skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good idea, but the results remind me of a Target commercial:P

If you switch the query to "dog bullseye" with imgcolor=red, 10 out of the first 20 results show the Target dog. If you remove the color restriction, only 5/10 feature the dog. So this feature potentially aids search accuracy.
I've seen an even simpler non-moving device to reduce electricity use in supermarket freezers. Because the air in the freezer gains heat more quickly than the produce, the freezer switches on too often. A simple sleeve for the thermometer made in a material with heat capacity comparable to the produce makes the thermometer measure something closer to the temperature of the food. It got tested by the standards agency in the UK and is getting used in some supermarket chains (I'd post a link if I could find one!).
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The example given in the article can be addressed by using foldl' instead of foldr. The issue is discussed in

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Foldr_Foldl_Foldl

A Haskell programmer needs to understand when non-strict evaluation can/should be avoided. foldr is usually more elegant but sometimes less efficient.
It's an interesting idea. Seems better than just gold. However I don't necessarily think it would be more stable. Changes in supply and demand of resources could have numerous unintended consequences.
I'm also very happy about with the editable fields on the change list.
You put more effort into crafting books than blog posts; the difference can be enough to make you sound like a completely different person.
I don't think morals have to enter into it. If a country artificially ties its currency to the dollar for purposes of inflating trade, it's going to end up with a bunch of dollars that aren't worth so much.

Seems like natural consequences to me.

I'm dubious that the system is so simple that simply changing the reserve currency is going to fix anything. But if I were an expert in international finance, I wouldn't be working on startups. And I'd probably be a lot more boring.
...and google controls the rest of the internets ads.
Free articles are available at mises.org, there are enough articles to keep you reading for months/years. Several of the authors predicted the housing bubble bust before it happened although they did not provide an exact time. You won't always agree with the articles but they will make you think.

Recent articles cover the issues and effects with the current administration's budget and economic plan along with more fundamental economic issues.

There is also a section with free books if you do not mind reading on the computer. There is also at least one guide to readings on the mises.org site.

Both of the books mentioned in previous posts are available through the mises.org bookstore.

Also check out Robert Murphy's "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism" as another primer on economics.
So you could afford to buy a house, but not to buy a drum set? Maybe I should reevaluate house ownership.
I spent about $200 on it promoting http://www.christmasbingocards.com last December 1st through December 17th or so. The idea for that site is it pitches exactly ONE thing with laser focus. The idea for the advertising campaign was "Get this in front of technically aware moms, have them blog about it, win".

I received overwhelmingly targeted traffic. They loved it. I got plenty of thumbs. 95% of them left within 2 seconds. The remainder did not give me the blog links I was hoping to get from the experience.

I got much, much better results from the concurrent campaign I did on AdWords. User engagement was much higher (downloads, comments, clickthroughs to my site, time on page, etc). If you compared prices per interested user (defined as someone who didn't bounce in 2 seconds or less) AdWords was something like a twentieth the price of SU. And I wasn't even using it for conversion related purposes -- if I had, I think I'd probably have spent about $10,000 on SU for every $25 sale I made.

I will not be using SU again for this site this Christmas, or for any of my similar promotions. It is just drastically inferior to my other options for spending time and money to promote things.

(Incidentally: I received a few thousand organic stumbles, too, and they were about as useless as the ones I paid for.)
> Be Wary of Entrepreneurs Who are Building for Businesses They Have No Experience In

Does anyone have any advice on this? What if you want to do (for example) a startup in music, but don't come from a music background. Can you mitigate this point by having a few advisors and research to back your project up? Do you need a founder with direct experience in it?

We were of the opinion that we're coming from outside the box is a great thing - we know whats broken and how we'd fix it, whereas if you grew up in the industry you might not be aware of it.
I have no interest in compelling others to do more than leave me alone; the fact that this is not universally true means that I must either be prepared to meet violence with violence, or delegate the job to others.

As I said libertopia is not a stable equilibrium. It collapses into violence and warlordism if there is even one defector.
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Strange. My family in Germany is very much a part of their community.

Their neighbors have a key to their home, during winter they perform "church service" by clearing the snow off the sidewalks and when I go to visit I'm surprised to find out that the neighbors know who I am and where I'm from.

This is not just a single household in Germany. I've stayed with many of my family members in different parts of Southern Germany and I find it to be similar.

This, contrasts highly with South Africa where the idea of community does not exist. This in part is because of the high rate of crime and the 8-foot, spiked and electrified, walls that people have placed around their homes.

If I was given the choice I would prefer having a community than not.
All good stuff. I think the best option IMHO is a drop-in replacement for AppEngine. This way a service can start easily on AppEngine and when it's big enough, can roll out on its own infrastructure.

Interestingly... this is the same play MS used to gain prominence: they controlled the API and the more code was written for it, the network effects kicked in with more force. Very interesting parallels here.
Ask HN: What technology platform would you use for an Medical Records app?
I was thinking, would it be possible to modify Joomla sufficiently. I haven't worked with it before and i don't want to end up with a square peg situation.

The other option being using frameworks Django perhaps to build it from scratch.

What would you people suggest?
There can be multiple stable points of equilibrium in a given system. To use the pencil example, there are an infinite number of stable equilibriums where the pencil is laying flat, but none where it is standing on the pointy end.
Whatever advice we give you, you'll need to test it. Your landing page, your target market, your target demographic, etc are all different from our experiences and they interact in unexpected ways.

If you believe it cannot not work, then throw a sensible but low amount of $ at it and see what happens.
This doesn't warm up the water to the heater, but rather the water going to the cold side of the mixing valve in the shower.

If it takes me 5 minutes to get the stupid thing at the right temperature now, imagine what will happen when the temperature of the incoming cold water depends on the temperature of the drain water - and it's a positive feedback - the hotter the water, the hotter the incoming cold water, making the output even hotter, etc.

This has the potential for using more water rather than less. Although I assume not all faucets are as sensitive as mine - in less than a degree or so of turning I go from freezing to boiling.
For those wanting the short version: powerful businessmen really rule the government.

<<Sigh>>
Up on a second server now:

http://tweetrextoo.directededge.com/
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You should use a platform that you already know well. Starting from scratch with a new framework/language is certainly fun but I don't recommend it for paid projects unless you have a solid experience and expertise and very confident about your abilities.
Check out this site if you haven't already http://startupschool.org/
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You'll need mod_proxy as well to forward the request from a LAMP stack
I do have some experience in Django. I've never worked with Joomla before.
The app i was referring to is more like a protoptype for now.
Medical records? Ethically your number 1 issue is security now, and it may be legally also depending upon where you're building this.

While a web framework is a great place to start for things like this, I do implore you to keep the medical records that it stores as far away from the Internet as possible, if you can. At least consult really good security guy if you must have them on the net.

Opinions:

Both are notionally MVC web packages.

* Joomla: Joomla is actually a CMS - and most medical records are text, so - maybe it'd work - but I'd be worried about the burden of the cruft, as well as laying your own security over something that's designed for publishing stuff. It'll be quick to get something up, though.

* Django: You can build any kind of database, CMS or virtually anything you can see on the web in Django - so I'd start there. Django has usable security out of the box, too.

Joomla is PHP and Django is Python, so in the interests of code reuse I'd personally go Django every time. Some quite big desktop apps are built in Python, so you'd be in good company.
This doesn't add up. The drain water is, by definition, cooler than the boiler water. Looking at the diagram, cold water is heat exchanged with the drain water which means it will be heated but to less than what a boiler does.

This heated stream is then pumped directly to the shower to be mixed with the boiler water, which should cool it a bit. Anyone else find this odd?

Personally I'd redesign the system to put the exchanger upstream of the boiler water inlet which means that the boiler would need to expend less energy to heat the water going to the shower head.
It's interesting to note that the majority of the books are about philosophy topics. This comes not as surprise but what makes me think is that most people I know have never read anything about philosophy.
You can find some goodies here: http://blog.sontek.net/2008/05/11/python-with-a-modular-ide-...
I am European and I moved to California some months ago. I find it both amusing and mysterious that people here in the U.S. talk about "community" so much. I really don't get it.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 to 1859) said in Democracy in America that was one of the characteristics of Americans, to self-organize to help their communities. It still is. This results partly from European persons who had this tendency immigrating to America while other Europeans stayed in Europe.
How to get a traffic spike to your Web 2.0 App
If you have the spare time think of learning Haskell as a great learning experience. Haskell's concepts are imho worth your time and are useful to know when programming in other languages. It is a cliché but i do think learning Haskell has made me a better programmer.

Haskell's laziness is at times surprisingly cool but will also remain tricky. I sometimes compare it with lock based multi-thread programming. It can be done but also requires additional thought.
A very good, readable, SHORT article worth rereading about what makes statistics a separate subject from mathematics is

http://statland.org/MAAFIXED.PDF

The article includes a bibliography of recommended readings, and talks about the use of software in statistics education.

Another good article is

http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...

Both articles will help a student in any kind of statistics course or statistics self-study better understand statistics, and how probability relates to statistics.
Unfortunately I couldn't find video lectures for 6.041. Do you guys only use lecture notes?
I don't think courts need to enforce contracts anymore. If someone doesn't live up to their word, others will find out and refuse to trust the bastard. Dishonesty is a losing strategy in the long run, and no one is likely to try it.

Furthermore, customers get scared off by contracts that they don't understand, because they could be held to some obnoxious clause that's hidden in there. Enforcing contracts is inefficient, and we should stop doing it.

Is there more to ESR's argument than that?
I think this previous submission with no comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415893

is not the only previous submission to Hacker News. That is a very interesting list of books. I'd probably prefer different books on psychology.
Don't try to make Joomla into a medical records app. That way lies heartbreak and a pile of code that does something but that you can never quite trust.

Build from the database out. And please use encryption appropriately.

In the US at least you are dealing with HIPAA which has a deep set of requirements your system will have to meet.

And you are dealing with crucial information, if you screw up medical records such that crucial information is left out or garbled or lost you could potentially kill people.

So use tools that give you a clear view into the development process and let you track, record and correct the system as you are building it.

Use whatever language the team is most familiar with and don't think that any framework will make your work easier unless you already know that framework well.
The Elegance of Imperfection
Summary: many languages are dev tools, playing specific support-roles in an eco-system. Where major languages interact, you'll likely get hybrid support languages between.

This article confirms for me that dev tools are worth investing time in developing (and crappy is OK); that languages wars in the abstract are pointless, as you can only evaluate language utility with respect to a 1. specific task; and 2. specific users. It's better to ignore anyone who goes on about any particular language being "better". Better for what? Better for whom?

I found the writing a bit dry; and the in-depth examples were mostly of the languages that the author himself wrote. Although they were successfully adopted for their task, and they are examples he can speak authoritatively about, it's a small sample from which to generalize.
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It may not be just individual 'effort'. There are editors involved in one process, and not the other.

For all we know, he writes books that sound like his blog posts, and these get "cleaned up" in the editorial process.
Building successful teams a Catch-22
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Leave for somewhere better.
I'm not sure whether I like this particular design but the idea is very good aand basic.

It is one of those things that are

- rather orthogonal to the existing system (plumbing)
- helps a bit in each installation
- but cumulates large gains when scaled up over a threshold number of installations.

So far, such ideas for energy consumption haven't typically thriven largely because energy has been cheap but this will probably change. It would be a good idea for the government to subside installation of such devices.

In Finland (and other Nordic countries, I guess, and probably in any country with subzero seasons) we do the same in machinated ventilation systems in homes and buildings. The thermal energy of the warm indoors air (that is exiting the system) is transferred to the air intake where it's used to heat the cold outdoors air (that is entering the system).
I imagine stumbleupon traffic would be even less likely to stick around on your site than Digg/Reddit traffic, which I wouldn't buy probably even at 10 cents per thousand.
The Open Company - Running your business as if it were an Open Source Project.
There have already been some good answers to this question, but to answer from the asshole's perspective (read: mine,) helping your community is really about helping yourself.

Helping a sick neighbor hopefully helps to keep them from dying, which helps keep their house off the market, which helps to preserve your ability to sell -- nobody wants to buy on a street everybody's selling on.

Keeping the neighborhood clean preserves your property values, which is easier to see.

Looking out for your neighbors, or at least giving them the impression you are, means it's more likely they'll look out for you, which means they're more likely to investigate or call the cops when they see a prowler outside your home.
Friis and Zennstrøm have been using this technology for longer than Skype has existed, their previous venture, the filesharing application Kazaa, used this approach as well and they built Skype on top of the network technology they developed back in those days.
Personally, whenever I see one of these lists, I look for fiction books. This is obviously a personal bias, but I find it hard to relate to someone whose life hasn't been mostly changed by works of fiction. In my view, those works are usually far more powerful than non-fiction about the same topics.

For instance, you can write about the duality of the heart and the mind at length, without ever coming close to the powerful argument of Narziss & Goldmund. And you can write about the cyclical nature of life till you're blue in the face (in the fingers?), but will you ever convey the sense of emptiness that one gets at the end of Marques' One Hundred Years of Solitude?

Non-fiction is useful, no doubt, but imho the truly great writings are in the fiction form.
(Current levels of) human life.
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He is listed as "maybe", I've seen him coming to a couple of tech meetups (beta launch of akoha.org for instance)
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Of course it's different than the real world - it's government. I'm sure we've all heard the phrase "it's good enough for government work." Sad, yet true.

Nonetheless, a lifelong commitment to the defense industry doesn't seem like a bad deal to me. Great pay, great hours, and no matter how bad the economy sinks - my job isn't going anywhere.
There's an OAuth beta now. I'll wait until they make use of it.
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In our experience, we received a high bounce rate of 80+% and about a 20 second time spent on page. This is definitely some of the worst traffic you can get. Some days you'll get much worse results, like 95% bounce and 8 seconds on page.

Keep in mind that once you put the money in, you can't get it out. So, even if you do test, put the minimum amount of money in.
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Because it's better (using it has fewer steps, the interface is like other web apps, it doesn't require you to pick one of the desktop PCs as a server and tell people the IP address, and it saves as you go so anyone closing their browser will not lose work).

just saying.
Quite. And the observation that the rise free software movement has been strongly associated with copyleft licences suggests that what ESR has no basis in reality.
Well, if you release in public domain you lose any right, AFAIK. Someone could step over, take your code and have intellectual property over it. You don't forfeit your property of the code with BSD licensing. IANAL, of course.
The reputation aspect doesn't really hold water, as a person's reputation doesn't travel that far, even in this global economy.

It's real easy to see how a negative hit to someone like Bernie Madoff ruins his career, but he's a high profile individual that many people know on sight.

If I started ripping people off, there's nothing to say I couldn't easily mitigate any negative PR by changing names (or on the internet, just changing handles). In more local endeavors, I could make a mint, ruin my name, and just move to another state (or if pressed, another country.)

Contract law still bears an important role in accountability, IMHO.
The article is about how it negotiates NAT using forged UDP packets. What is more interesting is how it actually gets past firewalls.

It exploits common default rules in firewalls. ie. to allow web surfing, a firewall will allow port 80, but most of the time it will allow both outbound and inbound 80, rather than just outbound. Skype will listen on a bunch of common ports (80, 25, 110, 443, etc.) and blast out connection requests, and then wait to see which port it actually receives a response on. It will also fall back on using UPnP to find a way through - a protocol that is often overlooked by network admins.

If you netstat while running skype, you will see it listening on a bunch of ports. It often prevents a local web server from starting up. The way it does this is a lot more interesting than the actual NAT punching - skype and kazaa will almost always find a way in and out of a network and they are a pain to block. Joost is also using the same tech stack.
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It was fascinating to learn about your personal preferences for a tone of a discourse and I'll patiently wait until you decide to dissect the argument.

Meanwhile, ESR's point is an excellent one.

MIT license has proven to help a project to achieve commercial critical mass, and GPL is becoming an anachronism. Most of recent open source software that managed to build up market- and mind-share quickly was put out under MIT license.

GPL-like licenses are becoming an off-putting factor nowadays simply because you expect to be offered a 'double-licensing' option somewhere down the line. Why would people invest in a project when they are only allowed to play with it, but never to use in a commercial environment? (Until you pay for a commercial license that is).

RMS has been proven right. Software wants to be free, so it does not need chains attached to it, even when they are meant for its own protection.
They are as safe as any other service provider. Ultimately, its always good practice to:

1. Do your own backups

2. Routinely test that you can recover from these backups

I would argue that point (2) is much more important than point (1). I do try to do that at least once a month to ensure that there aren't any bugs in the backups, including any missing parts of the infrastructure.

For mirroring really large data, rsync is a viable solution.

Edit: I do want to add that performing your own backups is really subjective and you might need to ask yourself - what's the cost to me/my business/my users in the event that I can't recover from backups and or my provider failed in their own reliability (for e.g. Carbonite)