skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What he's done is impressive to be sure, but getting the build cost down isn't really the problem; it's the lack of substantial competition that will keep prices up.

Someone has to build and sell these things and in the US and every other industrialized nation it will be regulated as a Medical Device. Likely, before it can be used in developing nations also, it will need some form of regulation and that's where the high cost comes from.

Designing medical devices, getting them FDA approved, and then building them to meet the standards, and meeting product support requirements (I think we're required to provide support 5 years after we stop selling a Medical Device) is expensive and any company doing that is going to want to recoup their costs. There's a high barrier to entry in Medical Device manufacture and as long as that barrier exists, businesses will take advantage of it and the products will be expensive. For example, the company I work for makes a medical instrument that costs us about $60,000 to build. We sell it for around 10x that.

His $500 probe will probably end up being sold for about $7-10,000 by the time it hits the market.
I applaud their innovation, but it looks like a cut-up Cessna in a pair of roller skates. I can only imagine how much interior room you lose on account of that, and even though it's as "big as a Honda Civic", it looks to only seat two.

Plus, it's another battery-powered beast... slow to charge, quick to accelerate, but heavy as hell compared to either gasoline or a fuel-cell vehicle. Not to mention the huge amount of pollution required to make LiOn batteries in the first place.

So, it's interior dimensions are a bit better than a Smart Two-Two, it has a bigger environmental impact (including manufacturing) than pretty much any of the small city cars you find in Europe, is twice as expensive, and will be a fashion statement in California to show how 'environmentally conscious' people are.

So, I don't like it. Watch it sell like a KFC next to a Weight Watchers. :)
Sure,

On my screen the buttons look crenelated.

Here is what I see : http://img260.imageshack.us/img260/3030/capture3.png
By and large, engineers have similar productivity levels.

Slightly off-topic, I was told by an electrical engineer that in most engineering disciplines, about 5% of graduates end up doing design work. The other 95% of engineers do support, quality control, sales, and other non-design tasks. (I have no evidence for this except one conversation. Support or refutation welcome.) By contrast, we expect most CS graduates to do design work. If true, this surely contributes to the unflattering difference between software engineering and other kinds of engineering.
Recently, I had to solve that same problem in PostgreSQL.
I use a multicolumn index with the soundex of first name, soundex of last name, and birthdate.
This yields a set of preliminary candidates to match. On a second step, we prune according to a hand-crafted distance measure, which relies on levenshtein and a bunch of simple calculations on the whole record.
Finally, we order the candidates by distance and take as match that record with minimal distance under a threshold.
Donations are no substitute for charging for products. If you have a commercial product and you make it free and ask for donations instead, your income will drop by 10X or 100X. Really!

Where donations work is when there is an obvious good cause attached to the donation. People will donate when it feels right. But getting a product is not a cause for donation.

tipjoy of course is the rolls royce of donations for your web site. Can't get any simpler than that, and simplicity is key.
I think they also have a hybrid and a hyper-efficient internal combustion version in the works. (The prototype design makes the powerplant pretty modular, which may have changed for the production model.)

If it's a fashion statement, it will sell like hotcakes, providing the economy recovers. I'd buy one as a commuter, if I still commuted by car.
If Prototype and Scriptaculous are your flavour:

http://wiki.github.com/madrobby/scriptaculous/slider

(though it doesn't look like their wiki has a working demo?)
Nokia: We Don't Know Why Criminals Want Our Old Phones
Is a large corporate making money off open software an oxymoron ? In a Sun / Java Context
You got that right, I know about a dozen young couples who would buy one in a second that are expecting. Anyone know if an 'at home' baby monitor device exists now?
No, it'll sell like hotcakes just because I don't like it. :)
It has some spotty support, I understand there is a "Ripper" gem that is in development, but basically 1.9.1 is an interim release that was really aimed at addressing certain performance issues and places where MRI 1.8.x is really broken/inconsistent.

A lot of other stuff was pushed right off the table to get it done. AFAIC, the only way to make sure it gets back on the table for future releases is to join folks like zenspider in working with the AST and showing how important it is for a language to be state-of-the-art for 1977 and expose its AST to introspection.

Thus, my work on Rewriting is a not-so-subtle way to campaign for progress in the interpreter :-)
The underground world of "neuroenhancing" drugs
PBS Brings Bugs, Presidents and Soufflés to the Web
And very interesting science.
Err .. I am the only one with this view or did anyone else also think that the article wasn't provided any new insight or point of view. He just basically iterated everything that everyone knows about the pros and cons of copying code ?!
No, You're spot on.

The author states that this is "an unmodified picture, straight off the digicam". Unfortunately for his test, this means the light passed through a Bayer filter, which uses a pattern of "50% green, 25% red and 25% blue": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter
It busted once already when Larry Ellison wanted to bring that back into the market in late 90's if I remember correctly. Computer industry shifted from terminals into home/desk computers in 80's, rightfully so I think. What made it lacking back then was bandwidth, which is no so very much the case these days. I think it is a good mechanism for portable, low power machines like cell phones, portable game devices maybe or things like that, but for home/office computers, no.
See swombat? Resize the font!
CSS3 & Flexible UI: Avoid Recutting UI Graphics for Mobile
I don't understand your argument at all. I've made donations of thousands of dollars, tax deductible and not, online. Lowering the bar for payment can only go so far. It doesn't solve the issue that getting people to open their wallets (virtual or otherwise) is a pain in the ass. It's a psychological problem, one that most people solve by requiring payment upfront, instead of passively hinting to have money thrown their way.

Personally, I hate the idea of "donations" in this sense. I would rather support your work/ideas/project by purchasing a product you profit from, than just hand you cash.
New 167-processor chip is super-fast, ultra energy-efficient
Yes, heh, I'm well aware. I'm a team member of the main platform it was built on, Yonkly. We're growing and trying to capture the main need to niche-microblog. It's definitely been a typical startups journey (noodles, credit extended, constantly trying new strategies). Hopefully we'll get that activity back up soon, and create a truly valuable and addicting experience. :)
> I know that the term beta has been somewhat warped...

"Somewhat warped"? Try "has warped completely." Gmail still has the word "beta" on its logo, what, five years later?

These days, "beta" implies a service that should function dependably, a few kinks aside. "Alpha" is a much better choice to describe an API that is truly unstable or subject to drastic changes without notice.

Your point is taken that it's a developer's problem if they chose to rely on a Twitter API, but I think it is absolutely appropriate for developers to be up in arms about the issue and for Twitter to be called out for it.
Can one drive it on a freeway? The article doesn't really say that, although the comparison to Honda Civic suggests that the answer is yes.
Right. Monotone (an earlier DVCS, inspiration for git), while a really nice system technically, expected you to set up keys for authorizing changes to the repository before you could use it* . It was a little thing, but reducing setup to just "git init" (or "hg init") makes for less friction to putting stuff in VC just because...and then you find out it's good for things you would have never anticipated.

* One style difference between the two. See Graydon Hoare's comment here (http://www.mail-archive.com/monotone-devel@nongnu.org/msg080...).
I feel like these are the same people from every event like this in NYC. Can anyone really hear David Rose speak about how Amazing NY angels are again, and again?
Btw, why all of those startups are web sites ?

Ain't there anybody who sells desktop applications ?
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Great. Another iSuppli teardown that's going to cause everyone on the Internet to cry foul at how Amazon is charging 48% mark up on it's devices. Yes, because these things build themselves, weren't designed by anyone, get shipped through instantaneous teleportation, market themselves, and do their own support...
"Follows the bigtable model, so it's more complicated than it needs to be. (300+kloc vs 50 for Cassandra; many more components). This means it's that much harder for me to troubleshoot. HBase is more bug-free than Cassandra but not so bug-free that troubleshooting would not be required."

I only had problems (data losses) when I was using HBase in production 3 months ago, but I'm certain that HBase will be mcuh more stable in a few months. And there comes that Cassandra developer and says that Cassandra even has more bugs. Lol. Now I'm pretty sure that I will never touch Cassandra as well.
Would it necessarily have to be sold as a regulated medical device if it is not used as such? There are many companies which sell devices which claim to function as fetal heart monitors (most of which do not work) which are sold without regulation.

There are also consumer-targeted EEG, EKG and such devices which provide medical information but do not claim to be clinical-grade.

I don't know what the law here is, but as long as it was not sold with any diagnostic claims, and did not recommend any invasive use, would it fall under regulated equipment?

I do agree however that competition (or lack thereof) will be a determining factor.
> By and large, engineers have similar productivity levels.

I don't know, but I have my doubts that this is true. In fact, I doubt it's true in any discipline, from maids to CEOs.
Yeah. Many blog posts (and not just his!) consist of rehashed material from books like _The Pragrmatic Programmer_, _Code Complete_, _The Practice of Programming_, etc., with small amounts of commentary.

Sometimes the author is doing it as a way to ruminate on the ideas, sometimes they're doing it for some kind of ad revenue, etc.
People who didn't know graphical design learned it to do web pages. Perhaps people who don't know typographical design will learn it to do fonts in web pages?
A closer analogy imho is with lawyers.

Writing doesn't necessarily involve logical thinking of the type programming involves, and it doesn't seem to involve "hacking" (in the best sense of the term), and it doesn't involve working withing constraints in a pre-existing system.
50% mark-up is pretty standard for retail items. I'm surprised the Kindle mark-up is not higher.
Their are great RIA, but it's the app that is more important.
I started using Prezi yesterday, and it is truly amazing.
But it isn't amazing because of RIA, it's a killer because of the product, and it just happens to be a RIA (isn't RIE more suitable? Rich Internet Expeirence).

It's like asking 'where are the killer python scripts'. the technology doesn't matter as much as the product.
123 for PC, and Pagemaker for Mac where killer apps not because of the platform they were created on , but because they replaced the previous methods of accomplishing the task.
A lot of newspapers, certainly, but not all of them. I'm missing at least 5 national newspapers for my country (strangely all the Francophone ones). Only one newspaper in France too. Still, great fun to look at what the headlines further from home are!

By the way, newspaper sales for the quality newspapers are rising here. I wonder why that is.
First Printable Upgrade (to a MakerBot 3D Printer)
Numbered lists are not code, so please don't format them that way. They break the page.

(HN really needs some CSS that restricts the width of code blocks.)
I have to admit that it's pretty. I used to think it was a dumb idea, but it looks cool and seems quite usable. I'd buy one if I had that kind of "play money."

It's by no means practical and I'm sure the first few 1,000s will be purchased like the comment said "as a fashion statement." But realistically, except for the crappy range, it's as "useful" as my 350Z: which is to say, not very - you buy these things for fun, not practicality!
As a consumer, I'm more interested in cost of ownership of the device in comparison with just buying physical books rather than the underlying manufacturing cost.
"Mind-blowing" is the word indeed.

As I read through this article, my first thought was, what if they do create a full, human-like brain. Would it be immoral to then shut it down?
iPhone App Sales After 3 Months
Any other Star Trek nerds here think this sounds like the beginnings of a Tricorder?
Wow, thousands online, that's impressive. Did you feel it cheapened the site or software by asking for them? In waking life buskers, beggars, waiters and charities are the only entities that come straight to mind with regards to tips and donations.
Doesn't sound all that wrong. My dad is an engineer with a thesis in bridge-building, and the closest he's ever come to engineering is to draw up the plans for an annex to our house 20 years ago.
Stinky blogging stats
It's not 50% mark-up, it's 93% mark-up: $185.49 to $359.00
No, it becomes chaotic and unusable when I have more screen windows and switch among them :-)

I would not complain, if I knew such an easy way to make it work, really. :-)
I'm trying to be charitable in assuming that after 3 years (?) of development HBase is more bug free than Cassandra after 8 months.

But to my knowledge nobody has ever lost data with Cassandra.
ClickInsights: Featuring Cloud Computing
That is what Jeff does. I really don't understand how every one of his inane posts makes the front page of HN.
This stuff definitely looks pretty raw. Mnesia seems to be quite mature in comparison, but isn't the greatest option for a system not fully written in Erlang.

Has anyone tried this Project Voldemort referenced in the post? Skimming the description on the project page, I get the impression that it's fairly well thought-out.
The H&FJ Institute for Unapplied Mathematics
Ask HN: How do you manage mailing list subscriptions and mitigate spam?
I subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists (as I'm sure many do) and I of course get inundated with spam. What I've typically done is either created new email accounts once things got unbearable or recently just relied on gmail's spam filtering.

How do you manage various email accounts / mailing list subscriptions?
The only reason it isn't lower is because they can't make them fast enough.

I'm sure Amazon would sell these at a small loss if it meant grabbing marketshare. The most convenient way to get a book on the Kindle is through Amazon.
Ignore your users’ needs. Call them stupid instead.
You are correct, it's mostly targeted at multicore servers and the preview only holds Google's InnoDB patches. Generally thought, I hope they keep looking at performance issues beyond the InnoDB mutex patches - - and set some of the Sun optimization wizards to optimize MySQL. Sun has some _very_ bright people (those that have made ZFS, DTrace, Solaris, Java's VM etc.) that could optimize MySQL to new levels. Let's just hope they don't drown in bureaucracy.
Yes, it does. We don't need some GUID standard for stuff like this, as advocated by the article. Your example is fine.
Wrote this initially as a joke, but perhaps it might actually have some use :) Would love to hear any feedback on the site and ideas for applications.
He seems to have recovered pretty damn quick!

http://twitter.com/mikebutcher/status/1585118548
I always assumed it ran on SVN.
I think you get free wireless for the entire lifetime of the device. Some of the cost must go toward that.
Or, we gradually scale back the world's population using vasectomies and one-child families. Not realistic, maybe, but global population control doesn't necessarily require a big die-off. The exponential growth cycle has to stop some time, and the natural method ain't pretty.
Peapod Comes Live Today.
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Missing almost every single local newspaper in England / Scotland.
Some of the links in PinkTweet, actually promise porn but deliver malware
What kind of person would do that?
exactly: ($new-$old)/$old gives you % change which is ~93%.
The article also mentions a top speed of 90 mph, so I would assume so.
I'm sure thousands of words could be written about why code is like writing. The similarity in process is what strikes me most, but I found it easier to write up a few aesthetic guidelines that apply to both.

1. You mustn't make your readers think hard without rewarding them for their effort.

2. Quality is apparent in many dimensions and at all scales. Defects from any perspective affect the quality of the work as a whole. Writers have strengths and weaknesses, but must strive for competence by every measure.

3. Readers strive for simplicity and coherence. For instance, if a character behaves in an unexpected manner, readers will try very hard to reconcile the character's behavior as the actions of a coherent, believable individual. Characters can be multifaceted and dynamic, but outright insanity should be used with caution. (See rule 1. What is true of characters is also true of objects, classes of objects, and functions.)

4. Verbosity dilutes good qualities and amplifies bad ones. (See rule 1.)

5. If a beautiful chapter can be replaced with a good sentence, or a beautiful sentence can be replaced with a good word, then the substitution must be made. (This may not be true for all writing, but it is true of all code.)

6. Innovation is welcome, but should be focused and purposeful. (See rule 1.)

7. Deviation from these rules is welcome, but should be focused and purposeful. (See rule 1.)
Yeah I didn't follow that statement in the article either, about as "big as a CRV on the inside ... it seats two". Last time I checked, the CRV is a small SUV, with 5 seats and plenty of cargo space.

Not sure I follow your "heavy as hell compared to either gasoline ..." statement. The car weighs 1700 pounds. That is more than 1/2 the weight of most modern vehicles. I'm with you though, the current state batteries for electric vehicles leaves a lot to be desired.
I find it odd that they would call out ARM licensing fees. Wouldn't that be included in the cost of the part?
Housing Crisis Not Over Yet: Median Home Price vs Median Income by Region
Lifehacker.com - Turns Web Sites into PDF Files Online
Proud dad: my son is one of the three founders of Caustic. In the video James (someone else's son :-) demonstrates the developer version done in FPGA. A 10x version in custom silicon is due out next year.

The founders raised their nest egg by cashing in their Apple stock. They created a software emulator and then raised $5.5M from angels, not VCs. They did use a VC to find a CEO whose function was to raise the capital. He got no salary and no stock until he got the funding. Even after funding the founders still had control. Take heart, it's possible to do hardware, even these days.
I often play games the same way. They need a constant injection of novelty to maintain their grip.
I'm guessing it's a typo, and they meant a CRX.
I see the problem he's identified and I have used this analogy before. But when I use it I generally say "Programmers are like writer's who can't make a single spelling or grammer mistake and have to write a story about every action their characters could possibly take"

I don't think the analogy is sufficient without those caveats though
Ah, I forgot about that. Cute, but we of course need a slightly less gamey, more contemplative play experience for this problem.
Writing software is a lot like writing, yes.

I've been reading Stephen King's "On Writing" several years ago. What caught my attention is how King describes writing process.

He says that a writer visualizes everything in a scene he is about to describe and "hears" people talk, "sees" objects move. Then the writer uses a method of telepathy that involves using letters and words in a proper albeit frivole format to convey the whole scene to a reader.

In a way, and this is another analogy, writer telepathically TRANSFERS the scene he has in his brain to the brain of a reader. Like this:

King's brain -----writing-writing-writing---> reader's brain.

It's not the words, not the letters that matter but the scene that King can build in reader's brain. If reader doesn't understand the notions of telepathic protocol (e.g. written informal English), he can't build this scene in his brain.

In a way, this is like Paul Graham said: programmer IS a program. He has a program in his brain, all important parts of it, everything and then he modifies and "sees" what an object does to another object, how the data gets transformed. Then he writes whatever he has seen and heard in his brain to software, writing it out piece by piece, much like a good writer.

When there are bugs, they are similar to misunderstandings. Watch a fundamental Christian read an essay about people searching for truth and god. He'll think that it is a personal assault at his faith, while another person might think it's a brilliant and inspiring essay about freethinking.

Hence the principle of writer: write for your audience.

The problem of course, is that for a writer, audience and the writer himself are extremely similar. A writer and his audience are made of the same stuff. They've usually listened to the similar people, similar music, read similar books.

A programmer and his audience (interpreter/compiler) are much different. Programmer's audience doesn't understand why Beatles kicks ass so he can't allude that, programmer's audience has much different values and understanding.

Yeah, but try alluding to the fact "Beatles kicks ass" to a baptist pastor and you'll see a huge bug: for pastor Beatles might as well have come from the devil himself.

Also, note how I assumed that all pastors hate Beatles. You might have had a different experience; hence you might be pissed off at me.

Holy shit, I did write a lot of words.

References:

Stephen King's telepathy => http://www.inmedium.org/2006/09/from_on_writing_by_stephen_k...

PS. Wow, I just understood that when you make this analogy with open-source software, many things make sense. Can you imagine a world where to read a book you had to hire a translator from company's obfuscated language (machine codes) that would make you forget the contents of it after you were finished? What a bunch of apeshit crazy motherfuckers!

It is already happening, just read RMS' page on Don't buy Harry Potter books (http://www.stallman.org/harry-potter.html).
Using the Google Analytics API - getting total number of page views