skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Admittedly, the API example was not totally on point since it was dealing with copyright. However it illuminated the problem with lawyers even under the best of circumstances not understanding software and programming.

I agree that the question of "What is an API" was quite important for good reasons in that case. What was gravely concerning to me was that the lawyers from neither side had a clear idea of the answer, despite the fact that had the best possible set of circumstances for lawyers to get that kind of understanding. Specifically, their clients gave them access to some of the smartest people in the world, they had virtually unlimited time and money, and the lawyers themselves are some of the best in the country and were experienced in complex litigation with technical companies. Extend this kind of conceptual ignorance to the lawyers who are arguing about and making policy on software patents, and it's both terrifying and infuriating.
Knowledge Workers are Bad at Working (and Here’s What to Do About It…)
The reason a CRT seems to flicker with low refresh rates is because the screen goes dark in between beam traces, a LCD does not. So a static image on a LCD with 60 Hz refresh rate is stable whereas a CRT would flicker at that rate.
How is it economically efficient to move non-time-sensitive cargo at high speeds? If the goal is to avoid the pollution associated with sea shipping, the natural competitor is the existing land-based freight network: trucks and diesel trains. If you want to sanity-check your numbers, that's the number to compare it to.

Here's a back-of-the-envelope calculation for moving a 40-foot shipping container over rail from NYC to LA:
3 cents per ton-mile * 30 tons * 2800 miles = ~$2500. I couldn't find a quote for that route by sea, but from NYC to London I got a $1750 quote, and I imagine the costs are comparable.

I believe you that container ships are huge polluters. It sounds, though, that it'd be easier to fix this by taxing those externalities, rather than making two arguments simultaneously: that container ships are bad and that we should build a giant high-speed domestic freight rail network.

Take the numbers above with a huge grain of salt, but here are my sources for them:
3 cents per ton-mile: http://www.kehoe.org/owen/portfolio/truck_vs_rail.pdf
a 40' container weighs 29kg loaded: http://hamburg-sud.com/hsdg/en/hsdg/servicesproducts/contain...
Have you checked your calculations against David MacKay's? His conclusion was that "International shipping is a surprisingly efficient user of fossil fuels; so getting road transport off fossil fuels is a higher priority than getting ships off fossil fuels."

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c15/page_95...

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c20/page_13...
Shameless plug ahead. I checked all the HN clients for iOS (I think) and I didn't like any of them. Their designs are usually rough and they don't add much functionality to the site. That's why I started writing a better HN app and I'm documenting the process. If you're interested about it, you can see my last post about the app here http://www.rainycape.com/post/300/building-hackerful-day-2/ (currently writing post about day 3).
Good work. I imagine 1g/1m^3 is roughly what you'd expect - especially in a desert.

If the extractor area is the size of the bottle's cap (2cm x 2cm = 4e-4m^2) then to get a litre of water (1e3 m^3 air) requires 2.5e6m of air to flow past it - If you want it full in a day that's 30m/s... hmmm... doesn't seem likely.

However if the size of the extractor area is as large as the bottle (say 10cm x 10cm = 1e-2m^2) then a 1 m/s wind may do it.

Based on this I'm not confident in the "marathon runner" claim, but I'm sure techniques for extracting water from wind have been used before, but improvements could be made.

Scaling up the technology obviously increases the viability, yielding something like this: http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/prototype-wind-turb...
I am a student at USC. I could not do much on the financial side of it but I sure did spread the word on Twitter and other channels. I e-mailed them about the awesome work they were doing and told them that I would help them from the technology side if they required me. Then I got a reply back from Chase (co-founder) himself. In life very seldom you get a chance to do something meaningful, they are doing it! Hats off. Go Watsi!!
To me, this looks like a really cool tech demo without a clear purpose. I can think of several possibilities: For instance, teachers using this as a way to distribute examples for people to play with, as an improvement over paper hand-outs. Or as a tool for remote tutoring, as in the collaborative drawing example. Or as a tool to organize study notes.

But I think it would help if you choose a single use case and focused. If this is a tool for remote tutoring, try to integrate it with other similar services. For example, a built-in code editor. (There was a really cool online tool I saw a while ago that let you step through python code line by line, showing the currently defined variables and values at each step, with arrows and such pointing to objects on the heap...).

Basically: the technology looks really cool, but it's hard to say anything else. I'm not sure who this is aimed at.
One of the interesting things about Jacques speculation is that if you move the pressurized air with the capsules they never go super sonic, the air is moving with them and their motion relative to that air is pretty constrained. The duct friction issue however is a serious issue.

It could be a giant hack of course, it could be Elon saying he knows how to do it when he doesn't and getting all these great ideas to pour out. Or he could die and it would be his 'last company' legacy like Fermat's last theorem, sort of "Wow, really elegant way to do that, won't quite fit in the margin here though."
Trending On AngelList: Tactics & Results
> Sorenson notes there is more than three quadrillion gallons of water in the air, which is essentially a massive untapped resource.

For what it's worth, air with low humidity can be pretty damaging. Lots of materials would become excessively brittle at very low humidities, causing them to break easily. This interesting white paper [1] suggests that, for most materials, the optimal humidity is between 40-60%.

Still, this is a very cool concept.

[1] http://www.descoenergy.com/pdf/Humidity%20How%20it%20affects...
Mark Zuckerberg, most famously, thought that Facebook would kill email (2010):
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1329979/Faceb...
http://www.channel4.com/news/has-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-j...
This is pretty awesome, I'm going to be using it for sure. As the title suggests I definetly think it is much better than the standard bootstrap modal. You should try to get this implemented into bootstrap. Good work.
"A poor workman blames his tools."

. . . but even a master carpenter can't build a house out of rotten wood. Of course, to me, rotten wood is OSX and Windows (why anyone would build servers on those instead of one of the BSDs or Linux, I'll never know; to me, development is also incredibly painful on Windows and OSX), but Ubuntu is not without issues. The rallying cry of "usability first!" is all well and good, until things like taking shortcuts by way of binary drivers causes crashes. Still, one has to wonder why they didn't just try another distro. If you think your tools (or your "lumber") are the problem, try different ones.
World's oldest digital computer successfully reboots
I welcome the development of a classic mode regardless of how it is implemented, but I think the use of extensions makes a lot of sense.

Red Hat Enterprise 7 desktops will be based on Fedora 18 I understand, and I gather that release has Gnome 3.6 and therefore the fall-back session as currently provided, i.e. not an extension.
Low muscle strength in adolescence linked to increased risk of early death
Most ID numbers are used as weak authentication: Driver's license numbers, SSNs, etc.

The security on a ICCID is arguably better than any of these things. Unless it's transmitted in the clear? I don't know.
Дом, сияющий чистотой
Typically in a study like this, a psychologist / psychiatrist will compare psychotherapy alone against psychotherapy with a drug being evaluated. But what they won't do is try evaluating the drug alone, without psychotherapy. The reason? They fear it might work, which would expose talk therapy for what it is.
> That doesn't mean that he abandoned his values.

This was exactly my point. The parent was suggesting that MLK compromised on his stance but presented only evidence of a change in tactics.

I agree completely with your other assertions.

I think it would help to distinguish that there are really 2 arguments happening here, muddying the waters: Unwavering belief and unwavering actions.

I personally think that unwavering belief in something is commendable and this is where my comments have come from. I think this is necessary in order to effect any real change as the process is usually long and arduous.

Unwavering commitment to a losing tactic, as danso points out, is stubborn and foolish. A person who is unable to adapt when facing challenges does no favors for their cause.
So, now the real question is: How long until we have a self filling beer bottle?
An MVP is not about building a bad product, it's about testing your biggest assumptions and leaps of faith.

In the case of ThingShare, what are your big assumptions that are core to your business working? I would say it's not whether people will list their games online, that's trivial and not really required by the product. It's not whether people want to rent games, that's proven.

I think your two biggest leaps of faith are (a), that people are willing to lend their expensive games to a stranger for a small sum, and (b), that people will be reliable about sending their games to other if your product works by mail or if it works locally, that they will be willing to meet a stranger in person to exchange.

To test those assumptions you don't build a broken website and automation system. You have a web form, using Wufoo or Google Docs. Have people list the games they want to rent and the games they want to lend. Then you search the database/spreadsheet, make matches, and make all the arrangements. Make pre-paid mailing labels, give them directions to where they are going. Do everything, just do it all manually, you only have 30 customers.

In the match.com example, you don't build the next match.com. That is, you don't build a whole site with a bad UI/UX. By saying you want to build the next match.com you are really saying that match.com is doing something wrong, and you can do better. What is it you can do better? What is your assumption?

I don't know match.com, so I'm making this up. Maybe your big assumption is that the reason match.com doesn't work is because it doesn't take into account financial parity. So you offer a service that will match people up with others that make the same amount of money. No algorithms, you may not even need a website, just match people up. If that works, if people go for it, if they like their dates, test your next big leap of faith (maybe that people won't lie about the income?).
I think this aspect is often overlooked in the MVP discussion. Customers are trained to have certain expectations fulfilled and when they're not met they perceive things as broken, as you observe.

I think the examples of MVPs that have worked best appear to be targeting other startups or folks in the industry with a high degree of tolerance for failure and understanding of how this all works (and therefore patience with the process).

But most real-world customers end up disappointed with this kind of thing. So far as I can tell a lot of MVP-driven startups just accept that they'll lose a percentage of their early adopters over this.

Worse, and I have some experience of this with a startup of my own, often MVPs come with the need for investment $$ to make them truly viable. So what to do? Well get 10,000+ folks signing up and using your system, in just a few weeks, and showing it's got great demand (that was a big number for the space). Yet the more you ramp up early adopters the bigger the cliff when you still hear crickets on the funding trail and never manage to afford to give those customers - many of whom have invested a lot of time and energy in your product - what you promised them.

Many folks are okay with this. There's something almost sociopathic about many young inexperienced entrepreneurs who don't appear to think about the real world consequences of abandoning their early adopters (and their efforts and data).
The bad reputation they/we get is almost entirely due to the (comparatively) low rent. Our client base consists of the poor, students, and people with mental or substance-abuse problems (who tend to be very poor indeed.) Those tenants with addictions or mental illness are the most visible (and obnoxious) of our tenants even though they aren't the most numerous.

Simply: these new units are more of the same, but for wealthier people (and I will be sending in my resume, TBH.)
Instagram introduces Badges For Your Websites
Floating point addition and multiplication are commutative, but are not necessarily associative.
"Stackable"

After checking out the live demo, I have no idea how "stacking" modals could make a good user interface.
The low cost of living is also an enormous advantage for anyone trying to start something from scratch. You can rent a decent multi-bedroom house in a decent area of Omaha or Kansas City for what it would cost to rent a small room in a shared apartment in SF, Boston, or NYC. In how many places on the coasts would you see a grassroots group providing free Google Fiber-connected houses to live in while you work on your startup? [0, 1] It just wouldn't be financially feasible.

0. http://www.kcstartupvillage.org

1. http://www.homesforhackers.com
This is one of those things I wish I'd thought of first. Good job!
An upside to giving demos is that if your viewer doesn't know you're a dev on the project (thinks you're just a business/sales person), they're a lot more honest with feedback. I've learned to never position myself as the guy who knows everything about the product...they're less afraid to 'hurt' my feelings.
Your comment gives the impression that Clojure is a big multiparadigm mess. But it is not. Clojure's design is clean and simple. Clojure is mostly functional. Sure, since it's a Lisp one can kind of incorporate other paradigms with macros. But out of the box Clojure does not do Java-style OOP (except for interop) or Prolog-style logic.
Great job man. This needs to be added to stock bootstrap.
It's terrible and only getting worse. When Google released the official YouTube app, it was something like the 9th result in the search. The first three applications in the same search results didn't even have YouTube in the title.
This is a very naive understanding. The statute was intentionally modified from "knowingly" to "intentionally" and the reasons for this change are a matter of public record. It was to explicitly decriminalize accidental or careless unauthorized access. Any judicial review takes such documentation into account.

This article is an uninformed rant spreading FUD in the pursuit of a personal goal and it doesn't deserve the attention it is receiving any more than the garbage legal scaremongering for which SCO was notorious.

Also it's "proof of concept" fails to identify screen resolution so not only is the author a failure at reading the law but also at writing working code.
You sound like a very Zen (if you don't like that term, calm) person :)
Anyone know what proxies still don't like foo.js?v=1 style URLs? I thought we were past this.

Also, a static build process (a la require.js) solves a lot of these for you in a way that's not specific to Django or any other framework. You also don't end up bloating your web app code with the concern for how static files are to be processed, which I personally like a lot.

Another way to go is to use Google's mod_pagespeed [1], which once again is not framework-specific.

Lastly, you can try another trick where you pre-generate .gz versions of all the files too, to really speed things up. It's nice not to have to do things on the fly and web servers like nginx can take quite a lot of traffic serving static files, so you can hold off on going the CDN route, unless of course geography matters more to you than offloading server resources.

[1] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/mod
My friend quit his job at an investment bank to make these.
Meters. Beijing is not as bad as Switzerland, I have a lot of space now.
I am ordinarily a big fan of articles pushing back against established best practices, but only because despite the sometimes whiny tone, they almost always bring something new and thought-provoking to the conversation.

This article does not.
Python is perhaps rare (unique?) in having a single authoritative, uncontroversial coding standard (pep8). I'm pretty sure its existence solves more problems than it causes.
you should build widgets so that others can embed the top stories from your site and get distributed exposure, I'm sure it would provide sustained exposure.
Agreed. ...the Silicon Prairie was the new Silicon Valley at least once already.
I have found one case where it makes sense. Say you have a modal popup with an 'editor' widget in it. If that widget then needs to popup another modal for adding a link, it makes sense. Here is a screenshot of what I'm talking about...

http://www.evernote.com/shard/s178/sh/003f6b5e-0869-44af-ab9...

This is also using the bootstrap modal solution referenced in this article. Redactor is the editor widget.
Brightcove CEO slams Facebook, wants end to “wars” over platforms
Wow. The video was cute but I wish it convinced me that the product would make a bike sounds like a horse. The music was mixed too high to hear it.

edit: There's another video on the page that does this, but it's tucked away at the bottom behind a button!
No, I'm not, but I haven't expressed it very well. I always run vsync, and I don't run games at settings where fps < refresh rate.
Web Malware - Understanding SEO Poisoning Attacks
It still requires a willingness to burn early adopters - those who put most faith and trust in you - in the cause of learning.

It's not that I advocate against MVP/Lean Startup - I've been following the movement since it was merely a set of unorganized blog posts. But like all things it's not to be followed blindly and uncritically in a one-size-fits-all manner. There can be real consequences of burning your early users just to prove/disprove theories about your product.
Old report, but seems to me that barge shipping is more energy efficient than truck or rail (see page x):
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/53xx...

More recent report from Europe comparing different transport modes for CO2 by kg-km traveled. Shipping is reported as most efficient over rail and road.
http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/energy-eff...
Low-information listeners
Yes, but it is in two parts.

You migrate to a place like Omaha or Des Moines from rural places like you said, but then after an education people traditionally left those places for the even bigger cities like the Twin Cities, etc. That said, effort by various colleges and city governments has gone into the brain drain problem for years so the drain has been declining. You can see marketing campaigns like http://lifeisright.com/ for various cities to try to promote staying put.
i think you're confusing collecting area with airflow cross-section. they're completely different things, unless somehow the air is blowing through the side of the (solid) bottle.
And every one of your examples uses passwords in conjunction with a second factor, or uses biometrics which is a heavily flawed idea as I previously pointed out. Your answer does not support the comment you originally made. You're fighting windmills brother.
Kind of, there's significant risks involved in shooting someone into space but not the risk of a long lingering death from radiation exposure. I think that's where the ethics committees get a bit hesitant.

I fully understand someone wanting to do it despite the risks, if its their choice then they've made their decision.
Pretty cool. The coconut should be included. IMHO.
Shrink Your Team to Increase Effectiveness
Upvote for Longcat :)
Vaporators! Sir - My first job was programming binary load
lifters, very similar to your vaporators.
The following code causes an error in Internet explorer
It's much more than that; the flickery 60Hz CRT is only incidental, it doesn't relate to the perception of smoothness. Like a sibling comment to yours says, it's very noticeable with the mouse, and even more so when moving around a window on the desktop. It looks like crappy stop-motion animation compared to what it can be at higher frame rates.
Yes.

That looks right.

It's a completely different tax, if the employer didn't have to pay that to the government you'd have to renegotiate your salary to get any of it (because it's not part of your salary).

But in Sweden you do negotiate the 10,000 SEK. You generally don't talk about the 13,100 unless you are an employer and have to think about it. That is my point and that is what I think is stupid.
It's a very common pattern in desktop software (complicated config panels, for instance). I don't think that makes it "good" but at least it's well understood. It's dumb that most existing modals can't do it.
I think on a person-to-person basis there's a lot of talk about startups and companies that have failed. People who have worked with startups that ended up going under have no discomfort talking about the causes and errors, which subsequent companies learn from. I think the experiences and lessons are passed on fairly well, it's just that this exchange happens out of the public spotlight.
Thanks for letting me know I'm not entirely wrong. I was just waiting for your personal validation.
Did you manage to find one audio clip that actually made the sound they are selling?
Checking In on Foursquare's Valuation
Have you checked out the Android-x86 project [1]? I remember, they were able to deliver some nice performance gains using an x86 emulator vs the ARM based emulators.

[1] http://www.android-x86.org/
Kickstarter sued over 3D Systems' printer patent
The video looks really neat.. Looking forward to how this and firefox OS both play out actually. The mobile OS wars are clearly not over!
I think it's simple physics. Moving anything on water at any speed is far more expensive than moving the equivalent thing on land. It is, at the simplest level, a comparison of hydrodynamic drag vs aerodynamic drag. It can't possibly be more efficient to displace water for days and days rather than push air out of the way, even at high speed.
Disappointed after realizing the title was not:
Scientist Creates Self-fulfilling Water Bottle
Agreed. The prototype video got me far more excited about the product than the meme filled promo. It should be featured more prominently.
It also assumes you have no social capital that can be burned by channeling folks towards trying something on your word and then finding it isn't - in the eyes of the user - a finished product, it's broken or under-featured. Reputations can be ruined like this.

It's not all Dropbox posting a signup form with no product behind it or Steve Jobs building the iPhone from whole cloth in secret with nothing in between. There's a continuum and startups can find their own spot on that path. IMHO
Note that I am not suggesting that conventional rail or trucking are options here. Trucking is only efficient for "last mile" delivery.
I think it's a terrible UX the way it's presented, but there is definitely a use-case for the functionality.

Say you have a modal that contains a step-by-step process. Now you can load multiple modals, and dismiss them one at a time. To a user, it will look like s/he is moving through the steps.

Is this a good use? Ehh...maybe not, but it's possible.
Just brainstorming here.