skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In a (US) Embassy, there is something in place called the Warden Cascade System. It's a low-tech solution to help crisis management. Basically it's a pyramid scheme centered around phone calls. Someone triggers the cascade by calling a few people, and they each call a few people, and so forth; until the message has been conveyed to everyone it needs to be conveyed to.

Something like that would be handy in these sorts of situations - pick up the phone and call some offices, it's easier to manage these sorts of outbreaks as though you're dealing with many smaller entities than as one monolithic unit.
Usability Mistakes
can you figure out a way to use twitter for this? they underwrite your text messaging costs.
Ask HN/YC: Seeking advice for building a physical hardware device (esp. Picwing)
To give some background, I'm looking into building a Linux-based touch-screen device that I can run stuff on.

I have no knowledge in electrical engineering or anything of the sort. I'm primarily a web developer, trying to move away from just doing web apps. I have a bit of C knowledge, and I have a plan on how I'm going to go about doing this (prospectively.)

I have a hard time figuring out where to start.

I don't have access to a college, so I can't really take a course. With everything tech-related, the only choice I've ever had was to self-learn, so I'm looking for any textbooks or books in general that will give a crash-course on electrical engineering, PCBs, and building hardware in general.

I'm especially interested in Picwing's Smart Frame. They've built a Linux-based(?) hardware device with wifi and Flash (though I'm not looking into doing Flash)

###

So to pose a question: how would you suggest I get started on the path of building a touch-screen device, with no knowledge of building hardware stuff?

Thanks!
The one word "Epic" post adds absolutely nothing to this conversation, and your paragraph whining about being downmodded actually detracts from the conversation.

You can continue to whine about it, but understand that there are up AND down arrows for most of us; and we really appreciate comments that somehow contribute, instead of being "lulzy".
Business User: Hey, let's have a web chat instead, I don't want to call you guys.

MSN User: Okay, I use msn, but I can't get to it at work.

Non-Chat User: Um, I'm not sure how that works.

Yahoo User: I use yahoo, I'm busty_hot_chick_16@yahoo.com

Business User: Guys, just go to campfire.1234.com and sign in.
type in the specific schools in google and grab the first result?

you could automate this quite easily, too.
That's not even an issue here. Alan Kay, or at least the user Alan Kay on Stack Overflow, is still an "Unregistered User", which means that he hasn't linked his user account with an OpenID. It also means that if his cookies are deleted, he won't be able to get back into the account without manual intervention from Jeff.
what kind of fine [...] $.99 per file or something like that?

17,281 album downloads x $7.22 per download = $124,769.

At the time, Judge Jones sentenced Dove to 18 months in prison for each count, plus a special assessment of $200 and a $20,000 fine ($10,000 per count).

However, the RIAA and Lionsgate Entertainment had both submitted requests for restitution—they had argued that each individual copy of content downloaded through Elite Torrents was the equivalent of a lost sale. For example, the RIAA said that 183 albums were transferred through Dove's server 17,281 times, then multiplied that by the wholesale price of a digital album in 2005 ($7.22) to conclude that its member companies were owed almost $124,769 in restitution, or $47,000 if Dove agreed to be part of an RIAA "public service announcement" about piracy. Similarly, Lionsgate said that it owned copyrights to 28 of the 700 or so movies that Dove served up—Lionsgate argued that Dove caused the movie industry to lose some $22 million, and since Lionsgate owned copyrights to about 4 percent of the available movies, it was owed $880,000.
How To Download All Of Your Favorite Shows Effortlessly And Watch Them Anywhere
Prior to 2001 I would seek a financial justification for such attacks. Sadly, we can no longer count on such rational behaviour.
Did Seeqpod Die?
old news is so exciting...
done this w/ my iPhone since first day i had it
This is why all your goals are bad for you
www.TomorrowIt.com your day
http://www.tomorrowit.com is a simple site that let you track your tasks for tomorrow easily. Simply "today it" or "tomorrow it" your day.
As was said in the comments, the UI is very text heavy and is not intuitive. Also, I don't understand what utility this brings to me and my use of Twitter?

Can you SHOW me why I should use this? Can you SHOW me what this application does?
The other advantage of a laptop is that it includes a "kickstand" by default (the keyboard). When I'm laying on the couch, I have the laptop on my chest and use a wireless mouse.
I meant in the future, after all the lawsuits and stuff...what kind of fine a person would get for downloading a song
3 uncommon usability mistakes.
It's one thing to build a prototype.

It's an entirely different ballgame to put a prototype into production.

Someone has to print out boards, solder stuff on the boards, burn an OS on a drive, order parts from suppliers, and have a rigerous testing program.

Then you need to package up these puppies in pretty boxes and get them shipped out.

Oh, don't forget a crew of folks to man phones and deal with new orders and support issues. Don't forget the salespeople you'll need to get these into the hands of big suppliers.

Prototypes ain't hard. (More accurately: they tend to be inexpensive and you can fit everything you need into your two-car garage.) It's the business model that wraps around it that gets expensive and time-consuming.

Best of luck though to the crew. I like to see new competitors. It pushes everyone's game up.
There's a lot of monolithic server side JavaScript packages like Helma, but I want something more modular. Also, Helma is written in mostly Java I believe, rather than JavaScript, which is ok if you don't want to hack on Helma itself (or if you know and like Java), but I'd rather have an all (or at least mostly) JavaScript solution.

Anyway, I started working on part of a solution for this: Jack (http://github.com/tlrobinson/jack), which is like Rack (http://rack.rubyforge.org) but for JavaScript.

If you don't know, Rack/Jack are like bridges between webservers and Ruby/JavaScript web apps/frameworks, so framework/app devs don't need to worry about what server they're using, they just write to the Rack API. It also includes "middleware" which lets you pre and post process requests, which allows for neat things like intercepting some requests and serving static files, or gzipping responses, etc (in a server agnostic way)

Right now it only works with Rhino+Jetty but ideally it will work with a number of JavaScript interpreters and webservers.

It also includes a Sinatra-like routing framework (called Roundabout), which lets you define routes like

GET("/user/{username}", function() {
var user = this.wildcards["username"];
// do stuff!
return resulting_html;
}

Jack and Roundabout, combined with your other frameworks of choice, like ActiveRecord.js (http://activerecordjs.org/) make a pretty good solution, I think.
PR Nightmare: Charging passengers of Hudson plane crash a cancellation fee
The $20/month is only for the data, I believe.
It depends on how much you want to know, and what level you want to get to. I would say that a linux based touch-screen device is actually pretty high level (it is running linux afterall).

If you want to make something like this you can buy things premade like the gumstix (http://www.gumstix.com/) that can get you there pretty quick. Then you can hack from there.

PCBs and lower level stuff is another animal. I mean there is just a huge amount of completely different concepts involved. Designing a PCB for some 8 bit microcontroller running at 32KHz is nothing like designing a radio board with an antenna.
More:

Documentation has to be written. Then there are legal fees, and perhaps an entire permanent legal department. Regulatory fees must be paid. Taxes must be paid. Tooling costs. Electricity costs. Insurance costs. Advertising costs.
People who need an IRC server but don't have the time or expertise to set one up.
Indeed.

The number of times a product idea was sent from an SVP to the divison VP who forwarded it to the group head of product who forwarded this with the note added "SVP wants this done by the end of the day" was more than I'd even like to think about.
My first step would be to ask Edward of PicWing for any advice he'd care to share, and to ask if their device runs arbitrary AIR code, if you could boot it from alternate media easily, or if you could use an emulator to get the software working on hardware you already have or can source easily.

IOW, figure out if you can use some of what they know, and figure out if you can remove the hurdle of "how do I get a portable touch screen device working?" and make it more like "how do I get to the point where I can find out if I can even write what I want to write?" Maybe buy a tablet PC and use that to prototype, etc.

Don't even remotely consider building your own hardware until you have something that demands you do that. Custom hardware is messy, gross, expensive, intolerant of mistakes, long lead time, etc. Figure out if the rest of your business "works" before you commit to your own custom hardware. (Oh, and with your background, you're going to hire out the EE part, or it's not going to get done. Trust me on that one.)
Orkut dev in Mountain View had a lot of Indian engineers. They've since moved all dev work to Brazil and India.
Yeah, and when everyone starts doing this, the telcos are going to jack those data rates up so high they may as well be in orbit.

Of course, if someone can get them onside with this, you may have something.
Orkut was initially developed in Mountain View and I know for some people it was a frustrating job for exactly the reason you describe. I am not sure but I think it is primarily developed in Brazil now (where Orkut is very popular).
If you do a cons cell diagram for this it will make perfect sense.
Building desktop Linux applications with JavaScript
There are a whole bunch of these IAP courses - see http://stuff.mit.edu/iap/.

Does anyone know if somebody is going to make videos of these? I couldn't see any mention of it on the site.
of course they do, its a dream job. they have shuffleboard, a swimming pool, jogging track, helicopter pad for visits from the bankers that want to check on their hordes of oil...all the normal accouterments of a super tanker ;)
for a low level but not too hard introduction to all things electronics you can't go wrong by getting:

The Art of Electronics, Paul Horowitz
ISBN13 978-0521370950

If you know nothing then it will be hard but just plug away.
BlackBerry “Application Storefront” opening its doors this spring
Asperger's Syndrome and smoothies.
TipJoy folks: Congrats on the success.

One quick "tip". From an SEO perspective, you should be using a domain you control for your blog.

Example: http://blog.tipjoy.com (this way, all the link authority you build up accrues to you -- and it gives you the flexibility you need in the future).
If you can't get a definitive list, try a whitelist approach with a moderated queue for any domains not matching the whitelist.

Once you see a domain that's an educational institute it gets whitelisted and further registrations from that domain get ok'd.

No matter what text you include there, you're gonna get the odd student registering with a hotmail/gmail/yahoo account (I've tried something similar in the past). Try and get a list of free email accounts to give feedback on those straight away.

I think any domain using the .edu TLD is safe straight-away, but I'm not from the US, so it may be worth clarifying that.
Upmodded because its a very clear and thorough explanation.
Maybe I should read the "Why so many minds think alike" article because I was thinking about that exactly. Between Picwing and some idea I had, I was really wondering where one would start.

And I also have the same kind of background as yours.

I know myself and I don't think I'll ever get to it unfortunately (it seems that there is too much to learn and not enough time to spend on it), but I'm curious to know the process. If you do get to it yourself, please share your experiences in a couple of weeks/months.
TechStars Now Accepting Applications For Its Class of 2009
is there a way I can hit this service via sms message?

what I'd like to do to try this out be able to TommorrowIt from my phone, have it sync with google calendar, and either you or google or hack delivery today's tasks in the morning back via sms.
Yahoo opens up social dashboard to third-party activity
Exactly my point. My cash is good so why don't more US companies want it?
Why don't you get anything when the airline cancels your flight and puts you on another airline? On the way home from my business trips, I used to volunteer to get bumped when planes were overbooked- I always got something out of it.
Circuit City Closeout Deals Aren't Deals At All...yet
yeah, that's the idea. those sorts of people tend to think that any traffic originating outside of the US or EU or JP is fraudulent or criminal in nature.

That hasn't been my experience... I've personally had more trouble with USian spammers who claim the user signed up... and the user disagrees. (I've largely solved the problem by prohibiting bulk mail from my service entirely)

I've had plenty of customers who were intelligent, legitimate and profitable who came from outside of the 'first world'
Yeah, exactly. With how fast technology is going, and the fact that people go to 4 years of college to learn EE, I was highly doubting that I, a guy that hasn't even entered college yet, would be able to pull half of it off. Most likely I'll have to drop out to get the amount of time and money I need.

Definitely will document it and share my experiences if I do choose to do it.
Doing this kind of thing is good publicity for his blog.

I won't use this, but I would think about modifying it to my own tastes.
like open a twitter acount, and pull it for pm match on user name, parse out time in '4pm(-5pm) <text-descriptor>', and also use dm to send sms responses..

anyways, nifty
First you have to overlay an exponential curve of user growth, and then you're set.
It's not trivial if you get down to the PCB level. A good place to start is sites like:
www.sparkfun.com
www.makezine.com

These sites will have tutorials and such.

However, I would recommend you figure out what it is you want to learn from the experience. If it's making hardware, then focus on that, but start with more simple projects. Designing a PCB that has a fast running CPU and memory and such can be difficult.

If it's creating the software, you'll save a lot of money and aggravation by purchasing an existing piece of hardware and running your own software on it.
(for instance, the Android phones have touchscreens and displays, as do a lot of web tablets)

[edit] Another option would be to make friends with a hardware person, give them lots of beer and coerce them into building it for you.
Thanks everyone for the excellent replies. I'll evaluate software in the next few days.
Well a few interesting things from this are
1) the year as a whole was still above 2004 levels, and near that of 2005.
2) the first 3 quarters were all above those of 2007, while the 4th quarter fell off a cliff.
3) 4th quarter was lowest of any quarter in the list

So, we can wait and see what Q1 09 does and see if Q4 08 was just a blip, or if this is actually a real trend.

Based on the funding which still seems to be happening, I think that Q1 09 will be up from Q4 08. Let's hope so anyway.
Python's CSV Reader
There's a chapter in "The Knack" about this: beware of rules you create in your company, because even though they're well-intentioned, they rob your frontline support staff of the ability to exercise common sense. The book's example is an auto dealership repair shop not allowing a $1MM+ customer to test drive his just-repaired car before paying; this is another case in point.

A more personal example: AT&T won't sell me FTTN DSL service, which they offer in my neighborhood and in fact push aggressively, because I have "conflicting" DSL service. I'm happy to cancel my old service, but they won't schedule an install date (3+ weeks out) until I've actually canceled it; their order entry screens won't even enable the "Next" button until they've verified that I have. Dumb rule!

Probably, every time you see some crazy customer service story like this, the culprit is an ill-considered rule pushed down on service staff.
If the airlines compensated people for that sort of thing, they would have to charge more for the tickets in the first place. At which point, another player would come in, not compensate people, and offer lower air fares. Most customers buy airline tickets based on price, and would choose the airline which did not offer cancellation compensation. Thus, the "nice" airline is undercut out of the marketplace.
If you re-frame this idea a little, you can come up with a better idea of how this bit of brain function probably operates in real life. (Experiments like this are carried out in pretty artificial circumstances, after all)

HN formed after reddit started getting... frivolous. Lightweight. Unserious. Dumb and trollish. We're here in part to have fun, but it's a forebrain kind of fun.

So rather than saying that you get voted down on HN for sloppy thinking, inarticulate, lazy, or generally being a dick [1], it might be more appropriate to say that, the community punishes people for violating its norms.

Or to get pedantic about it, the community assumes each of its members will behave this way, and steps in to punish those who aren't averse enough to being different in unacceptable ways.

[1] I think one of the site's official policies used to be "just don't be a dick. You know what that means," or some such, but it seems to be gone now.
I occasionally flirt with this idea,too. If I had the time... I would start with Chumby for the hardware design. I believe it is open source, though you have to agree to contribute back any changes/improvements to the Chumby folks. For the software, I would use Android. And for any misc. circuit stuff, I would experiment using Arduino. (I learned to solder my first circuit for an Arduino project of my mine last year.) The one book on my bookshelf that I reference very often is "Practical Electronics for Inventors" by Paul Scherz
The "usage bar" mistake is something I see fairly often in the general case - quantity readouts that are anything but clear.
Start out small. I'm a programmer and didn't know jack about EE until I started playing around with the Arduino and buying stuff off sparkfun.com. I still don't know much but I've managed to do a lot of really cool stuff with hardware from what I've learned from the Arduino.
Since people may be interested in the process of building an embedded product (a simple one) it usually goes something like this (that I have been involved in):

1. Buy a dev board closest to your product desires.

2. Modify the board as needed and get some of the features working, while laying out a PCB.

3. Design the PCB and simulate as much of the hardware as possible.

4. Send out a board revision with all sorts of test points and such, including parts for experimental stuff. Jumpers are good to add at this point to, so that certain parts can be tested independent of the rest. (this is expensive, think 1-5k for a small run of small boards)

5. Order all the parts, if the board is using a lot of surface mount (SMD) you do not want to be hand soldering, so order a stencil too (for laying the solder paste). Parts will be expensive since you need rolls to feed into a pick and place machine, stencil will be around $300-400 for a good quality one.

6. Build the boards.

7. Test them and find all the problems and errors.

8. Go back to step 3 until the board mostly works.

Software development will continue throughout the whole process.

If you are good and able to keep the revs to a minimum, and the board is small it can still be relatively inexpensive.

But if you plan to sell it, regulatory certifications (FCC, UL) can be another problem since they are slow and expensive.

Hope that was useful. Now remember this is the process I have been involved in and others may do it differently, such as when parts are very expensive more simulation is done. If you are doing something very simple or piecing together boards you may be able to get away with breadboard prototyping most of it.
In my experience the .edu should all be active universities. My university recently replaced the college in its name with university. We didn't add any degree programs, we were just recognizing that the school already had university status. And the .edu domain for our old name expired after about a year, I think. Right now our old name doesn't even link to our new website anymore, and educause has the registry on the whois record for the site.
I'm not sure what you mean by that.

I run a small social network, and advertising has 'generated users' at a much higher rate than any other method.
> Bad developers whine and complain that their product has been stolen.

"Bad" as in "being a bad sport", not incompetent.
What we don't know we don't know
Cool links re RTMP: Flash video streaming protocol
Keep in mind that most of the stories that FOW relates involve a lot of re-starts. Flickr was originally a game, PayPal was originally a Palm app, etc. The key to persistence is to keep trying for the big-picture goal (becoming a successful entrepreneur); you don't want to keep flogging on an idea that isn't working out.

Of course, knowing when to quit is a skill that takes time and experience (with failure) to cultivate. In some ways, then, it's intriguing that setting an expiration date on your project might be the best strategy for overall success. Try everything for a year, and if it isn't working, try something else.
Jeff's comment is all very well - he asks for the problem to be solved so he can see who someone else is...

I take it sdfx isn't your real name? How many people really want this 'solved' for themselves?
IRC is an ancient, rickety piece of crap, and a disproportionate amount of IRC server functionality addresses problems most people do not have, like synchronizing multiple relay servers. I grew up on IRC, have spent a lot of time in the ircd source code, and I can't imagine why anyone would waste time using it in 2009.

So, I think along with "time" and "expertise", you should also add "tolerance for needless pain".

You know, last time I checked, the BSD devs were still using icb. Maybe Campfire is also for the people without the time or expertise to set up icb. =)
There is some evidence that tv watching and computer usage both lower melatonin production, which would keep you up longer. So doing either right before bed probably isn't a good idea.
...or according to the wikipedia article it was intended to support C code entry on keyboards that don't have characters for [, ], {, }, #, etc. In other words torture.
(Only get the ones that are legal for you to download of course.)

Heh. I get the impression that most media creators are not voluntarily sharing their content in HD/commercial-free via Bittorrent RSS.
The Database Programmer: The Data Dictionary and Calculations, Part 1
Neil Fraser: Differential Synchronization
an individual's DNA can be used to infer their geographic origin with surprising accuracy--often to within a few hundred kilometres.

But with what kind of error band around that inference? Who has conducted a validation study on this?
arduino.cc
sparkfun.com
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LearnElectronics
http://www.gumstix.com/

Enjoy.