skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> whenever the chef of the restaurant he's trying to save appears to have lost the passion for cooking, he almost always says "I need to put a rocket up his ass".

I only recall this once, and he was referring to the arugula they were cooking with, which is called rocket in Britain. He didn't say a rocket, but rather referred to shoving the arugula up the ass of someone who annoyed him.

So, no. It's the author's misunderstanding due to regional linguistic differences.
"... Equo ne credite, Teucri. quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. ..." [0]

So I log in ( http://www.hackerne.ws/x?fnid=Ei8X5456V8 - see login on far right of http://www.hackerne.ws ) then you steal my password? I'd be more impressed with some neat hack that stripped out some useful data or re-think the reading process. Not a copy of what I can already use.

[0] Can be re-interpreted as "beware of geeks bearing gifts". The domain should be thought of as a Trojan.
Zune vs iPod - Which do you want for Christmas?
I'd take the $100 zune edition 1 from Dell.com over an iPod any day.

Then again, Archos 605 looking sort of sweet. But hey, people don't have unlimited budgets right? =]
Interesting.. I'm a developer and have the same problem finding designers. Care to share some of tips for finding designers?
Well, I don't know about PHP, but if you're interested in Python developers I can provide you with some references.
http://abstractnonsense.com/datejs.png
Corey Doctorow is a tool.

OK, that's argumentum ad hominem, so let's look at why he's being a tool this particular here time.

Bullshit argument. If you don't want to hear from the guy who beat you up, don't add him -- or better yet, write back and say "you beat me up, and you're lucky I don't track you down and let the air out of your tires every day for a week."

Social networks are not for pussies. They're for people who are ready to face society and its weirdos.

Perhaps Corey Doctorow isn't just a tool, but also a pussy.
At least in my area (Ann Arbor), the resolution is too low to see much. As a cyclist/runner, for instance, one might be curious about steep inclines around town. No such luck here.
We'll wait and see, I guess. Certainly it is a clever loophole and the gambling business is a good one.
Try "next friday at 1700" and you get "Wednesday, November 30, 3707 0:00:00 AM"

So it fails a simple test (24hr clock). [0]

But it is a nice idea. You get real time feedback and so you can test if it works. Now would I use it for my blog engine? Maybe. Would I use the source? I looked at the code [1] and the structure looks good but I cannot read the code. It looks like it's all on one line and is not readable. What's the use if I can't enjoy reading it? It's free software, but I can't read it to fix it.

Dates and times are difficult. For a real alternative try ~ http://datetime.perl.org/?Modules

[0] http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/2070923712/

[1] http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/2070134059/
Are you sure Navteq has elevation data for the entire world? They have high-resolution elevation maps for Europe as well.
What quantitative facts would you like to know about your startup's market?
Hi.
A friend and I are trying to create some sort of resource where founders can share /swap quantitative facts about their (soon-to-be-launched) companies.

Wanted to know what are the questions that YOU would like answered? (I always get to "So how many users will pay for my service?" sooner or later, unfortunately ;) )

Note that I'm talking hard facts (of the sort you could put in a wiki), not opinions.

Thanks :)
xkcd continues to impress me with its immense cleverness. I saw Randall Monroe speak at CMU a couple weeks ago.

First, I was surprised that he was 23. I assumed he was older. I also assumed that the deep romanticism of some of xkcd's comics meant that he was in a serious relationship of some kind -- he isn't, and implied that he always has trouble with girls.
Here, perhaps, but you may find PHP is less popular here than average.
YouTube for Computer Science researchers
"2138+ free video lectures from the world's leading and prominent scientists." There are so many fascinating videos that it is difficult to select just one series to link to.
I can definitely see this. I like a lot of things about Vista. One of them is not the speed.

I'm wondering if MS just decided to optimize the user experience aesthetically and let the hardware catch up on speed, figuring that in 4 years everyone will be running 16 cores and an SSD.
Good password stealing sir. I had this and about 11 other things open in tabs, plus was AIMing and got confused. Good thing I use Roboform and have randomly generated passwords for each site.

Hey PG, is there a change password function?
you are right...i guess it could be redirected directly to news.ycombinator.com...
I agree. I worked doing php development during while studying CS undergrad. The thing with hiring students is that they work cheap, but don't expect them to get much done during midterms or finals.
hmm why dont you just put up a wiki
I think the average hardware has not caught up to Vista yet. I just reinstalled it after 6 months when I upgraded my computer to 2x Raptor Raid 0, along with the existing 4gb ram and quad core. It's running really great now. I can have all my work apps open and then load up a game like COD4. I think the hard drive transfer speed was the biggest bottleneck.
if you did a simple "dig www.hackerne.ws CNAME"
you would see there is a record for news.ycombinator.com
thus I don't steal anything.

there is no even server hosting the domain.
nslookup could give you a hint
Why are some links on here no follow and others not?
I am wondering why many of the links on this board are no follows and some are not? who decides on this policy?
The greatest problem of communication
actually, I am Greek ;)
Don't miss the video; there's a lot of detail here that's absent in the slides: http://www.vcasmo.com/video/osnow/391
Sorry, I don't even know what that means. There should be basic account maintenance functionality anyway though.
Because this is what we look like when we're working on our startups.

The Sun... it hurtssss ussss.
When it comes to sites like Reddit, I wonder if limiting the number of votes a user can contribute per day might help.

This way votes become a limited resource and you've got to use them carefully and really choose what you think is the best news item of the day.
Seems pretty damn brilliant to me. Gamblers LOVE Forex. I can't even count the number of excellent poker players I know who pissed it all away either there or day trading.

I agree with your assertion that skill probably has little or no effect on that game in the short run (and hell, maybe not even in the long) but people tend to credit skill wherever they win and luck wherever they lose. Anything with sufficient volatility will satisfy people's desire for both.

That said, I don't think they're in the same market we are, and I don't think they'll be too successful. Forex is far too esoteric for the common man, even with nice little animations of foot races, and probably too unpredictable for most of the rest. I don't know how many people read The Economist, but their target audience is some subset of that.
Coming next, reddit for people who like to wear yellow hats.
I'm not sure if I should post it publically, because it's the kind of information that could help out black hat SEOs. Send me an email.
i recall reading elsewhere (and verifying) that the dom node manipulation thing isn't actually faster, but i can not find it at the moment.
That's the plan :)

I mean, if folks at a forum like this can come up with why they'd use such a wiki (actual examples), it'd make the concept a little easier to explain.

Right now, whenever we're trying to talk about it; we simply run out of examples before anyone "gets it"!
Yes, math -- like every other discipline that can take itself seriously -- is about models and relationships. But given these models, we ought not necessarily "apply them to real-world objects." Rigorous math is powerful precisely because it is abstract.

One of this guy's prized "deep insights" is that negative numbers refer to deficits of cows. Granted, that's a slick (if not wholly obvious) way to represent an intuitively awkward concept, but it engenders a false confidence. Negative numbers don't exist to represent bookkeeping deficits. They are there because some formal mathematical argument grounded in pure logic said they had to be there. The fact that we use negatives to refer to cows reveals more about primitive functions of the human brain (distinguishing among objects, counting) than it does the deep algebraic structure of the numbers themselves.

I admire attempts to ground difficult abstractions in physical reality as much as the next guy, but we shouldn't confuse these simplistic observations with mathematical insight.
Jia Shen talks about the frenzy of social apps
Definately an interesting video from one of the top social app developers
I agree, although playing online poker is kinda fun.
Watching a tug of war between 2 currencies? Doesn't really have the same appeal.
Intentional or not, it's probably a bad idea. I think most hackers would be repulsed by the idea of a community where users try to be on their best behavior, lest the divine hand should pass them by.

This is probably why you don't see many hackers here. PG said recently that he is "cautiously optimistic" about this community. Between the lines, that sounds like disappointment. Old reddit this site is certainly not.
My favorite line, though it makes no sense in context, is:

"Do you remember who released the first MP3 player in America? If you do, kudos, and you probably also know that they aren't around anymore."

I had the Diamond Rio, which I think was technically the second, but was the first anyone had heard about. And to be honest, if it had the same amount of storage as an iPod it might still be preferable.
Interesting idea, but it wouldn't fit the different user types - someone on the site all day needs more votes for the same level of scarcity as someone who's on the site 20 mins a day. Otherwise one person has scarcity and one has plenty.
Does it work on Linux? VLC and Mplayer don't seem to like the stream, yelling about connection problems.
I wonder if Vista will be best run in a future "Vista Light" edition that will be hacked together by software pirates... though I guess it will probably be best run on a solid state drive.
Stunt Pilot - our first flash game
We've just put up an initial version of our site, Rock Solid Arcade, along with our first flash game, Stunt Pilot. It's in semi-beta right now - the site itself is just one page, I'm working on the dynamic site in django to integrate high scores, comments etc. But the game itself is fully playable and pretty much done (we'll probably add features as time goes on). I'd really appreciate it if you could check it out and let me know what you think!
One of these days, Google needs to get their act together and create a _real_ flight simulator. A data set like this is the stuff that legendary software is made of. Just imagine what you could do with this accurate terrain data, satellite imagery and a few CPU-centuries of pattern recognition.

Who says we don't need terabyte hard dives? We need petabytes.
This is the initial submission text, reposted as a comment as it doesn't appear to be showing...

Hi guys,

We've just put up an initial version of our site, Rock Solid Arcade, along with our first flash game, Stunt Pilot. It's in semi-beta right now - the site itself is just one page, I'm working on the dynamic site in django to integrate high scores, comments etc. But the game itself is fully playable and pretty much done (we'll probably add features as time goes on). I'd really appreciate it if you could check it out and let me know what you think!
OK. My title was wrong -- what these people are attempting is certainly very clever and the profit margins are such that they can't really lose.
The text only shows up if you don't submit a link. This really threw me off for a while.

I played the game for five minutes -- I think I'm better than average at playing new games and I found it challenging. You want more of a learning curve. I would recommend making the loops bigger. I hit the sides of them too much. Maybe you can make them smaller again on later stages. Is the game too easy if you add a continue button, or passwords?

Also, do you get bonus points for doing loops? I'm not sure how the chain concept works. Is there a limit on boosts? These things aren't really clear. A tutorial might help, though I know it's better to put the player right in the game. When I initially started, I crashed into the ground twice. You should detect for this on first run and pop up telling the player that up is down and down is up, just like a real stunt plane.

Technically, you guys did a good job, the game seems to work flawlessly. One tiny thing I notice is that when you end the level while still flying vertically, the plane corrects itself pretty harshly. I think it would look better if you slowed that animation down, or maybe made it always finish in an extra loop... or don't take control away from the player and let him crash the plane if he wants.
Source: Yes, LinkedIn and News Corp. are working on a deal
Thanks for the feedback! Did you use the thrust button a lot when you were crashing?
http://mailexpire.com/
This would be a really big deal if they could beat coal energy inside of a decade. That would justify their stock price in an instant. Beyond that link, they're hiring for a new Director of Other. That would be a cool title to have.
Cool game. My only suggestion would be to add a way for the player to unlock the higher levels and/or earn more lives. Kinda sucks to have to start at level one each time the game is played.
That's an incredibly arrogant statement. I don't know if there's ever a time to ignore a large number of users when you're far from the leader in a field. Telling them "you can't have the feature you want, but trust us, this one is better anyway" is just plain foolishness.

I personally love folders. Folders + searching is pretty much perfect.

Google Reader has folders.
The Internet Gets a Stock Index
I guess it's kind of an artifact of the way the game was developed. It was meant to be something where you just try to maximize your score (so starting in the middle wouldn't really be a good idea), but then we went and added 42 levels to it...
I made it to level 12, I think, when I mostly stopped using the boost button. The game over screen is unsatisfying, it would be fine if you added a "Best Run" indicator on the main screen. You'll want to do global high scores eventually too.
Yeah, we'll be doing global high scores, and also stuff like challange a friend over Facebook etc. Just have to write the site next, as well as work on the next game! I think I'll put the last high score and best high score on the main menu tomorrow though, that's a good idea for the short term.
I don't see how one can interpret the first paragraph as referring to the Schroedinger equation:

"The first way -- which for most physicists today is still the only way -- follows the historical order in which the ideas were discovered. So, you start with classical mechanics and electrodynamics, solving lots of grueling differential equations at every step. Then you learn about the "blackbody paradox" and various strange experimental results, and the great crisis these things posed for physics. Next you learn a complicated patchwork of ideas that physicists invented between 1900 and 1926 to try to make the crisis go away. Then, if you're lucky, after years of study you finally get around to the central conceptual point: that nature is described not by probabilities (which are always nonnegative), but by numbers called amplitudes that can be positive, negative, or even complex."

It's hardly possible to even write the Schroedinger's equation on the blackboard without revealing the "central conceptual point" that complex numbers are involved.

The "grueling differential equations" phrase refers to classical mechanics and electrodynamics. This part is actually true, you typically learn some classical mechanics and electrodynamics before you start QM.
love it, however adds some credits that the user can restart if they want to from the level they made it too.

I am not sure how you are going to do this but here are a couple of my thoughts. Each user to your sight starts with say 10 credits and can earn more for completing a game, inviting friends, highscores and {INSERT OTHER}

You could also add fruit machines so people could gamble the credits and earn more to play on the games.
shame but at least you solved it. I hope you have the contact details of the players you lost so you can pimp out the new version to them when its ready :P

good luck with it.
can't wait for the inevitable myspace integration
3 Israeli Companies Top The EMEA 500 Fastest Growing Technology Companies List!
lol, yeah I can keep up but I am new here so just follow what I have commented on for the moment.
I'm not sure how willing I would be to share quantitative data about my startup's markets. I would of course like to read my competitors talking about their business, but I would hesitate to contribute.
try philweavers.net - lots of talent there.
i'm a php developer myself - i have some friends who are willing to do contract work... when i can't handle projects myself, i usually recommend those projects to them. i give them(client) the email directly so that both of them (client and reference) can talk it out directly...
http://www.programmermeetdesigner.com/

just what you're looking for
Love plus one
I think this is excellent news. Google is sitting on a pile of cash and it will take someone with vision to do this. Governments are so tied in to the oil machine that their hands are effectively tied. Good luck Google!
Of course we all would ;)

The idea isn't to talk about personally identifiable data about your startup, but rather to give average "industry" figures.

But that still doesn't answer the question: what exactly would you like to know?
It is amazing to me that on the day Google announces they're going into the power business, the top story is an xkcd cartoon. Electric power is really fundamental. Change how it's generated, and you change a lot. And Google could make a real difference. They have brains and money and a willingness to do new things. And (equally important) they can be their own beta user.

I grew up in this world; my father designed nuclear reactors. Hidebound doesn't begin to describe the power business. It's not (just) a conspiracy by a few big, classically evil companies. There is a whole culture of inertia. It is very exciting to think of Google doing a cannonball into that particular swimmming pool.

This announcement also shows how startlingly ambitious Google's plans are. Could you imagine Microsoft or Oracle, even at the peak of their founders' energy, doing something like this?
This would be a really big deal if they could beat coal energy inside of a decade. That would justify their stock price in an instant. Energy is the only resource that matters. Energy is the best industry to be in out of all of the industries, except maybe banking.

> Webcast and Conference Call Information

Google's renewable energy initiative call begins today at 9:00 AM (PT) / 12:00 PM (ET). A replay of the call will be available beginning at 11:30 PM (ET) today through midnight Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 by calling 888-203-1112 in the United States or 719-457-0820 for calls from outside the United States. The required confirmation code for the replay is 2205214.

Anyone care to put this conference call up as an MP3?
It was a pretty good xkcd cartoon, you've gotta admit.
I like it. I works smoothly, which you can't say of all flash games.
Sales numbers for all direct to consumer and via MD genetic tests
Impact of exchange rate on starting startups in SV
Just curious: who's finding it more and more attractive to take their euros and start a startup in Silicon Valley because of this ridiculously favourable exchange rate:

1 Euro = 1.4846 U.S. dollars (nov 28 2007)

http://www.google.com/search?q=euro+in+dollar&sourceid=n...
Agreed. Shake it up Google!
Portable Nuclear Battery in the Development Stages
America's emobyte deficit
How is the time bonus calculated? I keep getting whole number multiples.

Edit: Wanted to add that I like it. Good job. It could be more addictive though: eg: I never ever want to restart from level 1.
> And not just friends: 32% of the Chinese said that the internet broadens their sex life, compared with 11% of Americans.

Maybe Americans are doing ok at getting laid without the assistance of a computer.
The startup won't be quantum related, if that's what you're asking. Of course, there is a lot that I learnt in the course of writing the book that will be useful - techniques related to skills like abstraction, communication, synthesis, and managing large projects.
Humor: Just How Geeky Are You?
I got a 99%
Doesn't seem to be working on Opera. Once you tap up or down on keyboard, it just spirals out of control. I'm on OS X 10.4.11
I typed "112807" (the most likely entry by my users) and it responded "No One's Home".

Handle the easy cases first; then get slick.

It should be able to handle any delimitter, even no delimitter at all.
I hate to rain on your parade, but something about your request seems backwards. Start-up designers shouldn't be looking for freelance developers. Start-up developers should be looking for freelance designers.

If 2 of you can't handle all of the early stage development work, then you need a third partner. Why would anyone any good work for you without getting equity?
the top story is an xkcd cartoon.

I predict in 10 years, Google will mainly be known as a company that identified a flaw in social news sites :)
"China's soaring online population is now estimated at 137m, second only to America's 165m-210m."

When you consider the differences in total populations, thats very significant. Maybe with more actual experience Americans are less likely to over state the importance of the internet in meaningless polls.
I don't think that I'm totally wrong, or else x-mart would never accept t-mart's coupons, or say "look how much you save with us"
Speed kills: Use experience to avoid crashing your startup.
It's refreshing to see the less-than sign in the name of the initiative. Cost of Renewables < Cost of Coal

People whine and whine about responsibility for energy, while everyone chooses the cheapest energy available. This is a feature not a bug, and the same motivating force that makes our lives so astoundingly good by historic standards.

The problem with conventional approaches to alternative energy is the hope that non-solutions can help. They can't. Hybrid cars are not electric cars. A silicon based photovoltaic system will consume more energy (and money) in production than it will save. A popular acronym is EROEI: energy returned on energy invested. Non-solutions have EROEI close to or less than 1.

Potential solutions are those where $/Watt < $/Watt_Coal and EROEI>1. It is rare to see people that understand this. Google does.

Thermal solar systems are the way to go, especially in California.
well, other parts of the world standard to DDMMYY, so do you choose in ambiguous cases? not likely.
I want to see this check the timezone of the client, and calculate other timezones (unix: PST: next tuesday + 5 years)?
Where is the Privacy?
try www.assembla.com