skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
will allow for entirely new forms of spontaneous collaboration

... that require pre-packaged apps to be added as plugins to mom and dad's browser, then e-mails sent containing urls to their new service, then mom and dad not turning off their computer and having a good enough connection for whatever type of app they've installed. (Rule out real-time with my parents' place.)

As opposed to our current model where the app writer hosts said new form of spontaneous collaboration (e.g., twitter, skype) on servers and mom and dad discover the service through word of mouth. Then mom and dad install clients where appropriate (e.g., twitter on both computer and cell phone, or skype on macbook with built-in camera). And then there's Google Wave which seems like a better platform for new forms of spontaneous collaboration (more robust, easier to determine recipients/access, open & published protocol).

The main benefit of the Opera system seems to be the app/service store, which adds discoverability, and the url namespace through its proxy service. If there is a market due to these strengths, I'd expect Google's new Wave platform to do better.
bravo to the State Dept. and twitter but I wish they made the request more discretely.
This is only the source code for third-party free software projects used in the Kindle, including Linux, busybox, libpng, and freetype. It doesn't include any of the Kindle application code. It's not new - they've been publishing these since the first Kindle release in November 2007, as required by the GPL and other licenses. See for example:

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16247
It's an interesting idea. There are a lot of details that you would have to flesh out.

What is reputation? How would you explain it? How does it aggregate?

Draw some pictures - what might it look like, what might it be integrated into a site? Etc.

In my mind, reputation is the summary of a series of transactions. Ebay's user reputation comes directly to mind. How they will interact across sites seems challenging -- I have 1000 points on news.yc and 2000 followers on twitter; how do they interact? How do you present this, etc?

I recommend you cut the idea to the very minimal core to see how small you can make it, and see if you can validate that minimal concept.
Why must this be secret? This is a nice sign of transparency between the government and tech companies. Its much better read "State department working with Twitter" than "NSA installing secret monitoring equipment in AT&T building".
When I started http://www.learnitfirst.com/ originally, we only accepted PayPal. I did it this way because getting a merchant account seemed like a big deal+hassle (at the time). After we integrated PayPal, we added Google Checkout which was a collosal waste of time. We now accept credit cards directly.

I'd say that my customers 10:1 prefer to pay by credit card. If I didn't offer credit cards as an option, I figure I would have 20-40% fewer sales. That being said, get up and running first and foremost - that's what I think. You can always add credit cards. I think PayPal, for my customers, is an important option. Since it was the easiest of all to implement, I'd say start with it.
Totally agreed here. The reason I don't want to move to HAML and Sass is the learning curve required of devs, especially those that aren't necessarily familiar with scripting languages (like visual designers, etc). but do know about HTML and CSS.

This is just a simple enough extension to CSS that is natural, but still giving power to express styles much more concisely.
I just finished my EE degree. I did well, but it certainly wasn't by getting lots out of lectures (though going to them probably is a good idea).

The trick is to have friends to study with. I always had a hard time focusing on the coursework by myself. It's dry, at least as presented at school. Study with friends, and explore the material with them by coming up with ridiculous possible applications for whatever you're learning.

As a bonus, the friends you make at the library will probably be better to have than the ones you'll make taking drugs. ;)
I wasn't/am-not a lastfm person so I can't say - but IIRC doesn't lala.com have something similar? Perhaps they are better for classical? I don't know.

And I'm a classical "fan" but I have my favorites. I would not likely listen to anything other than a recommendation engine's suggestions at this stage.
well my concern is that it could be used as propaganda inside Iran trying to link the protests to foreign powers. but for domestic transparancy, to your point, is great.
Honestly, I have no idea. However, since I actually do like mac/iphone dev, I would like to stay in Apple's good graces by not saying anything about the content of NDA'd material unless noted otherwise ;)

I have heard from Apple engineers that leaking information as an Apple engineer may as well equal getting fired though...
Ask HN: What is good user retention ratio?
Assuming you are running a site which requires users to sign up/login and you intend them to return on regular basis. What is good percentage of sign ups v.s. regular users? And what is yours?
* This could eventually replace the credit ratings infrastructure of experian, equifax, etc.*

Wow - talk about smoking the kool-aid. We went from "similar to gravatars" to replacing Equifax all in about 1000 characters. That's a bit much for me lol.
So is this a room temperature superconductor? The article says no, but only because it has a low current? I don't think there's a minimum current capacity to be considered a super conductor.
Also I'm tired of hearing about all of these revolutionary things and never seeing them become commercialized. I mean whatever happened to memristors? They were supposed to be easy to produce with existing fabrication processes. Why don't we have any yet?
Thanks: PayPal first. Credit Cards second.

What made Google Checkout a collosal waste of time? Do customers choose not to use it? Or is it a hassle to deal with on your end?
fwiw, he confirmed the deposit on twitter: http://twitter.com/XSSExploits/status/2186157907
I like your analogy.

It may be that there isn't a program that's both complex enough to make the problem visible and small enough to count as a demo. In that case, it might be better to call it a sample.

If it were my demo I'd focus on making the value visible. For example, if the value is correctness, then make it obvious when the state becomes incorrect. An incorrect program ought to hit this if it runs long enough.
I had to go back and re-apply for my personal certificate and then go through the whole chain again for it to work. Had to revoke all of my profiles and certificates on the site (after re-getting my personal cert), remove all copies from my local machine and devices, and (with several reboots between "installs") got it working again. Took about four hours, give or take.
i don't like paypal much, so i'd probably use amazon's FPS

http://aws.amazon.com/fps/
Monetary reasons.
Waht do you Aspire to be? See the video
In my startup (http://industrialinterface.com), we started by manually creating invoices in Paypal and emailing them out. That got lukewarm response.

I'm the lead dev, so I buckled down and figured out the merchant stuff. There can be 1-2 weeks worth of delays in getting your merchant account, but our admin guy said it was pretty straightforward. Took me about a day or 2 to figure out the response codes and to program the cc processing.

In short, take the jump and just process your own CCs (assuming that you have the legal structure in place so that you can get a merchant account. If not, use the Paypal API). Took about 2 days of learning and coding to figure out cc processing (and the Authorize.net interface ain't the greatest).

Fees are all about the same, so unless your margins are under a percent, don't worry about the fees. And if your margins are that low, rethink your business model ;)
>> "They aren't that much more expensive"

Bandwidth overage on slicehost is .30/GB. On Linode it's .10/GB. That's a fairly massive difference.
This is a good article, and his basic premise is worth thinking about: 'When we separate ourselves from the systems that work on our behalf by adding layers and layers of complexity, we are ultimately doomed to fail.'

I agree with this, but I don't see it as particularly applicable to digital TV. He talks about running translators for analog television to provide PBS access to his local community. He concludes that analog signals are easy to work with, and then contrasts this with digital: 'If you want to really examine the signal itself, you need an expensive device that is able to recognize the signal and help you debug what's going on. Of course, our small TV organization cannot afford the cost of such a device, so most of the time, we can only guess.'

This seems misguided, and like an attempt to fix the problem with the wrong tools. Sure, it's difficult to diagnose the problem with an oscilloscope, but with cheap digital tuner cards available it seems like it should be possible to do a similar analysis in software. If one was tasked with retransmitting a DTV signal, it seems like the solution would be to decode (with error correction if possible) rather than blindly retransmitting the signal as analog. Is this harder than it sounds?
Are you a geek too or are you the business person?

Advice #1: Be wary of what you read on these boards. A lot of folks will tell you that you need to do "x". Well, what they aren't telling is that they think "x" will work for you but what do they really know about your idea? Zilch. "x" might have worked for them or for a friend and now they pass it along to you. They are trying to be helpful yet that doesn't mean they are helpful. Be wary.

Advice #2 - Decide whether you and your friend actually want to be the implementers or you want to sell the idea for someone else to implement.

Advice #3 - Consider talking to a patent attorney if it is an interesting enough model.

Finally, the process to go from idea to product varies too widely for me to offer specific advice. If your friend can code it in 6-12 months, here's what you have to consider:

* If it can be coded in such a short period of time, how quickly can it be copied?

* If he can code it by himself in 6-12 months, how realistic are his timelines? It's often that I find my project estimates to be wildly optimistic...

* If he can code it by himself in 6-12 months, how much faster could he do it with a team of four other people who are very talented working alongside him 60 hours a week?

* Assuming that a team of 5 can code it inside of 90 days, is there an opportunity cost lost by waiting the extra 90 days (for your friend to code it alone)?

* How long will it take to raise financing (to fund the 5 person team)?

etc

Good luck!
right, but i'm guessing his (and mine) trouble handling that loop has more to do with loop that it does with us - at least that's what i tell myself so please be gentle
Jython 2.5.0 Final is out
Conversely, announcing your plans and having a financial stake in the completion of those plans is shown to work exceptionally well. The company, stickK (stickk.com), is founded on this principle. It is drawn from behavorial economist Dean Karlan, so it is based on incentives rather than rigorous psychological evaluation, but it seems to work well: http://www.stickk.com/about.php
I'm not so sure about this one. You can't always talk to prospective customers because they may or may not see the application of the technology until it hits them in the face. Sometimes talking to prospective customers is the right thing to do and other times you're better off building the prototype/demo and seeing what impact it has.

I don't know - maybe the OP should ask prospective customers... I don't know enough about the idea to guesstimate whether this is a good strategy or not.
Myspace Cuts Workforce By 30 Percent
Warner Music hooks up again with Imeem
Still needed: a great iPhone office suite.
OK, I'll buy this.

At first I couldn't think of a real use-case that matched your description, but then I realized one that might be close - Say I want to copy some pictures in a directory that relate to a craigslist posting over into another directory. I've done that. And since I only ever use those photos once, I prefer not to import them into something like iPhoto or the like.

So that's a case for having a GUI file manager, but (back to the original point), I'm not sure it's a case for cut n' paste.
Annuities have counter-party risks...
It'd be a nice touch to link to the sites in question. I'm ashamed to say that I didn't recognize all of the YC companies on that list! :-)
If the financial state is already having invested the money, I wonder if this is more or less motivating than a possibility of money later. The money paid is a sunk cost, so failing to follow up negatively impacts your experience and not the financials.
Washington Times just broke through Safari 4's popup blocker and showed me a _really_ obnoxious ad for an Economist subscription. We're talking 600x400 pixels of #FF0000, flashing.
Now if anyone feels like writing a tmbundle for Less, I'll be more than happy to put it up on the site!
The space pen story is not true, according to Snopes:

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
Google just gave me 30 pounds ($45) of free advertising! Can't complain...
Hmm, I don't see anything in Mozilla.
Although I've never experienced any definite benefits from the occasional homeopathic remedy whose drops a friend has urged on me, I know several "hard-headed" (meat-eating, non-"granolas", rationalists) who swear by the homeopathic treatment for poison ivy/oak.

It may just be placebo mind/body effects, but if anything so innocuous can reduce symptoms for something so slow-to-resolve and aggravating, I'm up for "getting foolish".

As long as it's basically distilled water "with a healing vibration," is way cheaper than trip to doc, and cannot have side effects (see the zicam recall), what's not to like? --just my 2¢
http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode
The great irony is, Germany spends so much time combating anything related to Nazism out of paranoia of a return to totalitarianism. And they don't see the massive contradiction here.
Joshu - Thanks for the comment. Curious as to what exactly you mean by "cut the idea to the very minimal core to see how small you can make it, and see if you can validate that minimal concept." Are we talking about hashing out some specific feature and then seeing if that, on its own, will be successful? I guess, if you could explain a little about what you mean by "validating a concept," it would make things more clear to me.

Thanks
Let's suppose, however, that 100% of the undecided went for Mousavi. Well, he would have just barely won, about 55-56%. It is statistically improbable that 100% went for Mousavi. So while we are not talking about something that was mathematically impossible, we are talking about something that was statistically improbable.
That's really interesting. It's taken as read in marathon running that you should tell everyone you're going to do it and this well help you keep motivated to train during the winter. I did that because I was "supposed" to, but it didn't seem to affect my motivation much - however lots of people did prematurely say well done, hmm.
Thanks for compiling that list. I didn't know about SoftLayer.

I noticed the list mentions Justin.tv hosts itself. Aren't they built on Amazon EC2 and S3?
Just curious. Why the negatives?
we are a startup and we are going with paypal for now. We will move on to authorize.net after a couple of months and then to merchant account.
"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, and then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Chris Rock School Of Entreprenurial Management - "How Much For A Rib?"
Want The Kindle Source Code? You Can Have It.
Now if they would just write a compiler that fixes everything that's wrong with CSS positioning...

</cynicism>
I've found that thinking love/hate is not sufficiently granular for most problems and rarely suggestive of many solutions. It can be good for making very high level emotionally charged decisions like whether you want to even stay in school or not, but when it comes to implementing those decisions, you often need to be more specific about your feelings to figure out exactly what needs to change.

There is a chart in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's classic Flow, that I've found enligtening. It shows the "flow channel", the desirable state where the activity seems friction-free, surrounded by anxiety on one side and boredom on the other. Most people don't think of activities this way, where the goal is a mean rather an an extreme.

I've found that every instance of procrastination or avoidance in my life stems from anxiety or boredom irrespective of things like desire, enjoyment, or willpower, while all of the things I do get done are things that I don't feel much anxiety or boredom about, likewise irrespective of desire, enjoyment or willpower. (Those factors only seem to come into play with planning what to do, not in actually doing them.)

So it follows that the way to get things done is to figure out whether the problem is anxiety or boredom and then do what you can to counterbalance it back towards the flow channel. If you're procrastinating on something because you find it boring, the way to become motivated is to make it more exciting. Add constraints, make it more challenging, tighten deadlines, expand scope, batch repetitive tasks, turn necessary goals into desirable ones, etc. If you're procrastinating on something because it makes you anxious, the way to become motivated is to make it less exciting. Remove constraints, reduce the challenge, loosen deadlines, break up tasks into small pieces, reduce the harm of mistakes, reduce risk, etc.

What that means specifically depends on what bores you or causes anxiety and how much control you have over circumstances, but I think there is always something you can do on a practical and tactical level to bring any activity towards that channel where you don't have to force yourself into doing it.
Is this harder than it sounds?

No. I suspect that person simply has a lot of experience with analog and little to none with digital and all of TV is not switching to digital. I wouldn't want to be him.
I think Opera is actually quite popular here.
Someone else beat me to refuting your comment. The nytimes article was just chosen as a quick example. Use of Obecalp is taught in major medical schools and it is used routinely though not frequently by doctors.

Think of it this way, any pharmaceutical treatment you have undergone was probably only 80-90% as effective as you think it was :)
Or to deal with administering any of it...
The for-the-children brigade has been using its scheme for ages now and it is still working. It seems to me that for such a well known strategy an effectve counter-strategy should have been devised over the years. Yet, it seems to work very well every time. Can anyone point us to some material about this strategy in general, what counter-moves have been tried and how they worked out in the past?
Ask HN: Finding Top Talent
I'm a partner in a startup company being formed out of the University of Minnesota. We are doing online and mobile ordering for restaurants. We've been developing some awesome software however we're having an increasingly large workload and it has become clear we need to hire some extra developers.

However, finding top talent and people willing to take risks is pretty difficult. So to all the startups out there, how do you find awesome programmers?
Twitter / Maintenance
Game creation tool launches in Flash
This is ridiculous. The first two examples they give you, you are actually producing more code than if you had done it properly to begin with.

#header, #footer {
/* styling here */
}

Less, in their case, is actually more.
Writing an Android Twitter Client with Python
Exactly (thanks for linking to it:-) you can't compare the RAM prices directly. You have to figure in the 64 bit tax on Slicehost first, then compare. It turns out that Linode is significantly cheaper.
http://rulesformyunbornson.tumblr.com/post/51600839/222-dont...
I have case of homeopathic beer. It's $5 per bottle.. write me.... ;)
Do you think mainstream pharmaceuticals are 100% effective? They are analogous to a light switch that switches the light on/off about 60% of the time at best.

The placebo effect works 10-20% of the time. So we're talking about something that is almost as effective.

Most people taking advil OR those little homeopathic tablets know/understand nothing about how they work.

In the case of homeopathy, you don't need to know why it works -- in fact, knowing that it works via the placebo effect might undermine its effectiveness :)
Update on Google Native Client - now built into Chrome
I am using VPN to stimulate UK address in Manchester (from Brazil) and have not heard one ad in the two weeks I have been using Spotify. At the moment I have been listening for more than three hours straight, and still not one ad. My wife is using a similar setup and she has not heard one ad. I actually want to hear one so I can believe they exist :)
> trying to get your site to handle traffic on a 3GB server and a 15GB server.

I find that I always hit cpu limits way before memory becomes an issue.
Well, there I would more expect "MBA turns Firefox into a web browser."
SH really does have a strong brand. Initially, I wasn't really aware of the 64 bit issue, and saw that lots of people were happy with them, so I went with them over Linode without any real concrete reasons. That turned out to be a mistake, as Linode is significantly cheaper for what I need, yet still seem to run a quality operation.
Drizzle: Rethinking the MySQL Database Kernel
And here I was thinking that there was some grain of truth in homeopathy.

If I recall correctly, the link was here, a few months ago, about "13 things that Dont Make Sense". A scientist who was the scourge of homeopathy, had to admit that there was _something_.

Then there's water remembering when it freezes. Occasionally, distilled water will not freeze until a bit lower than 0c. It'll be around -2 to -4c before it freezes. Now, if we add a small amount of water, that is also distilled, but shown to freeze at 0c, all the water will freeze no lower than 0c. You must boil the water rigorously before it can retain the possibility of freezing below 0c.

Who knows how it happens. Quantum memory, perhaps? But there is something.
This is a bit off topic, but am I the only one who thinks yahoo could have picked a better name for that service? :-D I can see why they might try to emphasize the "dot" in the smush.it logo (for separation of the last four letters). But having the "it" in the logo be brown, as well as the brownish background on the main page doesn't help. Part of me hopes that someone just really wasn't thinking, and the other part says they are doing this on purpose. I wonder which part is correct. If it is the latter, color me unimpressed.