skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Loopt needs an iPhone development intern this summer
Loopt is looking for an intern to help us with iPhone development this summer. You don't have to know Objective-C to get the position but it would help. Experience with at least C or C++ is highly preferred.

If you're interested seeing what life is like working on the project that got us into WWDC, send your resume to aroon at loopt.
Perfect companion for the Nintendo DS: http://frodo.dyn.gno.org/~brettk/NetHackDS
A twitter clone that requires you to pass a spelling and grammar check and use more than 140 characters
Or a windup netbook?

The next generation of Intel mobile chips are supposed to run on one watt. They already sell windup flashlights that run on one watt.
There is a certain ritual of me starting my computer and clicking the news sites from my bookmarks. There is just something about picking which stories I want to read, and seeing my customized categories that can't be replicated in a piece of paper.

If it wasn't obvious: everyone has different morning rituals. I've never had yours, and I'm not a teen.
That's an incubator. Been done.
Note that this is completely unrealistic because no one pays for pron anymore anyway.

You would be surprised. If the following device does half of what is promised and recent sales of a device called a "monkey spanker" (I helped a female friend of mine set up an online sex store/blog a few months ago) are anything to go by, I think the future of pay for porn is very bright indeed.

http://gizmodo.com/5129520/realtouch-teledildonics-as-design...

Those guys are going to make a killing if it works as intended...
That's not insane at all. That's just a generalization of Facebook/FriendFeed/Aardvark/etc. I've thought a lot about that too.
How about pill identification? This is currently covered by systems that search by feature or imprint, and it would be cool if there were a way to pull these search features from a photograph input.
"Today, while powerwashing my deck, a bee flew and landed on my leg. Thinking I'll just wash it away before it stings me, I aimed the powerwasher nozzle at the bee. A bee sting isn't nearly as painful as powerwashing your leg. FML" http://www.fmylife.com/work/1818559

Ok, new idea. Mix this with the idea for an OCD iphone app, and you get a Mechanical Turk capable of giving SMS advice in real time to potential Darwin Award winners.

"should i try to skateboard off my roof?"
"62% say no."

This would also work as I originally imagined it.

"I just got a kevlar vest on eBay and I told my wife I was planning on fighting crime. She said 'whatever makes you happy'"
"She meant she's planning on collecting your life insurance."
I was thinking about this a few years ago, you probably wouldn't even need RFID, perhaps some barcode scanning grid around the rim, with beams pointing at different angles so that when something is placed in the trashcan, it can be potentially scanned already.
Great man indeed:

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/11/business/victor-grinich-75...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Grinich

Your turn to take the torch.
In his first section he describes a compiler as something that turns high-level code into machine code. This isn't necessarily true is it?

A compiler is something that takes code in one language and converts it to another. It can be a Python to Javascript compiler, or a C to x86 Assembly Compiler (which can then be assembled using an appropriate assembler).

I'm reading both Louden's "Compiler Construction: Principles and Practice" and the Dragon Book. They are both good so far.
Form a consortium that aims to get drugs decriminalized as long as the government approves certain suppliers, and get them to write the law such that your clients are the likely beneficiary. This is worth billions in investment. Target an American state which seems to be on the tipping point and you could be very rich.

Except for the fact that existing drug cartels would kill you before you could succeed.
you could make a full movie without ever leaving your home.

That is approximately the most depressing idea ever.
Shameless plug that you (being, presumably, a kiwi based on your grabaseat comment earlier) may find interesting: www.boozr.co.nz

I've decided to start with alcohol and work my way backwards towards groceries, but the idea is roughly the same as what you've outlined. :) Luckily here in NZ everyone except Foodstuffs (NW, Pak'n'save, Four Square) is online so getting the prices isn't too tricky...
> I'm tired of sex shops that ship their products using discrete packaging.

I agree. Down with discrete; we need continuous packaging.

http://everything2.com/title/discreet%2520vs.%2520discrete
Dwarf Fortress doesn't seem to work on Linux. Which is strange, since the GUI is ASCII. It is not open source, so I can't jump in and fix this either. All that said, it looks like a cool game.
I have been taking Carnegie Mellon graduate CS classes part time, and for the most part I have been able to use any programming language I want for assignments (within the bounds of "The TA knows at least enough of that language to read and understand your code"). I have used this as a fun excuse to learn a new language just to do the projects and assignments for a course. I've done this with Common Lisp, Python, and Clojure so far. Some times the source code isn't even required, just your answers to the questions and an idea of how you arrived at them.

It seems a much more grown up and civilized approach to me. Maybe this is because it is graduate level and not undergrad? I remember CMU undergrad classes requiring C, Scheme, Prolog, and Pascal, but that was over 20 years ago.
Is it just me or does "SuperMate", apart from the Web Preview window, look terrible? HUD panels are overused, the button styles for the most part look misplaced, and a purple gradient on the tabs? Really?

This icon looks pretty good though, although the perspective angle seems a bit off... I really wish I could make decent [OS X app] icons :(
"You put it on a server, because it’s the only place you can ensure that it stays safe."

Uh, what? If on OS X or iPhone, use Keychain. If on something else, do whatever makes sense there. There's really no need to stick it on your server, that I can see.

If the user loses it, you just generate a new one, right?
I didn't do my undergrad at Stanford, but I'm here as a grad student, and I believe they use Java for the intro classes. They do teach Python and C eventually, but no Lisp AFAIK.

I did my undergrad at Georgetown, where nearly every class used C++ (or C, for classes in things like OS and security).
Rental for moving boxes.

Whenever I move, which is fairly frequently, I have to make some trip somewhere just to get boxes. Then there's the effort of breaking them down and then either storing them or throwing them away.

How about some boxes which are just a little bit sturdier than normal, which could be rented? They are delivered to your home and then picked up again (perhaps part of the moving service) and reused for other customers.
What about open source apps. Do you force your users to register for their own consumer key just to use your application?
"Fundamentally understanding recursion, abstraction, complexity, scoping, FP, OO, and other more abstract topics is considerably harder working alone."

Reading SICP on my own time helped me understand these topics better, and helped me understand some things about Java better (like how anonymous inner classes are a half-assed, broken attempt at implementing closures). SICP makes sense of these topics in a way that I doubt is even possible in a class taught in Java. You can probably cover a lot of this material with Python, but still run into more limitations and inconsistencies than with Scheme.
An online wargame in reality using geolocation and mobile phones.

Build game servers that serve as wireless mesh network and locate them throughout the city(Partnering with local businesses such as coffee shops). They can also store the company's weapon hardwares and suits to loan to player.

Players can also build their own weapon system and suits.
Kidnap vacations. The ultimate thrill ride. You pay them some amount of money and they will arrive at your home, blindfold you, put you on a plane, and then take it off once you are in the foreign country. Then you have to work out where you are and how to get back.

I believe the government has been doing this for a while now.
I believe it runs under WINE.
I can only recommend the "Dragon Book". Its old but really a great intro into Compilers. I had the benefit of working with it must say I didn't find anything better so far.

Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
by Alfred V. Aho (Author), Ravi Sethi (Author), Jeffrey D. Ullman (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-Alfred...
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is arguably a better game than Nethack in almost every way, and it's actively developed. Crawl is better balanced, meaning that when you die it's often due to your own misstep, rather than arbitrary luck. The UI takes care of a lot of the grunt-work of crawling through the dungeon, so you can spend more time on the aspects of the game that are actually fun. And it's got more to do than Nethack does, featuring a variety of branches and interesting areas rather than the monotony of the same kinds of levels over and over.

Before Crawl, I never thought I could feel absolute terror while playing a roguelike. You'll see what I mean the first time you're frantically trying to find a portal out of the Abyss with a veritable armada of demons closing in on you.

More info: http://crawl-ref.sourceforge.net/

The one thing that Nethack does "better" is that it's got dozens and dozens of ways to die. In Crawl, when you die, it's usually due to hit point loss.
Matrix Mathematics And Column Major/Row Major Explained
Video Twitter. Post updates of 10 seconds or less. I have a feeling people are already working on this, though.
A pen-sized device which gives you cleaning advice. It has various chemical sensors built in to the tip and then displays a readout of what cleaning product to use.
Cadets Trade the Trenches for Firewalls
Kindle-ize all your books (in a DRM-free form, guaranteed accessible for 25 years). I want a service which is both legal and easy to use. Don't make me sit there and laboriously use some CueCat thing and make a huge bibliography.

If this means that someone has to cart them away and destroy them, I don't really care; actually it's kind of a benefit if you live in a small apartment. Most of them are not remarkable as far as physical form goes.
Especially the ones in the produce section of the grocery.

Why aren't these dispensed like Kleenexes or something, where just pulling one out automatically opens the mouth of the next one?
What's ironic about that? Just log in (it's even free). It would be ironic if you couldn't read the article because the NYT went out of business.
This seems like a colossal waste of valuable SEO linkjuice. Good lord! Would it be so hard to do a proper redirect showing the redesigned pages / branding?
> So the largest dating site in the world

Ahem, largest FREE dating website :-)
Where do they draw the line on rain harvesting? It sounds as like having any vegetation on your property would be included.
I was just addressing a single issue raised in the prior comment. I was not offering an opinion on the merits of a move or other issues (from any perspective). Of course there are other issues.

(It is not guaranteed the Leafs would sue. NHL territory rights have never been tested in court and it is probably to everyone's benefit that they never are - in order to ensure that value is maintained).
An alternative internet for file-sharers, using line-of-sight radio communications and other methods. There are enough people in many urban areas to make this work.

Perhaps implausible since you can already do most of that with VPNs on the regular internet, and hardware is expensive and obvious.
Is Atom's growth hurting Intel?
So true. There's a sense of desperate flailing as news media watch profits decline, and for some reason developing new technology is often treated as a last-ditch effort to salvage a sinking ship. I guess most of this strange behavior comes from the widespread lack of consensus about the future of media distribution and funding.

I definitely agree that regardless of the fate of newspapers and traditional news reporting, journalism and reporting themselves are by no means in jeopardy.
The biggest issue facing America
Lois Whitman Now An Unwilling Case Study In How Not To Do PR
Having a own language only for COP (Concurrency Orientated Programming) is fine. Heck I'm a polyglot fan. Though I wonder if the way of STM (State Transactional Memory) wouldn't have been a better choice to boost the already existing languages for the Multi-Core problem. (See e.g. Haskell)

As far as I know all STM implementation on .NET are experimental, right?

Erlang as a true COP language has its advantages, and so will "Axum" but Erlang is already quite a long time around. Wonder if they can catch up. Especially due to OTP and CEAN.
http://12seconds.tv
It already exists: 12seconds.tv ;)
The best opportunities are those where you create a new marketplace - an inherent result is that you own the market, initially at least. Big risk here though is overestimating the potential size of the market.

Second best is to attack an existing market in a novel way. You need to be able to communicate the benefits of your methodology to an existing customer base that has been conditioned to expect businesses in that market to operate in a certain way, and comparable with a specific set of metrics. Your novelty cannot ignore this scoring method.

The worst opportunities are the "me-too" models, where you attempt to compete against incumbents in an existing market by copying (what appear to be) their business models. Good luck with that.

As for me and my current idea (still quite gestational), I'm looking at a "second-best" opportunity. The market is known, huge, and essential. The novelty is (imho) pretty awesome. It'll need funding, but I believe the story is very compelling. Time will tell.
Since the newspapers are about to die, we need something to replace the government/corporate watchdog function of journalism. (sensational news, sports, classifieds, entertainment, and celebritard news have already migrated elsewhere, so let's not consider them.)

Some form of hyper-customizable newsletter service, providing updates on upcoming legislation or business deals. There are large firms who already subscribe to such things in the form of clipping services; this goes one level deeper.

The target market should be small business owners and people who have some interest in local politics.
Only $15? Last parking ticket I got was for $85
I'm proud to be an American, because at least I know I'm free....
I read the book. He says left-brained thinking, the West's strength, is doomed because of 3 'A's; Automation, Asia, and Abundance. One irony is, that Asians (all right, Chinese) are supposed to be more holistic (to my mind, right-brained) in their perception anyway (remember the 'picture of the tiger' story? Picture of a tiger in a jungle, Westerners say it's a tiger, Chinese describe more of the environment). So, at least by this possibly shallow interpretation, the West is already beaten both ways.
Definitely a good idea. I personally know that it's difficult to keep links around when they are implementation-dependent.

Look at my blog for example; with URIs like /comments/b31956d4-3dd1-11de-ba89-db8db9812c92/b5a70270-3dd1-11de-a405-db2750a175d7/b5a70270-3dd1-11de-a405-db2750a175d7.pod, it is going to be a nightmare to keep all links alive when I rewrite the software. In this case, I think I'm going to just kill them, since nobody links to individual comments. But I am not the NYT :)
Ask HN: Free Monitoring tools other than Pingdom?
I am looking for a free hosted Web Site monitoring service. I only need to monitor 1 website and I don't need any special features. Is there a service where basic monitoring is free?
A junk gym, wherein all equipment would be gathered from a large junkyard, and could be housed within a cheap warehouse. Bench press could be a small bench with perhaps an axle and two tires on each side, or metal plates, all with weights marked. Various other car parts could be transformed into different exercise machines. Dumbbells would be various pieces of metal with marked weights.
Yep. I'd be sticking them on my kids shoes
Can you give this as gift? You pick someone else to go on a "kidnap vacation" ?
While I will take your word that crawl gets good later in the game, I've always found it to be really monotonous to start, so I never got into it, and have never played it long enough to see past the first level or two.

Nethack was intriguing and really funny right from the start, so I got really into playing it, and the sense of humor is really important to me.

I will have to give crawl another serious look, because at first it seems really mechanical. Pretty much like Diablo, but on the console.
Yes, it runs under wine, but in my experience you have to turn off sound.
Simple Django Commenting System with Ajax
Just to play devil's advocate, how much more information would this offer over purchase data?
We've moved a number of times, and always bought 2nd hand boxes and then sold them again when done. No middle man, no hassles if boxes get destroyed or you want to keep them, and comes out net cost of $0 (2nd hand boxes have a constant value)
The iphone is the coolest smartphone on the market. Innovative software authors don't like working on boring platforms.

Until the iphone's cool status changes it will continue to recieve the most hype.
Last to be Tonight
Geology, visually identifying minerals in rocks.
Thanks. I'll check these as soon as I have a second.
That makes it easy: There is no in-game sound.

If you would like the DF music to play in the background, just fire up the game's mp3 (under /data/sound) on your player and you're off.
I totally bought a wind-up OLPC laptop last Christmas, with one extra feature: vaporware crank.
Did Mark Zuckerberg's Inspiration for Facebook Come Before Harvard?
The idea is to find out what people want ahead of time, rather than buying a bunch of product only to find out that nobody wants it.

Of course, just because people vote for something doesn't mean they'll actually go to the store and pick it up.
Nice interactive Star Trek ad on AddictingGames
Why not be a Toronto-based startup, also doing busines in SF?
Oh, I thought you were talking about something for consumers to get new product recommendations, rather than something to help the supermarkets target their inventory.

So...how often do people know new products exist, let alone whether they want them, if the supermarket isn't already selling them?

Not trying to shoot you down, I think it's an interesting idea, just trying to make sure I understand it.
They could have redirected it to the Internet Archive version of those pages?

Why don't they do that?
I think that unless you are investing a large sum to start this business and can indicate that it will benefit the local area (e.g. that it will employ a lot of people), your best bet would be to get a job and have your employer sponsor your immigration.

On that note, it may just be (substantially) easier to start your business in Canada. Are there specific reasons you want to start your business in the Bay Area, aside from personal preference?
The Myth Of The Missing Business Model
Give this a try: http://mon.itor.us/
The simplest thing to do is pick out the best healthcare system in the world, and then replicate it exactly. So bring in the top officials from Singapore, put them on an independent commission to redesign the healthcare system, and force Congress to pass exactly the plan they come up with.

Read more about Singapore's healthcare system here:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/01/singapores_heal....
http://www.american.com/archive/2008/may-june-magazine-conte...

But coming back to Earth, such a plan could never happen. If you approach the problem from the perspective of a hypothetical policy advisor, there is very little that is both a) politically possible and b) would actually improve the system. Raising the caps on medical school enrollment is an obvious fix that would reduce costs without costing taxpayers anything, but the doctors will try their hardest to block it. A mandate to buy insurance makes sense in theory, but in practice the required level of healthcare to buy gets set way, way, too high, and so a mandate ends up being a huge transfer from citizens to the healthcare industry. There are dozens of other examples. Our system is f*ed up for a reason, and until the political system is reformed, policy reform is impossible.

In reality, healthcare spending will continue to rise until it simply cannot rise further. The spending will be distributed according to political power.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

As a Canadian you have some visa categories open to you that others do not. I don't know anything about those so cannot comment on them further.

However, the US has the E-2 Treaty Investor visa for situations like this - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-2_visa and http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/types/types_1273.html .. Canada is a treaty signatory. There's quite a lot to it, but essentially it allows you to enter and work within the US to control an investment. Investment must be "significant" with respect to the sort of business it is (so if you were opening a steel mill, $200k probably wouldn't cut it, but a software company? Theoretically it could be as little as $100k). There was a post linked from HN recently about a British group of guys who used the E-2 successfully to set up a company in the Bay Area.

Alternatively, you could work on your company in Canada for a period of a couple of years then open a US branch/subsidary and transfer to it through an L visa.

The short story, though, is that it's really, really hard and generally rather expensive, unless you have access to some Canadian focused visa class I'm not aware of. Going to work at an established American company is not particularly hard (assuming you have a degree) but anything beyond that involves a great deal of pain. I've been investigating moving to the US as a self employed person for about six years now and am still not close to discovering a good route (with "save $250k in cash" as my current, tricky to attain fallback position).
There is FOSS with this feature set.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_editing_software#...
More specifically see these screen shots of Cinelerra in which it does the described... http://www.heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra_shots.php
RentADesignatedDriver.com
I did undergrad CS at Georgetown too (hi). What year were you, if you don't mind me asking?
Don't take this as legal immigration advice, but:

1. Create product on the side while working for someone OR move back to Canada and work on it full-time

2. Start an LLC (non-US citizens can do this, and C-corps)

3. Raise money or become profitable (actual amount varies, some say $200k or more)

4. Find a business co-founder and other employees

5. Sponsor your visa and come back to the US or go fulltime with your own co.

6. PROFIT !!! (oh, wait, that was step 3...)

I'd suggest getting the proof of concept done, and then worrying about everything else. Execute first, ask questions later.
One possibility: The grocery store seeds the site with product data from their suppliers, and customers vote up what they want to see on the shelves.

New product lines could be "featured" weekly, and the ones that pass a certain vote threshold get ordered. If a product you voted for gets added, perhaps you get an email with a coupon.
replace the government/corporate watchdog function of journalism

I think you misspelled lapdog
Have a look at:

HostTracker: http://host-tracker.com

Hyperspin: http://www.hyperspin.com