skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The popular (and free) thing to do is to use SMS gateways (such as sending an email to <number>@txt.att.net). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_gateways

And in the future: http://searchyc.com
What does FC add to this besides saving a login step?

Also, how will it make money?
The Reality of Enso
That's very cool. JSON seems a natural conceptual match for querying data like that. I think a different concrete syntax might be more readable for me - but could just be my unfamiliarity. And JSON is an instant, no-work solution, so there's no downside. It would be good to see your project.
email to sms is not pretty reliable not to mention that it imposes the requirement that you need to know the user's carrier.
Well this is just too interesting, and I should stop putting off this blog thing.
Yahoo picks new CEO to replace Yang
Could This Be Your All-in-One Social Network?
One caveat in A/B tests -- you have to be careful in deciding what metric you use to pick the winner. They used the number of immediate conversions. But maybe they just increased signups of freeloaders who will abandon the account within 30 days. And maybe not. Another, possibly better, metric would be the number of paying customers after 30 days, rather the number of conversions today.
Apple plans to integrate iPhone Mapping and Calendar apps
Electric cars disappointed in 2008 — and 2009 won’t be different
Heh... ok, riffing off this clearly silly idea, what about something that converts your tweets to smoke signals (using morse code?)
how about blocking coordination between groups of hamas fighters in their movements on the ground in gaza opposite the idf?
the requirement would be more that you need to actively be pursuing the thing you're patenting, instead of simply reserving the idea.

Perhaps the patent-holder could be required to maintain a website that shows how to reduce the invention to practice. However, all US patents are already published online, and, by definition, they all show how to reduce to practice. A caveat is that patents can sometimes remain secret for a number of years before being disclosed by the USPTO. Besides that, patents are enforced at least back to their initial filing dates (not their issuing dates), and therefore a company could be working on a product for several years without having any way of knowing that a patent on that product had been applied-for before they started.

-

The USPTO does have a method in place for encouraging patent-holders to market their inventions. It is the patent maintenance-fee schedule:

http://robertplattbell.blogspot.com/2007/10/understanding-ma...

U.S. Maintenance fees are progressive, so each successive fee is much more than the previous one. The idea is to encourage inventors to allow their Patents to expire unless they are actually being used. The Government does not want inventors to “sit on” Patents with the hope that maybe somebody will someday infringe, and then they can sue. With the Maintenance Fees, it is “use it or lose it”.

Maintenance Fees are raised periodically along with all other Patent Fees, so it is hard to say exactly what they will be. At the time of this writing (July, 2005) the fees are as follows:

YEAR Large Entity Small Entity
3 Years: $900 $450
7 Years: $2,300 $1,150
11 Years: $3,800 $1,900

If these maintenance fees are not presently doing the job, perhaps they should be raised. How about multiplying the figures above by 1,000? That way, the final maintenance fee for a large entity would be $3.8 million.
beware looking for this on youtube; youtube is mono =)
Distinguishing decorative from meaningful elements in UI design
Anyone interested in setting up a get-together on the weekend?
I've seen his collection on TV a few times. They used two of his tanks in an episode of Mythbusters, and the restoration of the Panzer tank mentioned in the above article was chronicled on a program called "Tank Overhaul":

http://military.discovery.com/convergence/tank-overhaul/epis...

His family has my condolences. Hopefully they'll now find a way to open his collection to the public.
The advantage of a college degree is not just salary: the jobs available to college graduates carry better working conditions, hours, and prestige. Evaluations using a net present value calculation are missing the point.
He left out "thanks for your patience."
I think that's a stellar idea, but I can't commit to regular weekends. I think it's very important that someone will be there every time.
I think experiments make sense for startups too. Maybe especially for startups. The basic mind switch is that failure is expected, your hypothesis has a chance to be disproven. Too often in the non-startup world and in the world of bureaucracies, failure is not an option. It must be carpeted over and the failures are ostracized.
> What is your reasoning that led to your conclusion that patents should issue before they are qualified to issue?

The observation that there are a _ton_ of patents issued to "inventions" that aren't even developed yet. That might theoretically be a bar to a patent being issued, but in practice all you need is the idea, the money, and a write-up.
When viewing messages on the Threads page often you have to click parent multiple times to see what the thread was in it's entirety.

Putting in a link maybe called thread start and making it go to the beginning of a thread would be a good idea.

Example:

5 points by vaksel 2 days ago | link | thread start | parent | flag

parent brings you up one message, thread start would put you at the beginning of the thread.
I tried to downmod you, but accidentally clicked upmod :(

We need a way to undo votes.
One of the comments is good. Basically, it asks, why the need for semicolons at all?
The Million Dollar 'Man-Page' (Tattoo Advertising)
No, it's just old and might get a few heads turned from some people who say, "Yeah, that guy's a nonconformist. Just like me!" Then nothing happens.

We need to do something against the man.
We played with multivariate testing at the last company I was at, using an expensive platform built by Optimost (now part of Interwoven):

http://www.interwoven.com/components/pagenext.jsp?topic=PROD...

(We also paid a company that did optimization via Taguchi methods, and found them to be a bit of a scam.)

Besides this and Google Website Optimizer, I'd be curious if anyone on HN has used other AB or multivariate testing tools? I would absolutely love something open source that I could plug into Django templates on the server side, rather than depend on external Javascript code to rejigger the page.
Posted this with the hope that some start-up is looking for some 'alternative advertising'
Check out the classic book 'Peopleware'. They have several chapters with empirical evidence that the open-plan office is bad for software engineers (or anyone that needs to concentrate and work in 'flow' mode)

It sounds like your open-plan company was an exception though. Personally we have 50 people in our open-plan office and I hate it. I can't get into flow without loud music via my headphones.
I mentioned this in another comment, but the guys from Peopleware did exactly that:

http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-S...

The also conclude that small offices with 2-4 people and a door that can close is best.
I've seen the same from Tipjoy. I got better support from Ivan in 20 minutes than most tech companies provide in any amount of time.
Spring's dependence on XML files always bugged the hell out of me. I like to be able to see what a piece of code does by looking at the code. Every time I tried to get excited about Spring I instead felt like at I was more and more at the mercy of my IDE.
I got an A+ in one of my courses without attending a single lecture (it was in an inconvenient time slot... which is why I didn't even go to the first lecture), and I enjoyed the course a lot more than most of my friends who did go to the lectures.

Don't overestimate the value of lectures. Sometimes a bad professor can do more harm than good to the learning process, especially for something you actually find interesting.
Perhaps it's just me, but I cringe at the idea of HN becoming a user harvesting site. That mentality is what has, IMO, drug Digg and Reddit and the others down.
I've definitely clicked that "all" link thinking it meant my repositories.

Who did the Github design? Was it internal or third party?
> Meanwhile on Dreamhost, things might not always be as fast as my Xen VPS, but neither would I log in and see a load of 10+.

Funny; I don't think I ever logged into my DreamHost account and saw a load any lower than 14-16 on a good day...
But, they're not cats. They're lolfounders.
There's a quote from Steven Bond, some guy whose web site I read a while ago, regarding why he critiques awful movies:

"Why do I review crap? Simple: for pleasure. For the sheer joy of it. Every piece of crap you like is an immense world of delight waiting to be explored. Crap is a driving force, crap is inspirational: nothing urges me to set things right more than seeing them done wrong. I'm especially pleased when the crap is so bad it makes me angry — for anger is a pleasant sensation. To feel your bile rise and your blood boil, to feel a rush of fury — why, it's the pleasure of being alive, of feeling some actual emotion instead of the constant dull fuzz of the easily contented."

http://plover.net/~bonds/stupidresponses.html

Partly it's that. Anger towards the system very often gives you the energy, motivation, and experience enough to make something great. The two big projects I've done - the book I wrote last year, and the site I'm building the beta of now - both had some element of hate against the system that was preventing me from doing something. It's not good to dwell in the emotion, but using it is useful.
electric vehicles are almost certainly the way forward

Nope. http://www.eons.com/groups/topic/401090

There are technologies aplenty that already exist that could be used to meet much higher CAFE standards.

- Hybrid-electric vehicles.
- Clean diesel engines.
- Diesel-electric hybrids.
- Turbo chargers and super chargers.
- Cylinder deactivation.
- Plug-in, series hybrids.
- Automatic stop-start technology.
- Higher voltage electrical systems.
- Regenerative braking.
- Better transmissions.
- Common rail fuel injection.
I was put in detention for reading in class, I had books taken from me and thrown away, I had long lectures from teachers in front of classes to humiliate me. I was sent down to several offices and lectured by several administrators who told me something like, "We understand you can do this, but it's disrespectful to your teachers and the school operates in loco parentis while you're here." And I thought the school system was a very good one overall.

If you can get away with that stuff, it's great. But more often than not you don't have a choice.
Not a fan of the ugly design and it's pretty much useless to me right now because I can't text, get a shortcode, seriously. Also, I would like a nice interface for getting CTA bus times. I would like to be able to text

"55 bus red line" or "55 bus woodlawn"

to your shortcode,

and get the times of the next busses going east/west
Entrepreneur's Creed: Running & Reading
On a similar note, the code parse an XML document in Java:

Document doc = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder().parse("test.xml");

That's not even a framework; it's just what's in the standard library for parsing XML.
Two thoughts:

1) Never, ever, ever do patent investigations before coding. If you for some reason still build something and are sued, it's called willful infringement and awards triple.

2) Successful patent litigation or settlements on non-executed (or submarined) patents are rarely if ever successful. It does happen, but it is very rare.

3) Patent litigation happens, but rarely is it tried against small fry (read small fry as meaning unprofitable, less than say 20m in the bank, non-public and smallish, less than 100 employees,etc..) It just almost never happens. If your company is the one you link to, stop worrying about it. You are too small to bother with. Anyone threatening you will likely buy you or be themselves out of business before you can get anywhere near where you could make a court appearance.

4) People will threaten. So what. It can take many (4 ->7) years for a patent case to get to trial, your lawyers on retainer can do all the wrong things and it will still take years and years. You can settle any moment before a ruling, so why do it immediately?

Anyhow, I'm not a lawyer, but I've been in this space for a very very long time. Good luck.
Okay, so that was more than 2 thoughts.
I love my MBP 17" with 1900x resolution. It allows me to pack my screen full. It sounds like it isn't in your budget, but as a developer, you might think about screen real estate.

I had a 15" but couldn't develop on it. Since I got this 17", I've used it 100% of the time, 10+ hours a day.
I work at a highly successful company thats working to solve some of the problems the health care industry faces(mainly the elder care community). We grow by 20% annually and we have goals of 28% when we only grow by 26 as opposed to 28 we see it as bad.

And yes the rules, and crazy laws, and hand waving are very very apparent. Its insane but we make plenty of money.
Oh, apparently you have SMS support? WTF? your UI sucks. no offense. it doesn't belong in the FAQ, it should be immediately evident. think Facebook.
They certainly prove that someone who has been divorced and remarries is still worse at staying married than the person who has not been divorced.

I don't think that is nothing.
Tattoos - A Tattoo Gallery and Museum
Tattoo pictures from around the world, tattoo articles, news and many more resources. We have one of the oldest collections of tattoos on online. Tattoo books, galleries, flash, articles and more.
I have a feeling Google will be going down this route soon. Especially with their voice recognition being so robust and having so many profiles.....I bet Google will soon be dropping a bomb.
Not much feedback to be had - I guess everyone's busy.
Second hand (or refurbished), last gen 15" Macbook Pro. I use one of these for development, no complaints.
Out of curiousity, would Facebook Connect help get you over the sign up hurdle?

There's no email confirmation step, so you could sign up with placeholder info until you get it.

We make money off of advertising and affiliate. Until we raised money in June, we were profitable. Reviews pages do pretty good CPM, and good affiliate conversion.

We also share revenue with our members via the Google AdSense API:

http://code.google.com/apis/adsense/docs/casestudies/rateita...
My reply to Auston's post:

@Auston
I appreciate the effort, really, but you just didn’t go about patching this or releasing the patch in the right way at all.

First, you made a forum post about it - which is the correct thing to do. Let other people validate that what you are experiencing is actually a bug. If you look through the replies you would see that Derek Allard (programmer) and Rick Ellis (CEO/Founder) responded. You never submitted a ticket in the bug tracker, which would have allowed the EllisLabs team (and you) to easily diagnose and update the community on the status of this bug.

Just a reply or two underneath Rick’s post someone mentions that it has been fixed in SVN.

Now, you come out with an entire release of CodeIgniter, just to release a simple patch that has already been fixed in the repository. Not only that, but you post that fix to Hacker News and the forums announcing what you have done.

Essentially, what you did here, was fork CodeIgniter to gain incoming traffic to your blog and ultimately your product. You didn’t wait on EllisLab’s to fix the issue (as it is reportedly already fixed) nor did you give them the opportunity or the tools/information to do so (outside of the forum).

Usually, a forum post is all that is required to get a bug fixed - but if it’s something important that you really want a status update on, the community policies are very clear - submit a ticket.

Hooray for throwing an awesome piece of open source software under the bus for your own profit.
Eh, this needs to be a portable machine, and I fully expect to have an extra monitor available to plug into if I need the real estate for coding. I've simply never needed that much space while on the go. Can't say I'd mind the space, but it's not feasible with my budget.

If the Dell Studio 15's were compatible with leopard, I'd go with that because there's a 1900x1200 resolution upgrade that is VERY reasonably priced.
How much did you pay, and where did you get it from? What do you develop in/on?
4INFO and GOOGL both do that quite nicely.

http://www.google.com/mobile/default/sms.html

http://4info.net/howto/search.jsp

Of course they do a lot more, but flight tracking and sports scores are two of my most common uses.
Let us not forget the salaries of administrators. Administrative bloat is a huge problem at many universities, and a large number of these people get higher salaries than tenured professors. Is this personnel overhead necessary? Why can't professors have more of a direct influence on university policy? I suspect many of them would like to run things more collectively, with more attention paid to the students.

The "corporate university" thing makes me sick. No thank you, Mr. CEO President.
Why not mootools?
sounds cool. Its fresh stuff. I'm sure if its as useful as it sounds, someone will host a well known screenbin server instead of the current DIY model.
Sounds like you really want a MacBook - you'll find a way to amortize the couple of hundred bucks extra it'll cost.

As for me, I use a 1st gen black MacBook w/Leopard, added a bigger HDD and aftermarket RAM to 2GB. I use a Logitech V470 bluetooth mouse which I carry everywhere, and I've got a couple of bluetooth apple keyboards (shorties without the num pad) - one for the office and one at home. For external monitors I've got a cheap Dell 23" widescreen in each location.

For the occasional Windows mission (usually to load updates to my N95) I was using Win XP via Parallels, but my experience with the performance of the last few releases has left me wanting and I'm currently using a trial copy of VMWare Fusion.
I just got a Dell XPS 1530 - bigger than you probably want, but for me it's outstanding. 1920x1200 LCD, HDMI out, 4GB RAM, Core2 Duo, 320GB haard drive - for under $1500. A huge seling point for me was that it can be ordered with Ubuntu so it's fully linux compatable.
I would want to know what the Facebook functionality would add to my experience besides the login ease. Signup is not really a major hurdle for me such that I would feel more comfortable with FC in place. In fact I would be less at ease because of my Facebook privacy concerns. My issue is more about the complexity of the site but perhaps its just my prolbem - just wanted to let you know my gut reaction. I visited, looked around, got confused and frustrated and left. It seems like you're trying to accomplish a lot - maybe a tour video would help. Or paring down the features/UI.

Take it with a grain of salt. I'm probably just an idiot.
I bought mine new a while back (~$3000 AUD) from Apple. Just looking at eBay, they seem to go for a touch over $1000 USD at the moment. I figure they're a bit of a bargain at the moment since they're perfectly capable and have just been replaced by the shiny new model. I mainly develop Ruby Rails/Merb apps with TextMate.
I mean that my site or similar will become that means -- not HN.
Ask HN: A startup that is not charging user and still profitable?
Do you know of any startup that is not charging users or taking a commission from sales and still profitable?
just wanted to say that Macbooks DO come with a DVD burner (SuperDrive) even the last gen ones.
Apparently Safari isn't a supported browser (it renders just fine). How very 1999 :(
Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors
Lucid Dreams
Ask HN: Hackerspace run as a business, paid for by equity?
Would there be a market for a hackerspace that you could join and then work there on your startup, and in exchange give up a percentage of the company you are working on?

On the one hand it could be a cross between the best features of a managed office, the Googleplex(?), a good cafe, a good library and so on. A dream place to work before you can afford one, all the hassle of managing an office done for you, on a no-success-no-fee basis.

A chef or two, table service, quiet offices, loud offices, gamesrooms, meeting rooms, general business services (power, maintenance, phones, spare hardware, temporary servers, mercenary coders and admins, tech advisors with experience of popular technologies...)

On the other hand, would you trade part of your future company for it? I don't know how much it would need to become viable, given that most companies seem to fail; 1%? 5%?

Also, and more seriously, does it risk sabotaging the founder's we're-working-from-a-shoebox-it's-is-all-or-nothing drive?
I've been using Dreamhost for years to host The Black Stripe (http://www.theblackstripe.com) and while there were some rough times at the beginning, things have gotten much better in the last 2 years. I recommend them as a host for my freelance clients because they are so cheap for what you get.

If anyone is looking for a dreamhost promo code, you can use HACKERNEWS to save $65 off the first year (or more) of hosting.
This is true, however for these large companies many of the patents are filed as a defensive measure. Its fairly uncommon to hear them sue someone for patent infringement, and they probably have a patent on just about anything (MS has a patent on the strlen algorithm for example, its really insane).

In other words, worry about getting sued by a patent troll not a big company. Also, perversely, I think you better off not even looking for patents in the first place because one of the factors that can go against you in a patent lawsuit is whether or not you were aware of the patent in the first place.
Students subsidising research doesn't make much sense.

I don't think that is very common: the vast majority of the funding for research comes from the government (e.g. NSF, DARPA, NIH), various non-profits, and corporate sponsorship.
Well, if things like not providing not providing this kind of support are bothering the reviewers then they are likely to bother readers.

It would be equally useless for those readers to read your review considering you don't need help with the basics, if they do.
No, because the alternative is that I can work out of my house.
What is the significance of the image at the end?
I'd get a XPS M1330. I dual boot Windows 7 Beta and OS X 10.5.6 with no problems. Got 4 GB of RAM, and both OS fly. I've installed Ubuntu on it as well and everything works.

Only things that don't work in OS X are Ethernet, Card Reader, and you have to manually press the Power button for 5 seconds to power down. Other than that, it's great.
A lot comes from these sources, but often a lot comes from fees. Also funding is not necessarily research grants. It also includes keeping the physical Universities & their bureaucracies going.

In any case, my point was that the fees charged by elite US schools are disproportionate to the cost of providing the education. Even the costs are probably disproportionate to the what costs would be if universities were competing on efficiency/price.
I have a backpack and I take it everywhere. Not sometimes, but every single day I hit up a coffeeshop. So it's very portable.

If you regularly plug into a bigger screen, a smaller machine might be better. If the Dell isn't compatible yet, I'm sure it will be in the future. Darn hackers!