skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Build a minimum viable product and go from there:)
http://venturehacks.com/articles/minimum-viable-product

Yes, there are some people that are awesome at thinking of an idea and making the idea a hit. But MOST others build something SMALL, launch, get feedback, address the feedback, rinse, repeat.
The mental mapping is less trivial if they only know windows. Not insurmountable but it is a bit of a curve. Though switching to linux just to learn a computer language is a bit drastic.
I like how it detects rhymes. I've never looked into that but it sounds non-trivial (unless you just have a map).
Worst response ever.

If it's still eligible for deleting you should do that now.

For God's sake man, you're the founder of an education resource!
Empower Your Ruby With Haskell And Hubris
Arnold Schwarzenegger's tour of Twitter HQ
Defying Experts, Rogue Code Lurks in World’s Computers
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How do I rip CD to iPod  MP3 - Rip CD to iPod MP3
No more: How do I rip CD to iPod MP3? Now, bacause DRMBuster CD Ripper can easily rip CD track can convert to iPod MP3, M4P format. DRMBuster CD Ripper is able to rip audio from CD and save them as MP3, AAC(M4P) WMA format for using on different devices.
I would have loved $200K-ish for a seed round. For a startup today the feasible options are $20K from friends & fam or $1M after somehow making a prototype with "traction" over a couple of years. That step function kills a lot of good companies. Once that gets solved the current level of startup activity will seem quaint.

The problem is where the money comes from upstream. The LPs in a fund want huge returns in 5 to 10 years. The work of raising money is so great that VCs do it all at once (hah, that sounds familiar). Then they are locked in.

The YC model is trying very hard to form a conduit of startups up to larger but sub-$1M rounds, but so far no one's figured how to get that tier established. You probably don't want money from podiatrists and i-bankers, but neither does there seem enough talented geek millionaires who want to join in.
Conference Fun
I don't see a lot of "flaws" with Powerpoint because its functionality is very simple.

I would say there are 4 key components to presentation:

1. predetermined agenda/topics for discussion (what people use powerpoint for)

2. ad-hoc discussion (whiteboards are a great tool for this)

3. verbal communication (in-person or phone)

4. non-verbal communication (in person or video)

To beat powerpoint in functionality, just have #1 + (2 and/or 3 and/or 4).

To beat powerpoint in marketshare...?

Also keep in mind that 3 and 4 are largely being met with products like gotomeeting or webex (and others). No one is encompassing all four as far as I know, so there could be something there.
Honestly, that was my problem the during two or so go-rounds ago. I had the first free podcast hosting company some six years ago, and it quickly grew to thousands of podcasters in a matter of months, seizing close to half the world's podcasters at the time.

I wanted to grow it past what I was capable of doing on my own, and I started talking to VCs. They were all trying to get me to write budgets for ten, twenty million. My cost was my time and my server bill. I really had no idea what to do with that much money.

I coulda used $100k-$500k to build out a sales team, hire a few developers, maybe a content manager, and be fully funded for at least two years or so...

.. oddly, I couldn't find anyone who was willing to fund me for a reasonable amount, and there was no way I could justify an insane valuation the tens of millions guys wanted.
Would you say it's more or less drastic than learning emacs? I'm going to go with less drastic.
determining the lowest energy conformation would require trying all possible conformations

I apologize if it seems like I'm arguing over semantics, but from the computer science perspective, solving the protein folding problem (as opposed to approximating it) means finding an algorithm that does give the lowest energy conformation, without (in order for it to be tractable) trying all conformations.

In some formulation of protein folding that is NP-complete, your statement (require[s] trying all possible conformations) is tantamount to P!=NP. So I'm guessing you don't have a proof of that. ;)

I admit that this is weak reasoning, but consider an analogy from computational biology: the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm for finding the optimal global alignment between two sequences. There are exponentially many possible alignments. Through the magic of dynamic programming, Needleman-Wunsch guarantees us the optimal alignment without trying all of them (it works in polynomial time). We can't rule out the possibility that some similarly clever algorithm can do the same for protein folding.

Now, Needleman-Wunsch works with respect to a scoring function that happens to make the problem tractable. In the case of protein folding, we'd have to ensure that the energy function we're optimizing with whatever clever algorithm we come up with is close enough to reality for the results to be useful to biologists.
NASA's social media experiment
Using Ubuntu doesn't always, as Canonical just reuses Debian's crap for a ton of stuff, and if they're nearing a 'release' even everything in testing freezes for fucking forever.

It's much worse with Haskell than any other language I know of -- last I checked there were two broken+old builds of ghc with different names and mutually-exclusive sets of packages that depended on them. On top of that the version of cabal (Haskell's packaging tool) in the repository was so far out of date that you couldn't use it to build anything remotely recent (including useful versions of itself), nor could you use it with anything in Hackage (the central repo).
There is an argument to be made for less restrictive IT rules. As someone who sets the policy for an IT department I tend to allow any of the normal sites on the theory of "people with computers should be trust worthy already and those people have lunch breaks so why not trust them with access to sites like Facebook or Myspace (at least until it's abused)"

But this author is a tool.

First, anyone whose dealt with consumers in general knows that most computer users get themselves into trouble doing benign things. For example, in my experience, most people get malware while searching for pictures on Google. They find the picture they want, click on it and before you know it they're infected. So how trustworthy they are isn't really an issue.

Second he dramatically misunderstands the laws he quotes. On Sarbanes Oxley Gmail IS a violation because S.O. requires the companies themselves to archive all e-mails. So if he leaves and takes his gmail with him than he'll have an archive but the company will be in violation. As for his fiance, the Medical Professional that can't use IM, any IT person in Health Care will tell you IM programs are a HIPAA violation because they allow for encrypted transfer of files and hence represent a risk to medical records (I work for a mental health organization and we have to scan at our firewall for files going out and have protection software to prevent certain files from being copied to flash drives)

I guess what I'm saying is there are certainly IT people who take security too far. But, as this writer proves, there are also users who ask for too much.
Rfs 1
I've been contemplating the journalism problem here at Medill for the past year... as a journalist/social media person. Wondering about ways to do more crowd-sourcing, more branding, more ... interactive tools. Anyone want a writer for their pitches/proposals?
This is exactly what we are going through. The VCs we talk to want to see revenue projections of $50MM+ in 5 years and want a project plan for investment in $MM. All we need is in $150k range and it is extremely difficult to find money in that tier. We have decided to continue boot strapping and stop wasting time for now.
Online Car Accessories and Parts Supplier
U.S. Biofuel Boom Running on Empty
---1. Java itself is terrible. It doesn't have lambdas. Enough said.

technically yes but it can be simulated with interfaces and in line declared classes that implement said interface and then have calling reference to the current classes delegate method. I used to scream and yell about this until someone pointed out that I could accomplish the same result this way. I will be the first to day that it is not pretty but you can accomplish the same result.
Time Warner Cable & Partners to Test TV on the Web
Looks nice, but I have CS3, and i am not going to pay for CS4. So looks like I am going to skip this one.
There's really good books on Data Mining at Borders, and a recent bunch of "collective intelligence" books; the Manning books are excellent, but you have know java; you probably also want to install Weka and R, look at the Python suite (numpy, scipy, matplotlib), tools like that; also look up the ~107 (!) algorithms that Bellkor used for Netflix comp.

http://www.research.att.com/~volinsky/netflix/

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...

http://www.amazon.com/Collective-Intelligence-Action-Satnam-...

http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Intelligent-Web-Haralambos-...
this is described as "the law of crappy people" succinctly in this very old post: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/loudcloud_pr.html
Yeah, we need to ask Google to whitelist Bookworm so that it can do a remote add-from-URL (described in http://labs.oreilly.com/2009/07/new-features-and-bug-fixes-f...). Right now they're blocking it (just like if you tried wget)...
According to this

http://www.pcworld.com/article/170843/adobe_responds_to_snow...

CS3 works fine on Snow Leopard.
It's just to emphasize the fact that he's not the hard-boiled cigarette-smoking 5-oclock-shadow-wearing private-investigator-type you might expect.
In Air, Wi-Fi Gets Ho-Hum Reception
You haven't read the article, eh?

Pogue says: "Techie note: Popular conception has it that the space savings comes from removing all the code required by those earlier chips. But that’s not true, according to Apple. Yes, that code is gone, but new 64-bit code, described below, easily replaces it. No, Apple says that the savings comes from “tightening up the screws,” compressing chunks of the system software and eliminating a huge stash of printer drivers. Now the system downloads printer drivers as needed, on demand."
"Buggy plug-ins (Flash and so on) no longer crash the Safari Web browser; you just get an empty rectangle where they would have appeared."

Yeah they nailed this one...

It's a good article, Leopard seems pretty impressive (half the size, twice the speed etc) but the author is very easily impressed.
Depending on your location, it sounds like the closest thing to what you want is to find a patron or an incubator/accelerator. They aren't that common everywhere, so it's probably just as effective as playing the lottery if you aren't in a tech hotspot.

SiliconANGLE incubates a few startups along those lines (SALabs), and for a time we were looking to align with a larger fund to do that on a more scaled up capacity, but it seems like the establishment VC firms aren't particularly interested in that concept.

Now that I reflect on our past conversations with said parties, I imagine that it's entirely possible that they're highly interested in the idea, but the wheels of their business move so damn slowly that at some point in the next two years one of them will come back and say "let's do it." I'm not holding my breath.
Mr Vembu, sir, you are an inspiration.
> 64-bit software, a geeky term that, for now, pretty much means “faster.”

Ouch.

In general there's way too much fanboyishness in this article. I mean, seriously, it closes on a note of, "You can't see any improvements so JUST IMAGINE how much they've done under the hood!"
Camper bike
I don't think the lambda and closure support was intended to mesh so succinctly object oriented features of php. You have to realize php is a multi-paradigm language and proceed accordingly. You can honestly implement your own oo system using arrays and anon functions/closures if you would like (much like perl). The only thing making it a little fugly/brutal is the HORRIBLE php "array(" syntax.
YellowBird Camera Records Videos on 360
I'm kind of hesitant to say this but I think somebody has to: there has to be an ethical dimension to this discussion. I understand Timmy is very much in favor of doing 15 hours a day of unpaid stenography on behalf of a for-profit business. (Which, if it were paid, would get smacked down before you could say Child Labor.)

Timmy is "dedicated" to his blogging because Timmy is not neurotypical. It is a symptom of his neurological disorder, and destructive of his ability to do things that "normal" people take for granted. Positive feedback for the behavior feeds it. It makes him feel like for his thing he is the master of his domain, that he is special, and that causes him to withdraw from the more difficult, more scary, more real parts of life further into the police scanner.

Because he is both underage and affected by autism, we have a special obligation to look out for his interests. I know, I know, he says he wants to do this. People with mental issues will say all sorts of really interesting things -- for every Timmy there is someone who believes that they bring order to the universe by sweeping the same floor, over and over and over. If Walmart gave that guy an unpaid job, but generously donated him busfare so that he could continue sweeping the floors for them, every one of you would go freaking ballistic. And you'd be right to do it, because it is exploitative.

That the educational establishment is in favor of anything that keeps him out from underfoot is disgusting to me, but not surprising. I say that as someone with experience on both sides of the desk in special ed.
I will try one last time - I invite anyone who disagrees to share their disagreement. Was there not enough civility? I've shared my experiences on the American system, and my opinions, and I've taken time to write them and share anecdotes. Something like 6-8 people found them useful and voted up. Something like 7-9 people as of now found them upsetting/wrong/something and voted them down. The comment score has been swinging. This is apparently quite polarizing to people.

I'd really like to know why - agreement or disagreement, actually. I would truly, respectfully like to hear it. I've shared my experience and opinion, and would like to hear yours. Or your rationale for saying "this comment ought not to have been made and/or is completely wrong", which is what a vote against says.

Was it uninsightful? Misguided or inaccurate? Not enough politeness? Certainly, there was some thought and introspection before writing. I am at a loss to understand people's views on this - I will not speculate further, but instead, again, humbly, ask for a reply so that we may have a discussion, if you feel it worth your time to make known how you feel.
Running IT at Google
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I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years more tech savvy employers require/allow employees to bring their own computer. With better "type 1" hypervisors, you could have your Home OS image and your Work OS image running at bare metal speeds with the ability to simply flip between the two.

Employers could save money and employees could do whatever they wanted on their "home" OS.
Changing a tire looks like an ordeal.
This article is depressingly bad.

Even a sysadmin runs their computer as root or sudo 2% of the time and should not run non-SOP software on a work computer...

How could you manage giving regular users the ability to install while maintaining a secure environment?

On our networks website restrictions are for bandwidth reasons not for 'net-nannying' reasons. And occasionally be have to adjust for silly dansguardian mis-flags...

But how can you seriously argue what this guy is putting forth?

I have played with the idea of giving users a VirtualBox install of Win XP that they can trash to their heart's content while having a more secure Linux desktop for the work applications (Firefox/ Thunderbird/ OpenOffice). But I am not convinced that is really secure. But that is more the way to go with something like this.
We were hunting for a domain in 2003 for our new initiative. We tried variations of SOHO (small office home office). Zoho happened to be up for sale. I was reluctant to shell out the $5K (I am cheap), but Raju Vegesna, persuaded me we should buy it. He was right.
Why should an IT person get to decide what sites are non-productive? Ridiculous.

I like this article on Google's approach: http://www.cio.com/article/144500/IT_s_Third_Epoch...and_Run...

"On Sarbanes Oxley Gmail IS a violation because S.O. requires the companies themselves to archive all e-mails. So if he leaves and takes his gmail with him than he'll have an archive but the company will be in violation."
The article clearly stated he was forwarding his email to gmail- so you are the one that has it wrong, the company would still have a copy. The problem here would not be SO compliance, but rather corporate document retention (destruction) policies where they want to get rid of records as soon as it is legal to do so.

"any IT person in Health Care will tell you IM programs are a HIPAA violation because they allow for encrypted transfer of files"
Do you mean unencrypted? Regardless- I can think of 100 ways to transfer an unencrypted file. Why single out IM, which has many useful properties.

Here's what's happening in the real world- the corporate network/desktop that is overly locked down gets circumvented. People bring in laptops and use cell modems, people use their phones, people install virtual machines.
http://research.swtch.com/
he probably could use a standard car jack.

i'd imagine biking up hills would be the true ordeal.
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Interesting idea, that depression is useful for ruminating. But, the reasoning seems premised on the idea that depressions are triggered by stressful events like discovering that your spouse has been unfaithful. Doesn't most depression occur due to seasonal changes such as the length of the day? (Hence depressions that occur at the same time each year, the effectiveness of treatments involving exposure to light at certain times of the day, etc.) The noteworthy, puzzling thing about depression is that it comes "out of the blue", for no apparent reason, not in response to circumstances that would explain a negative emotion. Also, when it lifts, there is similarly no apparent explanation. A problem did not get resolved; a rumination did not complete.
SciAm is indeed amazing, but this particular article seems like pure speculation.
I imagine some of your upvotes are like mine: I don't really agree with what you said, but I still think it's a valid, civil comment. So I upvoted it from -1 to 0. I consider that a correction upvote.

Personally, I'm not interested in engaging you in discussion because I think you've painted a caricature of our educational system - recognizable features are there, but greatly exaggerated. Addressing all of these would take more time and effort than I want to invest in a discussion that I've seen and participated in before.

Also keep in mind that people don't owe you a response. Scolding people into talking to you is not a good tactic.
Looking at their success stories page, this app: http://www.mobilewikiserver.com/Welcome.html

appears to have been created in Pharo and has a little "Available on the App Store" badge.

Apple really only seems to reject apps that allow you to get access to an interpreter/compiler, in a way that makes them nervous (flash).
"How could you manage giving regular users the ability to install while maintaining a secure environment?"
Don't put your important data on the desktop. An intranet app over VPN is definitely safer than walking around with the company data on a laptop.

I like your idea of giving people an virtual machine to worth with. I use virtual machines to do a lot of real work (as a contractor) where the corporate IT policies don't let you do work.
Another problem with the theory: a major symptom of depression is inability to concentrate. When you're depressed, it's like your IQ takes a 30-point hit. You become much worse at thinking things through.
One thing I have always done when reinstalling a Mac (rare) is not install those printer drivers. There's something like 1.3GB of them. Make the printers plug-and-play is great but that was just insane. I'm glad they're removing this.
Clean desk and room/office is absolutely necessary. You want to feel non cramped too.
I agree with you, but I thought I would add that Clojure has the dataflow library in clojure.contrib that does some of the same things as Cells. It doesn't have Mr. Tilton, though. ;)
I hate to say it, but if Timmy's happy with this, who are we to try and force him to live a more normal life? Normal lives are for normal people. Would it really be better for him, and for society, if we dragged him away from his police scanner and Wordpress dashboard to try and teach him how to live like a normal person?
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The real google calculator
Possessors of copyright can waive certain rights if they so choose.
I find techno (more trance actually) is great when coding in the zone (or getting there). I find C&C music (Frank Klepacki) is also great provided I'm in the right mindset to code (it might put me off if I'm not ready)

However, in the design phase I usually want something a bit different, and haven't quite pinned down what's best. Usually something epic or particularly interesting is good for inspiration.

I find this same dualism when writing normally.
Undoubtedly. I'd like to see a more modern version.
also free local calls... and ultra cheap international calls
> Personally, I'm not interested in engaging you in discussion because I think you've painted a caricature of our educational system - recognizable features are there, but greatly exaggerated.

Interesting - that's fair. I suppose a lot of people's experience differs too, so it's easy for people to talk past each other. I do know quite a lot of people, including a lot of self made people, and it's a subject I've discussed a lot. I've done teaching and training myself and I think our system is in disrepair, but perhaps I should be more balanced and less caricaturizing.

> Also keep in mind that people don't owe you a response.

Owe? Well, certainly not, though perhaps it's considerate for someone to explain why they downvoted a comment and it lets discussion get going. My own sense of decorum is I'll downvote noise ("right on! lol!" type posts) without explaining why, otherwise I won't unless there's already a good reply explaining why the disagreement.

> Scolding people into talking to you is not a good tactic.

I'm torn by whether to make a joke or a serious reply to this. I'll go the serious route: There's no scolding involved. I think people downvote identity-held issues without writing a disagreement, and I think it means people's worldviews don't evolve as quickly as they could, both mine and others'. I've had some fantastic disagreements with my comments in the past that led to very good discussion where I've learned a lot. For instance:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723610

So, I appreciate replies. Especially on an identity-level issue, yes, I'll absolutely ask again if I think people might be kneejerk voting based on identity. I want to learn on here, and want to be entertained, and I want others to learn, and I want others to be entertained. With discussion, we can do that. That's why I invite it. Thank you for your response.