skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> dump large amounts of current very quickly

Consider what happens when the flywheel dumps all of its energy within a fraction of a second - a not-unlikely event in the case of almost any mechanical failure. Do I have to spell it out?
A VC Model for the New Economy: Back to the Future
I have to add a somewhat shameless plug here, because my startup is tackling exactly the set of problems he's discussing here. We really believe that Yammer's model is somewhat flawed, and in our experience an enhanced "internal IRC" model has worked much better.

I like that he mentions integrating with other systems. Some of the biggest productivity gains we've seen have come from chat bots, which interject useful information into the conversation. They can also respond to commands from users to do useful actions. Our API still needs some polish, but we'll be releasing it to the public soon. Internally, we have chat bots that notify us about svn commits, Google alerts, changes to any Trac ticket or wiki page, etc. I can't wait to see what all the hackers here do with it. :)

Communication tools like this really change the game, especially for distributed teams.

We're in open public beta right now. Check out http://shoptalkapp.com and let us know what you think. We always value the opinion of HN readers.
I wonder if it would have been possible to have made the Segway a success on launch? Is there anything different (in hindsight) they could have done to the product itself to make it a "great product" on launch. Steve obviously was interested in the idea from an early stage, so what did he feel was missing from the product before launch?
Additionally, regarding the online image editing, people might want to check out the suite of web-based tools over at http://aviary.com/

Some pretty impressive stuff going on out there.
Sounds like a good book... thoughts on the story?
And this is the main point that makes time travel in movies completely unbelievable to me. According to the theory or relativity, there are no absolute coordinates. And even if their were, is earth the center of the universe that stands still? So how could you jump for one time to another and expect to land in the same relative coordinates to the earth. As the author of the articles says, there would need to be end points at both ends of the leap. Like two time machines. Or some naturally occurring end points. The only other option is to move through time and space at the same time(much like we do naturally), and not instantaneously jump through time.
That's a pretty sweet idea. I like it. Hire a good web designer to give it a Web 2.0 look, and look for a $ 2 million in VC money :)
Is it just me, or does the concept of "near speed of light" not make any sense? I was under the impression that light travels at a constant speed no matter how you are moving. And also, since there are no absolute coordinates, the concept of moving only make sense in relation to other things. Isn't it impossible to move "near speed of light"? Isn't light always going to move C faster then you?
"lack of decent public infrastructure" - what specifically do you think is lacking?
Following The Tr.im Incident, 301works Is Ready To Insure Shortened URLs
>>if annoying

He's not the only one. The tone of your posts on HN is extremely grating. If your offline persona is anything like your online one then I feel sorry for your friends and family.
Holy christ. I just read all about myself.
That's true, but Keynesians are just one school of thought. Austrians try to derive their understanding from pure logic; this isn't such a religion, but still isn't directly susceptible to the scientific method.

On the other hand, the Chicago school is certainly empirical, and to this extent, theories can (frequently) be investigated for proof or disproof.
Oh, yeh. That was all I was saying: I'd be suspicious and frustrated too if a new and very similar service appeared using my sites reversed name. It's a valid frustration even if it is innocent.

And did they not check? tut tut website 101 there! :P
What Are Intellectuals Good For?
Why can't I declare a type that derives from a generic type parameter in C#?
That's exactly my point -- NaCl would make languages and tools available to web app developers which have already proven their worth in developing complex, graphically intense application interfaces on the desktop.
Apply that argument to clothing. Stylish clothing.
The objective measure of a teacher's success must be what the class ended up learning regardless of what was or wasn't taught and all other random factors involved.

With that definition in mind, as a former pure math student, the best teaches I had were those who were

- oddly enough, good story tellers! By which I mean, they sounded very much interested in what they were telling me. Their narratives always had at least a few mini-mysteries going on just like in a good story. They used one thing leading to another kind of explanations rather than stating unrelated facts one after the other. The narratives always seemed to have a underlying theme even when that theme was sort of irrelevant to the lesson at hand.

- did not answer my question unless they properly understood what I was asking and why I was asking it. I hate it when I ask X and the teacher answers Y. The good teachers always went to great lengths to understand my questions.

- good mentors and guides and could help your career along if you deserved it. the best ones would go out of the way to make the system reward the deserving.

I think those were the two crucial factors. I have had awesome teachers on all sides of the arrogance, style, humourous, lenience, liberal, demanding, thorough/good enough at the subject matter, popular, good natured/asshole spectra.

Ummm... Not all the good teachers did this, but I very much liked the ones who actually tested what I had learnt rather than whether I was paying attention in the class or taking good notes or pretty much was even present in the class or not.
Boston groups:

http://www.meetup.com/cities/us/ma/boston/groups/business/?r...

http://www.meetup.com/cities/us/ma/boston/events/?radius=25....
Meaty, well-referenced, scientifically based article. A pleasure to read once I ran it through Readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/)
This years DjangoCon (conference from 8th - 10th September; sprints from 10th to 12th sep) is in Portland, OR. It's my first time travelling to USA and I'm really looking forward to this :-)
Interesting product. I think it could work well for large companies where the chat rooms make more sense but I'm not sure it would work as well for a startup. Adding features like hashtags and search would help too.

I also really like that Yammer provides a desktop client. I mention that a lot of the barriers to communication have to do with integrating into my everyday routine. When I have to go to a web page, it breaks up my workflow and I end up just not using the product like I should.
Google and Microsoft: The Battle for College E-Mail
Kirill Makharinsky & How To Predict A Startup's Success
It is a science if you consider the word's Middle English, Anglo-French, and Latin roots. Economics is a body of knowledge, and thus it is a science. It, however, is not a natural science. With that said, it doesn't mean that it is any less valid than something like chemistry or physics. While I am breaking my own rule about not discussing this topic, the only people that really seem to care about such distinctions are "natural scientists" whose egos have apparently grown too large to stick with the subject they know. I'm sorry that the Swedish Bank has deprived the world of the purity of the original Nobels by issuing an award that is not a Nobel. I hope the physicists are able to detect the sarcasm of the last sentence; if not, this sentence should make it clear.

EDIT: My position is more on the economics side. I'm working on a grad degree in financial engineering.
I'm the author of Graffitio: http://appsto.re/graffitio

I applied to YC and was flown out for an interview in November 2008. I was told that while it was a promising area, YC is reluctant to fund single founders. Fair enough.

A few weeks later, I responded to a technical plea for help from one of GraffitiGeo's founders in this thread a few weeks after that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=413929

When we got in touch, we had a long and frank discussion about Graffitio and the space in general. I told him about the challenges I was facing, and some of my plans for the future. He brought up the idea that we team up, and I said I probably wasn't interested, but I'd let him know.

Then I got the email. He offered me 1.5% of their company for all of my source code, the name, and my 40,000+ users at the time. He went on to use threatening language such as "Graffitio is going to get stomped out of the picture" and "Your financial alternatives are bleak." I chose to pass on the offer.

The first version of GraffitiGeo that came out in the App Store was an _exact_ clone of my app, Graffitio, down to the terminology such as Graffiti and Walls. They started to differentiate themselves with later versions. Some of those differences were novel, but others were features that I'd mentioned to him in our conversation. To be fair, they could have arisen independently.

Graffitio is over a year old now. It was in the App Store on day 1. I should probably be more annoyed than I am, but honestly, I have a lot of reservations about this space now after being here for over a year. Dealing with the App Store is another headache. I haven't been able to get an update through in months. Anyway, the first round of geotagging apps have fallen flat IMO. Turning them into a "game" like Foursquare and GraffitiGeo isn't going to change the fact that they deliver relatively little utility.

There might be a magic combination out there that makes it work, but I don't think GraffitiGeo or Graffitio in their current state is it. I wish them luck in finding it. If anything, they've lit a fire under my ass to spend more time on Graffitio.
tptacek, I am not trolling. If you can show me an instance where anyone, ever, has successfully brute forced a properly set up (salted AND peppered) hashed password from ONLY the hash and the salt then I will quite literally eat my hat. It simply cannot be done with current technology and no amount of rank-pulling will change that.

However, I've actually changed my mind and conceded defeat on this one. If the attacker could grab a copy of the app code as well and get the pepper & hashing setup, bcrypt would indeed slow down the ensuing attack on the passwords. You're basically screwed by then, of course, but it would be nice for the users if they had a little while longer to change their passwords on other sites.

I'll be using bcrypt from now on.
A lesson from a good teacher
Does the iPhone 3GS constantly pre-cache photographs?
Fully integrate Facebook Comments in Wordpress
Tips For Enjoying Your Massage
An employee at Ubisoft quits in style.
The products they make are some of the best I've used. Their profiler saved me a few projects ago.
Here's a funny little tidbit about Michael Braude's post: there's more to it than what Jeff Atwood quoted and focused on in Blogging Horror. What's more, in the context of the whole post, it makes a lot sense.

If HN audience has one blind spot, it's the fact that not everyone is an entrepreneur, working on their brand new startup, boldly going where (hopefully) no one has gone before. Believe it or not, it's really true that there's a whole lot of people out there who choose web programming because it's easy enough. There's no shortage of companies whose primary business is not software, where you can find a job that involves hammering out JEE applications using Struts (or just plain old servlets and JSPs), EJBs and one or more databases. I recently interviewed a candidate for a Java developer position who has spent 9 years in that same comfort zone, never venturing out of it at all.

Yes, Jeff, you did a great job with Stack Overflow. I use it frequently and I really love it. No, it's not trivial. Nothing worth doing is trivial. And no, not all programming will be web programming. Not without redefining "web" to mean something a lot different from what it means now. Case in point: game programming is (mostly) not web programming. Now can we please move on to a post that doesn't revolve around an exaggerated claim for shock value?
Thanks for checking it out. We have a search feature under development. I agree that search is key for this type of tool.

I'd be interested to hear what you use the desktop client for. We have been thinking of creating one simply for DM alerts, but do you find it useful beyond that? It's a shame that browsers can't do notifications.

Also, could you elaborate on why chat rooms make more sense for larger companies than for a startup? The real-time conversation aspect has just be so useful for us, especially since we're a distributed team.
You're not even reading my comment before responding to it. Focus your attention on the part about how the attack bcrypt defeats was the sole attack used against Unix passwords for an entire decade, the basis for two of the most popular security tools of all time, and the reason we have shadow passwords.

Also, there's no such thing as "pepper", despite what the PHP forums may say.

If you weren't deliberately misleading developers into using insecure code patterns, I'd just ignore you, sho.
No secure system depends on attackers not having access to your source code. This "pepper" idea is silly; if you believe it adds security, then you don't even have to bother with password hashing. Just XOR your passwords against a string in your code.
Google trends are noisy, but there is still a pretty strong signal in there (http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/04/predicting-presen...). And almost surely that signal is gathered from a far larger audience than the MBTI sites. That said, it would be interesting to correlate their numbers with the google trends.
With Foursquare, I often find myself wanting to be the mayor of my neighborhood, since I've had up to 5 mayorships in a 1 mile radius (a small distance in Los Angeles). GraffitiGeo seems to be addressing this.
I left my thoughts on this here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763559
Indeed, the main concept of economics is scarcity, not free market or anything like that. Actualy, the basic rules of economics are felt even stronger in non-free markets.

I still remember when I was a kid growing up in communism, there would be days with no potatoes in any store in the city, but there were heaps of rotting oranges that nobody wanted, while the store was not allowed to lower their price. Butchers and gas station operators were among the richest citizens, since those jobs allowed for the easiest cheating on both customers and the state.

While economics is nowhere near an exact science, some people would do better to learn about its very foundations, rather than write lengthy, post-modern-sounding, uninformed criticisms of it.
I like Portland a lot, but I'll assert that:

[X] is a great place for startups.

Where [X] = wherever you happen to be.
The social capital has been drained out of rural America. We can fix that.
http://blog.tradersheadstart.com/2009/08/new-broadband-infrastructure-projects.html

"We can restore economic vitality to underserved areas that for decades have not had the benefit of this IT knowledge base," says MAIN's Bowen. "People like [Microsoft cofounder] Bill Gates and others in Silicon Valley are bright people, but they had access to social capital to incubate and nurture them. The social capital has been drained out of rural America for several decades now. We can fix that."
Actually, Laconica.
The desktop client just integrates really well with my workflow. When I have to move from one app to the browser and open up a new tab it takes me out of my current mode of operation. It's a subtle nuance in liking the desktop client better than the browser but I think it's important. You also contend with other distractions in the browser. All hell breaks loose when I see my bookmarks to HN, Reddit, Facebook, etc. and there goes my productivity...

For our company, with just a couple of founders, chat rooms wouldn't make sense because we want everyone to know everything. We'd just have one master chat room. In Yammer, hashtags provide a similar feature to chat rooms, although all conversations are aggregated into one stream. I guess we could have separate chat rooms for checkins, bugs, etc. but now I'm flipping between tabs when I could have just tagged by comment with the right hashtag.
There have been script kiddies for a long time. This sounds like more of the same.
China Pulls Back From Edict On Web-Filtering Software
Anyone else getting real tired of these "Clone of XXX, Using HASKELL!!!" threads? I'm not impressed that people are able to complete straightforward programming tasks using a certain programming language; if the users of said language think I should be, then IMO there's something pretty deficient about the language.

Edit: Just to be clear, I have no particular problem with Haskell, but it seems like there's an awful amount of language envy coming from its users, and a lot of attempts to prove that you actually can program normal things in the language; but I'd greatly prefer to see examples of what Haskell can do that would be difficult in Java, Ruby, Lisp, etc., rather than examples where with great difficulty you can achieve what is trivial in any other language.
Actually,

I used to be involved medical software. And, yes, you do go to federal pound me in the a$$ prison if MEDICAL software you create has bugs in it. The whole FDA approval thing cuts two ways, and it is a VERY sharp blade. That's why most software engineers won't write such software. How long could they stay out of prison using PHP or Python? Imagine a trauma center's server going down. Yep! Off you go to prison son. A missed tumor because your imaging code did not bring out enough contrast. That's good for 7 - 12 years. The lack of guarantees in the floating point code alone is probably enough to get a lot of these guys 5 to 10.

And yes, it has happened . . . several times!

These sorts of laws would make you code like your life depends on it . . . because it does.

Be careful what you wish for. That's all I can say.
However, the main outcome of the research, as NYTimes[1] points out, is that a new screening method has been developed to be able to quickly identify drugs...

This is definitely a big one.

As to the question of do we only kill stem cells or both types of cells. That's mostly an academic debate, because your doctor won't hesitate to give you both kinds of therapy, just in case.
Iranian money can hamper Deutsche Bank - Sal. Oppenheim deal
http://blog.tradersheadstart.com/2009/08/finances-iranian-money-can-hamper.html

"...But the German newspaper SPIEGEL reported on Saturday, Aug. 8, that BHF Bank, a Frankfurt subsidiary of Sal Oppenheim, is holding Iranian government’s assets worth of billions. According SPIEGEL, the secret deals with the mullahs could hamper the Sal. Oppenheim’s deal with Deutsche Bank..."
I spent a coupla years using Common Lisp as my language of choice. I like lisp (though I have specific issues with many details of actual lisps, as everyone does). However, after two years of experience with it, I was chagrined to find that it hadn't reduced the time it took to finish projects very much, if at all, over Python and PHP. There were two problems, really: lack of libraries that did what I needed to build on, and the ever-present temptation, much stronger than in most languages, to build everything myself, even where there was a 80% solution already existing.

I recognize that this stems directly from CL's greater power, and I don't want that power removed from a language; I just don't know how to get the power and develop a culture of good libraries and reuse.
pretty awesome!
Are you suggesting that this is different with any other electronics manufacturer?
This probably varies by region, but in Maryland the unlimited nationwide calling plan offered by Verizon for a landline and Cricket for a cellphone is the same price - $40/month.
Perhaps not quite as big as you're imagining though. If there's, say, a spamassassin rule for it (we actually wrote one for our initial version of the centmail protocol) then it might be worth your while as a sender to sign up, to help avoid ending up in people's spam folders.

The main thing we're hoping for though, to achieve any kind of critical mass, is that you'll want to sign up initially as a sender simply to promote your favorite cause. Confer the popularity of Causes, the Facebook app.

We certainly don't imagine Centmail as a panacea; but you could imagine it becoming a reliable additional feature for your spam filter.

Think of it like hashcash, but instead of burning money/effort, you send it somewhere useful. Come to think of it, maybe this could be made more palatable by combining the hashcash concept with some seti@home-style distributed computation problem. Look for aliens in order to send email!
I think you are right. I tried it and it takes the snap the very millisecond you click on it which means it is caching it. Awesome!!!
We explored the caves before the air became too thin to continue.

"Thin air"? Those must be some very high-altitude caves. How in the world does one encounter thin air underground?

But it sounds very Indiana Jones. Could be an interesting movie..
Good point. But you can't reach the simplifying insight by any other road than your own initial stupidity. It's the way you learn Lisp. At least Lisp breaks you with grace -- quick and painful. Most other languages spare you the pain of insight.

And I'm consistently surprised by how easy it is to root out my stupidities once I've recognized them, thanks to the repl, a functional style and a small code base. Lisp teaches you to face your fears.
Whether or not these concepts are really proven wrong, I would claim they're not that centeal to economics. The most central idea of economics is that there aren't enough goods for everybody to have what they want. Therefore, you have to distribute the goods somehow.

Some (more or less) fair ways to do that would be to give the goods to those that pay more, or work harder, or wait longer. There are other ways - stealing, cheating, haveing influential friends.

In any case, the scarcity simply won't go away by declaring economics unscientific.
Can a hackerspace help revialize a city?
Has iPhone become a legitimate gaming platform?
Very interesting.

I'd like to commend you–if your accounts of what transpired are true, I think you've handled it in a mature and respectable manner. A lot of people would be very bitter about this and resort to whining or threats of litigation.

That being said, there's 2 sides to every story. HN deserves to hear from the GG founders. Possibly from PG as well.
Germs and such on fingers doesn't appeal to me. Instead I just pick at them...it's just as bad. I tend to do it most when concentrating hard, and I've been doing it for as long as I can remember. Any tips? (I think I need nail clippers always available)
Russia can't tolerate other countries' Arctic claims
http://blog.tradersheadstart.com/2009/08/press-releases-images-and-videos-from.html

According to the Russian newspaper Kommersant , Moscow sees the U.S.-Canada Joint Arctic Expedition, which started today, as a further North American expansion into the most resource-rich territories of the Arctic Ocean, which Kremlin claims, all belong to Russia.
"India has an elegant reverse-auction scheme, under which the supplier who asks for least cash to supply a particular area wins the contract."

Did anyone get this sentence ?