skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The circuit is normally completed at a scale where you can't use the electricity generated by the photo-electric effect.

To make is useable you have to somehow collect the electrons before they fall back to their base state. For that you need a semiconductor, which effectively creates a barrier across which the electrons can not travel back.

The little metal wires that are silk screened on to solar panels collect these free electrons and transport them to the edge of a photocell, where they can be used to drive a load on their way back to the substrate from which they've been liberated.
I would have agreed with you a few months ago but Palm has totally dropped the ball on WebOS. It's slow, buggy, missing tons of basic features. I just don't think Palm has the resources to put into WebOS that are required to keep up with Apple & Android. Unfortunately they are falling further behind, not catching up. It would be generous to say WebOS is even on par with iPhone 1.0 at this point IMO.
you see some app, and kick yourself, saying "why didn't I think of it first" - this is one such app.
Your suggesting that when a person responds to a post by:

1 - beginning with "You miss the point" and ends with a derogatory "Should we go on? You missing the point of the article"

2 - 4 out of 5 of their points are Apple vs. Palm comparisons, completely immaterial to my original post.

...that somehow I'm the one flaming?

Perhaps the point count to GandMasterBirt's post is attributable to others also inferring wildly into a post? Is that decent behavior? Does it make the content on HN better or worse?

[EDIT] keep in mind that communities like slashdot once had a higher signal to noise ratio. People, like me for instance, don't go their anymore, because its all too common for rational discussion to be drowned out in a sea of fanboyism and offensive behavior.
I had trouble uploading a GIF, but PNG worked fine (FireFox 3.5 on Vista). Also the page isn't centered for me. You should also include a Terms of Use page and a Privacy Policy.

You could also include links to social networking sites after you upload a picture (e.g. digg picture, tweet picture, etc). Then a url shortener would be helpful.

Seems like hosting a lot of images would be costly...how will you make money? Ads on the main page and on the direct link page? Premium account with no ads?
A lot of people go to college to study which is fine, but contrast those who start entrepeneuring the minute they get there.

Well-Known Businesses Started by College Students:
In addition to Microsoft, Dell, Napster, Netscape, FedEx, Apple, Tripod, and TheGlobe.com, here are some other enterprises started by college entrepreneurs:

http://www.quintcareers.com/businesses_started_by_college_en...
The site suggests a unique name because non-unique names require more manual setup. Just name it something other than "ourdoings".
I find twisted relatively easy to work with. There's no particular reason tornado can't sit atop twisted. Hopefully I'll get some time to do that this weekend.

The whole tornado vs. twisted thing is unfortunate, though. It exists in its current state because tornado is two different things: 1) a web framework 2) an async network stack.

#2 exists in core python and in twisted. If we transplant #1 to twisted, then it should be just as easy to develop web apps on twisted, except you get a whole lot of stuff for free.
You're coming off very over-defensive, calm down before you reply.

A point by point reply isn't a typical HN response, shelve it for a more appropriate response in future. You'll not only make your point much better, but you'll come across better too. This isn't reddit or digg, people like civility here and your response doesn't come across as such.

IMO you're taking an anonymous comment way too seriously, and you repeat yourself repeatedly. Quite frankly, you come off as an ass, and it certainly isn't suitable to HN. You're (IMO) on the verge of flaming, in fact you're probably beyond it but you don't appear to make a habit of these responses so I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt; you're (usually) a good commenter and we don't need to have you turning into a troll on us trying to start flame-wars.
I thought the bid was to rename HN "TechCrunch News". There can't be the most inane article on TC or it gets posted here.
I wish the headline would have been more specific and mention that this relates to Macs. I saw this headline on my phone while waiting for my table at a restaurant. I hurried my way back to work to sign up for it only to realize that it was not Google Voice / Grand Central. I guess I'll have to keep waiting for that.
Also, lack of exercise is correlated with weight gain in larger population and consequent lack of health.

People confuse this the statement that later exercise make up for a person's lack of exercise at a given period. This might or might not be true but it doesn't follow from the first statement. Lack of exercise over longer periods might screw people in ways that we have no idea how to fix.
80,000 people have signed up with Virgin Galactic for space tourism, including 100 people who have already paid $200,000 each for a single flight. http://science.howstuffworks.com/spaceshiptwo2.htm
Sysadmin of the Year Contest
Ehh, how about making your link to dropbox work? And you do know that dropbox has an affiliate program, right? Ever think about using it perhaps?

What about a two way sync - emphasis that your pics are safe on your hard drive, on dropbox as well as on ourdoings.

You may also want to think a bit about the general philosophy of online photos - with things like dropbox available, people will store their photos in such a service. But they still need a slick photo viewer, which dropbox does not have. Maybe you should also point out that your site is like a viewer for your dropbox photos.

By the way, good work on ourdoings - I really didn't think it would still be around at this point in time.
NASA should promote spaceflight and bolster technology innovations by offering tremendously huge prizes for companies that can overcome major obstacles, like lowering cost-to-orbit by a factor of a hundred.

They shouldn't be the space police, or the space bureaucracy, or the space experts.

If we were to reduce cost-to-orbit by a factor of a hundred, then you could launch satellites for a couple of hundred thousand dollars. You could have deep space telescopes for the cost of a new luxury airliner. It changes everything.

Whereas if we keep doing these one-off missions where we do this huge development effort and make no major breakthroughs, everything stays expensive for a very long time.
Oh dear...I'm sorry about that. I copied the original headline verbatim, because I once saw someone get flamed for not doing so. This was my first HN submission.
Maybe this is why you spend so much time programming and so little time doing business.
Snowboarder XS - Free Online Game: Smiths Computers
Programming isn't that hard, but the business side is? The scales have been lifted from my eyes! Next time a "business guy" wants me to implement his great new idea for an iPhone app, I'll totally make it for him!
Steve Ballmer publicly ridicules Microsoft employee with iPhone
Manage your attention, not your time
Legal troubles on the horizon for Cloud Computing in the EU?
Carlo Cipolla was a great historian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Maria_Cipolla

I particularly recommend Guns, Sails, and Empires and Clocks and Culture.
This was not the case of a theory being wrong. He's making the case that the device they show can not possibly have the characteristics the makers claim. And it's hard to say that's not deliberate. At a minimum grossly negligent.

The experiments that lead to the development of Newtonian mechanics (the Copernican laws, for example) are still valid. It's just their interpretation that has changed.
How is this better than any other threadpool library?
where do hackers look to discover the size of their target markets?

Its a whole lot of voodoo and has little to do with anything that matters to your business, since for a market of any size you're going to be limited by how much of it is addressable anyhow.

I swear, the only reason people even bother checking is so they can present the "if we got 1% of $350 million..." argument that everyone says they know is useless.
I'd be careful about believing any numbers, and just because some big market research company once said it doesn't mean it's true. Certain things spring up as being the truth after they are quoted enough, e.g. the Internet traffic doubling 18 months (http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=18702).

In my experience the best way is to analyse a market in several different ways and get bounds on the market size. E.g. for baby monitors in the US, the market size must be less than the total revenue of all the companies that make them, and the units sold per annum must be less than the number of babies born per year in the US. You then may find one company that claims to have shipped over a million baby monitors in a year (e.g. inside their SEC filings or even marketing material), which is therefore a lower bound.

A combination of google, asking people (e.g. either industry experts or in your local shop ask the shop assistant roughly how many of those do they sell a day) and you should be able to get to an order of magnitude of an established market place.
An Evolution In Web Browsing
The Evolution of Evolution
How about more like the FAA?
Network Automation Buzz Picking Up
I especially appreciate the proof- above and beyond the call of duty. However, I wouldn't be surprised if this was still slower in most real-world cases than timsort.
Oh, I don't care that I didn't think of it first. What I care about is that I'm thinking of it again, and it's still a viable business concept.
How to short-circuit the US power grid
It's on Hackage, as always, http://hackage.haskell.org/package/accelerate
I"m not interested in starting flaming behavior and very much value good behavior in this forum. GrandMasterBirt's post was quite offensive: "5) Should we go on? You missing the point of the article."
that's just not true. i use web1 extensively, and it works very well, and although it's performance is not as good as apache or lighttpd when serving raw files, it's more than adequate for most web application development.

web2 was never a formally released product, and most of the stuff that was only available in web2 (such as wsgi support) have now been backported. there was some confusion about this for awhile, but that was only ever a community issue, not a code-related one.

i primarily took issue with you calling it a "mess", i still think that's a rather inaccurate statement.
When I was there (2005-2006, so, ancient history maybe), Google had a cultural problem with languages like Javascript. All their coding standards were developed for languages like C++ and Java and the typical Google engineer had the most experience in such languages. Projects that promised to relieve the programmer from having to write in nasty Javascript (such as GWT) had a lot of support. There are islands of Javascripters in Google, but many of them are working on the browser initiatives.

That said, the article is right about the importance of peer review at Google, although the headline is typical journalistic bait. Google's culture isn't so much engineering as it is science. Business is understood as an ongoing experiment. Opinions are worthless, only data counts.

The results are stunning and many cowboy developers have become converts. There are many parts of Google's codebase that are so beautiful they almost brought tears to my eyes. You don't know what it's like to see megabyte after megabyte of source code scroll by, and you can't tell who wrote it. The same conventions are used everywhere, "tricky" parts are at an absolute minimum, and good documentation is usually a given.

If there's one thing about Google culture that is worth preserving in all the startups now budding off, it's the peer review.
Tokyo Cabinet: a high-performance key/value database capable of 3 million qps
Great idea. I'm not sure how useful it is to me since IPython can do the same and I rarely code without it, but I'll grab it and see if I find myself using it.

Come to think of it, if this were a command within Vim I'd use it all time time. Maybe this weekend...
find rocks with high rare earth contents

It wouldn't matter if you found a mythical space-goose which turned anything they touched into gold, you'd still lose money on the transport costs bringing the goose trash and returning with treasure.
The White House's Vision for High Speed Rail
The Woz calls the Pope
If you have public competitors you can often find out from their annual reports. For private companies published interviews with senior staff are often useful. Generally for most markets you have some idea of who the major players are and how the market share breaks down, so even if you can only get data for a few of the companies you can form a decent estimate.
Vaada raha i promised movie reviews
Real Time Publishing, Help with RSSCloud & PubHubSubbub (Push)
I don't want to make my own system for storing and retrieving records (juggling flat files?). I don't write my own server (no matter how little the project), and I don't make up my own database system.

The SQLite docs are clear, and there are a billion tutorials for interacting with SQLite in every programming language. It's easy to use, and it leverages the work of others so I can focus on the things I want to do.

This article is ridiculous. The lazy hack and the next lazy hack coughed along until they did it right.
Facebook vs. Twitter, which office would you rather work in?
The author's now posted a blog post on this talk. Sorry for breaking the news early.

http://justtesting.posterous.com/haskell-arrays-accelerated-...
In this particular instance you could use semiconductor market statistics, they often break the component usage down to market. They are usually for free and give some kind of indication. But as mentioned before there is lots of smoke around the market size subject and someone has to take these stated numbers with a grain of salt.
Ok, I buy it.

You could have fooled me though ;)

Konarka is one of the few parties that make dye sensitized cells today, you wouldn't happen to be working for them ?
http://www.powere2e.com
I thought "fat pivot" meant the approach to quicksort where you partition into { smaller, equal, larger } and then sort the three subarrays instead of two. I'm not sure what the "fat pivot problem" would be. Anyway, this new approach is a generalization of that -- fat pivoting is the special case where the two pivots are equal.
Sorry but that's proprietary information that gives Dropbox a competitive advantage! Please remain seated, the corporate secrecy police are on their way!
Interesting pictures of the environment. I truly like the new way of business and work environment created by new start ups as well by old and very successful like Google. BY no means it is much more pleasant and productive than corporate environment. But to answer the question: I would rather work for myself and create my own environment the way I want it.
OK. But--all things must end. If, say, you did not have a desktop component, are you obligated to keep the service up--forever? That's a long time. I wonder if--like a not-bargain price--a subscription fee is an indicator (to a different group, naturally), that you will be around--at least for as long as people pay you. Otherwise, what's to stop you from grabbing the money and stopping the service?
How to Compete
I'm definitely not an advocate of "big ideas" but I do think people need to shoot higher than yet-another-twitter-app. There's a middle ground, where stuff like Basecamp sits. Not "enterprisey" but also not just a bullshit re-tweet bot.

And passion definitely won't take care of everything, but it will solve the motivation problem, which I think is the biggest problem that a nights & weekends company has. You still need to find customers and all that, and while passion helps, so too does having a useful, viable product.

I would suggest trying to get outside of the HN geek echo chamber. Ignore Twitter, the iPhone, and all the other hot stuff right now and try to find an area or group that's totally underserved on the web. Ask friends, girlfriends, family, etc. for ideas on things they hate about the Web. In my case, my wife found that small plant nurseries are stuck in like 1996 when it comes to the web, so we started http://doleaf.com Sure, it's not super-sexy, but it solves a real problem for these people, and they're willing to pay for it.
All we are doing here is pseudo-science.

Simply let me state this:

- I sincerely listened to the evolution theory people

- I sincerely listened to the creationist people (but not in the US! In US, they all seem fundamentalists! We here in Europe have a much better religion/science culture; sorry, US).

I'm never interested in defending somebody or something, I'm always interested in the truth (read: ready to change my opinion, and I already did this many many times).

No, Darwin and followers: you don't convince me...

Yes, (european) 'creationists' (they aren't called so stupidly here, BTW): yes, you really convinced me!

P.S. Better have no science at all than bad (read: weak) science.
I've found very little documentation on this, but apparently the kernel optimizes multiple thread pools to prevent excessive context switches. (Consider an N-core system where multiple processes each create N worker threads of their own.)
They're very often wild-assed guesses. The introduction of a revolutionary new product often changes the market size significantly. For example, the market for computers got a lot bigger when the Altair was introduced (a world market for 6 computers? Really IBM?), then bigger still when the IBM PC was introduced, then bigger still Compaq and Dell and clones came about, then bigger still when Win95 provided the first decent GUI for clones.

You can make some rough estimates by figuring out what substitutes your product has, and then researching the combined revenues of all the products you'll be replacing. This also degenerates nicely: if you can't think of any substitutes, then it's fairly likely that you have a $0 market.
Too much old / academia guys for my tastes. Underground / modern programming is a different kind of culture.
Might find some details here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801503
I think there is a lot of cool potential for a toy robot based start up that adds a layer of polish to a Mindstorms style interface.

Something that focused more on a narrative than the educational aspect of designing robots. Imagine small rc bots that could be improved with new features/functionality via "expansion packs".

For example you could have a base bot that you could add tank treads to or go with a biwheel design like these bots. You could design games to play with the robots like a sumo experience, a rockem sockem thing with touch sensors, etc. different designs would give advantages in different games.

Combine addictive World of WarCraft style character customization with a relatively affordable robotics platform and you have a decent product for the $21B toy industry. Someone should do this for YC.
I think market research companies use existing sales data to estimate current market size; figures can then be confirmed with light checking. The market size estimate can be helpful to provide a reference on which to base rough figures (which usually mean nothing) or hone an idea. Investors that may not understand an industry do understand numbers, so that's why such figures are popular. I'd keep in mind, though, that a market size can change up or down for various reasons.
Online Brand Image Align O Malign
You can make a quicksortish sort algorithm with N log N worst case by letting the number of pivots increase with N. (Details and proof, of course, in Knuth. The details are nontrivial but not all that painful.) I don't think anyone's ever proposed that that's worth doing in practice.

Using more pivots is going to make the code more complicated. The benefits of moving from one pivot to two seem to be real but not enormous; I'd be pretty surprised if moving to three pivots produced benefits worth the cost. But of course that's just handwaving, and indeed it would be interesting to measure.
And blogs had 'more features' than Twitter too, but as they have proven, artificial constraints can make something popular. The minimalism is pretty much the point.
You weren't having fun at other's expense, you were had just like everyone else. You never said it wasn't a hoax because you didn't know it was a hoax.

There are two lessons to be had from this, and the recent facebook fax hoax 1) Traditional Journalism is good because they do fact checking and blogs do not. 2) The real time web is easily hackable.

People don't take the time to do research. They just read and accept. Slower news helps it be more real. Most of what comes into our brains now is just forgotten anyway. It may actually be better for us to read stuff a week or two after it comes out so it has time to be vetted by the community.

We may be doing ourselves a disservice by staying so "up" on the news because we could be polluting our brains with false information. We should be in constant doubt of everything we read on blogs, but unfortunately, we are not.
You are correct about the hardened lens. But consider: if you can't read things up close, then you read things at a distance, and small fonts are difficult to read at a distance.

So, yes, larger fonts will help.

By the way, I'm speaking from experience here. I'm 43, which I don't think is quite "elderly", but presbyopia has hit me pretty hard in the past year. My eyes are still better than 20/20, but I now need reading glasses for up-close work. Without my glasses, small fonts can be a problem.
I was thinking the tank droids from the Star Wars prequels. The product seems kind of lame, but the industrial design of the wheels is pretty sweet.
On the other hand, it doesn't need O(N) extra memory.
I was leaning towards Facebook, but the third from last Twitter pic showed someone's desk with Sushi on it. I'm sold. A creative working culture of sushi eaters and bike riders. My kind of people. Facebook looks a bit more flashy, but that's ok. Twitter it is.
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The Typo Test: Do Typos Ruin Online Copy? I'm Going to Find Out
I read some of the comments and others have probably said what I'm going to say. I wanted to startup too but due to other obligations (coughmilitary servicecough), I couldn't do it until I was... get this... 27. So I know how you feel. It's weird to watch friends do things and be successful and feel like you have to wait until your turn.

Every year I wanted to create something I called a cyber lemonade stand. Tim Ferris calls these muse businesses. I call it something simple where I charge money, people pay me, and I learn that I can do it. This is a big confidence builder and something you can start doing right away. http://www.feedbackarmy.com was my cyber lemonade stand, After the Deadline http://www.afterthedeadline.com was my startup.

What I find interesting is that I wasn't willing to take the steps towards the lemonade stand until I was out of the Air Force and had no job. If you're serious about starting up though, I really recommend you start on this concept right away. A small project will let you experiment with the things necessary to get something off the ground (contacting bloggers to generate PR, hiring out small stuff you can't do well yourself, etc).

Once you hit that magical time when you can startup--go for it. But you're thinking the right way trying to get some training in before the big race.
A few notes on HTML 5 for developers
...and offensive behavior.

Such as this lame mini-flamewar brewing here?

Time to just let it go guys.