skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I print unicode strings to a Mac terminal all the time without problems. just send a string formatted as UTF8 to puts(), printf(), or similar.

It never would have occurred to me to use the built-in locale stuff. That's heading for a world of hurt.
Hi Caffeine,

I have used your byline in Tonido Site. Thanks a lot
Looks like github+topcoder for ideas.
I'm sure I have ADD or something but I can't bring myself to read so much text.
A cousin of mine met him just by chance while visiting Stanford to check out the grad school last year. Prof. Motwani was more than happy to sit down with him for almost an hour and give him career advice. Being so open and helpful to strangers while being so successful is a rare trait and a sure indicator of greatness.

May his family find the strength to get through this tragedy.
I also wonder if the way Netflix framed the question is optimizing for the wrong things. They're having contestants try to determine how people would rate movies, based on the corpus's collective ratings. From a business standpoint, it might be better to focus on which movies people would like that they haven't seen.
Now imagine you could collapse all (or at least a lot) of those neutrino probability waves into one specific point (say inside a star), and assume they have mass. Boom! Instant black hole.

I see a fantastic new field of military technology just waiting for us. Talk about a deterrent. "If you attack us, we'll blow up the solar system".
Hm, you have to register, and then go looking for the small NewIdea button. I wish it was easier.
spacebar = pagedown

shift+spacebar = pageup
Home taping didn’t kill music
Seems to me that the spam filter has gotten worse lately--I've had a false positive for the first time I can remember, and regularly get 1 or 2 spam emails in my inbox each day. It's a testament to Gmail's normal spam performance that this shocks me, but shock me it does.
There is a believe in some form of a God in Star Trek, for example Picard believes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNwzawXu4v8
that the afterlife is run by someone/something, just not by Q.
Ask for referrals and talk to a (good) local lawyer.

There are trade-offs. There are options. There are costs. There are details.

More importantly, there are various (good) discussions and (key) decisions to be had among all of the (potential) partners (with the assistance of your lawyer), to ensure that all are on-board and in agreement, and that there are agreements around the plans for incorporation and for major state transitions including acquisition and dissolution.

Your lawyer is also then a good resource for a quick review of significant contracts; a good lawyer knows what to look for in these agreements.

NB: This incorporation topic (LLC versus S-corp versus C-corp, taxes, accounting, and related) seems fodder for inclusion over in the HN Library area.
Eventually the Telltale catalog will go Mac OS X native, but we haven't had the internal resources to do it yet, and our one attempt at doing the ports through an outside house went south in a fairly frustrating way. Hopefully sometime in the reasonable future, though.
Well in the 90's everyone adopted the internet quickly but it hasn't died yet. So I guess there are trends and stable products.
The Ding-Ding of Bing
Best part is the first 30 minutes, where Adam talks about 2 spectacular failures that he's had as a art director/VFX guy. He then summarizes what these failures taught him, and how they've shaped him as a person.
You aren't the only one. There have been countless studies on this that say people aren't going to read more than a paragraph or so before giving up on a site.

My advice to dejan: Most important thing, buy a copy of a book called "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/032134...). Have it shipped next day. I can't go in to all the reasons you need the book without essentially rewriting the book here but you really, really need it.

On the startup idea itself, I don't see anything inherently wrong with it. I'm not sure how successful the "suggest ideas" side will be only because, in my experience, people tend to be secretive about w hat they feel are their "great ideas". Most people that I've met have a dream of eventually executing on the ideas themselves one day and they don't want to give away a million dollar idea (which is generally their perceived value of it).

The company feedback idea on the other hand is a good one if you can build a community to support it.
Our company makes a virtual tour player, and we recently spent a lot of time testing UI's for ease-of-use for a one-time user. Demo: http://tourbuzz.net/2392

We tried to eliminate a lot of clicking, and it completely backfired.

Why? Because people move the mouse to "explore". Just like in real world if you're in front of a vending machine or a menu, people like to "half point" at things to help them focus and get their bearings.

The idea of an interface without clicks is horrible. People feel trapped when they can't explore by moving the mouse around without consequence.

Also, people have been trained for 25 years to click on things. Heck most people can barely stand to single-click things! At this point my mom doesn't even realize you can single-click things and she effectively double-clicks everything.

Thus, if that demo is anything other than an experiment to make the points above it's a horrible idea.
It's innovation/ideas crowdsourcing for companies, based on students' input. It aims at involving students in practical tasks of companies eg: marketing campaigns, new products, product improvements, business conducts, new markets etc.

I agree it's a lot of text. In fact, it's all stripped out, bare bones. It'll get replaced soon by visual clues. We decided to publish it asap and work on it while building the community around campuses worldwide. It's more offline than online in that manner.

@mitko, thnx, good point, I'll look into it.
I often hear people (including Brad Feld in the relevant article on the front page of HN right now) saying that a corporation is the right choice if you plan on seeking funding, because venture investors don't want the pass through income that an LLC can create. VC's generally don't want to create Unrelated Business Taxable Income for their investors.

I don't understand why these VC's don't just create a corporation to buy stock in a LLC's. I know for a fact that at least some venture firms do this (I worked at one that did). A corporation can own stock in an LLC, and corporations (when the elect to be a C-corp, which I assume the VC would do) don't generate pass through income.

The only explanation I can think of is perhaps if someone is making small, angel or YC style investments. Then, the administrative cost of setting up and maintaining an additional "blocker" corporation for each investment would be significant in comparison to the total dollars invested.

I am very curious to know what the reason that firms that are investing hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars don't do this.
Thank you, a very interesting lecture. The process physics he is linking to are maybe even more interesting. Everything based on random fluctuations ... hmm I'd better learn the statistics good!
Please read this other post for details in what I mean when I say that "comments are evil" http://makinggoodsoftware.com/2009/06/06/comments-are-evil/
:) Thanks TomOfTTB

I've read that book, and I agree that it's not so clear, as in the other comment.

No excuses...but take a month of time, and what you can build in that time span, alone. There is two of us, but I am the only developer/designer :) Would I spend another month hiding it while tweaking. No.

We need to go bravely public as soon as possible and change stuff on the fly.

This is so true, that revealing ideas is so difficult. I see it everyday, yet people do this within companies too. It's a million dollar idea. Well, unless you do something about it, its worth nada. And Aleveo aims at those ideas that you see around you and have no intentions on acting upon. How many times a day we say hmm, that can be done this way. Do we act on it... rarely.

With students it's even more different. When they graduate, they have nothing in their CVs. At least, they can have their ideas. And thats is what we want to show to the world.

Can't find the article now, but I think it was either Seth Godin or on Signal vs. Noise on value of ideas. Basically, they set it straight forward:

bad idea -$1
poor idea $0
good idea $1
great idea $10

no execution 0
poor execution 1000
good execution 100.000
outstanding execution 1.000.000

great idea with some good execution might be worth $10 x 100.000, but without execution it's just a 0. Moreover, no one ever pursues other's ideas, as they say, everyone thinks your idea is stupid except you.

Thanks for the input, highly appreciated.
Mr. President, we must not allow a mine-shaft gap!!
If you attack us, we'll use the red matter.
You can talk about "this generation" but I am just looking at sales / month. PS2 was still selling 100k / month in Feb/2009. And Sony still makes money from each PS2.

http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=11067
(US numbers, worldwide the market is heavily in Sony's favor.)

Dec/2008
Sony: 1,136,000 = (410,000 PS2 + 726,000 PS3)
MS: 1,440,000
Nintendo: 2,150,000

Feb/2009
Sony: 407,000 = (131,000 PS2 + 276,000 PS3)
MS: 391,000
Nintendo: 753,000

So Sony still has 2 consuls on the market right now. The same way they sold PS1's long after the PS2 came out. Walk into a game stop and you will see lot's of PS2 games on the shelf and PS2's for sale. Once they stop selling PS2's you will see a lot more PS3's as replacement's sell. Until then note how most cross platform tiles make games for 4 platforms PS2, PS3, XBox, and Wii.

PS: Some people suggest you need to adjust the totals because the XBox is a year older and closer to being obsolete, but I think you need to look at company sales vs product sales. However, the total sales for PS3 and 360 have tracked fairly closely when you offset for a year so it's a reasonable argument when looking at totals.
For some reason I found this article silly. I'm not sure why.

So these ancient neutrinos have such an extremely low energy and such a disperse wave function? Sounds like saying that we can't see them, and even if we could, they're not even in a "place" that can be seen. I mean, if your probability wave reasonably covers the entire universe, I'm not sure the word "location" works any more.
Technical, Hardware & Software Training Portal
Online Community for those interested in software, hardware or technical training.
It says something about challenges, but then when you read the FAQ it says something about ideas. Which one is it?

Searching for challenges produces 0 results, so it doesn't help with understanding what it is all about eiter.
If you're going to have a "lifestyle business" and you will be living in California you may as well just register the company in California. All Delaware gets you is more paperwork, i.e. the requirement to file in Delaware AND California.
Err...this works fine for me if I use UTF-8 rather than wide strings, eg:

std::string s("foo\u203D");
std::cout << s << std::endl;

Also, he's completely wrong about the program terminating on output of a wide string, it's just that wcout is broken. If he had tried causing output afterwards with, say, printf(), he'd notice the program is still alive. Or running it in GDB would show this just as well. It's generally speaking a bad idea to test whether your program is alive, using the same mechanism that you suspect of killing it!
"So 'this statement is false' is false if and only if it's true, so there's a problem."

I don't understand this. This seems to assume that the meaning of a phrase is contained within the phrase itself. But if you instead assume that the phrase is a pointer to meaning that is contained somewhere else then the paradox goes away.
Only if your vertical resolution is smaller than about 750 pixels. Calling that an epic fail is pathetic.
I agree one the keyboard issue. Even the Palm Pre does not have a full keyboard (I assume those keys are tiny, too), so not having experienced that kind of keyboard before, I wonder how much easier to use than the iPhone keyboard it would really be. I am willing to believe that it is a little bit easier, but neither solution would be convenient for writing a novel or something.

The price for the keyboard is high, though: extreme ugliness! The sliding parts thing alone is awful. Even without that, I would expect a keyboard to be prone to getting dirty, and being more brittle than just a flat, solid, iPhone-like brick.
The problem with biased analysis (like this article) is that it never gives you a clear picture. I think we all know the music industry inflates their numbers drastically to make the problem of music downloads appear worse than it is. But the Norwegian study that says those who download music are 10 times more likely to spend money on music is also pretty easy to debunk (the sample size alone is enough reason to discredit it)

In the end I think the music industry is losing money not because of pirates but because their market has evolved. Now people can buy the one good song on an album and leave the rest behind (which cuts 90% of the record company’s revenue). That alone explains their losses. But they’re clearly in denial about it and looking for a bad guy. Music piracy fits the bill.

So imho most of the anti-piracy rhetoric is just label execs hoping there’s a solution to their revenue problem (e.g. "if we just stop the pirates our revenue will go back up")
Sorry for the confusion, there still are not any opened challenges or jobs. We are negotiation with some companies to open some these days.

Challenge is a en entity to which you attach your idea, by tagging it with the tag that challenge defined.
Nah. That's part of the charm. Plus, from a practical standpoint, anybody landing on the site would figure out what it does in the first five seconds.
Is Google App Engine proving popular? Any significant apps?
Online app to transform your site into an ascii art
Pre can deliver the goods
Rumors Have Apple Unveiling New iPhone Monday
Rajeev Motwani passed away in a swimming pool accident
Nokia 3250 Music Express- Beauty in Small Package
Nokia manufactured a complete high quality surround sound phone named as Nokia 3250 Music Express with user friendly music controls so that user can play, pause, rewind, fast forward & stop their music quickly which supports all popular music formats. It provides the headphones so that a user can enjoy a music privately.Due to its twist type feature you can switch Nokia 3250 Xpress Music into three modes that include music player mode, phone mode and camera mode, it contains 4x digital zoom with 2 mega pixel camera through which you can take high resolution snaps that can be change later in contrast of brightness, image quality and type. Its rare feature includes EDGE technology which can transfer data approximately three times faster than the GPRS, a Tri Band Technology through which you can use this phone in most of the countries as its network automatically switches between bands, a WAP browser helpful in surfing.So catch this music deal of Nokia 3250 Music Xpress at Unlockcell.com
It is a very cool idea. The tough part is getting the balance right to where quality students will want to contribute (you may need to offer cash rewards) and businesses get value without risking their own IP (what if we have the same idea internally as someone offers on the site?). I do think there is a market for a service between MechTurk style base feedback and full-on usability consultants.

When I was in b-school we did a big project for free for a Fortune 100 company and got class credit for it. Maybe you should reach out to a specific university (or professor) in your area and set up a formal program. I think it would be a lot more attractive if the site was "in partnership with University XX" and you could expand it accordingly. Students might even be able to earn credit. Would help with marketing as well.

For businesses, the monthly service doesn't make much sense. I'd be more interested in paying for a one-time crowd review/ challenge and then come back again six months later or so. Maybe paying for a review cycle based on semester?
IDF Developing Sabbath-Friendly Keyboard, Computer Screen
There is a case when clicking is bad: in some mouseless interfaces like those based on computer vision. I once worked on one of those and had the user freely move his hand over the space to explore some icons (while having a VR headset covering his head). This interface would have been ideal for such kind of project, really.
Is NASA Over-the-Hill? - NASA's Engineers, Astronauts and Scientists
I am not trying to complain, just trying to help.
11-year-old college grad: I’m no genius
There's a Dutch start-up doing much of the same. They have challenges from companies and pay students that win. It's very 'local' and a not a really nice website, but they've been fairly successful in setting up the platform so far. It's called http://www.battleofconcepts.nl/
maybe there should have been a "buy this magazine" link to:
http://bit.ly/175fvY and also a link to this commentary, then it could be under Fair Use.
On most pages, hitting spacebar scrolls down a page, and this user is complaining that he can't tell if he's at the bottom of a page.
Other than the obvious "child prodigy" angle, nothing particularly interesting about this article. I'm actually more curious about the long term careers of such prodigies, especially such extreme cases. I know of a couple in law - Kiwi Camara graduated from Harvard Law at 20(?) and now runs his own firm. Eugene Volokh graduated from UCLA undergrad at 15 and now is a law professor.

On the same note, I'm also interested in hearing thoughts about hacking education by reducing the number of years we spend in school. I'm a proponent of the belief that we inevitably fill up the amount of time we've allocated to a project, even if it doesn't end up resulting in an improved product (Can't remember, does this come from the 4-day work week?). I don't have the numbers, but I recall seeing the stats somewhere that American students have significantly more vacation time and therefore less school days than their counterparts in Europe and Asia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_paradox#Possible_resolutio...
What an expression of humility! Savage has earned much respect in my eyes. I've watched the other talk where Adam speaks about obsession. I aspire to have the work ethic and the modesty (and success) of this man.
If you drink coffee, switch to tea. I find the tea bags detestable but Chai made at home, the Indian way [1] or, in a pinch, from Starbucks works well.

[1] http://www.chai-tea.org/rec/rec103.html
Yes, that's how it got understood. =) Thanks for the feedback, I think it needs a lot of revisions so that it's all a bit clearer.
Actually music exec have a solution to the problem it just takes a long time to implement.

The solution is known as 360-contract. Currently labels profit only from the selling of albums and some of the merchandise, but not from tours, sponsorship deals or ads. An artist on a 360-contract pays the label a cut of everything...

The assumption of the labels is that illegal downloads actually boost the total value of the artist, but diminishes their share (artists make more money on touring but less on the records). The labels have started to push their artists to 360 contracts a while back, but until all the old contracts are up for renegotiation they have no choice but fight the illegal downloading.
Badges? Badges? We Don't Need No Stinking Badges?
Other than complaining about the mismanagement of the company, was there a point to this that I missed? It seems overly personal to me. The bit about the end about leaving the customers in the dark was perhaps the only part that made sense to write about publically. The rest only seems noteworthy cuz it happened to the author.

I could have written an entire book on the ridiculousness I experienced while working at Limewire, but that'd be in bad taste.
Anyone who thinks that filesharing hasn't totally killed record industry profits is either crazy rationalizing or stupid beyond belief.

I can tell you that I would have bought many, many albums if things like bittorrent didn't exist. Since I can just get mp3's from bittorrent or my friends, unscrupulous people like me can basically get unlimited free music, although I do often buy music on iTunes to get a high bitrate non-defective copy of an album I especially like (Tea for the Tillerman, Neon Bible, Trial of Van Occupanther). I hate going to concerts, so I only do it when people convince me to go along, and certainly no more than I would if music wasn't free. The bands I like are probably about the same as the ones I liked pre-filesharing, minus ones I've grown out of (Tool, Radiohead, Weezer -- I've bought albums from all these bands pre-filesharing days) plus ones I randomly found on iTunes, plus ones I heard my wife listening to or on Last.FM. I haven't found any new music via filesharing really.

The argument about filesharing is that it is impossible to stop, so attempting to do so is pointless. The amount of government intervention necessary to effectively end sharing of music (and thus violating copyright law) is so draconian that given the balance of (good done by enforcing law) - (harm done by enforcing law) is extremely in the negative.

When the government tries to enforce laws that people will not follow, it does great harm to people's respect for the Law. Marijuana laws, too-low speed limits and other laws that are ignored put people in the habit of ignoring the law if they can get away with it. While Jeffersonians like me generally see this as a healthy attitude (as no one gets hurt), it should still be our goal to establish laws that aren't bullshit, if only for practical reasons (like using the police to work on crime that we actually care about instead of people going 65 instead of 55 on a flat, straight highway).

Since there is no way to stop filesharing, and reducing it at all will involve huge monitoring of the internet, fuck it, change copyright law to reflect reality, and let big music publishers join horse-shoe makers and coal delivery men in the history books.
Great job on the implementation!

I think I get the concept as it's something I have thougt about for years.

My first and only minor gripe is the name; it isn't memorable.
Great marketing for a student project. Clever and fun. Not practical... but it doesn't have to be, it's a combination research / art project / thesis / marketing stunt. And in those senses, it works very well.

Gotta explore the unthinkable to come up with new things to think...