for solutions right now (anyone with advice appreciated)
This seems to be a very poor comparison, remarkably so in fact. You are comparing a new ecosystem to that of one which required absolutely no change (and in fact, is still dominated by applications built/designed for an iPhone, but stretch miserably to work on iPads).

There are lots of legitimate challenges that Windows faces with this push, and lots of interesting interactions between these issues, but you fail to outline any of them.

To the many posters who have not yet written application for Windows 8, let me assure you that for the vast majority of applications which are currently available on Windows, building the application using the new SDK will not only be quicker, but also have much better products. You can also import almost all of your old codebase, the main changes are with respect to asynchronous IO, which creates a hugely different user experience, and of course poses difficulties to developers who are less accustomed.

@Patrick Moorhead, is there any logic behind your choice of 5K as the number of applications? It seems to have come out of the blue, and not from any analysis.

Excuse me if I seem critical, I guess coming from HackerNews I was expecting comments and insight.
Sorry, I certainly didn't mean to pick on anyone (and that was after my time, so I don't know the story any more than you do).
The newer Groups have up/down votes for questions. It looks like GAE group doesn't have them enabled. You can see it on the Google+ group.

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/google-plus-developers/JBF...
Groups has code highlighting but you have to use the web interface.

https://support.google.com/groups/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...
TV-based botnets? DoS attacks on your fridge? More plausible than you think
Turning down the volume: sound-cloaking acoustic metamaterials are on the way
So you want the CEO of a company to commute rather than focused on adding value for shareholders?
Some possibilities:

* They had good UI designers to start with, so no major changes were needed.

* By now the site appearance is part of their brand, so they don't want to change it.

* Amazon may now be such a complex site that a change would be expensive.

* It's not broken, so there's no need to fix it.
In lthread, a coroutine lib, (http://github.com/halayli/lthread) you can make blocking calls inside coroutines. It gives you the lightness of event-driven, the advantages of threads, and the simplicity of sequential statements. And it can scale over cores.
Personally I have been thinking that anti-discrimination laws are fundamentally flawed for a while now.
Notes to mods:

A: it's Purdue

B. the original article title is:

Thermoelectric Coating Harnesses Wasted Heat Energy
I agree. It actually seems really reasonable. You're fairly likely not to forgot something (whether by habit or by constant checking) when it actually starts costing you a lot of money.
How Apple Killed Cinema
I see the core ideas being diluted into Wikileaks, Anonymous, etc. Those are bad representations of the core ideas.

There are not many people who can lucidly translate the understanding of technology's issues into the language of non-techies. It's not sufficient to be technically correct: it's required that the presentation works as well.

Techies seem to have allergies to other cultures that don't have similar value systems and have largely failed in translating our concerns to the broader world. The old word 'luser' adequately explains our shortcoming.
Drawing the line
I agree, but I think some of that might boil down to different priorities, rather than design per se. EBay hasn't slowly turned into the rather annoying mess it is because of incompetent design, but imo mostly because of aggressive monetization, which hands non-negotiable constraints to their designers. Craigslist just doesn't care about monetizing beyond their comfortable income level, so there's less push from management to compromise the design. As a result, it might be possible for them to create a "Web 2.0" looking site without pulling in the bad aspects of other sites, because the bad aspects are due to the aggressive monetization rather than to the Web-2.0-ness.
How science failed during the Gulf oil disaster
They are drilling in my backyard right now for natural gas.
It looks like altavista.digital.com and babelfish have "been excluded from the Wayback Machine" so we can't see what they looked like back then unless anyone has kept a screenshot for 15 years or has a book or newspaper with a screenshot in it.
I do not give back. This blog post is definitely helping to motivate me.

It's funny that I think I'm too bad at coding to give back, but a great way to get a lot better is to just try.

I'm going to find something fun I want to work on and just do it already.
You don't need anything but assembler. Yet you just named three languages and not a one was assembler. Once we've admitted that the niceties offered by more specialized languages are worthwhile, that "you don't need a new language" argument becomes a whole lot less compelling. For all you know, maybe programming this stuff in C++ is like programming sequential code in assembler — dismissing it just because the tool you have can be made to do the same thing isn't bad (I'd never disparage people who accomplish things), but it doesn't make a very compelling case for anything besides your own comfort zone.