skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, but honestly what do people think is right? People investing in kickstarter project are fully aware that the project could take a year or two to complete, it's not like he can suddenly pull the project out from his ass in a day. If people are going to threaten with lawsuits less than a year from the initial backing date, why did they bother investing in the first place?
> If only there were some novel funding mechanism

How about a crowdfunding mechanism to enable interested parties to donate funds to "kick" the "starter?"
Yes. You're right. Utilities are told by the regulations to pay the engineering firms so that they can operate. I wish they had more choice other then the big ones but no one seems to be able to enter the market.
They should contact Phil Greenspun:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2012/12/12/what-do-the-hi...
ITU/WCIT issues resolution on Internet governance by "vote"
This is brilliant! How did you get access to your school's data? I'm assuming the bell schedule is hard coded, but what about the events schedule? I would be surprised if your school provides some sort of developer API, so are you scraping it? When I was in high school, I remember scraping our bell schedule to create Dashboard and Konfabulator widgets. This is much higher quality than anything I made back then!

In a related note, my startup (https://tabuleapp.com) is working on improving managing homework due dates for college students. I guess my itch to collect school data and make it more organized never left me.
U.N. summit rejects U.S., Europe hands-off-the-Internet plea
I didn't say Google did everything themselves. That would be ludicrous and, AFAIK, no one does that. I said that gathering more data yourself can be easier than integrating disparate data sources. In other words, direct data gathering is an important part of the story and fixings things isn't as simple as "MOAR DATA"!

> And sorry but Google doesn't own any POI data either.

Some of Google's recent acquisitions would beg to differ:

http://www.wired.com/business/2011/09/google-buys-zagat/

http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/13/technology/google-frommers/i...

And, unless you know differently, I'm pretty sure Google owns Google Places...
Found this on google -
http://www.giantbomb.com/code-hero/61-39471/code-hero-dev-ta...

Not sure I get it, seems a lot of people don't understand things can fail, then people become overwhelmed and to scared or inexperienced to deal with the issue.

Maybe there's more to it and the are still trying for money?
You can tell from auto-complete many people add 'wiki' or 'wikipedia' to searches at Google. And with the growth of Google-search-from-browser fields, I would also strongly expect that most people who type reformulated queries during an extended Wikipedia session do so through Google, not Wikipedia's much weaker onsite search.
Thanks! My school uses Google Calendar, so I'm using the Google Calendar API with AFNetworking to fetch the events.

Tabule looks cool, too :)...
Ask HN: What are these "important problems" we keep reading about?
It seems a recurring theme throughout a number of articles and blog posts submitted here outline working on "important problems" as something strongly coveted in the software engineering industry. Most people would probably define these problems differently, specific to their own domain or recent experiences, but I have a feeling there's a fair bit of common ground.

To generalize, I would consider any difficult yet solvable (in the near future) problem - that upon solving would ultimately raise some standard of living - to fall into the "important problem" category. And I would also assume, from my own experience, that these problems are either presently unsolved or their current solutions are less than adequate; and producing an optimal answer would be extremely satisfying to the point of feeling like life as an engineer/contributor to society is one step closer to completion.

Conversely, it might help to examine "unimportant problems", ones that might be too monotonous or easy. Or maybe solving them doesn't quite scratch an itch. But in solving them, you know you're one step closer to achieving a greater goal.

So with that said, what problems do you consider worthwhile? What are these "important problems" we keep reading about?

Edit: I should have been more clear and mentioned where I see the term come up most. It seems to be mentioned almost weekly on various startups' blogs, most of which are geared towards web apps and the like. It would be interesting to discuss the non-obvious "important problems" from hackers' perspectives.
That's true only if you needed to replace water in the primary loop, but that's not likely. Seawater is only in the 3rd outer condenser loop in a PWR design.
I often want a photo to illustrate a blog post, but I want one that I can use legally, e.g. public domain or under a Creative Commons Attribution-Only (CC-BY) license. Flickr provides an easy way to search for CC-BY photos in their collections; I find it incredibly useful:

http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0/
You make it sound so simple! If all projects were addressed with better budgeting and done in steps made of smaller projects, software projects would never miss a deadline. You should email Fred Brooks about how you just discovered the solution to his Mythical Man Month, maybe you'll even win a Turing award for your insight. </sarcasm>
> I don't consider Alex the most experienced dev, but I do think he is one of the most passionate people I have met. He tries for the stars and often times falls short, but so did the Wright Brothers, Tesla, and Edison.

It doesn't matter if he's the most passionate person in the world. Lack of communication and failure to deliver is what matters here.

> Even the best of startups fail. I think the rate is like 1 in 100 that succede. I hardly think we should hold kickstarter projects to a higher standard.

If a startup receives $170k in angel funds you'd better believe the angels would expect frequent, regular updates on the progress (or lack thereof).

> I have contributed over a thousand dollars to Kickstarter projects, and I don't consider any of those dollars, purchases. I consider them donations. Some projects will succede while others fail.

It doesn't matter if you consider them to be donations, they're not. If a company promises to deliver items like shirts and USB drives in exchange for money they're legally obligated to follow through.
Without Siri integration, it loses the real appeal of Apple's voice navigation system. Being able to say things like "I need gas", or "take me home" without taking attention away from the road are what really sell the voice navigation on the device, in my opinion.

I realize Google has been adding their own voice recognition to their apps, but there is no easy way to activate it without having to look at the screen; a no-go while driving.
I use my 3rd gen ipad all the time, in the bay area, and the Apple maps suck. Sorry but they do. My wife's iPad, being Gen 1, has been spared being upgraded to IOS6 and so we look up map things on hers. On numerous occasions we've compared what the 'old' Maps app brought up and what the 'current' Map app brought up and merely shook our head.

I am surprised that Google would even consider putting their maps back on iOS at this point given the publicity but they have never been a very scrutable organization.
We get that question a lot. The answer is no. There is always a manual confirmation step. The user must agree on both his laptop and phone and check if the unique photo matches.

Edit. Auto correct typo
See here:
http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
>I spend most of my time working with NetBeans on a mac, and it's just as pretty as Keynote, while more responsive and stable.

Just as pretty as Keynote? I beg to differ. NetBeans (and Eclipse, IDEA) always hit the "uncanny valley" for me (and Eclipse is even using Cocoa!). Not looking right at all for the platform, and with BS divergent behaviour on lots of UI controls. On top of it, all three are quite laggy (gotten a little better with huge memory these days and SSDs, but still, if you need 4GB and solid state to get something to run fast, well...).

In no way I would say NetBeans provides a better experience on a Mac than Keynote.
Do you mean median?
You don't have to hit every deadline on the nose for a successful project. Nor am I saying every project can succeed. We're getting off track here; the point is, I just think that success rates on Kickstarter projects are not inherently related to the success rates of startups.
Tvs option?
I believe the report includes music devices...might it be the iPod (released '05)? I'm not sure if the report would include the first-gen iPod, but it seems to.
> seems to be one of the more balanced write ups

That article seems to be one of the worst. It starts demonizing McAfee from the very first paragraph. And as far as I've gotten into it, never stops.

It does though do a good job of repeating the same old garbage printed in every other article. That and ignoring the other side of the story.
This is over 50% of their market cap of $9.6M, and looks like it caused at least a little bump in their share prices:
http://tinyurl.com/bwzblvy
Not crafted by guest workers.
Review my startup (Drimmit)
True, but releasing a beta of your potential replacement (for example), is another way of acting.
Ex-Admiral Personal Computer Targeted
Well, maybe instead of offering product, they could offer... I don't know, equity? Then, perhaps, sell stakes in their future profits it some kind of public offering...?
You think just like every first timer on kickstarter. A friend of mine says she's never going to offer t-shirt rewards on her kickstarter projects anymore. In the end, it cost a lot more than what she thought, and involved significant physical labor which detracts from the purposes of the actual project at hand.
> I think people looking at the Newsstand or apps for publishing are missing the point. It's not about formats or delivery mechanism. It's more of a fundamental business problem.

If you have never read it, I highly recommend Clay Shirky's classic essay: "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable". It may make you think more about the economics of publishing and forced change.

"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem...

The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L’Osservatore Romano as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental..."

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...
I think we can say that brains/neurons have the lowest communication overhead of any computational approach known. Common computer architectures that move contents of memory to computational hardware through a limited number of ports is incredibly inefficient by comparison. There is massive room for improvement. We're still only using 2 dimensions in silicon, basically.
Really, the greatest reason has to do with organizational momentum. Think of how office politics work when different groups have competing ideas for the same solution. Those with expertise and time invested into their way are going to protect and defend their turf. Thorium lost that battle.

The argument that it wasn't good for weapons integration doesn't hold water as a commercial power reactor would not be used in that fashion at all. The DOE's production of plutonium 239 comes from specialized irradiated u238 rods exposed for 4 weeks or so - totally different production method and process that a PWR power reactor would use.
It does matter when a potential buyer will mentally juxtapose the cost of production with the price being charged. If the individual can reproduce the same value at a lower cost by producing it themselves, they will likely do so. This is why business-to-developer commerce precludes price gouging: the developers can replicate your product if need be.

It's possible to wring a lot of money out of people or corporations that don't have the capacity to replicate your work by opining the virtues of yielded "value." It isn't possible to do that when selling to technical people. At that point, cost of production needs to be taken into account. This is also why soft features like polish and convenience become significant in differentiating products.

EDIT: Also, you never refute the argument in the original article decrying your stance because value is idiosyncratic.
In China, social divisions are written in a little red booklet
Tell an iOS developer what control to build and open-source next
Thanks. Although I was hoping to get some real, personal examples of what folks here consider to be important problems.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they don't use source control or build control. The index file linked has tons of production-specific configuration information (database ip/keys), which wouldn't be checked into source control under best practices. That would require manual editing on the server to set up correctly.
Probably not the best choice for fuel, though. It takes around a month after capturing a neutron for thorium to become fissile, and if they just needed to get to the moon and back, a thorium breeder reactor isn't going to be too helpful with that. Highly enriched uranium is the way the NERVA guys went.

If they needed long-term power for a moon base, of course, it might be another story.
Have iOS6 users been waiting this long to get GMaps back??

Yes. Very much so. I was frustrated with the app for a few weeks, then one day driving back from out of state I ran into a closed section of interstate. After half an hour of fighting the app in a convenience store parking lot, I gave up and went inside to buy a road atlas.

I could really rely on google maps to give me good directions and actually show me all the roads sensibly. With my android phone, when I needed to deviate from the calculated route I'd just let my sense of direction lead me around for 15 minutes then look back at my phone, thats how much I trusted it.
Email idea is okay. But keep in mind, Passbook IS able to function in a lot of great ways, but just isn't implemented by most developers. For example, American Airlines COULD ask for your email, and mail you a link that creates the Passbook ticket.

Anyone can make a Passbook ticket of any kind right from a URL: http://www.passsource.com/

It's up to developers to implement this in better ways (as opposed to having to install an app)
democraticunderground.com is thataway. This is ycombinator.com, where people know they can improve their working conditions and get rich even if they are in rough conditions. Grimy work, risks, pressure, 100 hour weeks (making "overtime" laughable), and knowing it could/will all come crashing down - and all with society blaming you - is what you make of it.
ExploitHub Official Statement
That wasn't what the article was about - it was that once you become a founder, with other people depending upon you, you don't have time to develop any more, not that you can't become a founder if you're a developer. I've heard Zuck still does code occasionally, but I'd really doubt he spends more than about 1% of his time doing it.
yikes, perhaps the besider folks should know about this.
Holy crap this would make a good image compression algorithm. Might be complex to encode, but super small and efficient to decode.

Can we have this, please? Someone?
To add to the cacophony of "I built one of these too!", here's mine:

http://mattdw.github.com/experiments/image-evo/

It's more strictly a genetic algorithm than the OP, too, as it's mutating a population, and instances age and eventually die.
So much for "Uniform"
You might be interested in the Mincome experiment in Manitoba: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
It's probably because the friends of yours that cared about your marriage probably showed up to the marriage in person. But clicking likes maximizes around sports games (especially if you have friends who are also Orioles fans).

It's the same thing with my friends: My 5 closest friends don't even register on my facebook feed, because I talk to them regularly in person and share experiences with them. The more intimate private conversations. It's the next 50 that show up constantly in facebook, hitting like ex post facto.
As a non-developer solo founder, this article resonates with me more to the point of "as a founder, you can't expect to devote all your energies to any one thing". My responsibilities with my startup have varied pretty much by month.

First it was working with potential customers to figure out what kind of product they wanted. Then it was time to find the technologies that would allow me to create that product. Then it was finding a technical staff that could build our product using those technologies. Then it was preparing our sales strategy, materials, and sales staff to sell the product. Now it's primarily marketing, pitching to writers, blogs, and doing what I can to get the word out to consumers. If I had to forecast the next month or two, I'd say that preparing investor pitches and materials will start to absorb an increasing amount of my time, and I will probably end up finding a marketer to take over my marketing responsibilities so I can focus on the funding side.

Each of those stages basically involved devoting myself overwhelmingly to that particular issue that was most crucial to the business at that time (product development, sales, marketing, etc) then finding someone to delegate that work to once I needed to move on to the next step. Frankly, I'd never want to do it any other way, because it means I know every aspect of my business, my product, and my customers, and I know exactly what I need to delegate to make sure things get done right.

Moreover, by knowing every aspect of my business, no one is indispensable to me. When my original programmer decided he had to take a full time/weekly paycheck job for financial reasons, I knew my product and technologies well enough that I was able to seamlessly bring in a replacement to finish the work because even though it wasn't my code, it was my product so I could specify exactly what had to be finished, and what he'd be working on after it was done.

Last point, because it seems to be a widespread misconception here: Programming is only a part of the technical side. My startup uses multiple pieces of technology that my programmers weren't aware existed until I showed the APIs to them. Now, I couldn't have used those technologies without those programmers, because I lack the ability to actually take the APIs and plug them into our code, but I can find the technology that does what I need done, and then have them integrate it. If on the other hand I'd brought one of those developers on as a "technical co-founder", and relied on them to handle the technical side, we would have been dead in the water or would have ended up with an inferior product.

None of this is intended to be antagonistic, or to diminish the importance of programming to a tech startup. I simply state it to show there is more than one way to bake a pie, and that a non-programmer can still handle all the technical aspects of a company needed to create a successful startup. Food for thought!
Straight from the VC’s mouth: 5 things I look for in a CEO
Couldn't we say that any solution that makes life easier raises the standard of living? A better interface, faster software, etc... Product & idea iterations improve the standard of living in the future because their effects snowball overtime. They are also stepping stones for their creators to move onto better and "more important" problems.

Truly important problems - the ones where a solution would make an immediate and significant positive impact in some way for the human race - would be things like solving multi-planetary existence (figure out how to survive a lifetime on Mars and grow), ending poverty, ending crime, ending corruption, ending world hunger... There's a lot. To me, these are the end steps of whatever these "important problems" solve. For instance, we can't end crime until we end corruption, have a government system that people don't need to circumvent for anything, and have everybody be satisfied enough not to commit even the smallest crime. I once read that in Soviet Russia, people would illegally offer their repair services to individuals and companies that didn't want to wait for scheduled maintenance or replacement (or something similar to that idea.)

The problems we solve today are steps and pieces along the way to reach these end Utopian style goals (living on Mars isn't Utopian.. but the other things I listed are.)
This is exactly the problem with passbook.
User has to learn a new 'hack' to make his passbook useful..
Why does the user have to click 'Add to passbook' button from his email when Apple can scrape our email and surface the information directly?
I was working under the assumption that the government would subsidize the difference.
North Korean Satellite out of control (update)
His passion is at best irrelevant and at worst an indictment of his suitability as a candidate for investment.

Personally, I would have much more confidence in a totally dispassionate individual, who raised funds for a project because they saw it as a rational use of their time and other people's money, not because they had a deep emotional investment in a particular idea. I would certainly expect a dispassionate individual to make far more accurate predictions of the necessary budget and timescale of a project, and the likelihood of it failing.

Peake has no clear track record of delivering large software projects and interviews suggest that he has no clear constraints on project scope. To a developer, those are glaring warnings that a project is at risk of being vaporware, but I wouldn't expect anyone outside of the software industry to recognise that. I think Kickstarter need to think long and hard about whether they're doing everything they can to educate "backers" of the serious risks involved in certain classes of project. The lonely-hearts section in my local newspaper gives advice on how to avoid dangerous situations; The motoring section gives advice on how to spot a stolen or misrepresented vehicle. I don't see any equivalent on Kickstarter on how to spot high-risk projects.
LeBron 9 Cannon For Sale
Possibly, it's been awhile since I last ran the code.
How is something like this done?
Are you profitable? Can you live off that profit?
There's a typo on the README site that might indicate that they had similar ideas: `Google Analtyics`
Personally, I would say the (probably obvious) examples would be medicine (or quality of life improvements approaching old age), reduction of famine, and freely available and easily accessible information / learning.
Worst Ideas of 2012
Wouldn't the computer also need to support NFC? If so apps like this should remain relevant for a while to come yet.
That's true that thorium would upend the ceramic uranium pellet market if if was a prevalent design, but it's not. The fuel fabrication business is tiny compared to most other segments of the energy market. It's probably not even the main revenue stream for a company like Areva. Remember, the nuclear industry is not a vertical industry like oil that takes the product from the ground to the service pump. It's a scattering of smaller service companies, small mining companies, and construction that are dwarfed in size in comparison to fossil fuel companies.
But how many of those people are active users? I would bet very few.
way to beat a dead horse
/s
Hasn't Apple allowed browser apps that wrap UIWebKit well before Chrome?

I'm pretty sure there were already stand-alone browser apps in the App Store before Chrome came.