skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Minimize dependency on 3rd party library code"
doesn't make sense especially when it's in the "write less code" section P15. Moreover, it's a really easy thing to say when you have seven guys fully dedicated to the view layer as compared to a two man operation doing everything....
So is this a competitor to Amazon's S3 service, or more like a consumer backup serivce?
Reason to exclusively fund 21+ y.o.
>Mr. Negroponte says he complained to Intel's chief executive two weeks ago, then "made peace." Intel and the One Laptop project, he says, have agreed to work together to design by early January a new "Intel-based" One Laptop device. An Intel spokeswoman confirmed Mr. Negroponte's account, but said any comment would be "premature." AMD, whose chips are used in One Laptop's current machines, declined to comment.

I could also see Intel releasing a version of their Classmate that runs the OLPC OS.
Ideas on Marketing the OLPC
The article is a response to the Wall Street Journal's article on the OLPC.
Brightcove: We Change Our Business Model So You Don't Have To
Should have kept everything in Lisp.
Brightcove.TV Gets Its Plug Pulled (Sort Of)
PJ@Groklaw: "The Classmate looks to me to be just another laptop, only smaller and cheesier looking, with a too small screen (it has a resizing feature, so you can cram a normal amount of a page on it, which I'm guessing people leave on all the time) and nothing a child would particularly enjoy by my reckoning, other than the fact that any laptop is better than none, except the digital pen, which is an optional addon, and I'm guessing those pens disappear or get lost in no time. And indeed Intel doesn't market Classmate as something kids will love. They market it as a laptop teachers and parents will find reassuring, because it gives them the illusion of control. Now that's significant. I just learned something about marketing. It's about dreams, not about reality."

That was what bothered me about the criticisms of lack of teacher training for the XO. It was not meant to be used by the teachers.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071125113058548
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84054
Google Takes On Global Warming
FastCompany Cover Story: All Eyes On Apple
Apple: What Could Go Wrong
Microsoft, Intel, et al are really acting in a despicably greedy manner here. That being said, they're all just trying to be good capitalists. It's a depressing situation.
CEO of Automattic WordPress Blog Tool on the Future of Blogging in Big Business
Developer guru gives his take on why the success of blogs hasn't permeated the enterprise space just yet.
Yeah I like it. Maybe it complicates things but it'd be interesting to see if it pleased the users.
Google Gives Up IP of Anonymous Blogger
By 10am this morning, a friend of mine had already taken two movie quizzes and a trivia challenge - as faithfully reported by Flixster's PublishActionOfUser. I wonder what happens if her co-worker and FB friend, who might not like her too much shows her FB profile to their boss. It's one thing to let people waste time on your site - it's quite another to tell everyone exactly what they did and when they did it.
Opinions/advice on JavaScript libraries or write your own?
Hey All,

Ive been spending my spare time writing a web application, and have been using Dojo as my JavaScript Library. Ive done a fair bit of work on it including writing a bunch of custom widgets. Dojo is now up to v0.9. I use v0.4.3, and they are not compatible. Im very comfortable with the code, and don't mind branching off on my own version if requried.

What I am concerned about (especially after reading the "High-Performance JavaScript: Everything you've been taught is wrong" post) is the eventual speed, as it seems that some of the reason the Dojo guys are writing a new version is because of speed. ( I dont seem to have any issues with my app at the moment ... but still have a fair few things to add)

I guess my question is whether anyone here has completed an app in Dojo, or any other library, and whether you had to do alot of optimising afterwards?
eToro Makes Forex Trade Child's Play
Run currencies in a marathon? The Yen is represented by a sumo wrestler? Bizarre.
Datejs: A Truly Slick Date Script
Google expands into alternative energy
Because this is important hacker news.
I wrote a response:

I came in contact with an article summarizing Stephen Key's technique for licensing new inventions: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/26/a-beginners-... [Yes, thank you news.YC]

Stephen Key is a serial inventor. He comes up with ideas then licenses them to large corporations. One of the key tools he uses is that he does not sell inventions, he sells benefits.

What is the benefit of the OLPC XO?

I'll tell you this in one sentence:

The OLPC XO gives your child a significant competitive edge.

I read the the hardware specs. Those were nice but not compelling. When I read the software specs, I realized that the XO contains many of the ideas that the MIT Media Labs had been trying to get into mainstream computing for years, but failed. A great example is garbage collection. LISP programmers have been using garbage collection for over thirty years or more, but its benefit has only recently reached the programming communities at large through languages such as Python, Ruby, and C#.

However, the XO takes garbage collection one step further. It will automatically save revisions of your files and garbage collect that too. When you run out out space, it tells you what junk you should throw out, and you decide what you want to 'keep'. Otherwise you never worry about having to save because the computer might crash in the middle of writing something. There is no other OS that is built to do that from the ground up out on the market. It is one of the many things about the XO that will give a child a competitive edge, having grown up with it.

More importantly, when they become adults, they will demand this functionality from mainstream operating systems. Some of them, having grown up with the 'view source' key will have the technical skills and the perseverance to make it happen. If the adults are too clueless to want it, they will go ahead and make it. How's that for competitive edge?

When I realized that the main benefit of the XO is to give a child a competitive edge, I found it highly interesting that the original plan called for distributing the XO exclusively to developing nations. Think about that.

There has been a long-standing discussion over the decline of the US educational system. A device that gives a US child a non-trivial, competitive edge should have its doors beaten down by their parents ...
"The next big thing that will dethrone Google..."
Does anyone know where to find the article that said the next big thing that will dethrone Google will be started by Google employees? I'm trying to put together a blog, and I can't find this for reference.
Idea: PayPal for Identity Management
Someone might have thought this up already, but if they haven't, this might be an interesting project for someone to do. Basically, the idea is to make the equivalent of PayPal, but for identity management.

For most sites, authentication consists of an e-mail / password combo. Some require you to create a user-name as well, but it's basically a proxy for an e-mail address. The problem is -- a lot of people don't really want to give out their e-mail address. (1) Spam. (2) Linking multiple accounts to the same e-mail provides lots of info for data-miners.

To deal with 1, many users already create junk-mail accounts that exist for the sole purpose of signing up for stuff. The problem is that sometimes you want to see SOME of the newsletters those sites send. Leaving them all in the junk account ensures they're buried under all the other stuff. Use your non-junk-mail account and you may not be able to undo the damage later (ever try opting-out of some of the spam messages? PITA sometimes). It also doesn't solve 2.

So .. why not create different e-mail addresses for each site you create an account with? Have them all forward to your real e-mail address. When you no longer want spam from a certain source, simply terminate one of the fake e-mail addresses. This would be a pain for a user to do for every single account they created, but an entrepreneurial hacker could create a service that automatically generated fake e-mail addresses, strong passwords, set up any forwarding, and allowed users to track and manage their login info on multiple sites. You would also have to write a browser plugin or something that looked for user-name/e-mail form fields and filled in the proper login info (it'd be unreasonable to expect users to keep track of all the fake e-mail addresses on their own).

Just as PayPal allows you to pay without exposing your actual financial information, this would allow you to login without exposing your actual e-mail address. Even better, unlike PayPal or services like OpenID and Windows CardSpace, it requires no change on the part of the actual sites themselves. It's all done on the client-side.

For the truly paranoid, you could potentially extend the idea by creating full-blown fake identities (with names, addresses, etc.) for each site you visited, but I suspect you would run afoul of the law here.

There's a lot of room of abuse, but I don't see any absolute deal-breakers so far. I'm busy with my own project right now, so if someone's looking for something to do, go for it.
Extra points for creativity but that assumes that 'content is inappropriate' abusers do not use the 'mark inappropriate' feature for actual inappropriate content. I don't have any quotes or statistics here, but common sense suggests to me that abusers will mark real inappropriate stuff and stuff they just don't agree with.

By keeping mum, you also lose the scare effect, though OTOH that might keep the "I'll just create a bunch of accounts" folks down.

A third risk is that legitimate marks no longer get made because the potential marker doesn't want to risk the ban. However, if the ban is ONLY on the use of the mark as inappropriate button and not for anything else, then I doubt it would actively scare users.
Deconstructing Facebook Beacon JavaScript
Forget Facebook. Search Ads Are the Revolution
Pfft. Anyone who would ridicule me for buying porn is right to do so. Porn is freely available on the internet.

Seriously, though: I could care less about what shows up on the feeds. Anyone who would criticize or judge me for what I buy isn't among my friends, in real life or on facebook. Worried about your boss (as Doctorow says, you pretty much have to friend this one if they come a-courtin') seeing too much? Just twiddle the privacy settings so he or she only sees the most innocuous of updates.

While there are many valid criticisms of facebook, I have never worried once about the ones you listed.

Just my 2 cents.
"the average corporate email user received 126 messages a day"

Wow, that seems on the high side to me. I realize you typically tend to get a lot of low-signal mail when working in a corporate environment, but 126 per day on average is still a little hard to believe.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071125113058548
The entire Yahoo "People of the Web" series is worth checking out.
go gdrive go!
This reminds me of 3D Mail Box, the aircraft simulator meets email inbox.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/24/worlds-worst-email-app-...

The visual representation of data, huh. These people must make Edward Tufte cry.
That's a very kind offer.

That said, I think that the news.yc domain name is very intentional- It emphasizes the connection the site has with the Y Combinator application and submission process.

When PG et all review yc applications, they look over the posts that people have made to the forum, and use that as an element in their judgement. Knowing that this is the case encourages people to make thoughtful and relevant posts, rather than just posting LOLcats, and the like.. Essentially, it's reddit, but your conduct matters, if you want to join the YC club.

For that reason and others, I suspect that the YC crew probably prefer the name being predominately tied with the Y Combinator brand.
I think it's somewhat dishonest, but clever in it's dishonesty.

The way I read the site, it's basically acting as a gambling site, giving minigames that people can bet on, and luring the gambling crowd into the game, but they're using a loophole in the US rules against gambling.

It reminds me a little of DraftMix in that way.
The pets.com of online trading.

Edit: The reason conventional trading software is complicated is because traders want every tool and advantage they can get if it's their own money they're risking (they also probably like the illusion that they're making rational decisions). I don't get this little PlaySkool dealie that made TechCrunch.
I don't think it's stupid (maybe it is if you only thought of it as a finance trading tool) - but like TechCrunch pointed out it's pretty much online gambling in disguise, but legal even in the US (at least that's my guess)
Google's Goal: Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal
Any suggestions on good places to find freelance developers?
I was wondering if anyone had any tips on places to look for freelance developers. See, I run a small web company (just me and my developer partner), and sometimes we get a lot of job offers in the pipeline and we like to have some freelancers in our rolodex in case we need to contract out work. Finding designers is fairly easy since I'm a designer and I'm in the community, but I'm not plugged into the dev community. I would like to know some good resources should a time come when I need to reach out. Any tips? p.s. When I say developer, I mean someone with PHP and MySQL server-side experience and XHTML, CSS, and Javascript client-side experience. Thanks.
There is one by Cringely...

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070524_0021...
What is the target market for this service? If it's the same market as Draftmix, I don't think this site will be able to attract enough gamblers.
Google Maps now has Terrain view
given the appeal of day trading and gambling to a certain portion of the population, I'd wait and see

I think when the US gov starts stomping harder on gambling companies that it deems illegal (which it already has to a degree - even with bad repercussions from the WTC), we'll see what happens with this company
Detailed list of new features in Firefox 3
There's also the potential that they'll just get in the way and make things harder for a small team, though, especially if they're only around for 2-3 months.
It's in no way a gambling site from what I read on techcrunch. Sounds like they just take forex quotes and instead of displaying them in a graph or with tickers, they use competitive games and you get to watch your currency duke it out with the other currencies.

The fishy part is them leaving off bid/ask spreads off the site. Couldn't find them while taking a quick glance.

They also use 400:1 leverage meaning for $25 you can trade $10000. You're wiped out in a 0.25% price move. Looking at the yen today http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=USDJPY=X&t=1d long or short anyone would be wiped out with that kind of margin.
Ouch: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/3dmailbox.com/?metric=uv
Meet the supermouse bred by geneticists that can't get cancer
Crikey, 400:1 leverage!? I've never heard of such a thing before. Is there anywhere else where a regular guy can get this kind of leverage?

(As to the term 'gambling', I think people are using the broad definition by which day-trading and other such financial transactions are termed a 'gamble' rather than a 'very risky, poorly informed financial investment on such a short time-scale that one can't possibly make informed predictions of price movement'. Similarly, I believe that poker is often legal because it's a 'game of skill', but that doesn't mean it's not also a gamble.)
Facebook the new AOL?

Absolutely the best analogy.
It's only as easy when you look at it from the technical side (two buttons - click one). From a more social point of view there's a big difference (how big depends certainly on each person).
oDesk, elance - farm it out that way if needed.
ZAGG Inc Teams with MyNuMo for iPhone Game Sponsorship    
Online Game for iPhone and iPod Touch Users to Be Sponsored by invisibleSHIELD Provider
Google Plans To Offer Online Storage Service
Windows XP Significantly Outperforms Vista, Tests Show
"Who's idea was it?" - Who cares.
unemployment office, bars, Ycombinator rejects get-togethers?
Is that the girl he almost didn't found reddit because of:

http://cache.valleywag.com/assets/resources/2007/11/Huffman....

...or is that a post-aquisition upgrade? (excuse me if I have my founders confused.) Also check out the kiwi in the middle of the above:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp
Also http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2007/11/27/cancerresista...

I haven't found the original paper or much information about the gene in question.
Try the 37Signals gig board.
Most online forex brokers push people into 200:1 using a "mini" account that trades in lots of 10K. Normal size accounts trade in lots of 100K. I'm guessing they have the little ones to get some people making big returns quickly and then bump them up to larger and safer accounts.

I remember reading something in Jack Schwager's Trading Wizards book where someone talked about successful hedge funds not using more than 5-10x leverage.
What's your problem with freelance developers?
Scribd is Seeking a System Administrator
Interested? Send a resume to jobs@scribd.com
Edit 2: Joe Average jumping in on trading is the classic sign an equity bubble is going to end.
Beauty Kit for Little Girls - classic of Web 1.0 web design
Your developer partner isn't similarly plugged in to the community?

Very well then... Colleges and universities aren't bad. Most students will work for a reasonable rate, and most CS majors can handle a little PHP easily.
Breaking a stalemate
I think one of their major trade fairs is held in Las Vegas. They definitely do not call it gambling, but they target the gambler profile.
I think you may have missed the point. Regardless of what the CEO says, eToro is just a run-around on anti-gaming laws; as such it's not really supposed to be a legitimate tool for forex trading.

Far from stupid, I'd say this is actually quite clever. What's more, it's no less moral than betting on fantasy football.
You can get 400:1 leverage at most "retail" forex brokers. You will have fewer options if you want _lower_ leverage, not higher. Something like 90% or more of traders lose all of their money, and the market maker gets to keep all of it, so they have all the interest in offering insanely high leverage. You are practically guaranteed to wipe out your account at 400:1.
"I remember reading something in Jack Schwager's Trading Wizards book where someone talked about successful hedge funds not using more than 5-10x leverage."

Leverage doesn't mean much if you don't know the beta (a measure of risk) of the security. I think for most hedge funds the amount of leverage varies wildly based on what's being traded, so it's tough to apply a single rule of thumb to an entire market.
Wow! Wow wow wow. This is really awesome drawing technology. I wonder where they get the data from.
OK, I understand that there are many people that like gambling for gambling's sake. I played online poker during its peak and I enjoy draftmix now. I do some sports betting from time to time. There are certainly many people out there who stopped playing poker online after Bush messed it up and are looking for a gambling fix.

I think all of those people are going to keep looking and not even blink an eye at this. When you're betting on which currency goes up or down during a one hour period, there is not even the feeling that skill is involved, online sports betting and poker and fantasy sports.

I just don't think there is a market of people that would prefer to gamble on racing currencies instead of sports. Who is this market? People that have always wanted to day trade but have never tried?
Out of curiosity, will you be applying any principals from the book to the startup?
Shameless Plug: http://issackelly.com
looking for general freelance work to help fund my bootstrapped startup. I've worked extensively with each of those technologies.
It's still interesting. Reminds me of The Black Swan.
from NAVTEQ, who in turn get it from the Census Bureau TIGER project
wow i really dont get what this has to do with:

(A) web 1.0 | (B) hackers news
No, I think Schroedinger's equation is exactly what Prof. Aaronson is complaining about. It's part of "the complicated patchwork of ideas invented between 1920 and 1926". (The equation was published in 1926.) Teaching the Schroedinger equation first is the historical approach.

Consider this sentence from Wikipedia:

"The Schroedinger equation defines the behaviour of \psi\;, but does not interpret what \psi\; is. Schroedinger tried unsuccessfully to interpret it as a charge density. In 1926 Max Born, just a few days after Schroedinger's fourth and final paper was published, successfully interpreted \psi\; as a probability amplitude, although Schroedinger was never reconciled to this statistical or probabilistic approach."

What this tells us is that Schroedinger's equation was a hack. It gave Erwin the right answer, but he didn't know what it meant. And, lo and behold, when I learned quantum mechanics in school I didn't know what the equation meant, either -- I was so busy trying to solve the differential equation, and learning about the relationship between the quantum Hamiltonian and the classical Hamiltonian, and looking up complicated Bessel functions, and being confused by angular momentum quantum numbers that I never really understood what the hell the wave function actually represented.

Aaronson's point is that we now know that quantum mechanics is about probability theory. Once you understand that -- complete with bras, kets, state vectors and matrices -- you are better equipped to understand the Schroedinger equation as one particular application of quantum theory.

I wish I'd known this guy back when I was a first-year physics grad student.
"there is not even the feeling that skill is involved"

Well, the 'skill' in BJ is pretty thin, it's thinner in craps, almost nonexistent in roulette (if I recall correctly, all bets are equivalent in EV, except for one, which is worse), and completely absent in lotteries and numbers. And that's not to mention "Casino War". People will create their own feeling of skill based on magical thinking. After all, none of those games seem to be lacking for players.

I think this is brilliant; forex outcomes are basically random (yes, they are - if you could predict them, you'd be too busy counting your yachts to be here) so this system uses them as a RNG for games of chance.

Which people love. Wish I'd thought of it.
There's also an ability to have users contribute corrections to Google Maps data ("Fix it"), which I haven't noticed before:

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/edit/promo.html#utm_campaig...
Google wants to generate green electricity at prices that rival coal.
I on the other hand find this quite elegant

(...) ? $doThis : $doThat;
Soon my pet mice will have nothing to worry about but stroke and heart disease.

Actually, I think cancer has been cured in mice several times over. The problem is that mice have a two to three-year lifespan and several orders of magnitude fewer cells than a human. So cancer in mice is very, very different from cancer in humans. Mice don't even get the kind of cancer that concerns us -- the kind that develops after dozens of years, and that can evade a human's anti-cancer mechanisms (which are more powerful than those in mice, because protecting humans from cancer is a much harder task!)
xkcd - Network