skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
my (available on the mailing list but not integrated) patch for the library gives you a callback into just that point in the process where the library has parsed out what it can but hasn't filled in defaults yet, so you can insert the assumptions that make sense for your application and not have to rely on the default ones.
I wonder, does someone knows why Microsoft developed Office with such a patent infrigment?. ¿Did they hope nobody notices?, ¿Didn't do the homework? or just thought they could give some millions away and everything would be fine again.
elucidate
verb [ trans. ]
make (something) clear; explain

As usual, you have no point whatsoever. Glad to see the fan club noticed though. Why don't you "tweet" about it?
I had the same experience, and we ended up having to patch the core library to get our desired specific result too. It's pretty cool, but it hasn't been updated in a long time and it could really use some fleshing out.
values Twtapps at $500,000, based on his estimation of how much it would take for anyone to develop as many apps with as much traction

Sorry, but $500k is a joke, those apps are trivial.

If I had that kind of money to drop on such a thing I'd much rather spend $50k on copying the apps (doable by one developer in under 6 months) and the remainder on marketing or more apps.

Moreover, if he thinks his little toybox is worth half a million, then why on earth doesn't he just monetize it himself...
Rebellion-B-Gone: Chemical Neurowarfare
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=802865
See also:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804585
The "College Algebra" [1] covers what high-school curriculum covered in either sophomore or junior year

College math should go back over high school math for the first 6 month or so, because chance are you where taught the math in an incomplete way in high school. The first 6 month or so of math when I was at university was basically starting back from square one and being re-taught everything we thought we already knew. But this time we where taught it correctly with formal proofs and everything put in its right context, and I'd certainly consider that not only college level, but also very useful.
This sounds like an article from 1998. Are there still any incubators that work this way? Certainly none of YC-like seed firms that sometimes get called "incubators" do.
The Companies Headhunters Avoid
There you go again, inserting reason in an otherwise good discussion.

This reminds me of the domains section on ebay where you are offered these great online businesses, only they just can't wait to move on to the next greatest thing so you can have it now cheap.
Having your idea stolen may not be so bad either. The usual analogy is the 2nd mouse getting the cheese.

An earlier competitor can open up a market for you to swoop into and grab, if your product is better or better marketed.

Of course a canny mouse might grab the cheese and leave the trap set for you to die on, don't trust dodgy business analogies too much.

A quick story about a little business - it's a pottery painting studio http://www.barefoot-ceramics.co.uk , we were hesitant about opening here because we saw the potential market to be possibly too small; pottery painting as a concept had not been established in the UK at the time. When we were preparing to open we were very secretive as we felt without first-move advantage or in the presence of competition we'd collapse. Another studio opened in the month before us whilst we were preparing the premises. They however closed 6 months later and, as we'd established a relationship with them, passed us on some customers and bookings. They also helped to establish the idea in the local area and probably in the long run we've had a small financial benefit from that time.

We've since suffered from customers who have (contrary to promises) established similar businesses locally by using our studio and then mimicing us. They liked what we were doing so much they thought they'd try and put us out of business, nice! You can't really do much about that sort of thing though.
I would like my user agent to fetch everything beyond a shortened URL automatically as a sort of protest to skew the stat counting results.
No, in the early stages there is no language attached to my thought processes, though as I mentally interact with the abstract concepts, I generally start to concretise into recursive functions. This conception of 'recursive functions' still has no notation attached to it, it's more that I start to decompose my solution (mentally) into cause and effect.
"The Myth of Accelerating Technological Progress" fits the article better, but then everybody would think it's by an anti-Singularitarian.
Hear Hear! Doing nothing --just being-- is a vital part of the creative life.

(and I'm so glad this article wasn't titled "The 10 rules of how to enjoy yourself")
some meaningless device driver code for a giant open source project.

Oh FUD. Don't write the bloody device driver. The whole point the article was making was that you can choose what you contribute and to what you contribute with open source. If you'd rather write something else, write something else. If you're trying to make a name for yourself write something that will get noticed. It's certainly a lot more amenable to some people's preferences than your 'spare time start up' idea.
output that runs on the flash player. that's all the users care about.
Wanna swap - 2 businesses, 2 kids, no free time and a million things that need doing.
I confess to knowing very little about the limitations of URLs so perhaps this is s dumb question: why not go all the way down to the shortest possible? Can they just use the minimum unique string of characters? For example http://xyz7g. What are the limits?
The answer as with all questions that have not enough qualification is: "It depends.".

If you need to finance something short term and you have a fairly good idea when you'll be able to pay off then the answer is probably yes, unless you can borrow it cheaper somewhere else.

If you need credit cards to bootstrap your business then you need to very carefully work the cost of borrowing into your financial model. If you do that you are more likely than not going to find that it is better to find an outside investor who gets a piece of the action than to use credit cards.

Think of it as an absolute last resort when you're in a pinch and it's fold or take a chance on the card, or for very short term financing where you'll pay off the debt very shortly after you start to incur interest.

Any other uses are going to be trouble. And the penultimate example really is a hail mary pass, chances are if it gets that far that you'd be better of folding rather than to end up folding any way but with a bunch of extra debt that you can not get out of.
i once talked to two guys who had bootstrapped a successful test prep company. i asked them how they'd funded the startup. they opened a drawer, pulled out two fistfuls of credit cards each, grinned, and said "these are our investors".

i laughed, but thought those guys were nuts. there are much better and far less-risky ways to bootstrap.
It is a quasi particle that results from the collective state of electrons in solid matter. It is not really a monopole, since it is necessarily connected by a flux tube (no Back to the Future jokes, please) to an opposite pole. If you integrate the flux over a closed sphere, you still get a total flux of zero. Only if you leave a small hole where the flux tube leaves the sphere around your "pole" you get something that looks like a monopole, with things like the inverse distance behaviour you see for electric and gravitational fields.

This is similar to the field you see near the ends of strong long and thin conventional magnets (where the matter of the magnet plays the role of the flux tube).

So this is a very interesting discovery in the field of solid state physics, but any connections to elementary particle physics you might think of when you hear about the discovery of a magnetic monopole are wrong.
negative thinking feels good because it proves us right when things go wrong. it's easy to make things go wrong when you believe that'll happen. that dopamine hit when you're right feels damn good.

>Another reason why negative thinking feels good is that it's passive, and it's easier to be passive than active.

negative thinking absolves one of responsibility. you can think "this plan won't work, so i'm gonna sit back and watch it fail" and enjoy being a critic instead of a participant.
desktop grade hard disks

I believe the data dispel this marketing myth.

http://usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_htm...

http://usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/full_papers/pinheiro/pi...
Characteristics Of Great Investors
Agreed. I know there are some issues with people who uses Twitter via SMS but I figured by now they would found an intuitive way to ignore URL's in Tweets.
I can imagine some scenarios where a credit card could be useful to bridge a gap once profitability is already established. However in general using a credit card to fund a startup in any way is just plain stupid.

If you need money you don't have you should either find an angel or get a job and start saving. If you run a balance on a credit card you are getting ripped off plain and simple. If you put a balance up on a credit card for a business you better have a sure thing on your hands--and not a sure thing based on entrepreneurial optimism--I mean you have paying customers and are cash flow positive. Otherwise you are just making a short term bet that's going to cripple your long-term freedom in exchange for a 2-6 month shot at something. And how often do we succeed in the first 2-6 months?
Yeah, I was half tempted to say "Dupe", but since I posted the original, felt like it would be a toolish thing to do.
The business managed to get by with old paper books somehow until 1980s. Granted, VisiCalc and its clones gave a boost to productivity, but it is not ground breaking in same way the invention of lightbulb or construction of jet engine was.
RSS Is Alive And Well
The random person element of your thought experiment strikes me as pretty important because cost is one of the only ways I can think of to measure technological progress. Simply picking two specific technologies from the same sector and then stating an opinion that the progress isn't impressive doesn't persuade me. What could possibly persuade me is answers to questions like these: in present day dollars, how much would it cost to purchase one extra year of life in 1909, 1959, and 2009? For N present day dollars, how long would it take you to travel from New York to London in 1909, 1959, and 2009? For $100 present day dollars, how many copies of a book can you make in those each of years?

I think the author is right in that there are physical constraints on what types of things are possible, so any improvements will only be of degree. Once you have weapons that harness nuclear reactions, there aren't a lot of other fundamental forces left to harness. Likewise once you have devices that can reproduce sights and sounds (the two senses used for communication) all you can really do is make those devices cheaper and bigger (or smaller). The author didn't express that very well, choosing instead to cherry pick specific inventions and present opinions as facts.
Good point, but I suspect even given the amount of money they've spent on development, and given the production runs on these things are tiny, they'll probably still beat Sun on total price. Hell, even if they only made one of the things they could spend $800k on developing/manufacturing it and still beat Sun.

As far as I'm concerned, you'd have to write the custom software even if you used Sun's boxes. I wouldn't trust data to a single machine of anyone's design. Though that's probably just me.

The S3 comparison is totally invalid though, I agree.
Ah, you're talking about the "geek goggles".

Of course there's always Leah Culver, who's just plain hot no matter how you slice it.
And the men are also "IT" hot, so it evens out.
well you have to have a valid domain name, and xyz7g is not one.
Slavery happened for purely economic reasons didn't it? In one systtem the dominant African tribes and other groups rounded people up, they sold them to the (AFAIR) Europeans who were ship owners and traders who took the slaves off to be traded elsewhere, the slave-owners then traded on further or used the slaves to work the land and make profits. Those profits being invested back down the chain to the slave captors in Africa.

Slave trades established in other areas I expect followed the same modes. The purpose was to make money for those links in the financial chains from those in the iron chains.

Slaves were also taken from prisoners of war which is probably as much about dominance in government of the lands won as it is about direct financial gain.

People in Africa, and elsewhere, are still sold into slavery just not as often transported to the West.

Sorry that was all a bit OT.
You need a domain name, a period, a top level domain, a slash and then an address at that domain.

The shortest top level domains are the country ones - which are two characters long. The shortest domain name on top of that would be one character.

So http://j.mp/Whatever is in fact the shortest you can get.
You giving up your age here :) The world was actually fine, and more or less the same as it is now.
haha. I miss read the title as "A javascript dating library" on first glance.
Information Visualization Manifesto
Gmail for Mobile HTML5: Reducing startup latency
its not about being lazy or being lethargic for an entire week. Its about taking a hour or two, after you've got some work done to relax.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System#Parts_of_a_d...
New microprocessor runs on thin air
Given the things that have been granted, no-one can ever be sure they aren't infringing a software patent. As an example, any piece of software implementing markdown would almost certainly infringe this same patent. Google's web spider and search engine would probably be found to infringe this patent.

Microsoft is unpopular and often the 'Bad Guy' in these situations. And i4i isn't your everyday patent troll.

But this is a bad patent. It's an excellent example of how the process for granting software and process patents is deeply flawed and in need of review and reform.
How a software engineer invented a breakthrough medical device
Point taken, and that's something I can definitely do
Have a Great Labor Day Weekend
metadata such as urls do not belong inside the message body when they can be attached to a separate field per tweet.

this can even be expanded; get other useful data such as gps location or hashtags out of the body and into a metadata field.
Ask HN: Where do you get data?
I am interested in playing around with popularity algorithms, graph theory algorithms, trying out some map coloring algorithms, etc...

All of these require data though, and I'm not sure where to get it. So I was wondering if people on HN have good places to get data.
Assuming it's effective, this guy deserves the Nobel prize.
Predicting Antidepressant Response with EEG
People use CREDIT CARDS to fund companies???

The U.S. of A is a strange, strange country.

Anywhere else, this would be both impossible and something no sane person would even consider.
I've found iTunes University to be a great resource for education, top level schools offering their course material is just great in so many ways. It's also interesting to see how courses at MIT compared to the same courses I took at my state university and realizing they are really not that all different.
It has contributed to fewer people starving. That may or may not affect our life, but it certainly affects many lives.
Act gay... Get a boyfriend! Girls like gay guys as friends... silly.
You can go even shorter with help of one of the TLD registrars, e.g. http://dk./ is a working URL -- you may skip that dot in Firefox and use http://dk/ (Opera will assume you're confused and try to use dk.com).
Read to the end of the blog post for the sneaky trick in the research. As usual, Peter Norvig's article on scientific research

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

warns of issues like that to look out for.
My biggest problem with this article is that he discounts technologies based on their their most menial modes of usage, e.g. advanced telegraphy wasted on p()rn. A lot of cynicism is certainly warranted, but he loses some credibility with me by ignoring the higher uses of technology.

He brings up Lisp, which was interesting. I learned Lisp from the internet, in less than a month, in my spare time, without taking time away from my work or family. Pretty much all the technical knowledge that I've gained over the past eight years has come largely or entirely from online material, with far less impact on my schedule than graduate school would have had.

And I bet that almost every commenter here has had much the same experience as I.
The one about the "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory", ie that those online and anonymous become inflammatory, profaninty-spouting morons.
And as an addendum, I'd like to say that it's really about managing your time well. There are times when focusing and being productive is important, and there are other times when it is ok to not be producing. Knowing when to be which state is the part that can be managed better by everyone, esp. workers and managers in the US.
This reminds me of an idea of using hotornot as a captcha. Should solve the problem for a while...
Just ran this on some files, random files about 801 or so jpg files...

Pre utility:
du -d 1 -k
39710	.

Post utility:
du -d 1 -k
37074	.

So about a 6-7% reduction. These are files uploaded via wordpress, not sure if it does any type of reduction by itself in the upload wizard, i doubt it.

Time to run the utility:

279.84 real 176.08 user 72.19 sys
" However in general using a credit card to fund anything in any way is just plain stupid."

Fixed that for you. You shouldn't buy ANYTHING with money you don't have! No wonder so many people are in debt!
Why AI is a dangerous dream - interview with Noel Sharkey
Flash Chart / Graphing Solutions
Article concerns biohacking particularly manipulating living organisms - could HN have some editorial system to ensure articles posted have a proper descriptive title or maybe a categorisation system.
"Just imagine what your world would be like without google and email"

I would not be wasting time having this debate at my office, which is part of his point. :)

I do not think just saying "The Internet, I mean, come on..." wins the argument. There needs to be something showing that the Internet changes our lives in ways similar to what radio, television, antibiotics and the atom bomb changed lives in the first half of the 20th century.

I think part of the problem with making that argument is that the Internet and computing technology is changing life much more appreciably in India and China than it is here. It is allowing people in India to suddenly join the cubicle dwelling, information processing, Western world work force in large numbers in ways that are profoundly changing the lives of many people there. Walmart's computerized, just in time inventory systems makes ordering products in China and getting them to the right shelves in a timely manner feasible. That is having perhaps an even more profound effect on the life of many Chinese. (This also applies to many other developing countries, of course.)

So it may be that the technology advances are less noticeable here in the U.S., where many of us were already working in offices and shopping at department stores in the 1950s. But the way lives are changing in developing countries is akin to the kinds of changes Americans experienced in the first half of the 20th century.
I think http://sproutbox.com/ is sort of doing this with a mix of a YC-like seed firm. When talking to anyone about YC and programs like it, I really try my hardest to make sure people realize it's not an incubator.
Debt is not bad. Unmanageable debt is bad.

Does your cashflow cover the interest payment? Is your cashflow showing an upwards trend so that you'll be able to pay up your debts? If yes - credit card debt or any other kind of debt is not bad. It'll help you grow faster. Without losing a lot of control.
What would you tell your kids about Bush2, Bush1, Vietnam? Korea? Hitler? Stalin? Slavery? The Spaniard Conquest of the America? The Ancient Greeks? Can you hide the truth. Not really and the further you go back the easier it is for the current politicians, educators and parents to let kids see facts clearly rather than through tinted glasses.

As for the oppressed seeking revenge once they know what happened, you need to teach your kids acceptance of other cultures and to live in harmony with the world (irrespective if you German or Jew, black or white). Cultures take a few centuries to forget (they don't need history)! We also need to teach kids OBJECTIVITY that is what most grown-ups miss!
I have at least 10 good business ideas a month...I just don't have the time and energy to execute them, and I bet the would-be idea thieves don't either (I don't know if they're even worth pursuing). Edison's adage "Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration" is so true for startup ideas.

Here's an example of an idea I had just yesterday: A dating site that's like a mashup of meetup.com and match.com with a dash of speed dating. Instead of looking for one-on-one dates, you put in all of your interests and create small groups to do activities together, and then you can get to know each other in person, and maybe click with someone you like. There's no pressure...if you don't connect with anyone, you can at least have a good time hanging out in a group.

Ok, I put my idea out there for anyone to steal...let's see how long it takes for someone to execute it!
Ask HN: where to share hacks?
for the past half year i keep submitting small code projects, aka hacks, only to get zero points or comments. sometimes they are solve a niche problem, sometimes they seem at least topical to interests here. i'm passionate, at least temporarily, about all of them and i'd love to get more feedback.<p>my favorite part of hn are seeing and discussing other peoples small hacks, too (almost more so than actual startups).<p>one of my housemates also creates small python hacks every now and then to help with his mechanical engineering robot work. i love the idea of non, or rather still-learning, developers sharing and encouraging software hackery sideprojects.<p>maybe this community exists in larger parts elsewhere. any recommendations?<p>thanks hn!! i still love the spirit of this place!! i fully expect someone here to have already created this site ;-)
Ask HN: Who is going to DjangoCon 2009?
I know there are a few HN readers going to DjangoCon this year - maybe we can have a mini HN meetup in Portland for those going and those who already live there.

I have never been to Portland, so hopefully one of the Portland regulars can suggest a place.

(I tried searching to make sure nobody has asked this yet; if there is a thread going for this already, please let me know!)