skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Claytronics or Gershenfeld: Why You’ll Be Able to Make Almost Anything
The thing that drives me crazy about Emacs regexes (which I use nearly every day) is how their escaping behavior is opposite to everybody else's.
Virtual Currency Boosted By Ad Sponsorship: Super Rewards Close to $50 Million
At least one person has already tried: http://wrongtomorrow.com/

It needs a design overhaul, but it's an interesting proof of concept.
From everything I've read, it seems there is debate on exactly how to describe/explain what generates lift. Most of the explanations are correct, but insufficient by themselves.
Due to intricacies of the NYC tenure structure, Stuyvesant doesn't even have particularly good teachers -- they get many teacher who are essentially retiring and want students who will teach themselves. It hasn't prevented the school from providing and excellent education, though, but most of it comes from the advanced peer group.
Update: Final Netflix Prize Leaderboard
Fascinating indeed. On top of that, it would really help leverage the 140 character limit if some sort of re-usability was introduced. I was wondering about the same thing and i even coined the term "social programming" for that a few days back while brainstorming with my friend.
Talk about a photo finish... of course, nothing is decided yet, it will depend on the performance on the final test. I think its possible that one of the team overfitted by submitting tests every day and adjusting accordingly; it might perform worse on the final test for this reason.

We'll see! Very exciting!
It’s hard to give a definitive explanation for this trend, but among the reasons are a decline in innovation in the aftermath of the tech boom, leading to fewer new businesses...

Was this just a decline in tech innovation? I wonder how much tech companies contribute to overall workforce numbers (in addition to IT departments of non-tech companies, I suppose). Also, was there really a decline in innovation, or just a decline in eagerness to start a business based on such innovation?
It's call a REPL and any decent programming language has one. Instead of creating a project; a new directory, a build script, manifest file, etc. all you have to do is type an expression at the repl and have it evaluated immediately.

You couldn't "tweet" code because tweeting has a longer response latency than a REPL; you're waiting for a human twiteratus douchebag to write back or acknowledge your existence. But the repl makes up her mind in an instant, so you're hooked in a far more enjoyable, not to mention far more enlightening dialog than you could ever have on twitter.

Try it:

telnet prompt.franz.com 23

(look, an odd-ball question deserves and odd-ball answer, alright)
The reason I didn't believe the curved-upper-surface explanation as a kid was that meant that the volume of low-pressure air would have to be similar to the volume of a blimp for it to be useful for lifting the plane, even if it were as efficient as hydrogen; the wings would have to be many times the size of the fuselage.
See what apps were built in a day
I very much doubt it. I see a limited market for this type of device.

Too expensive for the netbook market.
Too big and redundant for the iPhone market.
Too slow & limited for the MacBook Pro market.

So who buys it? PMP fanatics? Tablet fanatics? There's probably a healthy niche market there (ala Macbook Air) but not enough consumers to be a flagship product. All bets are off if Apple releases it at a much lower price point than rumored. A subsidized offering might play but only if Apple can work with carriers who offer reasonable data-only prices.
Given the failure of risk models in this situation, it's not surprising that unemployment models are not that accurate either.
Typeface by Toyota. The iQ font Designed By A Moving Car.
Developers put out some awesome apps yesterday! Check out what could be done in a single day. We had 10 applicants for this spontaneous event, and 4 teams came together and put together some pretty solid products. From what I can tell, the applicants were all from our Hacker News community.

Big thanks to Chatterous for fixing up our room, Wufoo for the forms that helped keep everything in line and organized, Posterous for the sweet blog platform to help post our announcements, and all the other support we got from the community. All the participants could not have done it without you!

All the teams will add comments about their story in the blog post. So please leave us some feedback here.
bjelkeman, please. :)
Or, you build them online with this neat Javascript-based tool:

http://www.gskinner.com/RegExr/
May I be added too please?

alanthony
M-x alter-expectations ;-)
I don't believe you will be happy with the results of any contracting situation. For instance, what you've described is a moving target. As soon as you change something that affects the server side API, you will need to rework the bits on the iPhone app. The contract dev will need to be re-engaged to fix that for you. Your question contains hints that you're vastly underestimating the scope: maybe blackberry, just some sync, caching, how hard is it to upload a photo, etc. You're ripe for being taken for an expensive ride by someone who isn't that good.

If you have less than $10K to spend you're better off investing in a macbook, some books and sending yourself or one of your in-house developers to an iPhone training course. I've not taken the iPhone version, but I took a Cocoa course at the Big Nerd Ranch and it was one of the better educational experiences I've ever had.

Another approach would be to hire an intern for three months to work on this project. A student with little professional experience would love the chance to get paid to learn iPhone development and end up with a real app to show for it. It's a win-win for you and the student.
What counts as a living form? The definition of life is based entirely on scientific observations of what we currently perceive. Does a virus have a soul? Why or why not? (If you say it doesn't because it's not alive, what are your criteria for life? Science's?)

Remember that it is only a belief of yours' that the soul is at the heart of life. What if an entirely inorganic machine was one day created that could:

1. Maintain its internal state (homeostasis).

2. Harvest and utilize energy (metabolism). Very recently robots have been created that can digest organic matter and convert it to usable energy.

3. Manufacture add-ons for itself (growth).

4. Sense its environment and change behavior accordingly (response to stimuli).

5. Manufacture smaller versions of itself by harvesting and creating the needed materials and assembling them (reproduction).

6. Contain a code that can be modified and that governs its behavior, so that imperfect code can be weeded out or changed to improve (adaptation).

And this machine would be completely autonomous. It wouldn't even need much intelligence since all it essentially does is maintain itself, respond in pre-programmed ways to the environment, and create more of itself. How is this different from life other than it doesn't use life's materials? Would it have a soul?
Wow, that is great. Definitely check this out guys
It's such a tiny country. We must know each other!
For a while, I wanted as an exercise to build a minimum viable product (http://venturehacks.com/articles/minimum-viable-product) very quickly. I also wanted to round out my web development experience, and take a project from start to completion (at least, deployed). So I participated in this event.

The day of the event, there were a handle of people on the channel who had no idea what to work on but wanted to hack something.
I was amazed to find a fellow who wanted to work with me, without knowing really anything about each other.
We just sat and coded for the entire day. I have no idea where he even lives or what he looks like.

But our work dynamic was great. We rarely stepped on each other's toes, we covered each others weaknesses, and we didn't have any arguments.
In sum total, we sat and developed an MVP and deployed it:

http://doubleblind.at

The goal is to see if enough people like to take this quiz and give us their email address, so we can get enough data to do interesting NLP and ML and bootstrap a collaborative filtering system.

We literally spent the first 6 hours (1/3rd of our entire effort) trying to get Twitter-Django-Oauth working, because we were convinced it was crucial. Instead, we should have considered alternatives (e.g. Friendfeed) earlier.

The organizers, who do browseology.com, created a new URL shortening service http://kiw.is. It shortens your URL and it gives your reader a 10 second personalized message before delivering the final link to them. Cute idea, right? But it might not get any attention if it was released on its own. So co-announcing this microapp as part of a one day app event---especially if only one or two things get built and deployed---will get them more attention than it would otherwise.

Lessons learned:

1. Django deployment isn't that difficult.

2. If you want to find a collaborator who will actually build stuff (instead of just talking about building stuff), participate in a one-day-app event. It automatically disqualifies people who cannot or will not actually make the time to hack. It's also a good way to determine quickly whether you and someone can work together effectively.

3. Any time you feel that something is 100% (or very) necessary it for your success, that should be a red flag. Examine this assumption before investing too heavily into it.

4. Twitter-OAuth-Django integration is a PITA, and cost us several hours. Conversely, simple authentication with Friendfeed was a breeze.

5. If you want to promote a microapp, organize a hackday and roll your announcement into the overall press release.

I am also discussing this event in the Eric Ries's lean-startup-circle group (http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle/browse_th...), if you are interested.
gmail meets twitter meets gtalk meets wiki meets pingback - with a twist that you can have web pages a client to wave so you can show there your feeds too and that typing can be seen real time on the other, recipient, side. Oh and add to that that there can be multiple participants. Participants can be robots too, and you can mash up all of that into multiuser game kind of experiences.
It's amazing how all-over the place these comments are on frameworks! Maybe it's because frameworks vary so much in their goals, weight and architecture.

There are really 2 kinds of performance; latency and throughput. Latency is how fast a single request is served; throughput how many requests you can serve concurrently. A good framework has a noticeable but negligible effect on latency (which also goes down all the time as the framework improves and hardware gets faster), yet also makes scalability easier by helping you abstract out the parts that make it scalable. If the framework you're using makes it hard to scale horizontally, that's a failure of that framework, not of the concept of frameworks.

I also disagree on the size of web sites that frameworks are useful on. I see a lot of comments like "ok for small/medium sites but bad for large sites". Why would frameworks suddenly get bad on a large site? For performance reasons? Architectural reasons? If either of these happen to you then you've simply chosen the wrong framework.

The argument that "an organizational system and set of useful libraries for programming web-related tasks" all of the sudden stop working once a site reaches a certain size is bogus. It might be true for a framework, but it won't be true for all of them.

I ended up writing a php framework (http://phocoa.com) in order to write less code. Frameworks give you leverage. They only box you in or cause scalability problems if they're architected poorly. I have really enjoyed the experience of building a framework as well as using it. I have been writing web apps, mobile apps, and desktop apps of all kinds for nearly 15 years and so I have had broad exposure to a variety of development stacks, from nothing to rich frameworks. Of course it's just my personal opinion, but in my experience a well-written framework is always better than doing it yourself, and a poorly-written one is almost always worse than doing it yourself.
I'm biased, but I like mine better:

http://regex.powertoy.org
The most common sentence an iPhone developer hears is "It's not that hard to do, it's just..." It may not be extremely complicated but it is time consuming. Small features sometimes require large amounts of code and with code comes testing, lots and lots of testing.

There is also basic economics at work here. The supply of iPhone developers does not fill the demand and therefore the price of iPhone devs goes up. You can go overseas and get something built for $500 but if you do that, I'm warning you, it will not turn out well.

The simple facts are if you aren't willing to invest the required amount of money in an iPhone app, is it really worth it to have it in the end?
Apps in the app store and apps downloaded are two very different things, and that article doesn't cover the latter.
same here, add me: keyframe
24h Business Camp - 90 people, 52 startups, 24 hours
You are exactly correct and very few people understand this.
Amazing that you had the exact same reaction I did! He manages to make a talk on Feynman about Rule 30 and Mathematica. He even closes with a thought about how Feynman said such nice things about him. I mean, really? Wolfram's a smart guy, but he seems to have security issues or something.
For radically different worked efficiencies to account for a different unemployment numbers, something about the distribution of worker efficiencies has to have changed since the last recession. But workers have always had different levels of productivity and efficiency, and in hard times the less efficient are more likely to be out of work.

As work becomes more skilled, the differences between the average and best workers tend to increase, but the amount by which work has become more skilled and technical between the last two recessions, and say the 2d and 3d last recessions, does not seem to be revolutionary. The mathematical relationship the article notes did not have to be gradually adjusted as the workforce became more technical over the last 60 years; rather, it held until it suddenly broke now (if you believe the article).

An alternate explanation, would be that 1) economists and their mouthpieces don't know as much as they pretend, and 2) there is a high liklihood that this is the start of a big depression, not a "really really bad recession", and most businessmen are correctly assessing that liklihood, and rather than expanding their businesses to meet a fantasy future bigger market, they are waiting for the market to shrink to match their business.

Another, less dire reason for these numbers might be a general shift towards more home-based and freelancer type employment; such employment may be undercounted in the economists' numbers.
See micks56 brief explanation above. You're comment is made without knowing or understanding the history behind this decision, one which originated here in the US in the late 1990s and has put Microsoft under Federal oversight even today.
That argument would only apply if Apple was somehow locking Palm out of some data. But they aren't: iTunes writes out an XML file describing its library contents. ($HOME/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml on OS X, probably similar on Windows.) With that data in hand, it's probably easier to sync files over to the Pre with their own software than it is to reverse-engineer the iPod's database format and make syncing work from within iTunes.
Opera 10 and Firefox 3.5 are beta.
This was really fun. I think the time constraint of 1 day allows you to focus on what really matters and how you can be really efficient with productivity.

Constraints are interesting. Twitter = 140 characters, One Day App = 24 hours. What seems like a hindrance turns out to be what makes them popular and engaging. We can show what we can accomplish in 1 day, and it makes the apps featured here that much more impressive.

I know we learned a lot about what can be optimized and where the time sinks really are when making apps that appear to be simple at first glance. There was a pretty lengthy discussion on HN over the past weeks about the perceived ease of building a site like Stack Overflow. Participating in an event like this shows you first hand all the edge cases and details that get in your way when building an app over the course of a weekend (or in this case, 24 hours). There are always things that come up that you don't think of in the planning stages. For me, I always remind myself to use less theory and more action. It's an easy trap to fall into, endlessly planning and trying to figure out everything in your mind. But in my experience it's often better to work through a problem rather than guess at how I would work through it. Sounds like a simple distinction, but it often makes a big difference.

I hope this becomes a recurring event! It was fun to see what we can accomplish in one day.
http://www.netflixprize.com/closed
Weird that you can't make public waves. I guess that's a bug(?)

Anyway my username is jjj
My hunch sides with yours as well, but I think they're discounting the HUGE segment of undocumented day laborers. When I left the U.S. a little over a month ago, we had hispanic day laborers loitering outside grocery stores in midday in northern virginia. Normally you wouldn't see them after 9AM or so.

The "undocumented" workers are undocumented only in government reports, but their impact and contributions are felt throughout.
This is what I use while I'm in China: http://www.witopia.net/welcome.php - Highly recommended given how much China is blocking these days. On other US/European sites that aren't blocked, I often find it is faster on the VPN than it is direct as well. Because I'm generally in Canada I can now also access Hulu.
It was a fun experience to put this event together. It was very spontaneous and casual.

We used kiw.is, a domain I had registered a few weeks ago because it was a fun name, and decided to use it for the web address and name.

We wanted an idea that could have some use to it, and also be done in a day. The technology used was all very simple, robust, secure, and well supported. All those factors made it easy. We thought up making a prestitial kind of page for people to add messages to a link that were completely customizable. Without needing to rely on messages inline with a link, such as twitter, users can now attach messages right before the actual page. Not a new idea in general, but new for this specific application of it.

It's currently in beta invite, and for the Hacker News community we made a few for you guys to try it out:

Beta Invite Code: hackernews09
Indeed! Many, many failed startups have hidden within them a much smaller and more simple idea that could have succeeded, if they'd had the insight and guts to strip away the excess.

Another example is that the earlier generations of bookmarking sites (which included Backflip and HotLinks among others) overlooked the massive-potential of delicious-style tagging and public link-sharing-flows. They were hung up in, among other things, a model of categories/folders/outlines, and explicitly-created interest groups.
Could you please add mikemaccana? Thanks.
It depends. If it's the same box and you can get root from exploiting OpenVPN than nothing. But if you are doing this correct - running OpenVPN on non-critical server that serves as entry point for the rest of the network than you just got yourself extra layer of security. It's like probability that there are two bombs on the plane.

Well, my point is, why anyone would leave SSH open like that on critical server. Don't want to set up whole VPN or using things like port-knocking? Just configure your damn firewall to accept only connections from your IP. Wow, I mean, there's million things I can think of to minimize your risk from single ssh 0-day exploit and I'm not even sys admin.
Still, the U.S. political system allows for such an outlier as Obama[1] to get on the top. It would've been impossible if it was only the issue of getting the most lobbyist beef behind.

[1] Not idealising him here, but his ascent was both extremely untypical and very American at the same time.
Well you mentioned forums and project editing, I naturally assumed there would be some sort of bbcode (or html, or equivalent) for markup. Typing that on an iphone keyboard would be a real PITA.

No, there's no rich text editor of any sort. You've got plain text entry and you can render HTML in Safari. That's it.

Sorry, I don't. I'm "booked", in the sense that I have too many projects of my own to take on any new clients. All the other developers I know are in the same boat. Like I said above, try cold-calling people who have done something similar.
Just tried out doubleblind.at. It's neat! I've also seen quizzes that work under this principle where you attempt to guess what picture/status update is associated with a choice of 4 friends. I like your thumbs up/thumbs down approach and then seeing the final results.
You can't get around the interpreted vs compiles difference (among others) that differentiate Python and C. The discussion is one of code size though, not the other differences.

You can make compact and readable C that looks like other language constructs by writing libraries, to a limit.

My point, if I didn't complete it, is one I've mentioned a few times. Libraries matter more than things like LOC count. And it is a really big difference.

I challenge anyone to write an Arc levenberg marquardt minimization in less than 100 LOC. In Matlab (and other languages with good sets of libraries) it is literally just a parameterized function call.

Maybe I'm just too pragmatic for discussions like this.
Or this one: http://txt2re.com/
That global warming sure is a bitch...
I'm not an expert in the area: my reference is an old copy of the SF Argonaut I found in the doctor's office. There it said that the majority of independently wealthy women in the early days of San Francisco were single or widowed, and the 1850's were the timeline they gave. However, I may have confused it as the point at which married women could enter into business under their own name. I did a little more digging.

The Legislative Act entitled "Act To Authorize Married Women To Transact Business In Their Own Name, As Sole Traders," was passed into law by the California State Legislature on April 12, 1852. California State Printing Office Index to the Laws of California, i850-1920 (Sacramento, 1921).

Subject to some restrictions - only married California women-not single, widowed, or divorced women-were required to publicly declare their commercial intentions and to limit their investment to $5,000 or less. Some argue that such restrictions limited women's personal, financial, and commercial freedom and, as such, underscored their dependent legal status.

In any case, the laws of California were rather advanced compared to the common law, and advanced compared to other states.
Quite simple, really. I keep a very, very small stable of clients (like two), who are solid, reliable, pay me every time I send a bill, follow the contract, understand that when they ask to add a feature it will cost them more, don't micro-manage, accept that I know what I'm doing, and provide me plenty of work.

I'd much rather work slightly below market for clients who are above market in terms of reliability and honesty.

Anecdote: the other day, a client decided now that he had 70% complete project X in front of him, what he really wanted was project Y (I told him this at the beginning). He wrote me an e-mail, saying "You were right, I was wrong, I've done some thinking and I want Y." He then paid me for X, and then paid me to turn it into Y.

Clients like that are hard to come by.
My friend participated. Most people had prepared their work a long time ahead and used these 24 hours to socialize and work on launch marketing since old media reported.
I find txt2re pretty much unusable