skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish we would get more of these types of submissions on HN. Well done.
Announcing the NYT API Tool
"You would expect to see a blur of movement for a fraction of a second while your eye moves to the new target, but your brain edits this out."

With a bit of effort, I was able to override this. Try it and you'll see why that gets edited out; there isn't much usable information there.
In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan (excellent; recently saw Food, Inc. as well)

The Next 100 Years by George Friedman (amusing; was given to me as a gag gift)

Currently reading: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
This has already been done.

http://www.kickstarter.com/

What is Kickstarter?

Kickstarter is a new way to fund ideas and endeavors.

Project creators can offer products, services or other benefits ("rewards") to inspire people to support their project: A hot-air balloon ride to the first person to pledge $300, an invitation to the BBQ for anyone who pledges more than $5, exclusive daily video updates for anyone who pledges more than $1. It's up to each project creator to sculpt their own offers and there's lots of cool ways to do it.

I don't know if it's been used to fund a video game yet, though.
Last: What is a Designer: Things, Places, Messages by Potter.

Current: Flow: The psychology of optimal experience by Csikszentmihalyi
I think he was pointing out the cool factor of it
With nothing on how exactly he identified the groups this is just silly pop sci. You can't arbitrarily select your subjects.

The whole thing immediately looks very suspicious if you go to http://www.bluezones.com/
Obviously somebody is out to build a cult and make a lot of money.
chrome definitley wins. but i think, (tracemonkeys) tracing could be THE feature in this case. lots of unrolled loops ... hopefully mozilla gets more out of it over time.
It's not, but I think the efforts should be focused on making the OS X version feel like an OS X version, rather than making the Windows version, which already feels at home, better.
> Millions in lost sales should teach them to take standards seriously.

Your assuming that value amounts to a large portion of their revenue.

I'd venture it doesn't, and they wont be too worried.
Spiteful as Apple could be, I would characterize "not allowing rogue USB devices to spoof iPhones and suck sensitive data out of iTunes" as a definite security issue as well as a definite IP non-issue.
There is a reason why Debian does backports: to get the bug fixes and nothing else. Why on earth would you want new features on a production box? If new features are added, something could break. If features are removed in the new version (and this happens more often than you might think) something could break. If even the command line arguments change, something could break.

For this reason there's pretty much zero pain to Debian Stable updates. I cannot even think of a single instance off the top of my head where applying buxfixes on a Debian Stable box has caused any problems at all.
This is very cool - stroke victims could benefit from this too.
Typical 2689% APR as a way to kill financial industry?

Stuff like that should be illegal in every country.
Given how much one's behavior is impacted by external constraints, location does matter quite a lot. I suspect that if you moved the newborn offpsring of two morbidly obese Americans into a family on Okinawa the child would most likely live a rather healthy lifestyle.
Not true, distance of 38.
There are different types of paralysis. Imagine a quadrapaledric who can control a pointer with his or her chin. This is a space where some tool is going to have a general success rate with each type of disability, but every case is going to ultimately come down to individual preference. Oh, and practice, practice, practice.
This makes me actually feel a little uncomfortable.... people taking the piss out of [my] geekery has never ever worried me :) but this is, well, a little tasteless.

I couldn't figure out if it was serious, ironic or just rude. :(
A few general points from a lawyer who has worked with tech startups for a quarter century in Silicon Valley:

1. If your startup is looking to raise VC funding within the next year or so, consider WSGR or Cooley Godward or any similar large firm that is in NYC. They will be looking for companies they deem "VC fundable" and, if your startup meets this criterion in their judgment, they can and will make valuable introductions to their network of VC firms with whom they deal. This large-firm approach is not particularly flexible but it works very well for the right startups. Their expertise is beyond question, and such firms do offer deferred-fee arrangements as a matter of routine for the right startups.

2. If you are looking to stay more flexible and nimble in how you approach the next year or so, consider a boutique firm that specializes in early-stage tech startups. I don't know the NYC market at this level but would imagine that such firms exist. You will most likely find a good one via referral from other professionals.

A boutique firm will tend to give you much more flexibility in how you approach funding solutions for the company. It is a good option if you do not necessarily want to feel pressured to take on VC funding early on. VC funding at an early stage can be a mixed blessing because that is precisely the point at which you will receive the least favorable terms for your funding.

3. Avoid "wannabe" startup law firms. It seems that all sorts of little firms now want to say that they are startup specialists. A few are but most aren't. If all you see (e.g., on their websites) is marketing lingo couched in very broad terms, you need to be cautious. In general, any law firm worth its salt in the early-stage tech field will be expert in handling the types of issues I discuss here (http://www.grellas.com/faq_business_startup.html - these tutorials may help you quite apart from your search for a law firm, since their goal is to educate founders about early-stage issues in particular). The firm should also be expert in doing funding rounds, IP and e-commerce legal work.

4. Very few startup lawyers will do direct trades of services for equity. It usually is a bad idea for tax reasons for the startup because it puts a high price on your founders' stock and limits your ability to offer quality incentives to your key people.

The much more common practice is a deferred-fee arrangement. Under this type of deal, the firm might extend, say, up to $20K worth of credit for legal services which does not come due until the earlier of some defined time period (e.g., 6 months) or first funding. In exchange for incurring the credit risk, the firm will take some small percentage of founders' stock.
that's not bad... i did a very quick attempt in ruby and it's been chugging away for a few hours and the best is 46 :)

rfc1036 tHreaded File poStgres donGarra MckusicK send blocks Postgres wozniak utc kahan
so, is that what 'niche publisher' is all about ?
This is the actual "What's New in 7.0" doc: http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/WhatsNew.html
There's some evidence Americans are working fewer hours; for example figure 1 on p. 9 of this survey shows a slight decline in hours worked from 1975-2003:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1233842

Still, do you want people to be forced to work fewer hours (as in some other countries), or simply to have the option?

Because if you want to maximize your leisure time, you can make certain career and consumption choices to do so. For example, if you wanted to live with only the amenities people had in the 1970s or 1950s, you could choose to work significantly less than 40 hours a week.
I think there is one glaring flaw in the paper wherein pg assumes that nobody would write academic papers if there were no structure of competition necessitating such papers. I have two problems with this:

1) I know several people who do indeed love writing these dry analyses - what they dislike is the academic format. Given freedom of style, I think there are very few topics that you would never find anyone willing to write about. For illustrative purposes, here's a google blog search with the same parameters as his academic search
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&#...

2) I think it's blatantly fallacious to assume that there is nobody in the world that wants to do a particular job. There are certainly garbage men who enjoy their work. Of course, this number doesn't really live up to our need for garbage men. But that's why different jobs pay different amounts. This is why corporate lawyers get paid as much as they do - there's a supply shortage of people who really want to do the job.
Ok. If you ever want to go 'offline' let me know I'll be happy to contribute to your project, it looks like it would be a worthy way to spend some time.
I believe in most hunter/gatherer societies, the hunters hunt in groups with the older hunters training the younger ones.
Interview with Jose DaVeiga, co-founder of Klicksports
In this interview, Jose reveals how, inspired by the promises of interactive TV, he invented the perfect interactive platform for sports games in 2001 and made it a reality five years later
Not at all: proving that the brain forms images from sensory inputs only proves that the brain forms images from sensory inputs. It's a tenable dualist position that the material brain handles sense perception while the immaterial mind handles higher level consciousness and thought. In fact, the body was always classically assumed to handle most of sense perception even before this research.

I understand materialism just fine. But this doesn't prove materialism.
Many times, the reason some people put so many hours at the office is because they feel guilty about going home while the rest stick behind. Sometimes, the people who stay behind don't really get to accomplish much, but in terms of social dynamics, the bunch who "hang out" at the office get the political spoils. Group leaders need to ensure that reward is given based on delivery, as opposed to face time in the office.
To save time for those after the paper itself (actually an extended abstract, but that's good enough for me for now):

http://www.philipbille.org/files/c10.pdf?attredirects=0

Executive summary (from me, a hasty reader and a sloppy thinker): It matches multiple characters at a time by taking advantage the fact that, typically, more than one character its in a machine word. This quickly becomes hairy, leading to over 50% of the remaining text written in the LaTeX math environment.

Less jokingly, in order to understand what's going on, I think you need to have read+understood Myers' regex algorithm first, which speeds up the straightforward Thompson NFA O(nm) matching by using a table scheme, which they then extend to support performing transitions for multiple characters at once.

Finally ... I'm not sure how much practical use this improvement really is, given:

> "Today, regular expressions have also become a shining example of how ignoring good theory leads to bad programs. The regular expression implementations used by today's popular tools are significantly slower than the ones used in many of those thirty-year-old Unix tools."

From http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html
Last fiction - The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

Before that - The Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson (recommended to all fantasy fans)

Last technical - AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis
Setting up ownerships shares of a start-up
Starting a website and looking at ownership options. 3 people involved including 1 developer. The dev. will be working for free but wants an ownership stake. I have been told that this is the common set up for ownership- 30% to the idea guy. 45% to whomever is putting up the money and 25 to the dev? Is that standard? The idea dosent really require much upfront money so we don't really have a "money guy." Ay ideas? Any general guidelines? Thanks!
So bikers spend more energy so others can ride.
'Create Your Own Economy' by Tyler Cowen - a good read.
I suppose it has to go somewhere, since there is no menu bar. The tools button could be toned down, like the XP mock-ups, but still, it is quite nice.
Eh, I'll leave it on my PowerMac overnight. Just fyi, I've donated the following browsers...

OS X:
Safari,
Firefox 3.5,
Webkit Nightly,
Chromium Nightly,
Opera 10 beta 2,
Shiira,
Camino 2,
Seamonkey,
Sunrise,
Flock

Then I have 3 virtual machines open...

Windows XP #1:
Firefox 3.5,
Chrome,
Internet Explorer 6 (Dev testing bed, not upgrading, but take it anyway),
Opera 9,
Maxthon 2 (Surprised I even had it)

Windows XP #2:
Firefox 3.5,
Chrome,
Internet Explorer 7,
Opera 9,
Maxthon 2

Windows XP #3:
Firefox 3.5,
Chrome,
Internet Explorer 8,
Opera 9,
Maxthon

I'd donate an Ubuntu VM or two, but... they don't wanna start up at this point. shrug

This may not help, I dunno, but I'm certainly not using the computer. Have a blast, and good luck!
The upcoming Internet pandemic: data addiction
ALMOST acts like an OS X app. There are still outstanding issues regarding the widgets. Take for instance the <select> element, which still looks freakishly non-native when you click on it:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=402625
last: East of Eden (Steinbeck)

current: Design Patterns of Enterprise Architecture (Fowler)
Current:

Ghandi and Churchill by Arthur Herman

Last:

The Odyssey by Homer

A bull in China by Jim Rogers
The lesson I walked away with is: live a stress free happy life with plenty of continuous low stress excersize and a healthy diet not consisting of fried fatty sugary foods.

Sub points
Excersize can lead to stress - incorporate a lifestyle of excersize
Have good relations with family -- less stress but out of your controll often
Organic food is good.
Let's keep some perspective here folks. The idea is cool and all, but as discussed in the other thread, SHA-1 throughput on GPUs is between 200 million and 600 million per second, depending on the GPU (http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=102349&#...). On the other hand, the maximum throughput that people are getting with JS is about 3000/second. Which is a hundred thousand times slower.

I think it is safe to conclude that browser-based crowdsourcing is not a compelling approach to numerical computation.
First, thanks for all the hard work. Second, Touching is fantastic! So glad that's there now, I've needed it before.
Working with Gen Y
An app like this could solve the puzzle in your newspaper faster than you could transcribe it. I would love to see more OCR apps which are even more useful. Where's the app to scan a barcode or ISBN of a book and have it populate with the information from Amazon and a link to download the e-book?
Indeed! Things like this are so inspirational
All of the things discussed in this essay are problems I see with product design as well.

Lots of people ask me for advice, and the first thing I always tell them is to change the first sentence a user sees on the homepage from "Abstract technologies to help people live better." to "We make a database with a Wiki UI."

This sort of thing fascinates me because the people I talk with who are clear and concise in the beginning are the same people who tend to succeed in the end. It is an amazingly good litmus test for finding good entrepreneurs.
Source code from Apollo 11 open-sourced
I would flip the 'idea guy' & 'dev guy' percentages at least. An idea without development/execution is worth ~nothing, wheras the development of a good idea is valuable.
Find the sucessful company that is closest to what you have in mind & see how they did it. Good luck!
Halting State, by Charles Stross, great for computer geeks
Scott, I posted a longer response at http://www.ontechnologycontracts.com/2009/07/five-potential-...
The Road To Gandolfo by Robert Ludlum
Ice- T Freestyle At Roc The Bells & Hatin' on the Internet | Hip Hop MVP
Thank you everyone. This thread is the best internet discussion experience I have had in a long time. :-)
Hey thats a good use of bigram probabilities :) Try reading in loads of text (Indian blogs if you want, but wikipedia would be more accessible) to build bigram probabilities, this way you can totally remove dependency on google suggest (and things people do not search for that often). I can help if you want :)
Short answer: Yes.

Throw me into a fresh install propagated with dummy data for a fake company. Make starting the demo a one click operation. When getting people to try things, you really need as few barriers to entry as possible.

What I'm suggesting comes from the same school of thought that motivates Wikipedia to allow edits without signing in, or StackOverflow to allow questions without an associated account.

See Twiddla's sandbox http://www.twiddla.com/ for an example of what I mean.
Heyzap founder story: Q1-Q2 2009
Dasher has a variety of options for how to drive it. Most of them are pretty forgiving of unsteadiness, and can type multiple letters per gesture. It isn't that great but some people with movement problems do use it, I think. (I typed this comment entirely in Dasher but I don't have any movement problems myself.)
The first things I noticed when browsing this code is the quality and quantity of the comments.

I sometimes wish that low percentages of comments would generate a fatal error!
I now no longer even read the title when I see a "steveblank.com" url - I just click it, because I _know_ it's going to be good, and just overflowing with honest-to-goodness Wisdom (with a capital W). Not sure if Steve reads here, but I want to put my thanks out there for each of his postings.

I have to say I sometimes feel guilt when I'm not working on my start-up. I know how long the to-do list is, but however much time I do put in, I also know that sometimes I just need to take an entire 2-day weekend off, and not think about it. I'm pretty sure the benefits I get from the break outweigh the "lost" time I wasn't working.... but I still feel the guilt sometimes.
trigrams probably work even better, two words preceding gives a lot more certainty about the third.
The Fundamentals and Flaws of Elementary Education
thx.
Not wisdom, just old.
This could actually go well with the CrunchPad.
Now the rest of us can see what bugfree code looks like.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html?page=...
Sorry! A major lesson I learned from this exercise is how painful it is to package an app for many different platforms/setups.

Thanks to everyone who got it running - it's really cool to watch the results pouring in.
Just to be clear, I never claimed it got a 0 :)
Ah, but in higher-level languages comments are bugs.
Electronic medical records are a lot more complicated than getting data in/out of a system. You also need alerts for new data, query mechanisms, prescription writing, ordering, trending, etc. All all of that functionality needs to be available through a fast and usable UI. None of that is impossible, there are a lot of EMR / EHR products, but building everything and getting all the details right is a huge development effort.

Then if you want to share data across multiple organizations it's an even higher level of complexity. Industry organizations like HL7, HITSP, IHE, and CCHIT are doing good work to decrease interoperability costs. But we're still far from being able to build plug-and-play systems across the whole industry. The US has no central registry of healthcare provider organizations, so in general if you need data on a particular patient you won't even know who to query. And to even be allowed to electronically connect to another organization you need to have a legal contract in place first, either directly or through an umbrella organization.

The good-old-boys network isn't (much) of a problem in healthcare informatics. The real problems are irreducible complexity and legal / political issues.
Commenting _too_ much can degrade the quality of code. Be smart when commenting.
Oh right, just someone I was following pointed to it and said it was. My bad :) (Well theirs, I guess.. :P)
> I cannot even think of a single instance off the top of my head where applying buxfixes on a Debian Stable box has caused any problems at all.

Well, a certain commented-out line in OpenSSL comes to mind :-)

But seriously, I refuse to run anything other than Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, or a stable BSD tree on my home systems. I rely on my desktop more than I rely on any given server, so why would I put something less stable on it?
I dream of my major worry being how obsolete my users' Linux distributions are. I still have users running on Solaris 7 for god's sake.
can they really say it makes sense for the vendor to spend time and money testing and supporting a platform that barely anyone uses?

There's a huge gulf between "we don't support Opera" and "no version of Opera is allowed to even try to render our pages."
Would you be willing to write up the stats of your experiment once the challenge is over? I'd be really interested to know how much compute power you were able to harvest and what was the rate of compute acquisition.

Terrific idea and implementation. I have 10 tabs on Chrome.
Good luck.
Imitateinformate.com
So let me get this straight--if you make it through the gauntlet of rather arbitrary, hype-driven judgements, you get a whopping $10k and you have to move to the Bay, which has among the highest real estate and cost of living in the country?

How is this not a complete waste of time since it's so exploitive of developers? Oh, that's right, being part of the startup-hype bubble machine entitles you to a magic wand that allows you to step beyond economic reality. Wave the wand, voila! we're so awesome, we're the next Google, we might as well print our own money!

If you're a good developer, you'd probably do better soliciting micro-loans through paypal and Prosper. I suspect any developer who has another option takes it. I myself have several modest software ideas I've been kicking around for two years that might have a small chance for making a good startup. But being paid a subsistence wage, even as an alpha-stage startup, is worse than just keeping the ol'day job and pushing the prototypes as a hobby. Y-Combinator seems to be more for high school and college kids along the lines of Google's annual summer of code.
No, I publish blogs in a number of niches. But that's my bio.
Yes, that's what I got too for the binary equivalent of the sha1'd challenge phrase.
Oh, I only submitted it because I was laughing my ass off at the idea such a thing even existed! :) So I'm going with option 4: creepily funny.
Some Emacs Key Combinations - Easy Reference
This could be like a more extreme version of pre-orders: fully-paid pre-orders paid directly to the developers before development begins, with the potential for there to eventually be no product. Who wants to bet on Duke Nukem Forever? Maybe an agreed-upon fraction instead of the full amount. I'd pay $20 now for a chance for DNF to come into existence later so I can pay the other $30 NPV of it or however much (if I thought I would be a PC gamer by then).
This is awesome! Congrats... seriously well done.
I suppose we could if this was the code for the shuttle. But it's not.
We've talked about "software engineering" before. This is it.

From mixmax's fastcompany link: "Ted Keller, the senior technical manager of the on-board shuttle group, flies to Florida where he signs a document certifying that the software will not endanger the shuttle". That's what's required for real engineering in the end: an engineer to sign off on the plans and to take responsibility if the product fails and people die.

This is alien to most software development, where "software engineering" is, at best, a useful metaphor. This is real software engineering.
Programming language puzzles (2006)