skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
pressure bubble

What? That wasn't my impression at all, though I was only there for ~8 months. That thinking seems like making lemonade out of lemons. There are orders of magnitude more angels and VCs that understand the web in silicon valley. That means there are that many more companies and sources of advice and support. You can't really get around that - it really does matter.

Keep in mind that this is coming from someone based in Boston that goes to NYC all the time.
Yes, and I'm sure Boulder ranks close to or behind Boston. Which seems to me a worse location than NYC or SF.
"Any company can adopt the open source OS to get into the cellphone market and, thus, the Android ecosystem will consist of many disparate and incompatible interests."

Sounds like what someone would have said about Windows in the early 80s, minus the open source of course.
It would be cool if this could be used to mark important pages on a site by individual users. Sort of like a bookmark, but more user-friendly. Users could quickly see a list of pages they have dog-eared and go back to them.
You assume keyboards will be still around then! Who knows... maybe they'll be obsolete in a decade.
Are you interested only in out of college guys or will you also fund well establish founders with good ideas?
Except the author of the article explicitly says they didn't mean that:

The iPhone has climbed to the top of the most popular
smartphones in the U.S. with a single model.
Corporate taxes are in general becoming lower than the US.

Alberta is a good place to incorporate as any.

http://www.albertacanada.com/economy/752.html
what can a I

Create a simple working installer for the major OS's that includes a useful IDE, Database connectivity to least one major database and a fully functional web server. Once this is working get some people to write a standard library for date / time functions, file IO, formatting output etc.

Never underestimate how difficult it is for a new user to setup a working environment.
Thanks lpgauth. I scanned their faq and they mention that opentick doesn't currently allow redistribution of the data http://www.opentick.com/index.php?app=faq&event=index#b8...

I'd guess that because my planned webapp is public this would be construed as redistribution of the data - does that sound likely?
As an alternative to OpenMoko, Nokia's Maemo (http://www.maemo.org) is also a fairly standard Linux platform based on GTK+ and Hildon. Nokia also owns Qt nowadays, so it will be integrated in Maemo eventually.

I rather like Maemo. The first versions that shipped on the N770 and N800 tablets were shaky, but they've made a lot of progress -- IMO it's finally delivering on the promise of a user-friendly Internet-oriented pocketable UI on top of Linux. Graphics performance has been a weak point of the platform, which is a shame considering that the displays on the Nokia tablets have been very good. But the upcoming version 5 of Maemo will finally enable 3D graphics acceleration on TI's OMAP3 platform (same CPU+GPU platform as used in the Palm Pre). Maemo 5 includes the Clutter API for building accelerated UIs.

(Maemo 5 will also include 3G mobile phone connectivity support, so it will effectively become a phone OS... I wouldn't have bothered to bring it up in this context otherwise :))

> Right now, all I can imagine is that if something like that happens then we would find people selling apps like how vegetables and clothes are sold now. Free-form retailership (anyone can sell apps). You could be competing with your friend if both you and your friend have your app stores.

Funny -- this is exactly how Java mobile phone games have been sold in my country (and presumably most of Europe) since about 2003. Purchases are initiated by SMS and delivered as over-the-air downloads, so starting up a "mobile game store" is as easy as getting an SMS short number and hooking up the content delivery system.

Most of these companies also sell other mobile content as well -- ringtones, background images, clip art for picture messaging, and so on. At least a couple of years ago, they were doing pretty good business, and the content stores were running lots of ads in both traditional and online media. (The newspaper ads were basically filled to the brim with little previews of the "hottest" graphics, games and songs available; each content item had a code for ordering by SMS.)

I don't see those ads as much anymore though, so maybe the novelty of mobile phone content downloads has dried up... Or maybe they're now advertising more directly to the teenagers who actually buy this stuff. Still, I definitely prefer this kind of fully open distribution to the "walled garden" approach of on-device app stores that seems to be all the rage in America now. (Why should the hardware vendor become the dictator of content distribution? I don't see the benefits.)
Since I knew I'd be seeing Alan Kay at Rebooting Computing, I decided to verify his Stack Overflow usage in person. [...]

We then proceeded to discuss how it's sad that identity is still hard online.

Couldn't this be solved, at least for the tech-savvy crowd, by beeing able to sign an openID-account with a PGP-Signature? This way you could "prove" that your openID belongs to you, the same way you can prove the authenticity of an email right now.

The problem with this is that openID is no fun right now and the last thing that is needed is more complexity. But at least Jeff would be able to know whether or not Alan Kay really posted on his page.
Sure, I remember it. You can also find it in the standard ubuntu repositories.

The tricks, that the game plays on you to frighten you, get rather predictable after a few levels.

Some year back I even hacked in the lisp parts of source.
You mean the one that grew into a large commercial market dominated by the proprietary Internet Explorer, Netscape Browser, and Netscape Server?

[Netscape server was never a huge percentage of the servers, but it was the server of choice for companies during the period when the web turned from computer oddity to "thing real people use". The netscape browser only became open source in their death spirals.]
I'd like to see this running android.
Hence solving the problem of associating a random set of symbols (representing an openid) with a real person by the much simpler problem of associating a random set of symbols (representing a public key) with a real person.
Ask HN: How do you measure the success of your startup?
Is it the number of users you have using your web app or is it the amount of money you're making? How do you know when it's time to pull the plug on your startup?
How about a congestion charge for the networks?
http://ideology.com.au/polyglot/ is a nice eight-language (Cobol, Pascal, Fortran, C, PostScript, Shell, x86, Perl) polyglot program.

Conveniently, it has a source viewer which will highlight relevant parts of the program's structure for a given language. For instance, the C compiler sees this: http://ideology.com.au/polyglot/c/
This has to be a troll. No one can be this out of touch with reality.
The summary: The Agora has hardware that's different from the G1. Developers write software that, boneheadedly, rely on features of the G1 and won't run correctly on the Agora. Suddenly, Open Source and Diversity are to blame.

Let the phones hit the market and let developers sort this one out. They should be clever enough to deal with different screen form-factors, resolutions, pointing devices and every other different gizmo one decides to put in a phone.

More than any other Java platform, Android means "write once, test everywhere".
Interested in both.

If you look at any early stage investing, you will see it is 99% about the team. We have accepted really solid teams with a very light prototype to fully launched almost profitable apps.
The funniest thing about 37signals' Campfire coup is watching people trying to deny that it worked, or complaining about how unfair it was. As if there was some sort of moral obligation to remain meek and silent in the face of your competition.

Many people seem obsessed with the fact that Campfire is so much easier to write than, say, Mathematica. And so it is, particularly after 37signals gave away the toolkit to do so. But if you're trying to make money with a chat app, building it is the least of your problems: There's probably thirty or forty chat apps sitting on Sourceforge right now. Your biggest problem is Metcalfe's Law: nobody wants to use a chat app which their friends aren't using. What you need is publicity. Ideally, you want to convince half the readers of Techcrunch to try out your chat app in the course of a single week.

Google handed 37signals that publicity on a plate, and they ran with it. Complaining about your product's imminent extinction at the hands of a mean, nasty corporate behemoth might be a good idea even if your competition is Microsoft -- obviously, your odds of getting those guys to back down are infinitesimal, but at least people might hear of your existence, it might be better to burn out than to fade away, and you never know: Maybe there will be room for more than one company in your product space, and if you play your PR cards right you might emerge with a reputation as the "classic", "alternative" brand and be able to ride Microsoft's coattails to fabulous wealth. Or modest wealth, anyway. This is how Apple Computer managed to stay alive long enough to be rescued by Steve Jobs.

But 37signals got extra lucky because their opponent was Google, which treasures its reputation as a kinder, gentler company that is certainly not mean like Microsoft, and is unwilling to tarnish that reputation over what (to them) is a simple demo app. So, when challenged, Google folded immediately and left 37signals in possession of the field. More importantly, Campfire is now a household word, at least in households where people read Techcrunch or Digg.

Meanwhile, you're welcome to try to compete with Campfire yourself. Bolt on features, make it do more, add plenty of nifty-looking toggle switches and a skinnable interface, make it scale so well that it runs on a netbook, etc. Go nuts. Don't skimp on the work if you don't want to: Work day and night! Just don't come crying when you can't make any headway in the market because it turns out you've been working on the wrong things.
Ah yes, but you've tremendously reduced the problem.

With PGP you can verify all online posting, so you reduce the problem to a singular instance: public key vs real person.

That is a huge improvement.
At least public key certification was designed and is used for this for quite some time. It works reasonably well for email and there is an infrastructure to manage and validate the public keys. With openID you'd have to start from scratch.
How to create a profitable Freemium startup (spreadsheet model included)
a job on this crew may qualify as one of those "what job can I do that allows me plenty of time to work on my startup?"
Yes, but it looks like Clojure's do is not the same thing. Lisp's do is for iteration, while Clojure's do seems to be the same as progn in Lisp.
Everyone has their style of how they see early stage startups, and how they do it. I've heard many friends refer to larger tech hubs as 'pressure bubbles' for early stage companies because of all the hype that can snowball around their company.

We really value the beautiful surroundings Boulder has, as well as the vibrant tech scene.

We also have an extensive list of mentors that regularly meet with the teams. http://techstars.org/mentors
Is it only me or I am not the only one worried about what can happen with such a big high-value sitting duck?
Baltimore Angels, a New Angel Investor Group; First Meeting Feb 24
I've seen a lot of comments - particularly on TechCrunch - relating to wealth and how much this would cost.

In terms of cost, this sort of setup would not be expensive at all. I bet my Mac Pro and 30" cost more and that wouldn't be considered outrageous. You can buy 19" monitors for $200 a piece now, and the computer the guy has is really low specced (only a P4 and 2GB of RAM) - if it cost more than $4500 I'd be surprised. There are plenty of us with setups that cost more than that.

I'd say this setup is remarkable more because of the time it'd have taken to set up and how original it is.. how many people have an exercise bike built into their setup! :)
Yeah, the multiplayer aspect was cool though. Pre-counterstrike, it was awesome!
45% of public biotech companies will go broke this year
French Government to Ban Phones for Kids
I've been thinking about selling everything I own and traveling for a long time..
Yeah, but I think many people's problem with 37signals is that their attitude is that one-size-fits-all and that because something worked for them, that's the only correct way of doing it.
Yeah, you are probably right. Because of Java's popularity and high demand, hosting providers have to be Java-ready and nowadays, it's not a problem.

However, it seems I've been living in a cave. Besides the Reddit case, I haven't heard (or at least can't remember) about problems running a CL environment. Can people who had this problem please reply - what disto, what implementation, what was the issue?
That slide is bad-ass.

And somehow I suspect the house is no longer connected to the 'net by just a single "T1 line, which allows connection to the Internet at lightning speed."
But its also quite small compared to how long you might expect it would take to make a game.
Nokia 6600 Mic Microphone Ways Problem
6600, 6600 mic jumpers, 6600 mic problem, 6600 mic ways, 6600 microphone jumpers, 6600 microphone problem, 6600 microphone ways, Nokia
Well, at least the creator seems to understand the gimmickyness of the effect:

But please, use it wisely. If it starts popping up everywhere and becomes “that annoying javascript thing”, I'll be very upset.
a lot of "social" startups are services where advertising online does not generate users.
In what way did it work?

http://www.quantcast.com/campfirenow.com

In the world of chat, Campfire is pretty small. It's pretty funny for you to say they are in possession of the field - they've only done 10m chat messages since they started!

Some random math:
Been going almost 3 years - 1000 days odd
10m messages sent! (From website)

That's an average of ONE message every 10 seconds.
"Lesson 3: Don't underestimate the art requirements"

I'd add music and script/writing to that as well. Sure, anyone can throw together some beats and chords, and anyone can put words on a page. But doing it well is a lot harder than it looks.
Also there are quite a few meetups around the world planned (one tonight in SF) if you want to meet the staff or mentors.

http://www.techstars.org/meetups/
What's his name? All Staff?
Really? We gave these banks TARP money and they're out spending it on hoarding oil so they can jack consumer prices later? Talk about sleazy.
The reason Boston and Palo Alto are such great locations are due to the locations of the elite neighboring universities and abundant reverse brain-drain
I'm not sure that fragmentation is necessarily what killed small teams, at least for video games - my understanding is that they survived pretty well in days when you had the NES, Commodore 64, Amiga, Apple II, etc. And many (most?) games got ported to several of those, whether by the original team or another, so customers weren't especially put out either. What killed small teams was that it became impossible to produce and sell a modern video game as one. XNA is making that possible again.

Likewise, the iPhone makes distribution easy for mobile phone apps. If Android can replicate that, then hackers will be able to find ways to deal with variable featuresets. They'll lose some simplicity, but openness will give them benefits as well. I think it will be a net win for customers and developers, but I'm not certain. Time will tell.
The closest thing at the moment would probably be Lispbox (http://gigamonkeys.com/book/lispbox/) altough it's a bit outdated, so you'd be better with directly downloading SBCL (http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html). Use cl-build (http://common-lisp.net/project/clbuild/) for to ease library download. and install. I guess it's too complicated for a newcomer, but there's no easier way atm, sorry.
The blurry line between life, nonlife
PLT scheme is primarily used for education. Pedagogy is (or at least was) the project's central goal.

Clojure is a general purpose project. It is not specifically competing for that space.

I'm sure that the average student can get up and running with DrScheme/PLT faster than with Clojure, but I doubt anyone is going to write an angry article about that.
I think it's not a new idea, but who cares! But yeah... its not a new idea, or even a twist on an idea. Its your basic crm software. But that shouldn't deter you... If you think you have something to add to that space then do it!
Nice job on the website, it looks much better than it has been for previous funding rounds.
It's pretty realist, it even has a doseq especially for side-effects iterations. It's not that it forces you to be FP (it can't, you can always run java methods), it's that it makes the advantages obvious and lets you decide.

It is my first contact with FP, but what I find incredibly cool is the way the data structures are transparently persistent. If it's true this is a rarity in functional languages, I can't imagine using another one.
iPhone is number one in sales even if not in market size. http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/10/22/picture-iphones-r...

PS: OK, Q4 is probably a peek for the iPhone, so 2009 sales might not be a win for the iPhone.
It depends on whether you are talking about "free range" as defined by the ag department or "free range" eggs from chickens that are raised on open pasture. For the ag department definition it counts if there is a door in the coop to some outside area, even if the chickens never go outside and that outside area is just a fenced in bit of bare earth. Real pasture raised eggs both taste better and have more vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, omega-3 fatty acids and beta-carotene. They also have less cholesterol.

Depending on where you are at a good farmer's market is probably your best source. If you want to understand the difference just crack one pasture raised egg and one egg labeled as "free range" at the supermarket to compare the color of the yolk...
Gaming site Destructoid hacked, passwords stolen because they weren't hashed.
Morgan Stanley hired its tanker at $68,000 a day, the two brokers said. That works out at $1.02 a barrel a month, based on a 2 million-barrel cargo.
That's my point, you could fix this.
they're out spending it on hoarding oil so they can jack consumer prices later

They are providing new value to the economy by smoothing price fluctuations. When the market prices rise, and they sell their stocks of oil, the resulting market prices will be lower than they would otherwise be.
Beautiful, parallel haskell
According to various comments I've seen on blogs, Reddit, etc., Destructoid didn’t even hash their passwords.

I was kinda worried because I run a lower-key gaming site (http://forum.fangamer.com ), but I salt and seed my passwords and use a lesser-known 1024-bit hash function opposed to popular ones like MD5 and SHA-1.
Link found at Microsoft Research:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...
There is something very sad about this.
How government infrastructure spending will actually hit the street
Can someone please explain why this is clever?
Meetings Are a Matter of Precious Time
Hard to expect innovative hardware with only a couple grand in funding.
I get that. I'll definitely consider it. It's on my list of open-source side projects.
Blackberry 8830 Cyclone Verizon CDMA
BlackBerry 8830 is the best and most suitable phone presented by BlackBerry Company. The handset which enables you to do the each and every operation, the phone which is very suitable to your personality.
Git+SVN is to SVN as TCP is to UDP
Craig Hockenberry on Free vs. Paid and Twitter To-Dos
the average american watches 4 hours of tv a day. if you're average in that respect, you could churn out one of these projects every week and a half.
thats because coding up a site doesn't take as much effort.

Here you'd need to figure out how to build it, then find a factory to build it, then figure out how to sell it to retailers, then figure out shipping etc etc
'le' is akin to 'are' in this context, so yes, it's needed :)
Everything sounded great until you said "a lesser known" hash function. Use one that's well known enough to have been extensively attacked by the crypto community.
It's a single source file that works in a dozen languages.
My experience trying to move some code from SBCL/OS X to a particular version of Linux is partially documented here.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/0450136edf...

The use case was a final class project, where the instructor needed to be able to run the final version of the program just by executing a script in an unpacked tar file. Couldn't get SBCL to run with the limited time I spent on it. Got CMUCL to run, but not in a way that could be deployed in a self installing manner. Punted and used Java (was easier to work with team members that way, too).

Clojure would have been perfect.
Just another case of a Rails fan boy finding excuses to start a flame war.

Django, however successful it may be in web dev and within python webdev , there exists a larger py-webdev/python developer community which does not care how many rails books are being written and sold.

Python developers have seen successes and failures elsewhere in their community enough times not to go overboard with the hype.

perhaps a related post: http://www.martinaspeli.net/articles/come-hither-hordes-of-f...
Can you provide some examples? I'm curious.
From Books, Obama Found His Voice
Inaugural Words: 1789 to the Present
The reason rephrasing is valuable is that it stop people from taking out or removing needed cases. If there is a test and someone changes that logic, it forces them to at least realize someone else tested and wanted that logic. Then if you search through the code and no something is unnecessary you can change the logic and the test.
Real pasture raised eggs both taste better and have more vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, omega-3 fatty acids and beta-carotene. They also have less cholesterol.

According to the American Egg Board, that is not true: http://www.aeb.org/LearnMore/EggFacts.htm#freerange

True free-range eggs are those produced by hens raised outdoors or that have daily access to the outdoors. Due to seasonal conditions, however, few hens are actually raised outdoors. Some egg farms are indoor floor operations and these are sometimes erroneously referred to as free-range operations. [...] The nutrient content of eggs is not affected by whether hens are raised free-range or in floor or cage operations, but rather by the breed of chickens laying the eggs, and what those chickens are fed in their diet.

If one wanted more of certain lipids, and lipid-soluble nutrients, in his eggs, why would he not simply adjust the chicken-feed accordingly?
I came across this http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Clojure_Programming/Tutorials_a... which seems to confirm progn ~ do

I'm just surprised that (it seems) you can do statement-based code in lisp. I thought it all had to be expressions. This feels like cheating. BTW: I can see that progn/do syntactically produce expressions, but the value of all but the last one are thrown away - similar to python in that respect. This seems against the spirit of expressions.
Genetic map of Europe; genes vary as a function of distance
Reddit wasn't built on SBCL, which you would know if you had read the blog entry you linked to.
I'm curious, what do you mean by "transparently persistent"? Do you mean that you can serialize anything (and so persist it as a file or what have you)?