skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see Heroku, Beanstalk, et al as the future here. This code-less approach will hit a brick wall very quickly, at which point they'll be writing something not unlike Google AppEngine, which itself suffers from being proprietary.
Sounds very interesting, but I may not be able to join this summer. Is it also going to be biannual?
Sounds fun. I have a great idea but I'm still flying solo, looks like you need a team
Would not having a 3rd party handle the logistics cut into their profit margins? I would assume because they do it in house and at such a large scale they save money vs hiring a 3rd party that would want their own cut raising logistic costs.
Straw man. I said nothing of my opinion on non-volatile memory. I was only pointing out that more and more users are less and less tied to any particular operating system.
Thanks for the reply. I don't use Twitter, hence the minor frustration. Also, wouldn't FB Connect be about as easy to implement while supporting many more potential users? Anyway, I really like the virtual incubator idea; I hope it works out well.
Bitbucket announces teams
YMMV; Annecdotes != data; correlation != causation etc.

but I've known a lot of modest, moderate and heavy recreational ket users - It's been quite a popular recreational drug in the UK for about 15 years. I would perceive (being not a doctor or anything useful) that the proportion of them which are depressed in some way is a noticeably higher than the rest of the people I've ever met.

It's an addictive drug (perhaps not physically, but definitely behaviourally/psychologically). In my opinion it grossly interferes with peoples' ability to interact with those who don't partake. I find it difficult to recall a single example of its use improving someone's well-being - the converse in fact.

Anyway, just adding my observations/bit of life experience.
adBlocker to remove ads from your view

I hate ads, but not quite enough to go round blocking portions of my vision just to avoid seeing 'em. I envisage myself getting run over by an advertising-covered bus.

first person shooter missions with google maps integration. All you need is an empty cow-pasture

Sounds fun, but niche. Laser Tag isn't a big industry.

architects/renovators guiding people through their new/renovated house before the contract' signed

That's more the sort of application I'd envisage.

Or how about this? Imagine a store you'd walk into, get issued a pair of glasses, then you could walk around, look at things, and have information about 'em magically appear? How cool would that be? Answer: awesomely cool... the first time. In year one, that store would be the coolest thing on the planet. But the fiftieth time you go in there.... meh.
Julian Assange loses extradition fight in UK Supreme Court
> i don't believe in paying third party charity

Why? Some are really good: http://givewell.org/international/top-charities/
Google needs to have some sort of brain interface to project glass. I.e. control it via your mind.

The speaking out loud is distracting. It wont work. It's too complicated. And nobody wants to talk with his glasses (like noone wants to talk to Siri in public). People will not use it.
12. If your startup can only afford 16 year old wanna be hackers you will have no problem finding them.
MetaLab launches Flow Concierge personal assistant service
Getting Physical: Tags For Droid
If the title is link-baity I read the comments first.
I am the author of the original HNlike button http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2934178

I have since then modified the Like button (www.hnlike.com) such that it acts as a submit button if the link has not been submitted yet. If it has already been submitted, it simply links to the discussion page in Hacker News. See it in action here: http://hacksandthoughts.posterous.com/

Nice work, jermaink!
Not if you invoke the nuclear option and put every facebook domain (including the fbcdn stuff) in your hosts file as 0.0.0.0
I'm seeing more apps/products that are talking about privacy as a selling point (at least it feels that way). Does this mean that users at large are becoming more savvy about their privacy and data-ownership (and looking for solutions like this)?
Yup. Thanks scirius! Anyone knows what's the one on OSX? (Or some multi-platform library that knows more about this stuff (Windows included))?
Well Steve is a programmer, and from the udacity classes he teaches he seems like a damn good one.
Can anyone tell me why we don't just hook normal RAM up to a small rechargeable battery such that it can maintain its state during a power loss. Alongside that, there is an equivalent amount of flash memory. The flash is never used, except when you get within, let's say, 5% battery life, at which point the entire contents of the RAM are dumped to the flash. Then, on system start up, if the RAM is still loaded, swell. If there is a ram image on the flash drive, load that and continue as normal.

Isn't this essentially NVRAM? What are the downsides to it?
Youtube handles 3.7x10⁹ frames per day (assuming 12 fps video, which is a low estimate). That's 3.7 billion frames that have to be converted and checked against an enourmous database of copyrighted content.

You're right that G+ doesn't, but FB doesn't have anything on Google on scaling.
He imagines that the feed from, oh, say, a baseball player? (football is too violent) will, someday, be wearing one of these, and then you'll get to see the game from their perspective while they're doing other things, and it'll be awesome.

... I'll believe it's awesome, with copious amounts of editing. If you're just watching it raw, it'll be disorienting and shaky and distracting. :P I'm also dubious exactly what baseball team would bother to wear these things in the general case. Presumably they would just be a distraction to the players. Maybe someone like, oh, downhill skiiers would have a better time of things?
Ask HN: Constraint Solving Libraries for Automated Scheduling?
I've been searching for an existing scheduling solution where the primary goal isn't filling set shift times, but instead supplying a certain amount of coverage at each hour of the day based upon a set of constraints (listed here: http://www.nathanhammond.com/a-scheduling-problem).

There are two existing categories of businesses that come to mind that might have this type of use pattern:

* Medical facilities
* Call centers

I've reached out (via phone!) to multiple companies that provide services to these business categories but I've been told by salespeople that they either don't have this sort of functionality, that it is so specifically tailored to the target market as to be useless to me, that I shouldn't be pursuing this (!), or they assume that because I'm doing this for a non-profit I'm not willing to pay for it (my money is just as green!).

At this point (unless you're aware of somebody that will sell their product to me) I was wondering what tools I should use to build this.

My first thought was to use something like Prolog, but because I'm not expecting there to be a "perfect" solution, I don't know how I would make that work.

After a bit of research I found Drools Planner which appears to be the 800lb gorilla, but before heading down that path I was wondering if any of you were aware of other lighter-weight tools that would make this easier to build in my spare time?

Thanks!
The wide proliferation of really terrible ones seems to tie into some murky SEO tactic of getting a designer to whip you up something 'viral', stick it on the www.totallylegitadultdiplomaswithfreeviagra.com root, and then have a cute little 'share this' link that gives you the url along with a blob of html stuffed with invisible SEOjunk keywords, and rely on people's laziness and stupidity to get the backlinks flowing.

I recall reading a good article on it a while back, but oddly enough, "SEO infographics" is now a sufficiently desirable niche that there are junk infographics just waiting to take your call.
If the business proposition was simply "make another Visa" then sure, the proposition would be uninteresting.

On the other hand, 2-3% of that $4 trillion is being consumed by the payment processing chain. Only a portion of it goes to Visa; the rest presumably go to banks and other layers of the service. Facebook potentially could, by virtue of being a trusted holder of identity worldwide, subsume all layers of this chain.

Look at it from this perspective: It currently "costs" 2-3% of a transaction to make a CC purchase. That's a huge dead weight loss. Is Facebook capable of using its brand, reach, and identity database to create a more efficient system?
State Agency Censored Online Health Food Advice Column
Makes you wonder why the Russians are only just investing in stealth technology. The US has been doing it for more than three decades.
Very true, but when they started working on a driver-less car in 2006, they were still thought of as a search company. They hadn't yet bought Youtube or DoubleClick.
Where do friends fit in? You seem to think that they are expendable since you don't see those Saturday soccer mornings as particularly important.
Are these people who are just causing problems or just want things other than what you are providing? Those are two different problems with two different answers.
Show HN: Carmivore.com (open sourced!)
I don't think that's a just argument; a database is just a means of storing information which is parsed data, the important part there is the transition from data to information, not the fact that they use a database to store the information. The reason that they are all top websites is because of their first stakes, ingenuity, pioneering, etc.
I'm convinced that even if someone did prove that a basic assumption of modern physics is wrong, it would automatically be assumed in turn that the author is a crackpot, hence the work can be ignored. I'm convinced that the physics community isn't interested in the slightest in new ideas. Of course I'm automatically a crackpot (even beyond a conspiracy theorist) for even suggesting that.

As an example to how bad things have become in the realm of physics, it's safe to say that the vast majority of thinking adults believe that black holes exist, because so much major media has told them so. But when you look deeper you find that there's no definitive evidence. Sites like the Chandra X-Ray Observatory admit that, deep in their FAQ, but in words that many people can misconstrue as a technicality. When I point out in physics discussions that that there's no definitive evidence of black holes, I'm automatically labeled a crackpot, especially by the working physicists. One of my books suggests that this is a grant problem, as in black holes bring in a lot of grant money, so physicists must be careful to pretend that black holes are a definite reality in nature.
I'm currently working on a little project that has a new spin on Pastebin. I'm playing with a Bayesian classifier (or attempting and learning a lot) to auto-detect the language and appropriately set the syntax highlighting automatically without a dropdown and a reload. The paste will also be saved automatically so there isn't a page load for anything.

I'm still hacking away and haven't got very far whilst I'm getting my head around the classifier. One other problem I've noticed is keeping track of ownership. One solution I have in mind is that there is no ownership: when it's modified it generates a new link to share with. It might be good for very simple code collaboration - I've tried doing this with Pastebin over Facebook chat and this should make the process a whole lot smoother.

I also need to think about how training will work. I envisioned it so that the user can train it i.e if it guesses wrong, the user would correct it by selecting the proper language and the program will learn for the future. I'd be putting a lot of faith in potential future users but I'm not expecting it to be big or anything, maybe just something me and my friends can share and work on code friction-free (some don't have GitHub/BitBucket/etc accounts, one doesn't like CAPTCHAs at all).

I'm currently going off 100% self-education here too so I'm having to get to grips with some other maths stuff like some symbols (such as | means conditional probability and _not_ to be confused logical OR), so if the project falls flat on its face at least I learned something from it :)
Don't forget Google Docs, Maps, StreetView, Gmail...
OK, thanks.. actually I just got an email, so maybe I was signed up already, sorry.
Unicode In Python, Completely Demystified [2008]
Not to hijack the thread too heavily, but is there an easy way to add Twitter handles after you've signed up as a startup? I submitted just with one cofounder's and need to add more (forgot to throw them all in). Thanks, and this is a great idea; looking forward to participating.
A world without LEGO
Serious question - how is that different from this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNMyj2ftuZA
You can legally invest in startups without being Reg D accredited. However, most professionally-managed startups will not take investments from non-accredited investors because they don't want to go through the hassle of making sure they qualify for exemptions from Reg D.

Private Placements and Intrastate Offerings are the two primary exemptions to Reg D, and they swallow up the rule in general practice. Reg D does not affect most companies; indeed, it is only an issue in the startup world because some lawyers have tried to make it an issue in an effort to drum up business.
How to convert a bookmarklet into a Chrome extension
I'm building a legal billing software that removes a lot of unnecessary complexity for solos and small firms.
DEF CON 20 Capture The Flag next saturday, June 2nd
If they included a restaurant with a 3 month waiting list they'd be setting up a lot of their readers for disappointment.

Unless they're planning in advance. I'd be kinda pissed if I arrived in a city and learned there was a kick-ass French restaurant but was not warned to book in advance when that was a real possibility and I could have done so.
I remember my parents called all mp3 players "iPod" long before the appstore was announced. The first generations of iPods might have been easier to use than the other mp3 players at the time, but that alone does not explain the huge adoption by the general population. Marketing definitively had a lot to do with it, probably more than the quality of the product.
If there's a Boston area dinner, I'm interested.
I am much more skeptical of using FB connect than using Twitter for authentication as a user.

I guess this is because connecting my Facebook account will mean that I am sharing a lot of new information about myself with the service whereas with something like Twitter there's just the authentication bit that's shared - there's no new data that now becomes available to speak off. My tweets were already public.
Mitt Romney iPhone app misspells America, sets Internet ablaze (gallery)
Why not just make it a branching model? Whenever a new user edits a paste it creates a branch off that paste. It allows seamless sharing, without links. Kinda like this: http://srctree.net/
How to Focus on Your Startup
Go to youtube right now and watch any number of first person downhill skiing videos. What does Glass add to that?
Hey guys, we just launched our coming soon page to start some traction and hopefully gather some interested developers' emails along the way :)

We decided to open source the (Rails) app because it has many useful features and functionalities, like simple admin, integration with Mailchimp, deployed jobs, capistrano recipe,... Pretty much everything a coming soon page needs.

Oh and it was designed by http://dribbble.com/faresfarhan (he's an awesome guy!)

Thank you!
Hell no. Zuckerberg has several billion dollars in the bank. He could buy several countries. He doesn't need my money, so he's got to have an ulterior motive if he's seeking outside funding.
I'm working in a 2D RPG in ImpactJS. Spent the last week getting HTML 5 caching to work on desktop and iOS, then put the finishing touches on a bash script to update the cache manifest, compress all my JS files and rsync them to the server.
something along the lines of giving the bad behavior a huge negative reward (penalty) and you end up automating that as well :).
12:
4 iMac
4 PC
2 Macbook Air
2 iPhone

Technically I also own 16x4 core servers in Germany as well, totalling 76 cores!

edit: ps3/wii also, but not sure on the core counts
Which, by the way, is just the same day as the Internet Problem Solving Contest (IPSC), http://ipsc.ksp.sk/
I'm building a web application for stormwater engineering that integrates local jurisdictional requirements of computation, design and reporting with industry-specific project management.
Yep, just go to http://s12.nreduce.com/startup/edit. Let us know if you have any issues editing your team profile.

Thanks!
No, I don't, but that's a good observation.

I think the simplest answer is that the iPhone must be providing enough features for power users, even if not all the features they want.
I've spent most of my career in e-commerce and I've dealt with these people for years. Your best recourse is to get rid of them, quickly. Seriously. Why allow them to drain your resources when they could be draining your competitor's instead?

Back in the day, I worked for a large e-commerce company. We started a project to track customer value. Simplified, customer value = total_purchases - (total_returns * return_processing_cost_factor) . We had customers who had made dozens of purchases but had negative value to us because they returned almost everything they ordered. We wanted to keep free, no-hassle returns but these people were abusing us. The only solution? Get rid of them as quickly as possible. We discussed--half seriously--giving them gift certificates to competitors and even closing their accounts. There are plenty of less-harsh methods, too. We talked about identifying their Caller ID when they called customer service to make a return and intentionally putting them on hold for a little bit longer.

Since you aren't really an e-commerce company, your solution will be different. Figure out a metric for customer value and act on that metric. Whether it's discontinuing service, or moving them to slower servers, or de-prioritizing their customer service inquiries, look for ways to gently encourage them to go elsewhere.

You can't feel too badly about this. There are some real leeches out there, happy to bleed you dry and maximize their benefits while minimizing your profits. These people ruin good things for everyone else.
Oh wow, that's the perfect thing and achieves what I need and more. I didn't even think about being able to see the history of a piece of code.

Thanks for showing me this. Much appreciated.
Yep, we'll see how it goes. We're hoping to have more batches!
Very much agreed. From a HN account that isn't immediately associable with the source of the story, this is little more than astroturfing. It's not as if they're unheard of on HN in the first place.
I view Google as a simulation company. The end game will be a real time whole earth simulation, with predictive power, and the associated opportunity for massive profits in any field where being ahead of the competition is an advantage.
I´m rewriting the strategy, moving from the app approach towards a html5 interfase guerrilla
I'm working on what I call "semantic version control". Namely, instead of diffing and merging text, the goal is to parse the program and diff/merge the AST.

EDIT: A better way to state the goal: I want to take advantage of the underlying structure of a computer program to inform the diff/merge. The first step just happens to be diffing ASTs, but I go beyond this.

I already have some neat features--for example, I can detect moves fairly robustly. That is, if you move a function, I can see that as a single action even if you modify the function a little bit when moving it (e.g. rename the parameters). Also, there is already more information for resolving conflicts in a three-way merge.

Unfortuntely, the performance is currently horrible, which makes it completely unusable. Once I fix that (I just need to memoize the diff function properly) and fiddle around with some of the algorithms a bit, I'll have something interesting (I hope :)). After that, I'll probably add a UI.

Also, I should add that I'm not the only person with this idea. A lot of the early design and features are based on YDiff[1], although I used no code from there. The merging and some of the other stuff I'm working on right now is more original though (I think).

[1]: http://yinwang0.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/ydiff/
Since somebody has to ask stupid questions -- what if I launched a new, different product every week?

I get how confusing that might look at demo day, but could one 'graduate' doing things that way?
i agree with you. all the haters on the project glass concept are not thinking of all the cool yet un thought of applications.

police officer gives you a hard time? not when you have these babies on.

-any- interaction with a portable or remote electronics could be done through glass

contextual info lookup, like price matching, comparison shopping, maps, directions, all of it

entertainment, eventually vr type emersion.
how is it easier for the user?
I'm working on http://judgmint.org -- we're turning guilt into money that can be used for social good. Ideally we'll be able to collect some interesting information about people's moral positions and biases.
It would be interesting to know how many Christian Hackers believe in Evolution.
sbashyal, I really liked your work, which is comprising much more than my few lines of css. Also, I think displaying the current HN score is way better than the (indirect) external possibility to upvote items via linking. Last feature caused big discussions as you know :)
I've really been liking the Mac App Store. Great potential for selling apps as an independent developer, and not nearly as saturated at the iPhone/Android app stores. Such as...

EdgeCase:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/edgecase/id513826860?mt=12
We do, something like http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255 or http://www.anandtech.com/show/1697/5 although I don't think they actually have a full NV backing store. They definitely exist though, and have done even before SSDs, it just had a normal disk hanging off it.

Battery-backed cache has probably been around even longer in write caches for large RAID systems.

The 5% power and shutdown is also how the Macbook laptops handle sleep. Sleep mode is a low power nothing-but-ram mode, and when the battery gets too low, it goes into 'safe sleep', basically a dump-to-disk all-powered-off hibernate.

The main reason it's not all that common is that for the sort of workloads you're prepared to pay for a shitload of RAM, you're probably just using it as a cache for a DB or some monster app, and actually keeping it around isn't that much of a priority. You've got failover somewhere else in the stack, and it's one less thing to buy and maintain.

The other critical flaw is that there is a (potentially huge) performance hit in presenting as a disk vs hanging off the northbridge MMU. Even the latest in new fancy SATA is hilariously slow compared to the actual memory bus (6Gbps for SATA3 vs maybe 100Gbps for DDR3[1]), and having all the filesystem abstraction on top, as in the titular article of this thread mentions, is a whole lot more overhead.

So yeah. We can. Sometimes people do. But it's probably easier and better to just stick it in the actual RAM slots, and use it differently for everything except 5-second boot times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths#Stor...