skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see two basic possibilities: One, it ran out of money before it could launch, or two, it doesn't actually work.

I would put relative probabilities of those two as somewhere around 1:9.

I look at this thing as an engineer and I see a signal processing problem that means it's probably pretty easy to build something that's right about 70% of the time, and with great effort you could get to 85%... but that's terrible for an input device. Maybe I'm wrong. But I also know for a fact I've encountered tons of people who have faced other problems like this, and in their boundless optimism are sure that the last few percent are just a matter of trying harder, and some of them go on to blow millions on "trying harder" on what is fundamentally impossible. The truth is, electronics really don't care how optimistic you are.

Most of the 'first class' ideas you think are being overlooked are actually the second case. 3D interfaces, a whole whackload of input devices (including the fun case of exotic video game console interfaces), energy sources, new circuit types that are going to blow silicon out of the water, and the list just goes on and on. Most of them just plain don't work like the advocates said they would.

Some of the advocates are honestly wrong. Some... are not.

Just about the only thing that factors in this thing's favor is that exotic input interfaces have historically faced a very steep uphill battle. Dvorak and other alternate keyboard layouts have gotten very little traction, and that involves no extra hardware at all. I've used a couple of exotic input devices or methods that work perfectly fine but stand no chance of general acceptance because people have no interest in learning how to use them.

(I would point out that I've left open the possibility that it does work. But I'd want to see a lot of evidence not coming directly from the company. Everybody always claims awesomeness.)
I don't think that's the use case. I think it's meant for when you don't find the image you're looking for, but find one that's close, or at least in the same ballpark. Then you can tell Google to find images that are close and it might find exactly the image you're looking for.

I personally think it's awesome.
Never heard of it before. But then --- I am a sample of one.
Capitalism happens when the factors of production (land/capital) can be private, not necesserily owned by the goverment, "business" or "customer" are really irrelevant to the economic system :)
This is pretty exciting stuff! Content based image retrieval has been an active and hot topic in research for years, yet I have rarely seen them in action that much specially in the form of any new startups, which is really surprising for me.

The startup I am working on is somewhat related to CBIR but in a different way, so it's definitely cool to see more implementations spark up in this field.
What Happens When Larry and Sergey Die?
Right. We would all be extremely disappointed if their work brought in just $40K in the next year. We have more paying work than we can get to at this point, and we're confident that we can do well for everyone with this arrangement.
I'm interested in what the company profiles were of the places that extended you offers (I know you don't want to name names).
Why would we do something like that?
It might be somewhere past vaporware. There is a product demo video for 2009 where typing is demonstrated. However, even if it does work, it may not work well enough (yet) for real-world uses. Future prototype iterations may well improve dramatically.

Inventor Gunilla Alsiö's elevator pitch at Plugg '09 (one of 20 invited startups out of 143 applicants at this Europe entrepreneur event).

"The movies [Minority Report, Johnny Mnemonic] are fiction but Senseboard is real. We will let you try this yourself during lunchtime. Our business model based on licensing, with the combination of licensing fees and senseboard chips. We are focusing on the mobile gaming market."

http://vimeo.com/3603806 (Starts @8:55, note, some of the other elevator pitches are fascinating to watch - check out Myngle's @2:45)

In the demo video, the rate of typing (painfully slow!) shown seems to indicate that the technology may not be fast and/or robust enough for coding or even email-composition typing needs.

"A first 0-series of the Senseboard(R) Gesture Recognition Technology has been introduced and can be tested at MWC. A demo video is available for download on at: http://www.senseboard.com/video_0109/video.php "

@1:17 - demo of using senseboard for Google earth navigation

@2:06 - virtual keyboard demo (note: continuity issues - video quality is low, set is different from Google nav demo - leading me to suspect it might not be demo'able live - if it was, why wouldn't they film it the same day/setting)

The video is 78mb and it has a weird, smooth jazz soundtrack. Don't want to jump their bandwidth usage but they don't stream it. Maybe someone can share/host it.
The Twitter revolution that wasn't.
"Everything In Its Right Place" == Radiohead's musings on the difficulties of design?
Everything, everything, everything, everything..
In its right place
In its right place
In its right place
Right place

Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon
Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon
Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon
Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon

Everything, everything, everything..
In its right place
In its right place
Right place

There are two colours in my head
There are two colours in my head
What is that you tried to say?
What was that you tried to say?
Tried to say.. tried to say..
Tried to say.. tried to say..

Everything in its right place

:) It was the two colours in my head part that really did it for me.
I agree that the quality of dubbing has greatly increased. But there still seems to be just that little bit of impedance mismatch. I think it's because the archetypes don't match!

Japanese female archetypes are just weird to Americans, and often don't have good analogues in our culture. When you have the tragically strong woman who will never be desired by a man, in English dubbing, she often comes across as the female badass that everybody wants, but is too afraid to try for.

Military types often don't match. Anime portrayals of Western-style Squad leaders/Sergeants are Japanese caricatures that have become Japanese-archetypal. The Japanese expect slightly different things from their fictionalized Generals than Americans or the British. (Like the degree to which they are allowed to display battle-lust, versus having to couch it in terms of "their duty.")

I think that when "voice acting isn't in your own language" it's also often the case that the archetypes aren't your own culture's. I think your first point is just another part of the same cultural mismatch.
Out of curiosity, how did the class determine whether anyone shared a birthday? The best way I can think of is lining up by order and then seeing if your neighbors share your birthday. Is that how you did it? Is there a better way to do it?
Digg ditches Microsoft as ad partner
While there are benefits to that approach, I'm glad they didn't do things that way. Putting performance issues aside, I think it's a lot easier to develop, test and maintain a small single purpose language then a cross-platform library with a public API and suite of bindings to an evolving language like Python.
You're right, they're not equal. But sounding arrogant -- on purpose -- is still kind of a dickly thing to do. It's I'm-making-up-for-a-small-penis behavior, and the world needs less of it.
"This song is about putting everything in your box so it all fits nice." -Thom Yorke
i'm cleaning my room now, adopting one-text-file-for-everything to physical world (one-dresser-for-everything, etc)

i put a dresser (take the doors off) next to my bed (i sit on bed's end) to eliminate chair

the height of the shelves can be readjusted so i can have a table too

i'm taking all things from drawers and putting them on shelves so nothing is hidden

eventually there will be only a bed and a dresser in my room
Ding dong television is deaaad...
I agree: caveats can be distracting. I'm not at all suggesting that, for instance, the 37 Signals boys start adding cavaets.

I'm suggesting that they stop constantly posting articles that say, in essence, "Hey, world, you're doing it all wrong and we know how to do it right and you should take your cue from us. There's only one Right Way and we have a lock on it." You know, like when they cap on startups because "building a business" is The Better Way. As opposed to a different pursuit altogether.
> As a major player in both worlds, Oracle has every reason to want to encourage greater collaboration between the Linux and OpenSolaris communities. I suspect that this will lead Oracle to rethink Sun's licensing decisions for OpenSolaris.

Found that bit interesting, it hadn't occurred to me that Oracle might alter licenses to Sun IP in a way favorable to Linux.
And being arrogant is not a capital crime --- it's far better than having the opposite problem.
How presumptive of you.
Bali Driver - Bali Tours - Bali Travel Guide
PC should probably be split into Windows and Free OSes, at a minimum. In popular culture it's okay for PCs to refer to windows, but here we'll just get a mix of linux/bsd/windows in that category.

Unless you consider "other" to be non-Windows.
Ran Linux as my exclusive desktop for ~4 years, then switched to OSX ~2 years ago.
Ok. But what stops me from paying myself $0, working a profitable project over summer and having all the 100% to myself during the year?

I apologize in advance if I'm impolite but it sounds like a ripoff and is even worse than Rentacoder's slave wages.

In fact, here is my counter-proposal: come to Seattle where I live, work on my ideas and if you're successful I will give you 50% of the profits. It's like: work for a summer get paid for five years!
I may or may not give you office space but I guarantee that I will micromanage you and give you advice even though I don't actually know your area of development.
If there's 0 helium going in, and >0 coming out, there's fusion, no matter how little. There's no other way to get helium from hydrogen.

Also, hydrogen gas would float a balloon even better than helium, so that wouldn't be much of a test.
If you have existing paying work that you're adding people to, it sounds more like you're in the staffing industry -- where paying someone 70% of what you're billing them out for is about the limit. I suppose you could argue that there's more uncertainty, but not enough to justify that big a difference.

I do like your company (when I was unemployed, Startuply was the only job board I liked checking), but I think this internship needs to be tweaked pretty seriously before it's a good deal for everyone involved.
What about for those who are flat footed?
Oh THAT cold fusion.

I couldn't understand how helium would relate to the Adobe web programming language.
It looks like a plug for Flurry who is marketing itself as (and I looked in the title of the Flurry page for this) iPhone and Android analytics. See whats missing? Right, no Blackberry. Just because they support it doesn't mean they push marketing in that direction. Its a skewed result from a opt-in service.

The article isn't so much about the iPhone as it is the Flurry service giving us biased facts and Fluffy information.
He says that there are 20 million bloggers, and 450K are making a living at it, more than there are programmers almost as many as are lawyers. Any of you out there doing better as bloggers than programmers? This HN gig isn't making me rich.
For the most part I'm entirely indifferent to the debate, but using a deprecated html tag when the requisite html/cs is trivial seems silly.
100% serious. One of them still works for us, 10 years later.
It'd be nice if lwn were free.
Are There Demand Limits to Growth?
my blog pays my rent and food while i work full-time on my startup. so it all works out. :-)
Your bounce rate is worse than you think
> pays less than $20/hr: Joel Spolsky's Fog Creek.

$750/40 = $18.75

plus

free meals =~ $100/week, so now we're up to $21.25 an hour

plus

free nyc housing =~ $200/week, so now we're up to $25.25 an hour.
I ran linux (mostly slackware) on my laptops from 2001 until 2005 or so. Then I bought a Mac with the expectation to install linux on it. I decided to see what OS X was like for a few days and never got around to install linux (now on my 3rd Mac laptop).

The thing is, I have been thinking of switching back recently, but I really like being able to run Photoshop and Office natively.

Edit: one more thing, "netbook only" would be an interesting option.
I should have guessed it had been discussed ad nauseam.

Calling it pragmatic seems ironic though, but I guess that depends on how familiar the builders are with CSS.

(edit: that sounds a bit more "internet-nerd-being-overly-dramatic-about-stupid-things" than I meant it to)
This is interesting. It's definitely a different take than the laser virtual keyboard or the Wii Remote. What sort of advantages does this have over hacking a Wii Remote? Is it more portable? Is it more sensitive? Arguably it's design would work better in a mobile environment. When I look at recent innovations in this sector (gestures/gyroscopes) I think the Wii is the product that's made the biggest impact on the industry and the first to (at least widely) release a product that does as advertised.

See http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/
It's possible that Google IS illegal according to that poorly worded Swedish law. But so what? It's not unconstitutional and I doubt anyone will care unless they actually did start going after legit sites.
Thanks for the recommendations, trully appreciated!
Is democracy a means or an end? To me, it is a means - a way to achieve better government by making government more accountable.

But you are basically saying, in order to have democracy, you already need to have good government. Well, if you already have good government, then what's the point of adding democracy? Why not just stick with whatever government is working so well?
Forget "ideas." We have working, proven software and a platform for extending it. We have hard won domain knowledge and battle-tested business processes that deliver. We have a pipeline of revenue-producing products that we can't get to because we're short handed. As PG has suggested, ideas on their own are worth nothing. We have the product and the adoption.

It sucks that this sounds like a ripoff to you. Can you elaborate on why? It also seems like you're trivializing the challenges of "working a profitable project over summer." This is not an either/or situation, either - most people probably aren't trying to figure out whether to (a) intern or (b) start their own company. The two are generally pretty distinct.

So the only thing that stops you is everything else.
I'm with you, and we're definitely looking for a way to make this happen.
Not just the Asian tigers - pretty much every country in the world established rule of law, property rights, contract law, and the other foundations of economic growth under authoritarian governments.
More Banks Beat the Street Monday
You can also use a lookup table, an AJAX call to a square root web service, using the canvas and drawing appropriate geometric shapes then measuring, or, if you have a bit of free time, implementing code which has commercial value, accepting money for it, and then going to Radio Shack and buying yourself a calculator with a square root key.

But personally, yeah, I'd use Math.sqrt.
For a bit-parallel approach to this problem, see: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.19.4...
PC, with Windows & Linux dual-boot.
pg has answered this many times. if urls in submission text were real links, people would be tempted to submit urls in the text box, rather than the url box, and then editorialize about them.
From what I've heard, if URLs were clickable in posts, users would be tempted to do more "Ask HN"-style questions, whereas the preference would be for users to make long posts on their blogs instead and link to here.
"When Sun liberated the Solaris source code, the company deliberately chose a license that would make it difficult for the code to be adapted for use in the Linux kernel. Oracle will probably dual-license the Solaris code so that it is available under the GPLv2 in addition to the CDDL. This will allow key Solaris innovations—such as ZFS and DTrace—to be ported to Linux."

DTrace, finally!
Smoothed Analysis of Algorithms (alternative to worst-case and average-case analyses)
This is a fairly interesting look on the recent settlement between Google and book publishers. The author has a point in that as a result of that ruling, Google has a regulated (by the courts) monopoly of source in which no other company can currently compete.
Convict Forced to Tweet every 10 minutes
Blu-ray in every home? Backers aim for $99 players
We're definitely open to suggestions.

Our thought with this was "come work with us for the summer, let's build cool stuff and make some money, and we'll pay you a piece of what you earn for 12 months rather than 3. We get help when that we can't pay for off the bat, and they get (1) cool work experience and (2) paid for a year.

We thought then and continue to feel that this is a fun, unorthodox, kinda risky and potentially very lucrative way for some college kids to spend the summer. There's nothing malign about our intentions, but we're resource-constrained enough that we have to be creative in our approach.

Just because it's a rev share rather than a flat fee, though, doesn't mean it's like the staffing industry. The staffing industry pays people below-market wages in return for letting them be entirely reactive about finding work. Our approach is to have interns share some risk in return for an upside that isn't capped.
This is so cool! I want one and I want to modify it.

I would be very surprised if these do not become very popular.
Top 100 Freelancing Blogs
What have you learned here that you didn't know already?
OurSQL?
Yeah, but the title part just gets ignored: http://www.amazon.com/I-Can-Basically-Put-Anything-I-Want-In...
Furthermore this is something that is relatively easy to do just by making an "Oracle" storage engine for MySQL, much the way the DB/2 guys did: http://blogs.sun.com/JenniferGlore/entry/beta_version_of_mys...
If you're open to suggestions, here's how I would have done it:

1) offer a stipend. It's going to be modest, but you're a startup, so "We'll pay for your lunch, and give you enough money to rent a place with roommates," is enough.

2) Instead of ownership of revenue, give people ownership in the properties they create. Getting 10% of something questionable is okay, but being in charge of whatever new, successful lines of business you create is great.

3) Drop the '12 months' line. Tell people that you're looking for folks who can create good sites, and that if they can do it in a few months, you'll bring them on board full-time. A cut of revenue might be the right way to do things, but it makes you sound like an affiliate marketer masquerading as an internship, rather than an internship with a novel compensation scheme.
Paul I have to say, and I mean this as a compliment ... you're the exception to the rule when it comes to blogging.

Although I do agree with the overall notion that it's easy to make some money with your blog/personal site.
"This person has protected their updates."

I wouldn't mind a source for this story, because at present it doesn't really have one, and if it was just based off of the Twitter account then I would be pretty skeptical.
Researchers Use Brain Interface to Post to Twitter
What really powers the internet
This is fake. From the comments:

"As part of the INFECTIOUS Festival in Dublin, this is a collaborative contest to try and reach 1 million page views by the end of April. The contest is open to anyone, and the rules are simple: TRY TO MAKE SOMETHING VIRAL.

This isn't real."
Dick Lipton's blog has a huge collection of really amazing kiddie pool tastes and pointers within awesome nuggets of theoretical computer science, one of his posts that I want to walk through carefully when i have the time is the one on the quantum method, for proving various nifty algorithmic complexity results etc.

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/erds-and-the-quantu...

sexy stuff
Yes, I know what Churchill said about democracy.

Funny enough, Churchill did not say what people think he said about democracy. He said, "it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time;" In other words, he was para-phrasing his opponents. Churchill was actually giving a speech defending the existence of the House of Lords! ( http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0105/0105chu... )

And while Churchill's misquote is famous, few have heard of Gibbon's quote:

--------------------------

OF the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule. Is it possible to relate, without an indignant smile, that, on the father's decease, the property of a nation, like that of a drove of oxen, descends to his infant son, as yet unknown to mankind and to himself; and that the bravest warriors and the wisest statesmen, relinquishing their natural right to empire, approach the royal cradle with bended knees and protestations of inviolable fidelity? Satire and declamation may paint these obvious topics in the most dazzling colors, but our more serious thoughts will respect a useful prejudice, that establishes a rule of succession, independent of the passions of mankind; and we shall cheerfully acquiesce in any expedient which deprives the multitude of the dangerous, and indeed the ideal, power of giving themselves a master. In the cool shade of retirement, we may easily devise imaginary forms of government, in which the sceptre shall be constantly bestowed on the most worthy, by the free and incorrupt suffrage of the whole community. Experience overturns these airy fabrics, and teaches us that, in a large society, the election of a monarch can never devolve to the wisest, or to the most numerous, part of the people.

----------------------------------------

In other words, the principle of hereditary rule may be ridiculous, but it's the best way to keep the monsters out of power. And note, after Gibbon wrote this quote, many European countries proceeded to cast away their monarchs and elect monsters ( Robespierre, Napoleon, the Bolsheviks, Hitler, etc).
Blogging is a job like any other, what you actually do differs from coding but the end result can be a decent living either way.

And a lot of hard work, creativity, luck etc.
I'm a bit biased (Ravens fan), but I suspect this would be an interesting read for non-fans alike.
Sad story. Here is hoping Hawking gets better.
sure it was. but that is a great headline to get clicks
well put jose. and it took me 3 years to even get near the point where the blog could pay for more than a cup of coffee each day.
"I don’t have to worry about shortening URLs, and I don’t need some Adobe Air client just to make it tolerable."

This quote sums up the argument between the two services pretty well. Posterous seems like an interesting middle ground between the super, uber short Twitter and other blogging services.
Well, this is what it sounds like to me.

1. We have some projects that bring us money.
2. We have some ideas.
3. You develop those ideas without any pay.
4. If they succeed, we'll give you measly 10%.
5. Our platform is worth 90% of your revenue-generating product.

Microsoft also has products and platforms for extending them. Adsense is a battle-tested business process.

And as much evil as MS is, they don't practically own your company just because you happened to built on their platform, whatever that means.
Got Blood?
This is almost certainly using some kind of image processing rather than just metadata.

http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/images?q=apple&prev...

http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/images?q=apple&prev...

http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/images?q=apple&prev...