skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I don't have any material on it but you can see that it makes sense from a mechanical physics point of view. Load up a craft to maximum possible weight (with ballast even) Then fly as high and is fast as you can (during which you build up the maximum achievable potential and kinetic energy) then during a dive build up as much speed as you can (during which you convert your potential energy from the weight and height of the craft into more kinetic energy) as you level out, you dump the excess weight and start climbing. Since you now have less weight but the same kinetic energy, you are free to take your craft higher than the height from which it started to descend.
How to Build a Free (or Almost Free) Phone System for Your Business
Just FYI: there is non profit organization that try to adopt open source model for development and creation of online textbook for K-12 curriculum, you can read more at:
http://www.ck12.org/aboutus.html
But for $300? You can get something similar (although simpler) for less than $100:
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6372429785.html

I'm planning to combine the latter with Boxee to create my home entertainment system.
I have had a day job for the last 2.5 years, while also having a little side business selling software. Its great fun.

I find it helps me focus on time management, in the same way that driving to be ramen profitable keeps you appropriately focused on charging customers money. You start to get pretty good at cutting out stupid wastes of time which some businesses get caught up in. (My favorite example for software businesses: fulfillment. Seriously, Mr. Highly Paid Professional, what the heck are you doing licking that envelope. You should outsource to a cheaper tongue and use the time savings to do something which adds value.)

After you're ramen profitable, or "day job profitable", you can pretty much quit whenever you darn well please. I'm not totally positive about my plans yet, but I'm thinking that I'll finish my current contract, politely bow my way out of recontracting, and then find something to occupy the 12+ hours a day that will free up. Probably a second business endeavor and a decent amount of what the economists like to call "leisure".
I was basically a "problem child" in middle school - I kinda refused to do anything I didn't want to. So after I'd flunked the kitchen safety test in home ec for the 5th time (true/false test and I scored a zero for the last 3 times :-)), school administration basically said "There's this new thing called the 'Internet' that we just got access to. We've got a dialup modem in the computer lab; why don't you spend the 42 minutes there instead of wasting your time pissing off the home ec teacher?" and then handed me a bunch of things I might want to try typing in - mostly gopher links, though there was this new invention called the "World Wide Web" that they suggested I check out too. I thought it was horribly disorganized and spent most of my time with Gopher.
A large amount of the content on scribd is actually plain text, or images. Wrapping those in a bloated proprietary flash 'player' is just evil.

Microsoft will probably buy them and wrap it all in a liberal layer of DRM and silverlight.

For me, Scribd is the caveat to "make something people want". It's undoubtedly popular with people who don't know how to share text/documents, but it's not good in the bigger picture.
Full-featured is right. These things have an HDMI port with 1920x1080 resolution, an IR port, and an SSD makes them almost noiseless! Sounds like a great device for a media center PC. Load Boxee on there and call it all good. Very cool.

EDIT: Looks like the SSD option doesn't have pricing available, but it'll likely be > $500
This is his best book by far. The prose style is pretty much the same, but he's got a more coherent story to tell, so you might find it less grating.
Yes, your explanation makes sense. That's what I thought. Nonetheless, I was interested in more in-depth technical info... some technical papers / reports on it would be interesting. By the way, have you heard of the pop-up maneuver?
No, his actual complaint is once you standardize a test, schools with a lot of resources will "teach to the test", giving their students an advantage.
IBM in Talks to Buy Sun in Bid to Add To Web Heft
(This isn't entirely directed at you, but is more for general consumption. Just picking up on a feeling I got from your post, though.)

You seem, to me, to feel that this is primarily a dirty sort of business. It's not (even though there are dirty players) and it's becoming a lot less dirty all the time, since people are becoming smarter at what to buy and not.

If you have specialized knowledge and can help people solve a problem or learn something they really want to learn, you can honestly and sincerely produce a product, an e-book, a real book, a video course - whatever - and sell it for a profit. Nothing dirty about that, and the more sincere you are nowadays, the better you'll do.

The "information" business is no more dirty than any other business. Do the majority of sysadmins do it other than for the money? (No) Do the majority of journalists write pro bono on the side? (Nah) Selling information is no dirtier than selling your time and, heck, I've seen just as many passionate and decent people in the info game than elsewhere.

Oh, and don't outsource the "marketing copy." It's your personal voice and the personal connection your potential customers will feel for you that will "sell" your product. You don't want to be wasting time "convincing" people to buy - you want to seem authoritative enough and so trustworthy that people are begging to see more of what you have.

P.S. You might enjoy looking into something called the "underachiever method." It'll provide one of the best ways to establish what it is you should be producing. It was a course once upon a time but you can get all the core ideas for free with a bit of Googling :)
Well, part of the "do it in the Valley" advocacy is social or VC-oriented. All those alpha geeks in one place make a lot of connections, work together, recommend each other, go to similar events during rare non-work hours, and some even hire each other or found 2nd startups with partners they met working for their previous employer. For me, it's easy to grant the truth of this because the history of how these startups began is public record. I'd rather not try to deny that such connections have great value.

I tend to take a more romantic view, one that says that it doesn't matter so much if you don't live in SV or Cambridge, MA even if the current metrics show that your startup will be more successful in those places.

I wonder whether SV/Cambridge will lose a little pull since VC has dried up a lot. Also, buying a home is going to get a lot cheaper in rural places. Of course, not all cheap places are equal, but what if it truly, really didn't matter where you located? There's crucial things to research like infrastructure, high speed network capability, the reliability of the public utilities. The Midwest US could be a great place to found a startup.

It seems to me the desire to reach ramen profitability by operating cheaply can outweigh the cachet of advice and networking in the meatspace.
The kids that are going to get in are going to get in. The kids that won't, won't.

At any given school, yes... but what if you were to give people advice about which colleges to apply to? There has to be some way to optimize the effort here, and that's got to be worth something. Especially when helping to rank the second-tier choices -- so you didn't get into Harvard, but maybe you happen to know that such-and-such College favors applicants like your client for such-and-such reasons.
Is a digital animation studio a startup?

Why not? I wouldn't have thought startups are limited only to webapps/software? We're building from the ground up?

It doesn't really have a huge scaling potential does it?

Why not? You don't think Pixar (800+ employees) and Dreamworks (1400+ employees) started out as large companies did you?

In fact, to further illustrate my point, I'll actually give you a rough timeline on how Disney started.

1923 - Walt Disney animating on own, formed company with brother in August of that year
1924 - Joined by Ub Iwerks and others from Kansas city
1925 - Company size grows to 12
1929 - Sound comes in, steamboat willie released
1930 - Staff increased to 30
1932 - More than 100 employees
1934 - More than 200 employees, Work on first film starts (snow white)
1935 - more than 400 employees
1937 - more than 800 employees
1939 - more than 1000 employees

So by 1939, they had only just released their first Cinema release, were working on 4 films concurrently (but had many small scale projects under their belt) and had essentially defined the entire field of animation for generations to come. In fact, a lot of the stuff they figured out back then is still applicable today.

What's even more startling is when you consider just how much they did, when each film at the time required approximately 2.5 million drawings to complete.

Your output is constrained by your animation stable surely.

I'd say no, it really depends on how you set up the animation pipeline.

I've got a different model in mind. I don't want to say too much on how it works, but it has potential to create lots of content with a significantly smaller sized team (to start out with).

That's not to say I don't have aspirations to scale it, I do. I'm just focussing on building something from the ground up.
That is true, but it still doesn't demerit what they did. I find this to be pretty amazing, especially since done by students just a year or two younger than me.
Yes! Though activity seems to have died down of late:

http://facemaker.redshiftmedia.com/
I grant the possibility.
How-to: building services into iPhone applications
To me that's like arguing it's crazy to pursue anyone committing violent crimes because they're "just moving atoms around."

That said, I think it's totally ridiculous they don't devote 100% of the crime fighting effort to eradicating producers, slamming down on abusing parents, etc. That they're wasting time on easy targets seems sick to me. The argument is that by killing the market, the producers won't abuse kids, but I ain't buying that because I bet a dollar to a nickel that there's always been a small section of society that has sexually abused kids for their own sick pleasure from it.
Hollywood Free Movie Download: The Last House on the Left (2009-English) DVDRIP
I'm just investigating the idea at the moment, I don't have my heart set on the zombie genre.

I guess I'm really trying to feel my way through various settings that could be technologically doable with a small-scale team. This is just one of the proposals, but it seems a good fit for the moment.
Site is down, I was curious so I googled a bit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot_virtual_machine

Parrot is a register-based virtual machine being developed using the C programming language and intended to run dynamic languages efficiently. It uses just-in-time compilation for speed to reduce the interpretation overhead. It is currently possible to compile Parrot assembly language and PIR (an intermediate language) to Parrot bytecode and execute it.

Parrot was started by the Perl community, and is developed with help from the open source and free software communities.
I commend the poster for having the will power required to omit an exclamation mark from the end of that title.
Scribd in the AP
National acts seem to go to Detroit more than would be expected.
Nice! Can you tell me a little bit about your experiences with it?

I've been thinking of buying this for a while:

http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=43

but the Fit-PC2 has good enough specs to make it worth considering instead. It's also smaller!

Anyone know where I can buy this in the UK?
Signs That Your JavaScript Skills Need Updating
I would like to say that I would encourage you to come and do my job before you try to make claims like these :)

> And I presume you're "coming out" in favour of a world in which you can be thrown in jail at any time for the existence, on a computer under your control, of a copy of a photo you didn't take?

This is precisely my job: to figure out if the suspect downloaded the image deliberately (which is a crime) or not (which isnt). As you might have gathered from my earlier figures 20% of the computers I look at are innocent (and I prove them to be)..... :)

Your "freedom" is for the computer users and doesnt consider anyone else.
You're looking at 200 MHz for that system, as opposed to 1 GHz for the basic Fit-PC2 and 1.6 GHz for the high range one.
To answer my own question on UK distributer, it's available late April:

http://www.fit-pc.co.uk/meet-fit-pc-II.html
USB finger, more details
I've been fascinated with this topic for a few months... but it seems that one has to be really resourceful to deal with life in one of those neighborhoods.

Startups, and coders in general, need to move quickly. All the services a modern city offers come into play -- from the guy you hire to design the logo, to the superintendent who fixes the radiator, to cheap and fast burmese takeout.

Those $100 houses are much more conducive to an artist colony, where people are willing to put in more effort and deal with reduced efficiency for greater freedom, and complete control over the outcome. It might be interesting to found a "hacker's colony" along the same lines but it would have to be pretty non-commercial, or be composed of hackers who already had remote working arrangements with paying customers. I mean, if the taxis won't even go to your neighborhood, you're not going to get a lot of client meetings done.
So Here's How Many Games I Sell - Indie Game Developer Story
The helium balloons probably didn't fall back down to earth as soon as the balloon in the story. But I still think that only 10 km seems pretty remarkable.
Are foreigners allowed to purchase property in Detroit at such prices too?
Are you sure those others things are true? Americans don't seem particularly likely to move house or switch jobs more than other modern societies. In fact I would have expected less whimsical job-changing in the absence of a more socialist country's safety nets.

This whole article stinks of "folk wisdom" and meaningless platitudes. The very first "fact" he stated was demonstrably wrong, why give him a pass on the rest?

"Over the centuries, the United States has been most conspicuous for one trait: manic energy."

Meaningless nonsense. Centuries, as in several centuries? What rubbish - the industrial revolution was in Britain, not the USA! Yes the 20th century belonged to America, everyone knows that, but trying to claim it's some kind of 500 years tradition is pretty rich.

"In short, the United States will never be Europe."

More cheap populism. Growth in GDP per capita over the last century was often higher in Europe, and it's mainly European countries in the 16 places ranked above the USA in GDP per capita.

And Europe is the old enemy anyway. Asia is the new enemy, curiously missing from the author's predictable cheerleading. If you want manic energy and appetite for wealth, Chinese make Americans look positively lazy.

Not saying I hate America or anything, far from it, I'm a big fan. However, no need to pretend the place automatically scores #1 on any conceivable list of positive traits as a country, because it doesn't.

Americans might be in need of a pep talk right now, and this article certainly delivers, but it could have left out the tiresome exceptionalism, especially when it's flat-out wrong.
> Anybody that clicks the link to get their daily Apple rumor will instantly become a criminal.

No this is not the case at all. It is my job to seperate out things like that - and show use. So a few images in your browser cache would be flagged as a negative. Or perhaps a (non apparent) zip file that was dl'd then deleted a few minutes later (with the images). Traces are left of the PC but you wqouldnt get in any trouble for isolated incidents like that.

On the other hand if the zip got downloaded and unzipped to "mucky pics/blah blah" and then there was evidence of it being viewed.. well....

Intent is the important thing
Funny, I'd say you only need to build a connectionism model LIKE the brain and it would develop itself. No need for 'memory 5 times that of the internet' etc.
Wait - the iPhone didn't have bluetooth before this update right? Which means it was enabled entirely through a software update. Is that right? I know it operates on the same frequency as wifi but still, that's pretty impressive, isn't it?
Computers store huge amounts of information if you know just how to extract it :) doing the above suggestion would leave traces for us to find (this is not a 10 minuts job; your looking at days of work per HDD).
It would be a sad day if Sun stopped being independent, but IBM does seem to be the best match that will preserve the most of Sun. Maybe they can even fix some of the JCP and OOo policy problems. On the other hand, NetBeans will probably go the way of the dodo..
How many of them photographed & videoed it to sell on the internet? :) (there is a distinction there I think)
The New Online-Only Newspapers Should Try and Emulate Startups
The idea on AmieStreet is to constantly scan for new songs, and "REC" (Recommend it) - if you catch a song early enough in it's rise up to $0.99 you basically get $.98 per REC that you make (presuming you are able to anticipate the taste or memetic attention of the masses).

The obvious attraction on AmieStreet is the sliding scale for music:
An investment of $18.75 gets you $25 worth of purchases and 26 RECs.

If you are half decent at picking music, you usually make between $0.25 - $0.50 with a bit of effort on those RECs - call it conservatively $0.25 * 26 = $6.50 + the $25 = $31.50. Your average song, if you are an active user and can catch things early averages around $0.35 for the really good stuff (ignoring the large amounts of free to $0.10 cruft that you probably don't want in your playlist anyways) - so $31.50/$.35 = 90 Songs for $18.75 - with the sense of satisfaction that a significant portion of your money is going back to the artist who made the music. (Do kids still care about that these days - I am so out of touch. :-) )

I just picked up "Live, by Luna" - a stellar album for $3.22 - in a solid 256 KB VBR MP3 format. Not to mention I can both
A) Play the music from the web when I wish to
B) Redownload if I wish.

I guess the big difference between popcuts and AmieStreet is that you are limited to $0.98 * your RECs on AmieStreet, wheras it appears that PopCuts has a higher payout, but a larger payin per song - they are all $0.99 compared to the "starts at free and frequently pretty cheap" on AmieStreet.

It will be interesting to see how the balance of cheap versus possible greater profit works out for the two sites.

Anyways, Congrats to PopCuts for their Best Online Music Startup in Accelerator Competition at SXSW Interactive award!!
WTF: Facebook Censors User For Promoting The Obama Deception
I've just used it for the first time running the 3.0 beta. I copied a URL from an email into Safari. It Just Works, as you would expect. It is very intuitive - I deliberatly tried prior to reading a detailed review or watching the video of the presentation.
the iphone had bluetooth before this update, but it was very limited in scope.
I believe we need to reinvent schools, that students need to be able to self-teach using online dynamic material (as opposed to static textbooks). Teachers would design courses from mashups and assist students individually in their progress. Students would also have group assignments, team activities, etc...

A few links that should help you in your quest:
http://textbase.com/Overview.html
http://www.smarthistory.org/pop-art.html
http://www.chem.arizona.edu/~salzmanr/480a/480ants/physchem....
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-07-09-open-textb...
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html
http://www.opentextbook.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_textbooks
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
Facinating! this is pretty awesome. It'll be cool if there's a way to generate synthetic realistic images from this.
He doesn't need to value their thoughts, he just needs to be potentially affected (financially or otherwise) by their perception of him, which could be heavily influenced by seeing the title My Life in Child Porn
Web interfaces are not bad for Erlang, although my intuition says the real sweet spot would be in doing the GUI in Javascript and simply passing JSON back and forth. HTML templates with Erlang are unpleasant compared to something like Ruby or Tcl, which were made to be very DSL'y and good at mangling text. So if you can skip the text wrangling and HTML templates and simply offload that to Javascript, that makes Erlang more competitive.
Motorola U6 PEBL Orange Only T-Mobile 
Finally, Motorola has come up with a mobile phone that provides the best of look and performance blended into one. This phone has been designed in a smooth oval form and innovative dual-hinge mechanism.
They should have waited another 14 days.
For a media center PC, just use a cheapo 8 gig SSD hard drive to boot from, and use a WiFi SAN to stream the movies off of.
Sun were a good 5 years too late open-sourcing their software stack including Java and Solaris, and should have made their hardware easily licensed for cloning.

I was saying this in 2002.

Only the most adaptable survive.
Ask HN: Webcam streaming solutions?
At work my team is split over two different offices in two different countries. We want to create a permanent video feed between the two offices using web cameras that we can view on our computers (or perhaps television). Does anyone have any suggestions as to what the best software or services are that would allow us to do this? The feed would have to remain private so things like Justin.tv are out unfortunately.
Ask HN: Has iPhone 3.0 Spotlight changed the way you use your phone?
I've used the iPhone 3.0 beta for all of 10 minutes and I have to say the Spotlight feature has changed the way I approach most tasks on my phone. For searching for emails, contacts, meetings <i>and launching Apps</i>, Spotlight appears to be the way to go. Any other features that boost productivity?
Control, choice, and cost: The Conflict in the Cloud
Yes. I'd go so far as to say that it's inevitable given enough time.
I wonder how the dock accessoires will influence the app review process.. Will you be required to ship your accessoire to Apple before they can review your app?
I love open source, and if I had the money, would work with nothing else. That said... for a big business like Sun, would that really have helped? Maybe their stuff would have been more popular, but it would have required a wrenching transition to services that might have hurt them very deeply.
Agree with last paragraph. I had my first sex at 17 with a 15 yo girl who then became my girlfriend for seven years. Guess America would gladly brand me a pedophile.

I'm not sure people would be so understanding today

The focused brainwashing by the media that led to this recent change in people's opinions should really be the focus of discussion here.
A friend of mine pointed out that commoditizing someone's product was a great offensive move. He thought that was why IBM funded so many open source projects, many of which were in the Java space. He pointed out that Eclipse is one of the slickest Java IDEs, and what is an Eclipse, but an occlusion of Sun?
I came across http://sygic.com/press/press_12.3.09.html which says it'll release its software for the 3G for $79
It's more or less the haskell version of a struct or a public class with fields and no methods, except that you can specify more than one shape for the same type.

data MyMaybe a = Just a | Nothing

...means in Java speak "MyMaybe<a> is an abstract generic superclass with a final singleton subclass Nothing<a> having no fields, and a final subclass Just<a> having one field of type a"

You then write functions that take that data and use it.