skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A tablet will simply never replace the Kindle and other readers like it such as thins article suggests. One of the most important feature of the Kindle is that it uses E-Ink! It holds a particular screen and only uses charge to change the text when a "page flip" occurs. A tablet will not come remotely close to matching this kind of machine in battery life or readability (since e-ink is less harsh on the eyes than an lcd).

I think people comparing the Kindle to the mysterious Apple Tablet is getting out of control. If Amazon would just lower the crazy price tag on the kindle it would spread like wild fire.....

I am anxious to see what apple does with tablet tech though. I own a tablet already and if apple can make a better one for cheaper I would consider switching.
Finally, some honesty from open-source hackers.

(I kid because I love)
Has anyone actually done one of these?

Yep, although I don't think I could comfortably describe it as a fun little sideline these days.

See http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats and look at the historical sales data: back in early 2007 when it was selling high three figures a month I think it would have been a fairly decent example of this.

Tim Ferriss would not be my first suggestion for who to look for for advice on how to accomplish this. I think he sells "You can avoid doing actual work!!!" when the real lesson is "You can do actual work very, very efficiently these days if you're prepared to spend significant amounts of time and mental effort laying the groundwork for it."

Incidentally, the amount of time you spend on "manufacturing the product" is rounding error next to the amount of time you will spend on this project. 90% of the value happens outside your IDE.
Read "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "The Third Chimpanzee" by Jared Diamond. He talks a lot about the rise of agriculture.

When we look at how the average lifespan is increasing, we're only looking at the lifespan since the start of civilization as we know it - allowed by agriculture. It's possible that our quality of life is only now catching up to what our hunter-gathered ancestors had.
Female friend of mine followed Mashable because she thought the avatar was cute.
Just like how everyone on the Internet uses PGP, right? Oh wait...
I like it. A lot of buzz is going on with being able to share answers to common questions. (twitter: what are you doing? facebook: who are you? Loopt: Where are you?) This also goes along with stuff like the epic fail blog, or fml blog.

Maybe this could be used to stream epic fail blog as a screen saver?

Anyways, cool post
It is also a testament to the benefits of federalism. The southern states are by far the ones that have exercised any autonomy at all (by instituting very different policies that those endorsed by the central governments). The regionalism of the south has often been made fun of, but it may not be the problem, but in fact, the solution.
Credit cards / payment management.

I hate that I cannot lock/unlock my credit card (online wire transfers, checks or other payment methods) at will, with a simple click of my mouse.

I'd really like being able to choose when my credit card can be used, maybe using rules like: "only on weekends, between 11am and 7pm. never online.". Then if these rules are not met, no payment should be authorized. Alternatively, I should be able to have more lax rules like: (all the above) "And only with automatic phone confirmation on weekdays between 12pm and 2pm". Then if I needed to pay for lunch, I could do so with my credit card, but authorization would be granted only after I got an automatic call with a recording asking me to confirm payment and maybe enter a pin number.
"Results 1 - 10 of about 22,000,000 for mother's rights. (0.23 seconds)."
Hmm... it seems that you're wrong about that. And the number of websites listed in Google is a poor measure of something's worth. After all, there are 2,810,000 results for "obama citizenship" even though that issue has already been settled.

Also look up alien abduction, underpants gnomes, and other urban legends.

I don't claim that courts in the past favored mothers, but in the present, there is no gender bias under the law.
Great, looks like BPC will win in the end. Well deserved!
This was the sort of thing I used to say before I realized that the crypto-anarchist manifesto was written in 1992 and none of the stuff it predicted has happened.
That would include all https traffic
I can still access 4chan even though I have AT&T as ISP provider. Why?
All yours - go for it. I already have enough things to work on that I think are far better ideas!
The company seems to be trying a combination of a few open source business models:

http://www.tersus.com/#Id=18

Nothing wrong with this, but I'm skeptical. It's my understanding that companies like RedHat (and JBoss specifically) obtain most of their revenue from support contracts, training and consulting for large IT groups. And, it's usually a back-door sale -- developers start using JBoss, it's well-liked, and then management buys support. How will Tersus get its foot in the door? It doesn't seem that people who would consider using it would be knowledgeable enough to seek out such a system. Wufoo likely gets back-door sales from non-IT parts of large organizations, and it markets itself in a "solutions" sort of way ("You can do surveys!"). It seems that Tersus walks in a no-man's land where its not sufficiently friendly to attract Wufoo-like users, and its not sophisticated enough to be chosen by a developer for a project. Who's their target customer?
Mashable gets a lot of traffic from Google. Mashable is on the front page for a search for Facebook or Myspace.
Definitely agree. The font itself looks out of focus and starts giving me a headache if I stare at it too long but the idea itself was genius.
how did you end up working on this project?

are you a freelance software engineer? do you generally work on creative projects like these?
This is fantastic. I'd heard of cutting a hole in the wall for this purpose, but I'd never considered using a doorway, which is both less permanent and more attractive.

It's brilliantly simple. The best kind of brilliance.
Perhaps my age is showing, but I wonder why anyone would want such a thing in his home. The instructables site is quite annoying, btw. Lots of ads and really poor design.
Executive Summary: "Hi, I'm George. My dad works in the whitehouse. Let me show you around."
"...spotted the "Cygnus Bubble" while recording images of the region on 6 July 2008."

Why are they running the story today?
Are you worried that because it didn't take long to create (and presumably has a small barrier to entry), that an influx of competitors will appear?
I know you are busy but could you add weaksauce?
I diagree with your claim.

If you have a situation where the number of engineers is doubling every few years, it is no surprise that the average quality would decline; it will start going up when the total output of engineers stabilizes again.

On the other hand, note that the state of Tamil Nadu used to produce only 2,000 engineers a year; if you look at the top 2,000 engineers graduating out of Tamil Nadu today, I'm sure you'll find that they kick ass compared to the past. I don't have data; but I think the onus is on you to produce evidence for your claim that the quality is declining every year :-)
Yes, because that's what a liquidation preference is.

You get your full investment back in a liquidation event before common stock gets paid off.

To illustrate, if LSVP was the only investor in Ning (which it isn't) at a $15MM on $750MM, then if the company gets sold for just $15MM, LSVP would still get $15MM back, and nobody else would get anything.
Apple legal is behind this. Someone on 4chan made fun of Apple. Apple then called ATT and threatened to take away their iPhones.
Reading some of the threads, people are suggesting that they go out and cut AT&T fiber (hopefully people are too lazy to do this).

But in all seriousness, if this does turn out to be an attempt at filtering, does anyone have recommendations on things that could be done by non-AT&T customers to help convince AT&T that this is a bad idea?
I read an article once about a company that invented a "rotary subwoofer" (link below, if you want to see it) that actually uses your entire attic as a baffle. It seems that because they don't use a cone, they can actually get down to something like 1-3Hz...though I'd think you'd feel that more than you'd hear it.

http://www.rotarywoofer.com/
rscott,

Thank you for the honest feedback.

I do go technical sometimes, but I actually write my pieces so that everyone can understand. I will remember this comment though and try to do a better job of bringing new insights to my writing.

- Ben
when people say 4chan, they don't mean 4chan the company, they mean the thousands of people with skills to make your life a living hell.
Sure, it's an online app for the medical market.
When searching around, the sites you find that exist for helping out dads are substantial. Real hardship, current stories, and dealing with the grief of having your kids taken away by a woman who has gotten tired of being married.

When divorce happens, that's when you see what people are really made of. Some women will take custody just to hurt dad.

Anyway, I hope you're right about the lessening of gender bias. I'd love to see data. No idea where I'd find such data though.
Yeah just don't want unneeded attention. Hopefully in the future I'll have more non-technical competitive barriers.
Latest theory seems to be that AT&T is doing this because there is constant on-going DDoS of img.4chan.org via AT&T's network. If this is true, then AT&T is presumably implementing a temporary block to help 4chan.org avoid this DDoS (and save itself from the flood of DDoS traffic).

(Citing the ongoing discussion in /x/ here: http://zip.4chan.org/x/res/2338751.html#2339847 and this thread on DSLReports: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22770292-)
For anyone that wants to get a real subwoofer (one that extends to 20 hertz), I would recommend http://www.hsuresearch.com/. I would also recommend his satellite speaker system, it's basically the anti-Bose.
I think people are overly concerned about competitors.

At least two people now have read my blog and set up their own businesses. One of them practically Xeroxed my business, and his I-can't-believe-its-not-me is fairly decent. I always joke that since my sales have doubled since then all I need is to recruit two more people who understand copy/paste and then I can retire. (The numbers in the joke are way out of date.)

Similarly, I was myself a new upstart competitor to the established market participants back in 2006, and I haven't killed them, either. (The idea is not to pick a market with no competitition -- that is a red flag there is no money to be made. Instead, pick a market where there is an addressable niche for whom the existing choices are painfully inadequate. Then, sell pain relief.)
Submitter: It's a bad idea to link to a 4chan thread for this story, which are by their nature extremely transitory. Your link is already 404'd.
One of the best "overview" pages I've seen for a web service
Going in I definitely thought this was going to be about lookbook.nu - I was wrong it's about http://www.polyvore.com/
You're saying this is the end of civilization?
I don't doubt that you can say "in the last 40 years" and you will still be right...
Gah, even your comments are boring.
I run the Bedbug Registry (http://bedbugregistry.com), which covers about half my living expenses. Every six months or so I put in a week's work on it; otherwise it's just a matter of site babysitting (irate landlords, requests to rescind a report), which takes no more than an hour a week.

Getting the site to this point took about two years, so I would counsel patience and perserverance. It also helps to really care about the project, even if you don't spend much time on it.

And it especially helps when your business partners are relentless insects who spread very efficiently and feast on the blood of people's sleeping children.
My honesty didn't require my wit.
Wow. Thanks for the data point(s)! Your web site cum stats page has got to be the most useful information I have ever seen or heard of, for the small, hacker entrepreneur.

Of particular interest to me is that the price for your program is $29.95. Being a software guy who never buys anything except necessities, books, and meals out, I have a hard time imagining myself in the place of a buyer. The reality, of course, is that for some people, $29.95 for the bingo-card creator is a good deal, and you found them.
I'm on AT&T and it seems to work fine.
That blog is a right old riot. Cheers for the link.
That is, indeed, a simplistic argument. Unfortunately, it has absolutely nothing to do with anything I've said here. I have not -- and would not -- suggest that science is a matter of consensus. The IPCC is relevant only in that it acts as an excellent, public summary of the scientific knowledge on global warming. It's a review article, not a popularity contest.

Your comment is only interesting in that you have, once again, used a favorite rhetorical tool of the pseudo-scientific debater: a faulty redefinition of "science". By your standards, a scientific experiment must:

"Given fixed inputs, produce a testable, repeatable output."

which is supposed to imply that global warming can't be science, since we can't predict the weather next Wednesday, let alone a random Wednesday in 2030.

Unfortunately, while this line of faulty reasoning is superficially appealing to those untrained in scientific thinking, this definition excludes 99.9% of all scientific research done today. We can't evolve a complex organism in the lab -- yet we know that it happens in nature. We can't grow a human in a dish -- yet we've been able to do a huge amount of research into human embryonic development. We can't do repeatable experiments with nearly any human genetic disease -- yet here we are, making measurable scientific progress year over year in nearly every field that touches human genetic medicine.

A scientific theory needs to produce a testable hypothesis, nothing more. The experiment doesn't have to be practical on any particular time-frame. And since you've (rather conveniently) provided a experiment for any theory related to global warming, you've refuted your own straw-man attack. Global warming theory is quite obviously within the domain of "science". It is patently absurd to suggest otherwise.
Machines have a lot of disadvantages that aren't readily apparent. Machines have to build collection systems or mine energy sources to thrive. We live on stuff that grows out of dirt-- that's pretty handy.

Of course, machines could become more and more advanced if they didn't go extinct in those first pivotal years, but I think it'd be to the end of looking organic. And if you're going to life out of something, make sure it's low on the periodic table. We're carbon-based because that's what works.
I like this. It's a chance to be creative in an easy, shared way.

An observation: Many of the posts are very poor, but some are wonderful. It would be nice if there was a way so the good ones would get more prominence. They seem to be drowning in the lame ones.
Mashable plays the SEO game really well, they threw out tons of HOWTOs and "best of" articles when they first started. If you search for "download youtube videos" it's within the top 5 search results. TechCrunch played the same game for awhile but corporate drama is really just a much juicier topic to write about.

However, I've always found that if you want real startup news CenterNetworks still covers that. If you want general tech and media news Business Insider does a pretty good job, though they're heavily reliant on the Top 10 list format. GigaOm, when Om Malik writes his punditry, is pretty on the spot but the focus is broadband and communications than startups. I like ReadWriteWeb too. Point is: get your news and analysis from as many diverse places as possible.
I wouldn't want it in my home. However, pointing out the front door of a nearly-finished construction site/abandoned building...
Expanding on this is the concept of panspermia, life spreading across worlds on its own. For all we know, the building blocks of life could be older than the Earth itself. So, aside from playing by the same rules, different forms of life on different planets could actually have the same ancestors.
> DNA and RNA are self replicators that, to the best of our knowledge, arose independently

Citation needed.
I remember seeing Polyvore when they first launched, then TechCrunch covered it (http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/11/polyvore-to-tempt-fasio...), and I definitely thought it was going to be a major hit amongst the played-with-Barbie-but-grown-up crowd. Even then, it took almost 2 years to get a NYT item.
Lucky for you.
I plan for the entire history of human civilization to be less than 1% of my lifespan.
And they got tons of traffic for topical/viral posts like the one about tracking swine flu: http://mashable.com/2009/04/25/track-swine-flu It was all over twitter and social networks.
Sorry if this is a long answer ;)

I work primarily as a software artist and teacher, and we (as in the folks who work on openframeworks) sometimes we do commercial projects / freelance work. Because of the nature of what we do (computer vision, interaction design, realtime software) we get invited to work on very diverse projects.

For this particular project, Theo, who is part of the OF team, had already been working on something IQ related with the advertising company Happiness Brussels, which was postponed because of the economy. When they thought of this project, they contacted Theo, who put them in touch with me as I happened to be in Brussels teaching a workshop and thought this would be fun to help with. Everything clicked from there.

If it's helpful, here are some links to other projects (so you can see what kind of stuff I work on):

http://vimeo.com/4706049 / http://vimeo.com/4732884 / http://vimeo.com/2892576 / http://vimeo.com/2375069

and I'm currently working on a project covered a few days ago on hacker news ;)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720146
How To Steal From Your Competitors Using Twitter
I'm not sure. Probably the relatively obscure nature of the task and the manufacturers' relatively short design-life cycles discourage any sort of heroics.
wow, I need partners like that! So far I've only gotten sloths who cannot even digest without sitting in the sun.
I experimented with lucid dreaming a few years ago, and did it for many times. I saw myself in mirrors and also in my own image of I myself sleeping somewhere. My own image was always wrong in some way, and the memories of some of those images are still completely creepy many years after the dreaming happened (I still have goose bumps for the memory of the image of one of these specific dreams... quite crazy really since it wasn't a very bad image that you wouldn't see in a bad horror movie for example).
Agreed. I only watched it for a minute or two, but I did see a couple that made me think, "Whoa, maybe everyone on the Internet isn't that stupid..." ;)
Interesting- Mashable's #1 keyword isn't "Mashable"- it's "YouTube". Mashable is on page one of the search for YouTube, which gets... (looking up) 618 MILLION searches per month globally (source: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal ).
Didn't seem that bad to me. Sarcasm?
I didn't say that we should all die young, but instead that aiming relentlessly to extend the quantity of life misses the qualities that make it worth living, including hope and the stunning curiosity that comes with youth.

There's beauty that no matter how burdened an individual is by experience, they will die and the next generation will get to try again, hopefully without too much of the negative baggage passed on.
Some people argue that significant evolution has occurred within the human species after the civilisation started, most likely in response to the changing selective pressures brought on by civilisation itself. The book 'The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution' makes this case.
Oh, well then I can be optimistic. Thanks.
I created one of these. My company used to actively develop for a particular market. Today we no longer develop for this market, but it's a big market and the large players have affiliate programs. We utilize these affiliate programs--they provide XML feeds and the like, and our site's backend combines them together and figures out the overlap--to run our own site in the space. The market players are quite competitive, and feud over exclusive product distribution, so ironically I think we actually have the largest inventory of any single non-affiliate site.

It took about two months of my time to do the original website, much of it spent on SEO optimization and traffic generation strategies. Today we earn ~$8k/month on the site with an upkeep of ~30 minutes/week.

This worked primarily because of deep knowledge of the market (from back when we were developing this kind of software). I don't think an outsider would have been able to predict hit products far enough out to lay the proper groundwork for SEO/etc. When I was actively creating the site site you could search for "Product X" on launch day and we'd be #1 or #2.

Note: I also launched the site on our company's domain name, taking advantage of our existing inbound links. SEO from scratch will take a year or more to really see predictable traffic levels.

So, yeah, it's definitely possible to create a cash flow muse; I think I could build another one today in around the same amount of time.

It would be hard to do from a totally cold start, though; I'm not sure you could say "you know what, I'm going to make money by creating a local real estate website", or whatever random topic, and actually make it happen. But if you had friends/family in the real estate business, or somehow had accrued expert knowledge in the area, you'd be off to a strong start. If you're smart about the area you pursue you should be alright...
I've watched this for 5 minutes and almost all of it were nonsensical or pointless.

Edit--at minute 6 it's pretty clear 4chan, or some lesser forum, got their hands on it.
Interesting. My submission: Where there's a will, there's a way... but not for you.

Other notable posts:

- hacker news will downmod you - anonymous

- will '\ drop table you - anonymous

- lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you - finally get it

Note that the author space is used to complete the sentence.

Note: If you want to help the better posts a bkovitz says, go to http://littlegreatideas.com/willyou/index.php?action=history and mark the junk ones. I'm not positive, but I think it will remove them from the cycle.
I don't understand what is difficult about regular expressions. Yes they are cryptic, but they are very straight forward when you understand the syntax. At work I have become the goto guy for all things regular expression related. The developers that ask me for Regex help are not junior programmers either. Maybe the cryptic nature of regex just turns people off or scares them.
2845 ways to spin the Risk | Understanding Uncertainty
Reminds me of the abc documentary "Live to be 150... can you do it?" where the profile several centenarians. They look in surprisingly good shape considering they are over 100 years old. See http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Longevity/Story?id=4559263&...
Has anybody tried coding in something other than C or asm for avr? There are some lisps that generate C code that might work (like gambit scheme), but I haven't heard of anybody trying them.
I would also look at http://code.google.com/p/cocos2d-iphone/
The tide is changing