skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It gets tricky because the human body is an evolved system.

Human-designed systems need to be human comprehensible, so they're laid out in neat hierarchical layers, each abstracting away the complexity of the underlying process. Evolved systems aren't restricted by comprehensibility.

http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

>Finally, after just over 4,000 generations, the test system settled upon the best program. When Dr. Thompson played the 1kHz tone, the microchip unfailingly reacted by decreasing its power output to zero volts. When he played the 10kHz tone, the output jumped up to five volts. … And no one had the foggiest notion how it worked.

>Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest– with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output– yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.
Anyone know what kind of speeds could go over these frequencies?
How so? This question isn't necessarily about whether there is room for me, personally, to make a hardware startup. Rather, I would like to hear people's opinions on whether they think hardware startups aren't a completely stupid idea at all compared to the much more prevalent web startups.
Sure but it used to be that they were flipping a product/site. Users may have griped about the new management but the 'stuff' would still exist.

Seems strange to me that people would consider setting out to flip themselves (but I can believe that it happens).
FUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKK! This is horrible news.

This comment will likely get down voted, but this is my authentic comment on the story. I am having a very negative emotional reaction to the news. Especially the part about not further developing new features (like the iPad app I have been anxiously awaiting).
I, too, wish Apple would allow campaign tracking, but there is (or at least, was at one point) a backdoor way to do this - signup as an affiliate (via LinkShare) and use that to track conversions.
Dojo: Level Up Your Communication Skill
To extend on this, a later article talks about how the system is written on an "in-house language" ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html ) called wasabi.

> FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5. Wasabi is a private, in-house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized specifically for developing FogBugz; the Wasabi compiler itself is written in C#.

So to avoid starting from scratch they introduced a new language/compiler? Hrm... I question the scalability of this solution, what if every company decided to do this instead of biting the bullet and doing a rewrite?
There are also opportunity costs to freedom. Viewing choices as a "freedom v.s. cost" is a pretty common model. I don't think it needs to be approached "freedom lovers" v.s. "money grubbers" dynamic. People have happily made both choices.
Hmm, 30% gets you a lot like an instant world wide market for distribution to millions of iOS devices, app store curation, payment processing via iTunes accounts, etc...

Perhaps you are a Google fan since you are the "Founder AndroidWorks consulting"? They also take 30%.
PhoneGap:Build requires registration with either Adobe ID or Github :|
The Shannon limit would be at most 2Gbps...
Unfortunately, we are not yet at the point where a range of frequencies anywhere near as wide as discussed in the article can be supported by a simple firmware upgrade. RF receivers typically include a very narrow bandpass filter as the first component after the antenna. As spectrum becomes more crowded, these filters are even more critical to prevent saturation of the low-noise amplifier and unwanted products from the downconverter/mixer.
I just don't understand... what features were people expecting sparrow to add? That they are now disappointed about not getting anymore? I have yet to hear anyone who expressed their disappointment about the announcement say anything specific about what they thought they were losing.
“The major modeling insight we had a few years ago was to break up the functionality of the cell into subgroups which we could model individually, each with its own mathematics, and then to integrate these sub-models together into a whole,” Dr. Covert said. “It turned out to be a very exciting idea.”

I gotta say, if I was going to be working on that code, that statement would make me rather uncomfortable.
Believe me, I have serious issues with the "top N funny things" sorts of content that rules the web, and that is reflected in the design of Stack Exchange.

At the same time, I am torn, because you can learn a little bit from content like this. And the audience loves it. If we didn't have any systems in place to tamp down on poll/survey/opinion questions, Stack Overflow would be virtually nothing but those kinds of question. They are INSANELY popular.
That's what I was thinking too. It'd be really easy for them to terminate their agreements with the trolls and start using the technology free again. My guess is that at least some of them will take this course of action.
free_enough + available > completely_free
This. I sold out (Etude), worked for a year or so, and now I just have money (not seven figures though). Have been floundering ever since trying to put together the next thing. Having runway kind of makes it worse, even.
The fact that they have a financial interest (albeit small) in their developers' success contradicts your own conclusion.
How lucrative is the email client market? Could the makers of Sparrow have survived for a while? I would think that a lot of people are already satisfied with Mail or a web client, and if someone bought a copy of Sparrow they wouldn't be buying another copy for a while. I'm surprised that there are multiple companies out there selling Mac email clients.
> Plenty of apps have existed for decades on those prices.

Most of these weren't funded by VCs expecting some sort of liquidity event to get return on their investment.
The article specifies that many people targeted used emails unique to their dropbox accounts.
Singularity University Converging Into Capitalist Machine
No, the GPL doesn't allow App Store applications. I don't think Apple cares what you do with your source code.
Better JSONP-ifier turns any JSON API into a JSONP API quickly and safely
"This is interesting from a technology perspective, perhaps, but it's hard to call it science."

As a physicist and scientist myself, I feel extremely inclined to say 'potato, potahto' at this one. This technology allows us to test many more hypotheses at a much quicker pace, which is good enough for me to call it science.
"Also, the law of supply and demand is not the kind of law you are obliged to follow under penalty of jail time. When Google got started, nobody was demanding a better search engine. But it turns out that the world really needed one, so now they have a $200 billion company."

This is another over-simplification. There were loads of search engines coming out in the years before and after Google. See Cuil. Bing. Alta-Vista. Lycos. Ask Jeeves. Overture. The list is long and distinguished. Google built a better one. But Google is a poor example because it began as a research project at a large University. Just like cancer research is handled today.

It is no accident that most startups that get funding and press are social photo-sharing apps- on the curve of startup ideas, these are very easy to build on several dimensions- they don't require massive headcount, capital, or sales teams and marketing departments like typical businesses. I suspect that this is in fact the reason there are so many social startups. It's really about these being the path of least-resistance.
Parody patent application on the ASCII table
Personally, I think that software should be protected by copyright only if its source code is placed in escrow and made available (a) when the copyright expires or (b) when the software ceases to be commercially available / supported (just as you can legally photocopy copyright books and pay a nominal per-page fee if they're out of print).

The purpose of copyright is to provide a limited monopoly in the interest of creating, in the long term, a public good. Without the source code, we never get the public good. Under this proposed law, Sparrow (and other, similar, products) would have to become open source once it was unsupported, or would not be protected by copyright in the first place.
Yearly subscriptions for a standalone app? I understand the motivation for continuous income. What's wrong with the old method of releasing a paid 2.0? Admittedly, it's a bit hairy in the Apple App Store world since you can't have paid updates, but why not a separate app? That way you can have maintenance releases in the old version and charge for the new one. Although, the rub is you can't give discounts for upgrades.

Like it's stated in the article, you pay a fixed price for a song that's released. Why should my software stop working if I don't want new features?
Fortunately, this story was written for average people to read and took liberties in the wording used, resulting in a possibly ambiguous interpretation. Had it been written in the precise language of tax accountants, such ambiguities would not be present and we would have been spared an entire thread of mental masturbation over the tax implications of such a disbursement.
They're not even losing anything, because the app didn't disappear into thin air. To be completely honest, I think most of this is simply people being a little dramatic.
It'd be very interesting if legal teams from different companies banded together to fight a common foe. I'm surprised this doesn't happen (or maybe it does and we don't hear about it?)

If I was a defendant along with 10 other companies in a case like this, you can bet I'd be calling them up to start a friendly dialog about sharing resources and discovery results (whether they were competitors or not).

I can imagine that for larger legal teams, like Microsoft probably has, they have very strict procedures dealing with this sort of suit, making collaboration with other teams difficult. I don't know anyone on MS' legal team, so this is speculation ;).
Just checking, CELT & Opus are the same thing?
Seems like they're saying that Opus is a merge of CELT & SILK
HNpod 3 - Ouya, GitHub, We Know What You're Doing
You think that another person should turn down (what was likely) enough money to support their families for the rest of their lives because you invested $10 in their email application? This is what you believe?
Rob Pike - Concurrent Lexical Scanning using Go
Your friendly (and frank) guide to the Diablo III Starter Edition
If you write "Apple: help the...", it appears like that was a statement from Apple. It should be, "Apple, help the best...". Not about the grammar or anything, but just to get clarity from the title.
That's kind of what I'm asking, though: how far can it be generalized to make your point?

How did Sergey and Larry "cash out," by declining acquisition offers? I'm thinking that's not the best example for you here.
That's true but the developers did say they were working on bringing some features to the app (push notifications for example). I think it's easy for me and you to understand that they were acquired for their talent but to ordinary people it just looks like they've bought something, were promised updates, and they weren't delivered. That reflects badly on all developers and it's something that's been happening a lot in the last few years. Businesses need their customers to trust them and acquihires are making the entire community look bad.
"This is not a good trend for Apple. Apple is depending on apps like Sparrow to make the iOS platform shine. Excellent apps like Sparrow cost a lot of money to build and maintain. Apple should be working hard to ensure independent app developers can earn even more than top salaries at Google, or they will all be poached away."

I'm not sure this even follows. Every time we see an iOS hitmaker acquired in 8-10 digit deals it tells the dev community that their golden ticket is to develop for iOS.

...

"There are two things Apple can do to help developers make more money:

1) Allow developers to charge monthly/annual subscription pricing...

2) Allow developers to track the success of social and internet ad campaigns."

Neither of these ideas would have gotten Sparrow's devs anywhere close to the money they made by signing up with Google. Sometimes people want to cash out, we need to stop pretending that is the end of an era of decent email clients. Sparrow is still there and it works. Other clients will clone and improve on it.
I can totally see why Google would want to aquire them. I can totally see why they would want to get aquired by Google.

This is still a very sad day for me as a customer. I love Sparrow, but I don't love Gmail. So seeing developers who created something I love move on to something I don't love is very sad.
In Java, at least, it can be useful when the value you are comparing a String constant with can be null:

if("test".equals(environment)){

vs

if(environment != null && environment.equals("test")){
This technology allows us to test many more hypotheses at a much quicker pace"

I think you're seriously overestimating the quality of the model. This isn't particle physics -- it's not as if there's an equation that precisely predicts the results of any particular molecular interaction. We don't even know if we know the full set of possible interactions in a system of this size. How can we possibly simulate it?

This is an example of "we ran the fancy machine for a while, it spit out some data, and we cherry-picked 'interesting' results from the output. Some of them even show up in experiments!" These sorts of breathless announcements are common in computational biology, but they usually don't amount to much. The best work is extremely reductionist. As others have already noted, it's easy to spend 10x the computational resources simulating a single protein on timescales far, far shorter than the ones simulated here.
Show HN: StartupWeekend pitch - open source music player and radio
Being a coder and desk jockey like many of us, I spend a lot of time plugged into my music collection or the "radio". The problem is that I don't trust iTunes after losing my history in a system crash. The cloud should solve that and also be available online, but comes with unfortunate restrictions.

My plan for this weekend is to build an open source, web based, music player, and social radio. This may sound like a tall order, but we will have a working demo in two days and all of our work will happen on github for everyone to see. (https://github.com/comster/disco)

If you're a javascript hacker or frontend designer who's interested in building a better music app and social radio, join team disco.js!

[end pitch]

[For example of the radio feature, see turntable.fm .]

The technology stack is all javascript. Node.js, Mongodb, and Backbone.js are the weapons of choice. Obviously my goal is to meet and learn from hackers at the event, but this is also a chance for me to shamelessly plug my open source platform as a service framework that I'm putting together (https://github.com/comster/house). It's just a bunch of open source components put together to provide a basic app development platform. The goal is to minimize your dev time on the server, so that you can focus on the application experience. This weekend gives me a chance to prove it can support a complex app like disco.js, and to get feedback from other developers and hopefully improve the architecture.

I'm looking for hacker feedback! Thanks in advance :)
I make the point because you're not the first person I've heard use the same argument.

Most recent that comes to mind was a banker interviewed on the BBC. I was listening, critically as I frequently do, and realized that the view he was espousing was flagrantly Marxist.

Amusing, that.
For more, http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Judaism-For-Little-Enlightenment/d...

... dropping the trivial words makes the tagline weird. It's "Zen Judaism: For You, A Little Enlightenment".
at genomicon.com the blogger talks allot about hardware. it's not exactly a 'HW startup' blog, but you might be interested.

edit: blog.makezine.com follows many HW startups also
These bits are too silly for the internet, so we're going to move them over here to this other part of the internet.

Sigh. This deletionism accomplishes nothing.
Original Dropbox YC App
They (also) exist for basic Java strings.

aString.equals("SOMETHING") will throw an exception if aString is null, while "SOMETHING".equals(aString) will just return false.

In some cases, that's one 'if' less to write.
I had to write an assignment about Steve Russell just the other week... if that is indeed you, hats off and I commend you for your work. Small world.. :)
Great example of Mystery Meat Navigation...
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html
In what way is using a technology not free, if you are given a royalty-free license to use the patents on it? (Honest question, I don't know what you mean here.)
No, because the 'I think' does not mean what you think it means. You can't take it out of its social context, which is to inform people that you assign a lower certainty to the next thing you are going to say. (Of course, you could say all that, but that would make most conversations very pointless and annoying, as I can say from personal experience.)
Here's Nonexistent Proposal to Move Network Diagnostics to Proprietary Servers
Join us in building a disruptively local marketplace - Yardsale (S11, iOS/rails)
Yardsale is a top-5 iOS application in Lifestyle and top-125 overall. We’ve been experiencing explosive growth in a multi-billion dollar market through mobile, and have a clear path to revenue.

We’re a small team of developers rethinking the way people buy and sell things locally. We're well funded, our users love what we're building, and we do too.

We're a rails/iOS shop, seeking an iOS specialist or hardcore generalist. We're looking for individuals who:

- Above all, learn quickly

- Have a strong understanding of everything from optimized PostgreSQL to performance hacking UIWebViews

- Seek out the latest in tooling, iOS open source or clang features

This is a key technical role, with significant equity and lots of room to influence the strategic direction of the company. The best fit will probably be someone hoping to be a technical founder in their next role.

Yardsale is based in San Francisco's mission district. If you'd like to hear more please send your github profile or something you've built to jobs@getyardsale.com, or visit us at https://www.getyardsale.com
Pokemon exceptions - our level editor embraces them :)

The result is, if something goes wrong, all you get is grayness, what follows is run Visual Studio, reproduce the bug, make sure that now catches exceptions before you, and hope it's not a heisenbug...
Past and Future in OS X Malware
WIPO: We Didn't Violate UN Sanctions... But Will Stop Doing It
This article really bothered me. Sparrow made a ton of money with only a small handful of people working on the product. It was extremely profitable and popular. I don't think any developers working there would have problems with Ramen noodle salaries with all the money that they were making.

When Google comes knocking on your door with eight figures, what do you expect them to say? How altruistic do you expect someone in that position to really be? They developed and designed a hit app that everyone loved and the team was snapped up. They don't owe anyone anything, it was their own decision, and although they were profitable and could have continued working on their products into the future, they chose to take a huge payday. This has nothing to do with Apple, a 30% cut, or them not making enough profit because they definitely were.
Looks like English language is adapting to problems it wasn't made for. :)
It's a shame that phones still can't properly handle web views well. My company went with PhoneGap and tried implementing webviews but no matter what, couldn't develop an app that ran well enough on phones. The folly of PhoneGap isn't really PhoneGap's fault, but their premise. Phones are NOT ready for Html5 apps. Tried. Failed. Now rewriting the entire app natively.
In regards to the Sparrow going on sale before being sold:

Maybe with every app ever bought there is a risk that the company goes under, therefore no more updates, and you've lost your money... but in this case, it's simply leaving a sour taste for a lot of people. Add me to this list.
TheNextWeb have also featured this story, with my image (giving me attribution):

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/07/21/email-app-creator-p...
Not totally related, but I found it ironic that the URL for this article is "I won't hire people who use poo"

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_p...
The story doesn't necessarily reflect reality. It is always safe to assume what you know is probably true rather than trust an author who's job is to write quick and get hits on their site.

Like I said, it is extremely unlikely he put the money in his bank account, then sent it to employees.
This judge and the legal system don't understand that SMARTPHONES ARE COMPUTERS![1] Now consider the mess that is patent law, and suddenly I'm terrified by the lack of tech-awareness in our judicial and legislative systems.

[1] Two reasons I say this:
1. Computer seizure generally requires a warrant and smartphone seizure appears to not require that
2. The rules of a pagers/phone number display are extrapolated to cover smartphones and texts/emails? Apples and oranges!
Whoa! The music app? I remember seeing that for the first time, had no idea Steinway picked it up. Congratulations man.

I had a similar situation with one of my first businesses. Low six figure acquisition and then.. oh, what do I do now? It took me almost 4 years to figure it out(!) and now I'm back on my feet again. Good luck!
I really liked:

headlessCamels and ProudCamels for verbally differentiating between the two different types of camelCase (or CamelCase)

(which was in the extended scrape of the original question: http://www.stackprinter.com/export?question=2349378&serv... )
It pretty much wrote a blogpost
On the flip side, I'm suspicious of people who immediately comment on typos and grammatical mistakes when they read something. Usually I don't even register such mistakes, my brain must just automatically make sense of the text. People who notice small mistakes that don't hamper the actual meaning/communication at hand - I wonder if they are really thinking about the meaning much at all, or just focussing on superficial details.
Emory Bubble - Let's Revolutionize Campus Connectivity
Very few people invest in an app hoping that it will stick around - people mostly invest in the service the app provides. Or the service the app enhances (like Sparrow enhancing the Gmail experience). If that app is gone for whatever reason, the market will simply move on to other solutions. Apps are not ecosystems and expecting stickiness is too much wishful thinking.
Based on what?! OP's question wasn't very well defined and your answer is completely arbitrary.
If you want the employees, and not the assets of the company, who cares about the investors and founders? They're not parties to the transaction. How could they stop the team from being "bought out from under them?"
Related NYT article: www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/education/edlife/campus-incubators-are-on-the-rise-as-colleges-encourage-student-start-ups.html

Thanks for your support!