skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Set it so that you can book a parking space (for a fee) ahead of time while you're driving there.

Instead of wireless cameras, I thought of some sort of sensor(s) embedded in the ground that could detect something about it (by sight, magnet, etc). If they were embedded poles, they could raise up once the spot was booked to prevent it from being taken, until you arrived, entered your booking code and lowered the barriers.

I think a city might need to be designed in advance for something like this though!
You are incorrect sir, porn is a 14 billion dollar industry.
Of course, Rakudo is still under heavy development, and also, there is no massive CPAN goodness for Perl 6 yet. For Perl 5, yes. For Perl 5, they could've thrown something together in short order and it would've worked -- just like Rails.
This is a really good idea. VCs sort of do this but they exact to high a price. YC sort of does this but they are more focused on funding. Then there are the legions of consultants that do some part of this but not the whole thing.
> Yes, Dot Net is for any OS, Windows, Linux, MAC.

No, .NET is not available on Linux (nor on the BSDs, for that matter--a far cry from "any OS"). Linux has the Mono project, but as it is not an official product in the .NET family, it lags behind the .NET framework in features language compatibility.

Also, Windows Forms is a proprietary extension to .NET, so GUI .NET applications built on Windows are not cross-platform. This is in contrast to JVM languages with Swing or SWT, for instance, or Python in combination with any number of cross-platform windowing systems.
Like Chris Rock once astutely observed,

You could drive a car with your feet, that don't make it a good idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgWv5-I8Qy0#t=1m28s
It's possible that the article itself may be a counterexample: NYT is running ads alongside this story. So NYT is at least trying to be profitable from online ads.
The assertion is not necessarily wrong, it's that it misses the point. It implies that the natural order is that 'we do the content, you do the ads.' You aren't doing your job, that's why we are failing.

That kind of attitude lets news-people stay high browed & complaining about how suits are ruining their content, so long as they are bringing in the ad-dollars. The new paradigm (as the author goes on to explain) has the dumb suits replaced with the dumb public ("The real question is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news,...?") The constant is 'real news.' The world better hurry up and find them a business model or you'll be sorry.

If I step back and look at the whole thing from the outside I'm not worried about democracy and the flow of information being destroyed by a mostly free web.

Taking a step even further back, I would note that there is systemic risk in a business model where you're main advantages are disconnected from your revenue sources. They were never selling news. People have never bout news. They were a way for companies to interact with their customers. They are no longer such a good way of doing this.
Looks like there are 9450 of them (as of now). Quite a lot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LinkSearch...
It isn't being proposed as the standard way, it is merely a proposed alternative. Nothing wrong with other ways to do the same thing. Some prefer other forms of syntactic sugar.
Check out the shoot-able car-stopping nets developed for the military:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2007/04/xnet_car_arrest/
I appreciate the hack value, but this website could be done so much easier using plain HTML and PHP for the Contact Us form...
It's not just 6.01/6.001 -- it's the entire undergrad CS curriculum. Moving these classes toward Python because 6.01 found a Python robotics library (from MIT, coincidentally) does not justify moving other things to Python.

Python's a great language, don't get me wrong but you're being misled if you think that popularity and marketability were not factors in selecting Python for the new course 6 curriculum.

As for the argument that "computer science has fundamentally changed", I agree. Unfortunately, what is really meant is that software engineering has changed. You can learn computer science concepts just as well with Scheme or Python or Smalltalk or OCaml...

Additionally, while library use may be more prevalent in industry now, that's no pedagogical argument for teaching "library use" (whatever that is).

Library use is relatively easy. Reading docs is hard for a lot of people but learning to read docs can be done with systems or languages instead of libraries.

It all boils down to what will serve the students best and what will let MIT deliver the most value. Students can learn python and library use on their own relatively easily. Fundamentally understanding recursion, abstraction, complexity, scoping, FP, OO, and other more abstract topics is considerably harder working alone. 6.01 claims to still cover these topics. 6.01 claims to integrate them with EE and robots to make the class fun.

From the conversations I've had with 6.001 students and 6.01 students, 6.001 does a much better job with these topics. 6.01 can and will improve, of course. Unfortunately, I don't think teaching about robots in Python will give students as solid a grounding as SICP.

MIT's new course 6 curriculum falls along similar lines as the 8.01/8.02 (intro mechanics and e&m) move to TEAL (a bastardized blend of game show and "hands-on" computer work that feels like high school). See http://tech.mit.edu/search.html?cx=000823599697007823270%3Aq... for how TEAL has been doing.

Would Caltech do this? No. So why is MIT?
I'm tired of sex shops that ship their products using discrete packaging. I want a store that ships products in packaging purposely designed to be as embarrassing as is plausibly possible.

Charge double what a normal sex store does, and even if you only get a few hundred orders a day via Google you still have a decent business.
yes, oops.
develop a crossplatform webinterface to read any and every format of text conceivable in its most CONVENIENT form possible.
Train chimps to break CAPTCHAs. My guess is that it's feasible. E.g, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTgeLEWr614

It is, however, unethical, and isn't something that benefits society, despite the fact that a viable business model might exist in the short term.

Note that this would give a whole new meaning to the phrase 'Captcha farm' :-)
Here is a cool startup that I talked to recently. http://www.spotscout.com/. They are making parking spot finding and trading possible.
I wrote StockPlay, a stock trading simulation. I open-sourced the foundation code, take a look if you're interested in developing your own application.

Engine: http://github.com/costan/zergsupport/
Game: http://istockplay.com
No, there's no counterexample on the horizon, and I have full confidence that there never ever will be.

Seriously: Who uses words like "never" in serious opinion pieces -- especially pieces that run in the NYT?
I guess the purpose of this tutorial is to show how simple couchDB is to use, but since I knew nothing about couchDB other than hearing raves about it from my local alpha geek, all this did was open my eyes to how astonishingly inconvenient it appears to be. Maybe it's just the shock of unfamiliar syntax?
I'm not sure I understand why a desktop application needs to authenticate itself with your server via a username and password in order to use OAuth. Could you explain further?
Top paid app in U.S. app store vs U.K app store
It's illegal to have a going out of business sale if you aren't going out of business, but I don't think this would be illegal. That said, I think they really are bankrupt.
A music service that actually reflected the reality of today's tech: ubiquitous access to all the music ever made. My iphone should be able to store or stream anything. I should be able to send anything I'm listening to to a friend.

Bullshit about limits on the number of computers connected to my iphone, illegal file sharing, DRM, $1 for a download that has $0 marginal cost, etc. -- all of it out the window.

Give creators tools to directly engage with their audience, make all their content free and easy to consumer & share, and make money from live shows, special physical goods, and patronage.
A law firm connected to a school where the lawyers make $30/hour and the teachers make $200/hour. ;-)
And of course, the Asians wonder why you have to set the buttons, when figuring out how to wash the load is a task better suited for artificial stupidity than human concern.
E.g. http://www.in.lge.com/Product/Products-Details.aspx?cat=137&...
Why do innovative software authors keep limiting themselves to Crapple's communist-like platform ?

Isn't blackberry the #1 selling smartphone anyways ? (I see a lot more of them in NYC than I do see Iphones ...)
6.003 (Signals and Systems) and 6.004 ("Computation Structures" -- transistors to microprocessors) were great classes. I don't know what they've done to them since I took them. 6.033 (Systems Engineering) and 6.046 (Intro to Algorithms) were also great classes. 6.046 has become 6.006 and 6.046' now. I've heard mediocre things about 6.006.

6.945 (Large-scale Symbolic Systems) is an excellent class. Afaik, it's still taught in Scheme by Sussman.

All these classes cover quite a bit of material in not-very-much time. They don't get bogged down by whatever language they use (if any) and they straightforwardly teach fundamental concepts in some depth. They have high throughput.
Ask HN: Simple service to save my stuff?
There's probably a service out there that does the following, but I'm not sure what it is.

1) Always working on code snippets at work or home that I want to save. Usually end up emailing them to myself.

2) Same thing with URLs. There's a lot of URLs I'll find that I want to save. I don't use bookmarks and I'm not interested in extensions that sync up to online storage systems.

2) I don't have a lot of interest in sharing things. That works for some people but this is just a personal tool that I want.

3) Really easy to search. Basically I want a search box that I type into and it'll try to match from the records.

Any suggestions?
Sadly the first thing I thought when I saw the title was, "aww no pr0n?". Gives you an idea how that presentation affected my thoughts on couchdb unfortunately.

On the other hand I might just have an overwhelming desire to look at pr0n that rears its ugly head no matter where I'm looking.
Great analogy. I guess the answer is "people should be able to apply both ways of thinking". So how do you impart both in a curriculum?

I have observed that for great hackers, it doesn't matter what method they are taught -- they'll learn both and apply them appropriately. This was probably true for Newton. It's certainly true for one of my best friends, an excellent hacker, who is as much a bottom-up thinker as anyone could ask for and yet he took the top-down class. He was going to learn how to think about problems in the optimal way no matter how, or what, anyone taught him.

I'm not sure what this means for how the intro course should be taught. Certainly it seems to suggest you won't be ruining anyone with great potential by teaching them the wrong stuff. So maybe MIT has realized that it doesn't matter for the best students, and they've been doing the same thing for 30 years and it's time for a change. What the hell. See how it works, and then maybe change back or learn something new. They're going to have to run this experiment for a long time, though, in order to figure out whether it's actually better. I'm quite interested to watch.
5 Star Jail Hotel (good for procrastinators).

Pay us and we will lock you up for as many days as you paid. You get one hour per day to hang out within our establishment. Breakfast, Lunch and Diner are eaten with other prisoners. The rest of time we will lock you up in your room (with internet connection). Phones lines are only open for x hours. Emails programs are blocked most of the time... You see where I am heading with this.

It could be good for someone with a deadline to accomplish something.
This tutorial shows how to use CouchApps, a very specialized use-case. While CouchDB itself is fairly straightforward, CouchApps need a bit of ironing out still.
Are you using Mac? Open a folder. Highlight the link or the text that you want to save. Drag them to the folder. If you want to search for it, use the search functionality in finder.

Since you are not going to share those items with people, so, it is a bit overkilled to upload those things to the web unless you want all your data to be on the cloud. If that is the case, use dropbox to sync your folder.
New York Jets Tickets
Ticket Vendor offers one of the largest selections of NY Jets tickets on the web. Ticket Vendor has been proven to be one of the cheapest ticket sites on the web, and goes even further by offering free shipping on every purchase which exceeds $200 in total cost with the discount code freeshipping being entered at checkout. If you are looking for cheap Jets tickets, you will find it is no easy task until you see the inventory of New York Jets tickets that Ticket Vendor has.
I think that in our lifetime it's likely that you will be able to continue purchasing a dead tree newsprint or some close cousin. You will probably even be able to have it delivered.

No need to worry
This could be easily simplified to "OAuth is a pain to use". Bouncing the user back and forth between consumer and publisher of the OAuth key is too long, too complicated, and too confusing for use by the average consumer.
http://www.thisismobility.com/blog/2009/04/11/please-dont-mi...
Hmm, that's really cool but not quite what I'm looking for. That definitely has a use between work and home though.
This depends on the conversion rate from twollars to real dollars.

The creator didn't mention what is the conversion rate. I doubt that the conversion rate will be 1:1.
What about it do you mind?
Sort of like Readability by Arc90?

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
I have to wonder why she even asked in the first place?
Chimps are way too expensive
Yeah I've had experience with a couple and they were terrible. One would just boil your clothes for an hour so when you took them out they would be creased beyond hope of any iron, and still wet.
There is also a middle ground: Instead of 'rights,' call internet access, health care or jury trials 'good.' Have governments pursue 'good.' They will argue about whether laissez faire is better at achieving this good then direct provision, but the groundwork is less idealistic & thus more likely to be rational.

If something is a 'right,' it makes it automatically take precedence over anything that is simply good (like faster internet access). This is a problem if you are deciding between connecting a small number of people or improving the service for a large number of people.

I don't think the distinction between positive & negative is useful for anything more then a rule of thumb. It's just that positive rights tend to cost less to grant. If we were comfortable with fewer absolutes, I would favour replacing rights with good, bad, better, worse.
*For the sake of predictability & a workable battle cry, it may be useful to grant tentative rights. But I wouldn't call them rights. "The government has decided to grant everyone access by 20XX."
Although it seems like a political and economic improbability in the US, I'm somewhat fond of the BBC's (potentially as an extension of PBS's) system of large-scale, government-supported news. Clearly we would prefer a more distributed, personalized, and capitalist solution for funding quality news, but it seems as though we're losing a lot of steam while groping around for some unknown salvation of our current paradigm.

If our society really does need exhaustive, deep journalism from large-ish organizations (which seems to be an underlying consensus among articles on the topic), then it's probably the government's duty to keep these institutions and practices alive.

Perhaps all this hubbub arises from a lack of vision though, and investigative reporting and in-depth analysis of current events are not in jeopardy at all - they'll simply come from different sources that most of us would expect.
Try snipt.net
Or one of the YC Startups Snipd.com ^^
This site is a test of the technology, but not really in the sweet-spot. The real use case for pure CouchDB applications is the p2p web, where your application code can be replicated from one database to another, along with the data. This means it's possible to build applications like Flickr or Twitter, without relying on any servers or intellectual property other than your own and your friends'.
I don't think I've been especially lucky, as I've had 3 of them at different times and they all worked OK. Caveat: they were all in Europe. Perhaps the ones sold in the US are deliberately sucky so as to drive you into wanting two specialized units?

Edit: might be a 220v vs 110v issue as well.
Summer hacker housing in Silicon Valley?
I'm a summer intern and I'm looking for a room in Silicon Valley for the summer, including San Francisco. There are many rooms on craiglist, including with "IT Professionals", but I would rather room with other hackers. I had a chance to visit some news.yc readers and YC founders over spring break, and I would love to have a similarly enjoyable experience over the entire summer. If anybody is looking for a housemate, please let me know. Thanks! - Vladislav (username @ yazhbin.com).
EMP guns FTW - http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2004/jul/12/sciencenews.cr... Bonus: they scare luddites, who are convinced these are used all the time to kill people the Illuminati hate by making them fly in a small plane during bad weather first.
SugarSync also does just that: the file is duplicated and the user is left to resolve the conflict at a later time. Actually it does that in a really clever way so that if users keep editing over the already conflicting versions, it doesn't create new conflict versions but rather treats the new files as further versions of existing conflict duplicates...
this website could be done so much easier using plain HTML and PHP

I wonder how much of that is simply a question of familiarity. Also, it seems to me that this use case is probably a bit too simple to start gaining benefits from the infrastructure.
Yeah better. I just grabbed the first linked that looked relevant. I was amazed anyone would not know about these.
The perfect gift for the person who has everything!

This startup needs one hacker, and three dozen lawyers.
Ask HN: legally start a Bay Area startup without being American?
I'm a Canadian, and have worked in the Bay Area on various visas since 2005 or so. Now I'd like to start my own venture here, but I don't yet have a Green Card. What are the options?

Some have advised that I create some sort of corporation, technically owned by an investor or someone else I trust, of which I'm an employee. That's a bit scary to me for obvious reasons. At the moment I don't have an American co-founder I trust enough. (I know that according to pg's criteria this means the whole thing is a non-starter anyway, but let's assume that I'd get some co-founders later once I had a spiffy proof of concept.)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=593551
Wow, I'm long-winded. Maybe I should write a blog. :-)
I've had this vague idea for awhile, but haven't done any research on what would be involved. Anyone know if this has been tried before?
If they aren't really bankrupt and this is a carefully orchestrated ruse that ends with the release of DNF, that would be so badass that I would buy a copy of the game and I don't even play computer games.
Where's Joyent?
Sadly I find publicly funded news organizations (BBC,PBS) far more informative than private organizations (NBC,FOX). However, I suspect directly paying for news that is not primarily funded though advertising might be the best solution. Removing the costs of TV / printing paper and filling a 24 hour news cycle means far smaller organizations can still fill the need for real reporting.

The other option is something like "the daily show" where in depth news is just one type of content and you don't need to yammer on about every new case of H1N1 to fill an hour of news every single day.

PS: The reality is paying 10,000 or so journalists is just not that expensive a proposition and assuming the current system is the only way to fund them is probably missing the point.
I pitched this idea to YC last year, basically.

Mine also had "GPS on phone to monitor person's level of physical activity to help tailor diet to their dietary needs"

We even worked on putting this together so that the algorithm could work automatically for a family who had different dietary requirements.

The problem we found is that it doesn't work for the consumer market. We focussed too much on the idea and not enough on consumer behaviour, which if we had done our market research would have shown this to be not so good an idea.

We found that the dietary consumer market is focussed on selling you early into things you wont use, because the people that generally need these products have low motivation.

Those people who buy dietary books, supplements, exercise equipment etc generally purchase them and might use them for a month or two before essentially "giving up" at best. That's why most businesses targetting that large market are focussed on getting your money early, because relying on longterm revenue is a bad idea.

Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig use a similar model, although the diet plans they use are actually loss leaders so they can sell you their other products, which is where they actually make their money. The diet plans in the long run is where people stop going, but they've already extracted value out of you by purchasing their material.
I meant out-door shopping markets, and the customers would most likely be people in wealthier nations purchasing the goods online.
The single reason why SugarSync listens to filesystem events is to build the journals and then merge them. I am not sure how that is different, and how that wouldn't match the user's likely intent.

You're right about the fact that there wasn't historical versions. But that was a year back. They're here now, have you not seen them?

Unicode encoding is very subtle. The difficulty is that there are several different - but equivalent - unicode encodings for the same strings, and the different filesystems use different normalizations to make sure that they can compare their strings byte-by-byte.
If you can agree that there is no way to safeguard the application secret key other than keeping it on a server (no matter how u try to bury it in the desktop application, it could be hacked no?), then you have to let your desktop application 'instances' use some sort of API to get their messages signed.

But, you don't want to let anyone just come in and hit this API! That could be expensive, in terms of CPU, bandwidth, and hosting costs. So you want to make sure the desktop application is indeed authorized to do so. So then you need some sort of authentication scheme between your desktop applications and your server... username/passwords being a common such way.
She grows and sells organic food. So being registered as a farmer, she probably has to show where her resources are coming from or be fined.

This is a really interesting article. Tradable resource rights are often touted as a solution to environmental overuse but this is a good example of how they can go badly wrong.
Aaaah yes locked files are fun too, I forgot to mention that in the article.
I tend to agree. I think some better documentation would do go a long way, though.
One problem could be that in any city where you'd need this, the parking spots are probably snapped up so quick that knowing there's an empty spot 4 blocks away isn't going to help you.