skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're interested in research, pick an interesting subject, and look for an open research question/projects in new published articles.

If you're interested in impact, i think it's easier to build an influential project(influencing 1000+ or more people in a reasonably important way) than a meaningful research. There are many useful research papers by academia that haven't been developed or commercialized and could be the base for useful projects. For example: [1].

[1]ParkNet: Drive-by Sensing of Road-Side Parking Statistics
I'd figure out how to put laser beams on shark's heads and hold the world hostage for 1 million dollars!

No, really. I think I wouldn't start anything because without the internet and places like HN I'd never have found the courage to seek out new business ideas. I'd view failure as too high an obstacle and be content with climbing the corporate ladder through an established company.
I've spoken with the founders and from what I understand they basically gutted and rewrote Etherpad. It's been used at both Pycon and SXSW which I'm assuming was pretty heavy load.
The productivity improvements of particular individuals needn't be so drastic as going from assembly line worker to computer programmer.

(Bear in mind that not all "assembly lines" or "programmers" are the same -- there are very likely line workers at Boeing who are multiples more productive than programmers at [big Fortune 500 company of your choice].)

Workers can improve productivity by taking jobs that are otherwise less desirable. Maybe they have to commute further, or work shifts they don't prefer. There is a small segment of the workforce that can improve its productivity just by showing up on time. Some folks will have to make more drastic changes, such as moving. Many people moved to Florida to build houses that, as it turns out, no one wants. Those people won't find construction work in Florida but might well find it in North Dakota, which is currently going bonkers.

And they can seek retrainings that might seem marginal. Maybe they learn to weld, or operate a crane. A semi-literate adult who buckles down achieve actual literacy probably opens very large possiblities for productivity gains.

So moving up the productivity curve doesn't mean learning 55 year olds learning Python. It can mean finding a way to do 5%, 10% 20% better.

That said, I have to agree that improving productivity is a lot easier for people with sound education and training to begin with. One of our great problems is the failure of our schooling culture to properly prepare people to understand and learn new things.

EDITED TO ADD:
Also, I don't want to sound ignorant of all the difficulties of this. Some gains are easily achieved, some are hard won but worthwhile for non-economic reasons. And some of the sacrifices required are pretty hard. It is one thing for economists to talk about "labor mobility" as a factor driving productivity, and another for those who find they have to move half-way across the country.
Ouya Approaches $5 Million In Backing, Attracts 5x Goal (So Far)
I currently intern for a company that does e-education for probably the biggest education services vendor in the world. My team owns the test delivery engine, including on mobile platforms.

a more intuitive touch interface is always easier for students to give tests on, that and more interactive questions, more colors and realtime assistance, analytics, central and quick test dispatch, quicker assessments and well anytime access being 'mobile', tracking. Doing all that is impossible with paper based education, and only some of it is possible using desktop.

And besides, change in quality arises from change in methodology. The two are not mutually exclusive.
I love the concept and the design, but I have a few suggestions:

1. Give immediate visual after clicking the cheer/boo buttons. It can take a few seconds for the loading icon and comments to appear, so having the button lighten or change at all would let me know that it is in fact working.

2. Show the number of comments on each subject so that users have an idea of how popular a subject is at a glance without loading the comments.

3. Add a setting to not automatically load comments after cheer/boo -ing.
If that is true, it will get proven in court. I see no Pacer links, so I take it that none of that has been proven.

Personally, I put about as much stock those claims as SCO's claims that we should all write them $699 checks for Linux, but we'll find out whenever the courts rule.

Feel free to supply a Pacer link if the situation changes.
I just submitted an article on this topic, but check out
http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism

You may recognize gwern from comments here at hackernews, and after reading it I didn't feel that I'd wasted my time (which should be read as mild praise relative to a typical submission to hackernews).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cats_named_Fluffy
Overthrown implies a zero sum of land, etc. How relevant is IBM to modern computing? Sure, they're doing some great work in supercomputing, but there's no monopoly they control like they once did. MSFT has a solid monopoly, but their relevance is lessening though still influential in some circles. Google is young/ambitious enough that it has its skunkworks projects - gGlasses is an extension from search, and self-driving cars is from maps/geo data, but it's still not really entirely defensible from their central data monopoly.
Wow, current.com really hates Mitt Romney.
Don't forget the obligatory leave-of-absence from NYU.
The hack you're referring to works because the input space is very small and well-defined, and the blur filter that's being applied is perfectly predictable. There's no truly random noise involved.

If instead you printed the document out and blurred it with a wet sponge, it would be much harder to reverse, because the real world is much noisier.

Similarly, an analog photo at the limit of its resolution is full of real noise that's hard to remove.
That's what Iran thought too. :-)
It seems to me somewhat naive to expect in these conflict scenarios no recording/spying on devices that are owned by the employer.

But I am wondering based on this case: How does "corporate" America regulate the use of private communication devices in general? Are employees who work on non-secretive areas generally allowed to bring personal communication devices into the office (how about a smartphone? a tablet? or a netbook?).
Indeed. Many brilliant, groundbreaking work is produced by geniuses who are lousy writers, so sometimes secondary sources are necessary to get past roadblocks.

Still, it's a good reminder to try reading primary sources, when so many people seem to be learning from screencasts and blog posts three degrees removed from them.
a. How do you know that other brains don't.

b. How do you know that consciousness is primarily a function of complexity.

c. Complexity need not give recognisable output.

d. The weather.
Configuration and Scope: OOP and functional approaches to implicit variables
I actually did a computer repair service for a bit in high school. I started with my parents recommending me for my service and word spread around quite a bit. I made a pretty nice amount fixing/replacing/upgrading hardware, backups, and recovery. Even if there was no internet, PCs still broke.
I think there's also a bit of entitlement. I don't intend to imply the negative connotations. However, these soldiers are putting their lives on the line, so is a free doughnut so much to ask?

Indeed, the fault lies with SecDef for the change. And the change affected a certain aspect of morale. But the suggested change would most certainly have been noticed. If Red Cross was the only place to get this item, then it dried up, then someone else made them available, even at a pittance, the entitlement sentiment exists and colors the experience.
They might be running some automated A/B testing to find the most effective headline. Currently the headline is for me "Vast Effort by F.D.A. Spied on E-Mails of Its Own Scientists", while the page title is still the "F.D.A. Surveillance of Scientists Spread to Outside Critics".
I've been on Reddit for four years, and I don't think that it's usable for even hardcore users. The people attracted by the front page invariably find their way to the subreddits too. And the overall mood of the place encourages even the best users to be goofy.

There are still good submissions in very small and highly technical subreddits, but those get very few posts.

I visit reddit because I'm honest-to-god addicted, but at some point my self respect is going to win out.
How about making patents non transferable? Wouldn't that solve the patent troll problem and at the same time preserve some of the rights of the inventors. The way I see the problem is that patents have become a hot commodity people just trade to make money where it should simply be a mean for inventors to benefit from their invention and creativity, meaning an incentive to innovate. Too simplistic?
Which company he was asked (but declined) to be cofounder of? Ah, must be Solar City.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_City
"SolarCity was founded in July 2006 by brothers Peter and Lyndon Rive, based on a suggestion for a solar company concept from Elon Musk."

And the douchebag remark was directed at Eberhard? No, it was Randall Stross.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/04/10/teslas-elon-musk-grows-a-pa...

Thiel and he riding in an F1? I thought it only had one seat. No, three seats:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mclaren_f1
A consulted expert disses new research with a conjured, speculative flaw, because it contradicts his own research.

This is illogical, but not just because the expert has a conflict of interest; the studies measure different things.

The old study put people on appropriate maintenance diets of varying compositions and found that everybody maintained their weights regardless of what they ate. As it turns out, humans are very good at maintaining their weights; feed them more, within reason, and their bodies burn more; feed them less and the trim is adjusted to burn less.

The new study measures how easily people regain weight on various diets after their bodies have been kicked out of this mode by extreme calorie deflicts (resulting in weight loss). Not the same thing, at all.
I did not imply that Instagram (or any similar product) is like a pyramid. All I said that if it is a step towards building one, there is no way to know this, yet.

Things that ultimately become useful are most of times never conceived in a straight trajectory. It's a curvy road. Claiming Instagram was a bad turn is just purely naive conjecture by people who delude themselves into thinking they have the magic map.

All we know is, more people than most countries' populations are using this invention to make their lives better. For me at least, Instagram was a massive shift in Camera interaction. I have never captured random moments on daily basis like that before. I only took pictures when I thought I visited some place important, not that great coffee I had in some new city. A good memory to have captured.
I would have started Chipotle.
Thanks so much for the feedback! Agree with your points and we'll work on implementing.
Do you really think the average American would fall for that trick?
As far as moments of inspiration go, I don't think this one would rank very highly in the tech community.
I agree, but I don't think the product is aimed at us. I would imagine it's aimed at people who e.g. are currently storing their passwords in a spreadsheet.
I really recommend reading the thread at http://coris.noaa.gov/exchanges/coralfuture/coral_future.pdf - this is a discussion by working scientists, and although it's from 2001, the predictions of the demise of coral reefs were already very current then. It's a good introduction to the huge complexity of reasoning about these systems, which involve more feedback loops than a non-expert can even imagine. What I take away from that discussion is that there is no serious researcher in the field who doesn't see the coral reefs disappearing at a huge rate, but there is no consensus about the dominant mechanism; I think (although I am not an expert) that the arguments of those who see pollution and overfishing as the main cause are more persuasive.

For example, a very large fraction of coral reefs around Sri Lanka disappeared in the 1990s, and this apparently had more to do with the fact that people blasted them and hauled them away to be used as limestone in the construction industry, than with any subtle changes in the pH of seawater. In the (very plausible) opinion of some of the scientists from that discussion, most coral reefs will die off long before the pH changes really become significant. It would be great if someone who is a researcher in this field could give us some more recent results and data.
Please, let's not have one of those debates.

I agree directly subsidizing businesses is foolish, in part for the reason you cite. I think there are lots of infrastructure-like things that could be provided, including healthcare. There is clearly something broken in US healthcare. It doesn't function as useful market for individuals and small businesses. There's clearly something screwy with the economics of it.

You can have the last word. I have to go sell my car.
I can't believe how often I forget my phone at home now that I've got a wristwatch again.
That's harsh. I have to say, his pitch resonates with the common man more than you think. How many people keep their passwords in spreadsheets or other haphazard ways? Zillions. How many stop and think "mh, what's gonna happen if I lose this spreadsheet"? Not many -- otherwise they wouldn't store passwords in spreadsheets to begin with. Scott just reminded them that they'll be screwed at some point, and he's here to help. I expect part of the reasoning behind Branson's investment is that the man himself (or some of his minions) must have had the occasional lost-password-crisis here or there.

Clearly, with a bland but fairly descriptive name like MySocialCloud, they are not targeting paranoid geeks (the ones who worry about details like "who's running this service?", and would rather use services going by dorky names with random missing vowels), they are targeting the common man who stores passwords in spreadsheets. They are scratching an itch they themselves had, which is often how you validate your own business plan. I don't see why they should be ridiculed for it.

(This said, the whole post is just planted marketing of the lowest quality. Hardly HN-worthy, if you ask me.)
There are ton....ton....ton. This market is over crowded and they are so poor in seo. Yesterday I was trying to find an app to view youtube offline and nothing came in google search. I know iSwift from the days when I was searching for job. Here is the link
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iswifter-flash-web-browser/id...
First, we don't know what Android's "true potential" is yet because it hasn't realized it yet.. unless it has and its what its doing now, but we still don't know that its not more than that. Maybe its true potential is that after Windows takes over all phones Android will power the UI to your car, who knows.

Anyway, Android is moving down the chain and inasmuch as smartphone economics look like mobile phone V1 economics, they should be getting too at the <$1000pa earners within a few years. Incredible when you think about it. Mobiles went from stock brokers and movie stars only to sustenance farmers in the worst run countries on earth in only a decade. People who haven't been reached by things like electricity, piped water or paved roads. A half a generation old technology has, in some cases, better market penetration than things so old we can't even think of them as technology. Things like literacy & money.
And how long do you expect the company to last after it loses its first million passwords?
It'd be a great story if it ended with "and that's why I decided to use 1Pass!"
www.Thersa.org I particularly like the animate items
A better mousetrap.
I looking for ARM-based boards/computers for OpenCL development. Any suggestion?
Sounds like you're suggesting Facebook may eventually become the next YellowPages. I could see that happening. It's mostly what I use it for anyway—remaining available to people who, since joining Facebook, seem to have forgotten I'm still reachable via phone, email, and IM.
Is this really a place for politics?
On their how it works page: "When you enter a password it gets emailed to us where we will manually enter it unencrypted into a massive spreadsheet."
Drop out of college to make a combo Delicious/LastPass!
This is so true: I remember in high school studying calculus from a random book which made me think that calculus was about was a bunch of tricks for doing integration and differentiation. A few years later when I first start working through Spivak's excellent book on Calculus, It was one of the hardest things I had ever done but the sheer magnificent beauty of the structure on which most of modern calculus is built on and how it gradually evolved comes to light. It is really both a journey in history and time and building mental models that reoccur through so many branches of mathematics.
find the alternates under the comments at
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/spool-is-instapaper-on-ster...
"Unfortunately, one of the things that makes the site so secure is that we do not disclose the exact encryption practices."

I don't know dude, sounds super secure to me.
most factories, power plants, chemical plants or oil fields don't have internet.

Some don't have internet. Most shouldn't have internet.

But given the number of SCADA exploits I've heard about recently... there's an awful lot of places which shouldn't have internet but do.
There's a lot of over-the-top hating from the peanut gallery in this thread. I'll balance it out:

What a ride this must have been so far. They're doing a great job getting their name out there, that's for sure. An investment from Richard Branson and a co-founder of Photobucket, plus this article in Yahoo Small Business that is now trending the HN front page. I hope they're able to take this massive opportunity they've been given and turn it into a successful business.
Are you saying one shouldn't reason with others, but instead just force them? That might is right?

Whoa. I expected some petty selfishness and shallow sophistry, and am very pleasantly surprised by the general quality of comments here.. but yours kinda takes the cake, it's even worse than anything I braced myself for. Which says a lot. Just mind-boggling.
The link: https://hackpad.com/
Would you care to explain why?

As someone not familiar with lace or wedding dresses, it's far from obvious why it would be notable. If you wrote up a response explaining, I'd bet that a lot of readers here would find it informative.
Thanks for the feedback I can see your point I'll get to work on getting something a little more visual to explain it.

And yes, it's very lightweight we already use it for bug tracking, beta signups, feedback and general contact. Other early beta customers are using it to manage job applications and competition entries.
This is a marketing piece masquerading as advocacy. What's the difference? An advocate won't personally profit from the course of action they are recommending. A marketer will. I say this because this man's conclusion is, basically, "The coral reefs are disappearing. Fund my research more."

This does, of course, put research scientists into a bit of a bind. Presumably, since they are the ones looking at these systems in detail, they are the "early warning system" for any catastrophic change. When they see catastrophe, what should a research scientist do? Write an op-ed piece in the Times asking for more research funding? I don't think so.

I think the correct move is to complete the fucking research. "Completion" means to come up with some really solid conclusions, and if the system is on course to do something nasty, to have a list of actionable steps to change it. Then, you advocate that list of actionable steps, citing your research as the basis for it. Presumably, you will NOT personally profit from those steps (except, perhaps, as a consultant).

Now, I can hear the objectivist/egoist hacker contingent's hackles raise - why shouldn't a research scientist profit from their research? Was not that their blood and tears and insight? Actually, I think that should be open for them - but they should call it marketing, not advocacy, and it should be clearly a matter of personal enrichment. The thing that an objectivist should focus on is the hypocrisy of a "call to action" masquerading as altruistic concern over the environment, when it is really a quite selfish concern for securing one's own funding source. It's not that I'm against securing one's own funding source, but to do it under the guise of advocacy is flat out wrong.
Remember all of the cheap, hardware decode capable ARM devices we've seen lately?

This is awesome, awesome, awesome. XBMC is an impressive piece of software. uPNP AV/DLNA, AirPlay, can play from every network sharing technology I've ever heard of.
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on what "troll bait" is in this context. I'm not following.
Storing attorney-client communication seems pretty illegal to me.
Also:

"We oppose any sex education other than abstinence until marriage."

"We support school subjects with emphasis on the Judeo-Christian principles upon which America was founded and which form the basis of America’s legal, political and
economic systems. "

The full platform document is an interesting read. I didn't realize that Judeo-Christian principles formed the basis of America's economic system.

I knew that the republican camp includes many religulous Christian conservatives, but I had no idea that it was formally written into their documents. How can one seriously be opposed to teaching critical thinking? I wonder what percentage of republican voters completely agree with all of this.
There's some Hyundais and/or Kias that look awfully like Jaguars and BMWs. You'd do a double take in the street. Do the aped companies wage a public battle against them? No, they know their quality speaks for itself.
Bringing Back Long-Term Quality
He said "at the time", which I guess refers to the difference between Smartscreen's release which was apparently 2006 with IE7; and MSE's 2009 release.
I don't hire someone to brush my teeth for me at $65 / hour or $250 / hour etc.

The US Government disagrees with you.

"The cost of preparing and filing all business and personal tax returns is estimated to be $250 to $300 billion each year. According to a 2005 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the efficiency cost of the tax system—the output that is lost over and above the tax itself—is between $240 billion and $600 billion per year."

"The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is the audit, evaluation, and investigative arm of the United States Congress. It is part of the legislative branch of the United States government."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_preparation

A tax is a burden imposed upon me by an external force. In the case of taxes it's generally completely involuntary. I voluntarily brush my teeth. There's a very, very, very large difference between having a time and financial cost imposed upon you, and choosing to spend a few dollars and x hours per month on brushing my teeth.

If someone is imposing a tax upon you, it's properly their responsibility to make sure it's as efficient and as non-painful as possible (in terms of time to file, added costs, etc). The US Government has completely failed in that regard. It's almost universally agreed (aka bi-partisan) that we have a disaster of a tax code complication wise.

1.75 million accountants in the US. That's about 60% more than there are lawyers.