skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While it'd be way more difficult to write the next office clone in this stack, the vast majority of apps we see on mobile devices are frontends to web data, calculators, or databases of some sort. In those cases, I think these APIs might be just about perfect.

Perhaps they'll provide ways to extend out the javascript APIs (e.g. native code modules) later.
So because government programs in a work of fiction caused more harm than good, all government programs in the non-fiction world must be bad. Good logic.
Well, nazis also never said directly they're killing weak people in camps. I just meant the overall style they represent. It reads like the newest findings of Nazi science or something...
That sounds like an absolute statement... is absolutism always wrong?
20 Ways Facebook Can Make Billions
obligatory slicehost post. why reinvent the wheel on this one
Introduction to the Principles of Music Synthesis
Don't pay too much attention to:

* Windows, floors, wall material, and other architectural features
* Color — it's easy to change color combinations
* Layout and arrangement — also easy to change

That's a monumental challenge for me. I vote basically based on what my first impression is, and these items inevitably have a play into that.

But I suppose if I were actually looking to redecorate, I would put more thought into my votes.
According to this...

http://www.irefeurope.org/col_docs/doc_26_fr.pdf [pdf]

...any given nation would be nicer, with no income- (including capital-gains) or consumption- taxes.

.

if the tax rate tends towards zero percent, its influence on the decisions taken by persons affected tends to be negligible.

...

less taxation, and, in addition, less distortionary taxation is desirable. Several studies even demonstrate that, from the point of view of maximizing economic growth, the long-run optimal taxation is zero. Milesi-Ferretti and Roubini (1994), for instance, show that under very general assumptions the optimal tax burden on labour and capital income is zero. Jones, Manuelli and Rossi (1993b) and Bull (1993) add that even consumption taxes ought to be equal to zero
Reading the first half of the comment, I was about to ask why people are the way they are, but your reference to Outliers stopped me. Thanks. I will have a look at Outliers.
1. A T-shirt recommendation system. I have been toying with this idea for the past, but never got the time to implement it.

2. An aggregator of free lectures (video/audio/text) on the internet
"The characters are thin shells used to promote Rand's thinking and in no way reflect reality."

Well, whose thinking do you think they should have promoted, exactly? And why do characters in a novel necessarily need to exactly reflect reality? I haven't run into any elves, dwarves, or immortal wizards, but that didn't stop me from enjoying Tolkien.

"The idea that unbridled self interest leads to the greatest good guided Greenspan's monetary policy and got us into this mess."

Really? How do artificially low interest rates translate into unbridled self interest?
If I had to take a quick guess, it's because Akamai charges by the bandwidth. While your (paid) MSDN account supports the Akamai charges, the general public will just get leftover bandwidth from various services which is 'free'.
I really liked it. Maybe at the end provide some links to stores specializing in certain styles?
The issue I have with slicehost is the limitation on operating systems. The whole point of a dedicated box would be for control. If I did this, I'd plan on running a Win2k3 VM as well as any number of *nix VMs.

Amazon is offering the same sort of deal, but at $90 a month for a single 'small' instance, I can't justify that over splurging the $100/mo on a colo.

Slicehost is pretty slick, but it doesn't do everything I would want it to.
Uh, those aren't buzzwords. If you have to choose a project to work on for a startup, one of the first things you should be asking yourself is "what can I do to maintain a slight advantage over my competitors for some reasonable period of time?" This should be one of the first questions you ask, it's a pre-condition.

It might be an exclusive partnership, a difficult to replicate technology, a patent, an incredibly novel or non-obvious idea, something you have domain knowledge that's relatively exclusive, etc. This particular idea has none of these, and would be marginalized overnight if it showed any indications of being a profitable venture.

Also, when setting out on starting a project that's going to take more than a few weeks, you want to pick a really good idea. You only get a few shots at this, particularly if you're going to quit your day job. You'd best prune away ideas that, best case scenario, you expect to "make a million bucks in a year or two and get smashed." Instead, you want to focus on the few ideas you have that you think could become the next Google. Of course, it generally doesn't turn out this way, but you should at least feel that it's within the realm of possibility.

I wasn't insulting the community beyond the posters here who are saying this is a great idea without actually critiquing the business side of things. If I see bad advice, I'll point it out. (Although I'll admit it was a bit snarky, I was just a little taken back by all the "Great Idea!" posts.)

BTW, insulting the poster isn't the best way to argue, either.
Does everything have to turn a profit? No.

Does everything that you're trying to earn a living off of, pay bills with, and hire employees with have to turn a profit? Hell yes.

If you're not going to aim at providing a return on investment, don't pretend you're a business.
I'm interested to hear why you think comments are evil.

Would there be any way to make that discussion-like structure accept input from anonymous, infrequent, or lazy users? Setting up a blog just to reply might leave out some decent responses.
This totally wouldn't have happened to highly anticipated downloads from Firefox or Apple, which can push their terabytes through pipes made of sheer cool.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/17/its-firefox-3-world-rec...

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Mac-fans-overload-...
Windows 7 Beta 32-bit build 7000 en_us :

http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-4...

Windows 7 Beta 64-bit build 7000 en_us :

http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-4...

I found this on another website, but the links work and it seems real enough.
He did? In what way? (Genuinely curious.)

My understanding is that, despite some of his views being at odds with her own, Rand was happy to have him in her inner circle anyway.
I just saw it this morning... I have to say, it honestly was one of two things that gave me a "holy shit!" moment at CES. First of all, they were the only exhibit really getting much attention in the Sands; and they were getting a TON of it.

Secondly, the description doesn't do it justice. They were doing a demo of it, and there was just something about the way this thing is put together that makes it feel like it came straight out of Star Wars.

Huge props to Trevor and crew for making something so cool - I hope you guys found some deals at CES!
India's first night safari to come up in Greater Noida
The vast majority of apps we saw on mobile devices, you mean. Then the iPhone and Android-based phones came along. If simple frontends are what the Pre plans to focus on, then Palm is still fighting the last war.
Interesting Bug, IE7: Cannot set a cookie if the Domain is in uppercase and has an odd number of characters
How about more top colleges?

Incredulous as it sounds, if there's really a flood of qualified (as deemed by college admissions people who aren't just making excuses) students for top schools, then simple supply and demand states that there's a market opportunity for 'top schools'. How to form a top school quickly is an issue, I'll admit - but there are scenarios that instantly attract smart and talented people.

For instance, consider a new private college/academy that had close ties with TED - they recruited a lot of the TED speakers to be professors or advisors and students would have the opportunity to work with these people. That would definitely attract talent quickly.
Doesn't sound like a way to make much money. But if that's not your main goal, your plan is reasonable.

A lot of people want their own box simply because it "their own box". Maybe you fit into this category.
Definitely. I'm not looking to make a cent, just break even or perhaps pay out a little more than I do for shared hosting.
My Tale to Tell
This blog gives more information about Malaysia , Music, Photography, food and some Interesting Events.
> Microsoft's not the only one who's blown web launches. Apple did it spectacularly with MobileMe

Oh, come on! Those aren't even in the same category. MobileMe wasn't a big file to download. If tanking on a large download means Microsoft is underestimating the web, then what the heck was Apple underestimating with MobileMe?
I thought that map is just interpolating from the schedules, not from GPS? Not that it makes much difference, the schedules in Finland being very accurate for buses afaik.

In Tampere on major stops we have information about when the next bus is coming in, some based on GPS and some on schedules, this distinction is indicated on the board.
I don't consider not having a physical keyboard a weakness. One thing that you can do with the virtual keyboard that you can't do with a physical keyboard is change to the keys to show more useful keys depending on the situation. Then when you don't need the keys at all you can have all the screen to work with. Personally I consider having a physical keyboard to be a drawback.
alright I got it working, thanks everyone for the help
See Olin College for an example of a 'top school' created quickly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_W._Olin_College_of_Eng...

It takes an enormous amount of money to do it. Also accreditation is a big issue -- you can't get accredited until a class graduates. Olin got accredited immediately after their first class graduated.
There would still be honest misunderstandings between people that might require a court to resolve, or at least the possibility of going to court to encourage a settlement.

Also, you would still need a military unless the whole world was also on board.
Sometimes I've had the idea of making a sort of "fan page" for my university (Tampere University), because their own homepage is so horrible. On the surface it looks OK, but actually it is quite difficult to use in actually planning which classes to take. The fan page would be maintained by students who are actually taking those classes, combined with pressuring the teachers to take part. This is where I think it wouldn't really work, people couldn't be arsed to help, so I haven't attempted it.

I feel so embarrassed for our faculty. I mean they have classes on UI design and usability, yet it's beyond them to make their own pages usable. This is the home page of our logic programming class: http://www.cs.uta.fi/~tn/LOGO_kotisivu_2009.htm I wouldn't mind the yellow background and the all-caps text, if every other course would just have the same information in the same place in the same format so that some sort of study planning could be done.
Tell HN: If you edit the submission title, you can increase the length to above 90 characters.
Like so. Intended behavior? Trying to submit with the above title wouldn't get past the initial filter.
What you say is "marketing," I think is author creativity.

What's the difference? Just because the author wrote the title doesn't mean it wasn't chosen for marketing purposes -- to grab your eye, to be memorable, to describe the subject concisely, to pique your curiosity, to remind you of a story inside of the book so that hearing the title mentioned in conversation prompts you to tell the story. Authors are marketers too. Indeed, the first task of any new commercial author is to convince a publisher to buy a manuscript, and that requires a title which catches the publisher's eye, and which the publisher is convinced will catch the public's eye.

In other words, when I suggest that publishers pick titles with an eye to marketability, I'm not suggesting that the typical model is "publisher buys the book and then suggests the title". I suspect that's actually rather rare, although some authors have had that experience. Much more likely is the model where the publisher solicits hundreds of manuscripts and proposals and then picks out the handful that feel commercially viable -- and a good title helps a manuscript to stand above the rest of that slushpile.
It exists and it seems very good.
There is a famous scathing review by Whittaker Chambers (of the Alger Hiss controversy) that later got accusations that he'd never read it.

Some people who criticize Atlas Shrugged obviously have read it to at least some degree. They may have been skimming, or they might not have had an open mind, but some of the points are always satirisations of some parts of the novel.

Occasionally it's done well. Usually it's just a waste.
I think (1) is a really interesting point, but don't you think that humans also strive for inequality? People don't just want to keep up with the Jones's, they derive great satisfaction from being ahead of the Jones's.

2) I think society benefits more from the generators of massive wealth than they do from the society. Obviously it is mutually beneficial, but the fountains of wealth would probably do fine with or without society.
I'm surprised no one has tried to sell your school a system like Blackboard. Is penetration of such systems low outside of the USA? Sounds like there is quite a marketing opportunity there, if you were to develop a competitor to Blackboard. Their software isn't great, it wouldn't be hard to do better, though integrating with the university's existing IT infrastructure could be tricky.

Be warned though, Blackboard basically has their whole system patented, though I think their patent for "using a CMS for school" was recently overturned. The patents may be less important outside of the USA.
Yeah. Shame on Ebert. I love the guy and he's an incredible writer, but I think he's wrong on this one.
- Let me queue up dj sets.
- Give me a desktop player so I can listen without keeping firefox open.
- Not clear why I have to create an account since I can't do anything with it other than leave comments

Have you checked out soundcloud?
The big point to be made here is that every form of art is inherently about the medium. Games have different rules from movies. Camera work doesn't matter, but creating a world such that every camera view looks equally beautiful does. The authorial control isn't the control of the actual actions but of the results of said actions.
http://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Robert-Mart...
The First Phone I've Been Excited About In A Long Time
Why are you using a streaming server? Stream over http, save on a little infrastructure since the files are generally going to be easily consumable by most broadband connections due to their small sizes.
I'm pretty sure you can explain the difference in averages between men & women's sex partners by a very large variance. E.g. village bicycles & nuns vs regular man-slut Joe six-pack.
Ask HN: Remedies for RSI?
Anyone know of anything that works well for RSI pain?

I've tried acupuncture, massage, ice, heat, electric stimulation, ultrasound, laser therapy, break timers, ergonomic devices galore, martial arts, weight lifting, running, swimming, speech recognition software, anti-inflammatories, turmeric, fish oil, vitamins.

The only thing I won't do is surgery.

It's been five years since my RSI started and it's starting to look like I'm just going to have to suck it up and deal.

Is there a miracle cure I don't know about?
ShopSavvy Deserved the Mobile App Crunchie
"Massive wealth generated in modern societies, though it tends to fall into the hands of a few (exponentially so), is generated by having a society/collective. If you have more wealth than you could ever generate with your own two hands, then you're benefitting from society in a major way, regardless of how much society takes back. (Even this is not strictly true--what you can generate with your own two hands depends on education, inventions society has given to you (like language), etc. It's hard to calculate one's debt to society.)"

You know, if you replace every instance of "society" in that sentence with "people throughout history who were left free to create things that make life easier, without having the product of their effort stolen from them," you'd get something Ayn Rand might have written herself.
There are two largely accepted definitions of art. The first is the view of art simply as the mastery of a certain action or craft. The second is the view of art as something that changes the person that sees it.

By the first definition, video games are inherently piece of art so long as there is an objective standard behind games. There's an art form behind, say, the comprehensive control scheme from Super Mario 64, which is in my opinion the best platforming control scheme I've ever used. There's an art to creating responsive and beautiful worlds.

By the second definition, games still qualify, but we're in a poor position in that thus far games are still parroting movies by-and-large. The large advancements that we've seen in gaming - I'll cite Shadow of the Colossus and Grand Theft Auto IV as the two pinnacles - are ones that, in terms of message, are still parroting movies. Shadow of the Colossus gives us the sense of loss, Grand Theft Auto IV gives us the sympathetic - and fully-fleshed - character. These things can be compared dismissively towards movies, since they're far more primitive in nature.

That's not to say that video games will remain as such. People are entering the field with ambitious minds right now. Many games are starting to hint at an expansion towards the sorts of things that gaming and gaming alone has to offer. I think that the "are games high art" argument will be moot 20 years from now, if not sooner. The gap is closing.

(I'll also say that if not the games themselves, music in video games is the least compromised that any forum of music has been for a century. I'm thinking of Nobuo Uematsu, whose soundtracks are regularly 4 discs+ long, who releases piano arrangements and orchestral and rock arrangements of all his pieces, and who - unlike, say John Williams - is given an incredibly wide scape of emotions to portray with every game he works on. His output is impressive, as is the output of Koji Kondo, though he isn't nearly as evocative in my opinion.)
I don't think anyone who has ever reviewed a paper would consider these three things to be "myths" -- they are just obvious facts.

I do think the peer review system will eventually change to something more like hacker news. It is a much more convenient way to do things than trying to find volunteers, mail out papers, collect responses, etc. Not to mention you can potentially draw from a larger audience and you make your work more easily accessible.

One mechanism that does exist in peer review that I'm not sure could be easily reproduced is a sense of duty while reviewing a paper. When selected to review a paper, you know you are one of only a few who will determine the fate of this paper and you feel a responsibility to try hard to understand the paper and give it a fair critique. If a paper were just posted online for anyone to critique, people might not put forth as much effort in their reviews.
The other thing with small companies is that the hierarchy is much flatter and people tend to be closer so there's the worry of spoiling the working relationship.
Very! I had the same experience when I read The Fountainhead for the first time, in the middle of an ego clash happening at my school.

It's important, I've found, not to mistake Rand's works for wholesale reality. She makes some incredibly good points, and I love her concept of the virtue of selfishness, but things are more complex than she writes about. She was aware of this too: her books are deliberately overstated in order to drive her points home. The economy, along with people in general, is more complex than headlines might make it seem.
Why are you disappointed that it exists? My reaction is more like "great, that problem is solved, now I can make something else".
It's not altruism if you benefit from the results.

It was in Rand's best interests to influence as many people as possible, since she promotes a system of logic and selfishness to better people. If people subscribe to her theory of belief, she gains as much as they do.
Well I posted about this here, because I have no intention of doing this. I don't really want to work with an entity whose income isn't really determined by the satisfaction of their customers. Finnish universities are supported by the government, there are no tuition fees. The system is nice for us students, but perhaps leads to them not really caring very much if their homepages are hard to use.
You could say the same thing about every character ever written. They're all extensions of the author. Even a character as complex as, say, Stephen Dedalus, is in the end a product entirely of his creator's mind. One of the catches of reading fiction is that you always need to remember that they are the product of a single mind.

> There is certainly a lot to be said for enlightened self interest and personal freedom, but the absolutism of objectivism is just as wrong as communism.

But which concept is better? When you subscribe to an idea you do it for the practical idea of it. Communism says that you should put everybody in front of you, and do what everybody else thinks you should. (Or rather, subjectivism does, since that's the true opposite of Objectivism; Communism rather states that the community is more important than the individual, which is closer to subjectivism.) Objectivism says that you should rely on yourself to do what's right. The one is much healthier mentally, and that's a good sign.
So you're saying that you think that closedmindedness on your part is a good way of stopping other people from discovering ideas? Even if those ideas are closedminded, you do better to critique the actual article rather than avoid it. Criticism is the quickest way to kill a bad idea.
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If anyone wants to make a competitor to Blackboard, please do. My school uses it and it is terrible: the UI is awful, response time is slow, and professors across the board hate it and prefer to use their own websites to upload files. Shouldn't be too hard to make a better version.
Nice article, but I have one thing to say: your list of priorities for features is probably what you think you want. Before I got the iPhone, I never browsed the internet on my Treo because the experience was just absolutely terrible (the experience on blackberry is also terrible). Now I browse the web on my iPhone more than I use it as a phone.

While investigating how to make the best UI, I've found that people's priorities come from their habits and not necessarily from their needs. At first this seemed kind of illogical to me. But if you think about it, before the iPhone, no normal people really could imagine a mobile browser as good as mobile Safari, so no one really put "a desktop experience web browser" at the top of their requirements lists for phones (obviously tech people did, but average people did not).

I wonder what would happen if you bought an iPhone.
Whoops, sorry. Meant to upvote and downvoted accidentally instead. Am upvoting two of your other comments to make up for it.