skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, I don't think that most companies have even harvested the low-hanging fruit in their data. They need to do it before they worry about optimizing it.

Second, there really are a lot of barriers to this. Your idea about improving prop design is cool, but it requires more resources than a few buddies can assemble: huge computational horsepower, as you note, as well as the ability to actually fabricate and test the props.

Liability concerns will squash much of the innovation. Your traffic flow question is really interesting. But I don't think I'll be entering if there's any chance that some lawyer is going to add me to the list of defendants when someone gets killed by a driver running a red light.

In some areas the government outright forbids private development. (I don't mean to turn this into a gun control debate; for good or bad, this is just an example) The USA used to be the world's innovator in firearms design. People like John Moses Browning are part of the reason that our military became the class of the world. But starting with the 1938 NFR, taxes and regulations made it impractical for private individuals. The result is that now improvements are really only the result of direct government funding (e.g., Armalite and the AR-15), or occur overseas, like in Israel. Similarly, I imagine that any biological or pharma work would wind up with the FBI at your door (assuming that you could get by without million-dollar hardware anway).
I created this page for you, it might help to collect and rate all your options and reasons here:

http://alpha.crowdmind.com/decision/62_What_Is_The_Best_Real...
Ask HN: How you implement GTD in you personal life
I just finish GTD book. I want to know how much practical is to maintain all the projects and their actions in day to day life. What all tools you guys are using for GTD.
"...he can use his 30 something years of industry connections to drive business to his new company..."

He can also use his 30 something years of industry experience to know what to do without too many false starts. Don't discount meaningful experience. Not everything important is learned from a book.
Exactly what I just did.
Top Database Performance Tips
Hunch: a fun web-based decision engine
I usually strongly disagree with changing the title, but you title wasn't to linkbait or hype, it was merely to provide a much better title than the original article. So kudos, it's the first title change I've seen in a long time that was purely for a more informative reason.
mv news.ycombinator.com/item?id=663460 digg.com/
Getting inside a downloader's head
Hmmm ... definitely a thought-provoking comment. Let me try to play devil's advocate.

> Right now, IIUC, banks and mutual funds and hedge funds and insurance companies and VC firms and non-bank mortgage companies are governed by different rules and supervised by different regulatory agencies, ...

Yes, but there is a good reason for this: these different types of organizations do different things.

> ... which allowed people with sketchy business plans to pick the corporate structure that gave them the most favorable regulations.

Is that a problem? For example, if I want to sell insurance, then regulations that nudge me toward forming an insurance company, can hardly be seen as a bad thing.

> Even if VC firms had nothing to do with the current financial meltdown, if they end up as the least regulated class of fund, then they will surely get drawn into the next meltdown.

I can't disagree with that, even in devil's-advocate mode. :-)

In any case, thanks for making me think.
Republicans have less to lose from this kind of thing:

http://www.slate.com/id/2220030/
Yeah, that works. Also "good design being design that isn't noticed".
Man, if you are texting enough to get RSI, you should either A: Make more phone calls or B: Wait till you are at a computer/face to face.
I commented on that near the end. You can compile Gambit without EVAL.

Also, supposedly there are apps out there which have embedded Lua. You just aren't allowed to download new code.
Didn't see that, thanks for the link to the discussion.
This might be the best use of Twitter I have ever seen, he has to feel at least a little dumb about that comment now.
I have to use Spring at work in a pretty large Enterprise Java environment, and our setup is not as you describe.

Despite Spring's message of conformity, it doesn't actually force you to program everything as singletons and beans.
Analogies and Relational Similarity - Applications
Rip: A New Way to Package Ruby Software
This could go over well with existing tabletops like Warhammer. It might be neat to have a handheld device that could overlay stats on the units that are in play. Maybe even synchronize some sound effects and overlay some visual effects as well.
Most of them, but it's not the same - that usually lists top posts only. I'm interested in the thread structure of all the comments and such. It's doable, just a pain in the ass.
"Thanks to my wife for being a great partner. It takes two."

We hear this over and over, but it can't be emphasized enough. It's almost binary: great partner and you have a chance, otherwise, don't even bother; you'll be fighting battles on too many fronts. A start-up is tough enough.
Testing an improved Oracle query optimizer would require terabytes of different databases in order to have a representative sample of real customer databases. That's not really practical today.

If a contest participant comes up with a proposed design improvement for a cargo ship prop, how do you actually test that? Testing in a CFD modeling tool is one thing, but to really be sure you have to build it and put it on a ship.

For traffic engineering, testing is the real problem again. Who is going to write an accurate simulation of an entire city's traffic flow so that contestants can use it to test their light timing algorithms?

By contrast the Netflix prize involves a small data set and doesn't require building anything in the real world.
I'll just have to make sure the site doesn't screw up :-)

As far as planning, I see my project as facilitating some forms of it in a very lightweight way--not a "serious" planning app. I'm going for beautiful, fun, informative, and friendly.

The convergence of interest in this space is--interesting! I just got an email from someone saying he'd like to help, except he's working on a competitor.
Got this link from the comments, pretty funny: http://petehisameme.wordpress.com/
On the other hand, as one who has dealt with Mr. Hoekstra and his staff before, nuance and context are not their strongest suits.
As a startup employee and father, I've tried to set a very similar set of rules and traditions for myself. It's worked fabulously so far.
How does Rails 3 improve the JSON support structure?
wouldn't that give you selection bias?
Do Your Employees Have Humble Pride?
textmate. ;D
GE's Really Cool Collaborative White Board
Post title should be: "Twitter lets lawmakers know when they are being an asshat".
Only if the chance of this happening to each bit is independent, and also memoryless. Either or both of these might not be the case; I don't know.
godaddy says $1.99 for new .com domains, .us are 4.99, etc.. It was a rough example:

"Buy as many domains as your profit will allow until you have amassed a reasonable quantity and are selling domains quickly enough to make a business out of it" was the intention.
Spring and J2EE are modular, not object oriented to any great degree. One can implement more OO further down the chain, such as in model objects, of course, and in other custom subsystems but the overall J2EE/Spring model is a hybrid of procedural/imperative and some OO.

a good counterpoint to your idea is: Would You Bet $100,000,000 on Your Pet Programming Language?
http://prog21.dadgum.com/13.html

--Don't worry, as for myself, I see only questions, and answers that only bring more questions.
Duh? There is no myth. The "accepted wisdom" in most circles except the startup scene is that you should wait until you have years of experience before starting a company. The whole point of pg in his essays is that young people are best fit for the job. Not everybody agree.
Junk DNA actually changes a whole lot because there's little or no evolutionary downside to mutations there.
Beans can certainly encourage http://martinfowler.com/bliki/AnemicDomainModel.html
I concur. I also use Spring at my dayjob, without the problems the OP describes.

Spring is really useful for setting up the underlying infrastructure/plumbing/cross cutting concerns of a system - however, you don't have to use it for all your domain logic too. Don't drink the dependency injection cool-aid. :)
He's not looking for a statistically valid sample, he's looking for alpha users to try out his new thing.
You need a certain level of intelligence to be able to pick up on that...
Most big companies I know just hire a right person who knows a few FSB generals and create their very own "defense" departments to solve these problems. They pay only salaries to people who know what to do. No bribes or "taxes" whatsoever.
Microsoft OneNote + Moto-rokr E6(that's my phone)

Here's my workflow, I have an "action" page which containing multiple bullet lists.
Whenever a task/thought occurs that requires action i put it into my action page under a heading it belongs to.. like <myresearch>, <myDayJob>,<MyHobby>, so i don't lose any tasks. Everynite i pick some things i need to do tomorrow, and add them to my cell phone tasklist, which also carries my calendar for meetings/events etc. And thats it.

All day i just keep track of my phone task list, cos it's just shorter and i don't have to be look at the bigger list.
IPhone 3.0 Software Walkthrough
Actually these are astonishingly cheap compared to a poor quality house in the UK. My parents bought an ex-rental unit to renovate at ~£100,000; it was single story (in the UK basements are virtually non-existent outside of cities) semi-detached and probably hung around 1,000 square feet of floor space. It was quite literally the cheapest house on the market in the area and it had nicotine stained walls, ceilings that seeped tar, had plumbing, gas and electrical problems. Not to mention one of the clauses for sale was that my parents dispose of all the junk in the house, which not only included bedrooms crammed full, but also a garage and a shed.

If you can get property in the UK and get the rights to put one of these sheds on, you'll probably save yourself anywhere between £25,000 and £100,000 on your lower end priced home.
Sorry, not quite catching you there, you do what to your computer? /sarcasm

Yes that is one of the down falls, pretty major too, but if you're family wants to share from your computer they can just call, or you can look and see the connections are 0 before turning it off. I can also imagine a caching/on-line backup system (like Dropbox) - eg for your fridge notes.

Peerweb is not the www they have a lot of overlap but this is going to change the way we use computers IMO.
Having a company full of alpha dog, intellectual talent can present unique situations. Google CEO Eric Schmidt wants to foster that young company feel as the company tries to make it possible to be "part of a start-up within Google."

I believe alpha dogs leaving to do their own thing is quite normal and should be expected. Accepting that some of your brightest talent will leave the nest to pursue their passions should be an embraced value. No hard feelings, okay?

I think Eric misses the point in saying "being part of a startup within Google". How do you stop a monoculture from creeping in and taking over your organization? Big companies have this problem and Google, I would guess, is no exception.

Maybe foster an environment where new ideas (coming from the outside) are brought into the fold (in the form of more startup acquisitions)? I'm sure this causes it's own problems where founders must now deal with the internal workings of a giant acquirer.

I would call this "organizational drag". Too many people with too many inputs into too few decisions. This provides just the right amount of friction to squeeze out anyone who truly wants to scratch their itch. Put another way, if you put up enough barriers, some will attempt to navigate your organizational obstacle course but others will simply see your barriers, and the organization itself, as the problem to solve.

I don't know if funding actual startups would be something Google should look into but I don't think Google could ever bring back that small startup feeling; that's just wishful thinking.
I've been using the hipster pda. http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-... for a few years. It works well for me. I find that maintenance takes very little effort any more.
Either certify or build something public using your skills, I guess.
I know you want to look in your online communities, but I have a friend who is a wedding photographer who can introduce couples with specific dates. Let me know if interested.
That's pretty much what I was thinking, reading this. First off, a frequency measurement -- "once in a billion years", 3.16887646 × 10^-17 hertz (thank you, Google calculator) can't really be used as a probability, as they are trying to do.

Then, even if you assign that nonsense statement some sort of charitable reading, like "one bit has a 50% chance of spontaneously changing state over a one billion year period", and infer that every bit has a 1/10^9 chance of flipping every year, then the odds that 8×10^9 bits do not change at all over the course of a year are (1-10^-9)^(8×10^9), or about 0.034%.

Granted, it'll still take a long time for that whole gigabyte of data to be completely scrambled, but I think we'll still be using error correction and occasional refresh, even with a technology this reliable.
Extreme Programming Failures Explained
Hundreds of billions is tiny compared to what's at risk this time. I witnessed massive fraud in the dot-com bubble. Very little went punished. I have no idea what the new regulations need to look like. But they need to have real teeth and need a reasonable sized army of experts overseeing the regulations. The SEC of the last 10 years was woefully understaffed to deal with our financial industry's activity.
and I thought platinum pins for 1s and holes for 0s melted into solid granite bed is the preferred long time storage!
The large versions of these homes are a quarter of the size of that apartment. It is only like 258 square feet.
As noted in other comments here Parrot & LLVM are not mutually exclusive.

Parrot has been compiled on LLVM as can be seen on this post: http://perlgeek.de/blog-en/news/parrot-buids-with-llvm-gcc.w...
Yes, please--really, the idea is any personal connection so people have some reason to trust it when there's nothing but a blog post yet.
Stats 48 hours after we launched tgethr
Book-keeper the UK 
Your Accounts Team is the one stop shop for all your bookkeeping and accounting needs with services tailored to your needs. We will simplify and streamline your accounting process, letting you get on with your business. Services include bookkeeping, payroll, management accounting, final account production and corporation tax filing.
Two points:

1. Does it matter? If it works and it's reliable (Spring has always fulfilled both of these requirements for me) then who cares what you call it?

2. You could build the same system in OCaml but good luck finding developers to work on it. Plus I don't know what kind of "enterprise" (database/web services/etc) support it has.
We are less likely to destroy ourself now than at any other point of time in history.
That's some pretty good advice from someone who's been there, done that. I'm in a similar predicament of trying to balance raising twins with my wife, working a fulltime job during the day and starting a company in the free time I have between 8pm and 1am at night. It's not easy and I find it's extremely hard to focus when all you want to do is veg on the recliner, watch some TV.
As a part of their training, CIA analysts are shown satellite photos of a civil war battleground near Washington DC. There is what appears to be a large open field there. They are asked for an analysis. Afterward, they take a field trip to the actual site. There, they discover that the "large open field" actually has undulations that are as much as 10 feet from peak to trough.

Being there on the ground can be a drastically different experience from reading reports and looking at remote data! 30 years of industry experience can give you some special insights.
I'm a type 1 diabetic. My when my glueclose levels are low from taking too much insulin and/or not eating enough I can certainly feel the effects in not being able to concentrate, being iritable, and often confused.

But when my blood gluclose levels are elevated it does not necessarily mean there is an abundance of sugar to serve as fuel for my mind. It just means I have eaten too much food for my injected insulin to counteract. My body will not automatically respond by producing more insulin and a subsequent dip in blood sugar. If I do nothing, my blood sugars will stay higher than is healthy for the rest of my bodily functions but as far as self control is concerned my blood gluclose will stay in a range that is constantly providing enough fuel for optimal self control.

From the perspective of self control, I can have higher blood gluclose levels without the negative lash-back normal insulin producing people get when their bodies react by producing more insulin. So... In this case... Being diabetic is an advantage?

I'm just trying to find a silver lining.
Iran's internet still up, but unstable and overloaded
Yes, I think the main reason they are charging 3.5k is to keep the hobby crowd away from the technology. They (eink) does not want to deal with you unless you have serious plans to develop a mass market product.

I decided to call up PVI directly (a fun experience since they answered the phone in a foreign language) and they were willing to sell me 6" displays for around $85 in low quantities.

For hobby related projects, the best bet is to use kent display's CHLCD modules which are similar to a LCD but with bistable pixels. The display driver is also integrated so much easier to interface with.
If I recall correctly, essentially they used to hide or cover their content using css. In Firefox with the Web Developer Toolbar I would just hit Ctrl+Shift+S to disable styles to read the content. Now you can just scroll-down.
And just for further reference Perl5 has also been tested with LLVM:

* http://use.perl.org/~Matts/journal/38786

* http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?llvm
Dude, you do not want to compare the e-ink technology from your "Motorola phone with e-ink display". That was cheaper, of course, but the resolution was awful (2x6). Not to mention refresh speed and screen size.

Pocket calculators have LCD displays for decades, too. That does not mean that your 22" inch LCD screen has no "new technology" and should be cheap.
You also need to build a machine that is able to read it in one billion years time. Anyone in the room that is still able to read a laserdisc? Didn't think so.

So, storing the information is one thing - being able to read it is a completely different beast. If you would really want to store something for a few thousand years, you're probably better off chiseling it in stone. Then you only have to make sure people (or aliens?) can read our letters and understand our words.
Apple Turns on Push Notifications
It introduces plug-able JSON back-ends, like the plug-able XML back-ends that exist today. It ships with JSON back-ends for the existing YAML implementation and the JSON gem. In addition to that all of the plug-able back-ends (XML and JSON) support parsing from an IO as well as a string now.

technoweenie has written a Rails plugin adding yajl-ruby as a back-end at: http://github.com/technoweenie/yajl-rails/tree/master

I also have a fork that I'll keep up today with the latest API changes in yajl-ruby at: http://github.com/brianmario/yajl-rails
It's really a time tradeoff. I see the first option, as pg and others espouse, as being the typical 20-something right out of college with no life (family life) and no money. They can afford to spend 100 hours a week on their startup gaining knowledge and experience as fast as they can. Since they have no outside commitments and no huge debts holding them down (other than college), they can do this.

The other option is to work a normal job for a decade building experience and knowledge slowly over time and then when you're in your mid-30's start your company. It's a race to gain knowledge and experience and while one way might be preferable to the other, it doesn't mean it can't be done either way.
We Done Been ... Framed
That's a good point. I had assumed that since There's no evolutionary pressure it wouldn't be forced into changing as much as active DNA is. You could encode it to multiple areas that must be checked against each other.
Advanced Javascript: Logical Operators and truthy / falsy
My wife wants me to have a fixed time for starting and finishing work every day. The trouble is that I don’t have a set time for leaving the work desk. Nor is there much distinction between weekdays and weekends.
How Self-Made Titans Launched Their Empires
Quite right, thanks :-)
Agreed. And I think there's a benefit to having an open source project versus a handful of certifications.

An open source project will generally only be looked at by people with the skill to evaluate actual code.

Anyone in HR can evaluate a certificate.

The underlying goal being that good shops should actually have someone in the hiring process who can evaluate your skills, while other shops are probably hiring to a checklist of acronyms.
That one's straight out of the Evil Overlord List: "One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation."
I said it long time ago in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=251020

"Freedom, democracy and smut can go hand in hand."

All governments just use porn as an excuse to "parenting" their own citizens. But if citizens can't judge issues by themselves, why do we need democracy and rule of laws? If citizens can't judge issues themselves, how can government officials be better in the same department? The difference is who has the power. And some people really take the power in their hands to serious.

We as human being tends to be corrupted with power at our own little hands. The only way to get the balance is to allow different groups owns mutual destruction power against each other, therefore we will all be civilized and enjoy the peace among ourselves.
Did Jeff Pulver Drop the Ball?
New Features on Google Books
Atlanta Startup Ecosystem 2.0 - Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Not Invited?
Let me define pseudo-math to be the approach of making a few mathematical definitions and then proving only some trivial "theorems."

Theorem. The Darc's theory of patches is pseudo-math.

Proof. By definition. QED
I am getting married oct 13th. gammons gmail com
"It's a race to gain knowledge and experience..."

Good point. The right job can actually help you play leap frog once you start your own business because of the experience. The wrong job is just a waste of time and life.
Honestly, I feel like Amazon wants to own the e-book market badly enough that they were forced to introduce their own reader. Once competing hardware shows up, I'd put my money on Amazon dropping or scaling back the Kindle to focus on content sales.

Especially when you consider their margins. Books on the Kindle store have a publisher-set "suggested price," but Amazon retains the right to sell the item at any price point. For each sale, regardless of actual price, the publisher gets 35% of their suggested price.

Imagine publishing an item for $100 on the Kindle store. Amazon can mark it down 25% and still $40 per sale while you only get $35. Not a bad situation for Amazon.