skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll agree, Flash Player is not OSS (though projects to emulate this do exist), and it can be a royal pain but...

You can definitely use Rails with Flex. Flex is not a server side language or framework. It can interface with all of them really well through web services. Heck, I'm pretty sure Flex can even inject and call JavaScript functions on your pages. Rails can render things to XML amazingly well, and you can still build an HTML response as well while maintaining the functionality of the Flex application.

Your co-founder is comparing apples to oranges, but whatever works for you all is great. Just don't let the tools limit you.
Conveniently, it does save characters on the website at entry time as their site only checks by character count. Also their backend via website doesn't validate by bytes either.

Their API has fluctuated from checking bytes and characters over time-- I think right now it checks bytes. SMS does it by bytes.
Courting Controversy: The World Wildlife Fund's "9/11" Ad
If that class counted toward a math major, then yes. At Rutgers, while those classes exist, they are there to prep you for requirements, but don't count for anything on their own.
People only complain when they want to keep using the product/service in question and are unwilling to take things to an extreme conclusion.

E.g. When people have a bad experience at the theatre, the only ones who complain at the service desk are those who will return regardless.

The people who've had enough just quietly walk out and never return.
my homedir is organized as follows:

bin/ - binaries that aren't installed; appended to $PATH
docs/ - docs for what i'm working on is here
src/ - code
dl/ - that i downloaded
*/ - that i wrote
misc/ - self explanatory
notes/ - todos, notes i jotted down, urls
tmp/ - my sandbox usually filled with downloads, tmp.c and the like

And OS X's dirs like Library, Documnets, etc
Pretty much at random. I use Emacs org-mode files and grep as a sort of alternative filesystem; it's a lot more flexible.
I found this gem in the comments on that page:

I appreciate the kind comments. If you or a friend / family member could benefit from the catheter, please do not hesitate to contact us on our website at www.vasculardesigns.com

No one will be turned away if they can not afford the catheter.

Robert Goldman
A blog would offer a few other advantages:

1. If anyone is ever looking for something similar to your side projects / hacks, it would likely turn up on a Google search and direct it to your blog. I don't think search engines give as much priority to social news sites.

2. If you do end up meeting people who are into what you're doing, they can subscribe to your blog via RSS. It's much easier to follow someone that way than to wait for a posting of theirs to pop up on a site like HN.
The Nobel prize is usually awarded for basic science, uncovering the mechanisms of something, rather than engineering applications based on that science.
Funny story: my roommate (much smarter than me) focused on algebra in undergrad and now grad school. Always poke fun at him for studying x+3=5 ;)
What do you believe the answer to be?
I have long felt that there is a massive and well funded lobby for curing things, but an impoverished prevention programme. There is no real financial incentive to prevent cancer etc, but lots of money and glory for curing people who have got cancer. This applies right across medicine.

Similarly there is a massive and well funded lobby for power production and very little for power efficiency, which effectively achieves the same result. Instead of spending the money on solar panels in space what about energy efficient fridges? And no, this doesn't shrink the 'economy' it allows us to achieve the same level of wealth with less resource consumption.
Ask HN: Possible/Pursue Grad School Researching on a Personal Idea?
I recently graduated and now working on getting a start-up going at the moment. I've wanted to pursue graduate school and I like the research aspect of it, and I've done undergraduate research as well.

I have several ideas which are a bit more hardware/software mixes and more research oriented, and no patents exist for them either, so the first answer is walking the patent path and selling the prototype/idea or have it bought out.

Other option: Is it recommend or even possible to pursue a graduate degree with a focus on researching on the said personal idea? Any remote chance a professor/group might want to entertain my idea (in which case I wouldn't mind if the project gets merged with the school)?
Antitrust, much?
thanks. I'm not implementing this idea. Was more of an ouptut of a brainstorming session.
Kids and the Open Web
I personally believe it's too early too tell, either 7 months ago or even now. Consumers will decide in the end who they prefer, even if it's not one of these two companies.
I can easily see parents requiring their teenagers to use this software and pay $3.99 a month.

They already pay hundreds of dollars a year for things like this:
http://www.flexispy.com/spyphone-flexispy-apple-iphone.htm
Why do I get this feeling that Loopt simply struck a deal for access to location/tracking/logging data that AT&T is already collecting for its own purposes...
AT&T disgusts me. How much money has the iPhone dropped in their lap? And all they do with that money is drag down the entire user experience with horrible, overpriced service which cripples the device severely.

They have had time, however, to try to squeeze as much money from this venture as possible while they still have exclusivity. I've now received two emails from AT&T about their navigation app. They charge $9.99 per month for it. How many other iPhone app developers can send out an email to every single iPhone owner at will? Zero. The rest of us have to charge 99 cents (one time) if we want to get noticed on the App Store.

And now that they've cashed in on Apple's brilliance and innovation, they're going to do the same with Loopt. They are the perfect example of a company willing to do whatever it takes to increase profits, but not willing to do much of anything to help their customers.
"Whence the vehement defense of the thesis?"

I don't know what part of what I said was vehement.

After everything you said, I think you arrive pretty close to Locklin's conclusion:

"Are cars better? They are certainly safer, and it’s easier to buy a very high performance car than it was in 1959, but they don’t get much more efficient than they were in 1959."

You give the reason why cars are not much more efficient than they were in 1959 (heavier due to increased safety regulations, which Locklin also csites). But nevertheless, driving a car in 2009 is a pretty similar experience, all around, to driving a car in 1959 (except maybe more traffic). Compare that to the difference between 1909, when cars went from being a novelty to the primary means of conveyance. Are you seriously arguing that the difference in everyday transportation between 2009 and 1959 is of greater magnitude than that between 1909 and 1959?
I like flash/flex when it's used as part of a site, to display video, a game, or some presentation. There are too many benefits from using standard HTML as to not use it for the main plumbing of a site.
So Gmail Was Down. Get Over It.
Using PageRank to predict extinctions
It's the first time I've seen it, so I appreciate it if it was re-posted.
Exactly. One of the primary benefits of using GTD (or being organized in general) is that you don't have to worry about something popping up at the last minute, like an obligation you forgot or a task that really needed to be done earlier.

It lets your leisure be all that more relaxing, since you understand that you aren't forgetting to do something else during that time.
This is not exactly the same, but I remember seeing a service in the news a few years ago where they would match scholars and geeks (e.g. you could look specifically for ornithologists, if you're a bird geek). It's not exactly anonymous, but the main focus was on areas of (very specific) interest, rather than physical appearance.
I am fairly certain that people using this will eventually learn to sing in tune with out the app.

I really liked watching how happy everyone was when they were using the demo. They were all so immediately impressed and inspired.
> Did you ask them how they managed to get that many cards ?

Can't be too terribly hard. I get three credit card applications in the mail a day. I've known friends in college that had five credit cards, mostly maxed out.
I'd say 98% of the hip hop that's played on the radio and on tv can "not" be classified as hip hop. Here is a fantastic video about the Auto-Tune industry, presented by one of the pioneers of real hip hop, KRS-ONE:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8RqgDsO3c4

Also presented by Buckshot from Blackmoon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5nk_J-SQ_4

Aside from that history lesson, this app is pretty hilarious, and I'd love to play with it :)
A-Teams = 12 people
Too much funding can be toxic for start-ups
While fairly introspective, I wasn't really sure what this was trying to say. Is it saying that he doesn't want to charge for anything he does so that he can't be valued?

I instead hope to charge as much as possible for as many things as possible, there-by valuing my life as highly as possible. My life is not non-profit :)
Well, tree-style tabs allows them to be nested that way. It's my favorite extension.
The real health-care problem isn’t moral, but structural
Based on my experience, this is long shot. But be SURE you have an agreement with a professor before getting into the program. The programs, from what I know, are about the professor's interests and ambitions.

That said, if your idea is particularly exciting, you may be able to induce a professor to get behind it, but this is something you'll want to have well understood before you enter the program; preferably before you even apply.
Twollow also put itself for sale this week on Sitepoint, but then quickly took itself off the market. Twollow was claiming 8k of monthly revenue and was asking much less than TwtApps.
The idea of applying treatment directly to tumors is obvious, true. He didn't patent or invent that. He came up with a delivery method that is safe, reliable, and easy. That was the hard part.
You know, you could give some context to this comment, and perhaps comment on the article since you know more.
http://app-o-rama.com/
Magazines Now Create and Customize Ads
Seeing JMP, I experienced a flash of x86 asm panic.
Click Web Analytics as a Desktop App via Fluid
This is the test I use on all date libraries I come across. I don't know what the right answer is, I just want it to be logical:

(pseudo)
Date d = new Date('1/31/2009');
d.addOneMonth();

What is the value of d? 2/28/09? 3/2/09? 2/25/09?

Writing a date library is not for the fainthearted.
Well, that's not entirely true. What is true is that if the mind is more powerful that a Universal Turing Machine, then we have no idea how to approach building one. However, we know that the resources required to build one are small -- humans do it all the time in a relatively cheap process called "sex." That is, the lower bound for creating AI is very small. Of course, the danger is that our brains have certain limitations for a reason -- these could be the property of this super-Universal Turing Machine. Therefore, a true AI may look nothing like our modern computer. The GP is correct in that we should at least be able to build a simulacrum of our own mind -- even if that is simply an artificially constructed duplicate using biology, genetics, and biochemistry. I would say that this may be fairly far away, because we have yet to truly understand many of the processes and structures in the human brain. This is why I believe AI is much farther off than most people think: to understand AI we must first understand ourselves, which is much more complex than at first take.

Now, this entire hypothesis rests on the idea that our brain is super-Universal. That is, it cannot be phrased as a computable function (by the Church-Turing thesis). This is a fairly unpopular view in the AI community, but valid until we prove otherwise. Up till now there has been no evidence that such a Turing machine exists in theory, much less in practice, which is a minor blow. In addition, many of our psychological structures and chemical activities seem to suggest a Universal Turing machine.

Edit: I just realized that I implied that a super-Universal Turing machine is a Turing machine. This is obviously untrue, by definition. Consider my terminology to be a replacement for whatever name we would give to this noncomputable function solver (since we have no category for that at the moment).

Edit2: Not that we don't have a category for noncomputable functions, only that we don't know which category they would fall into. I guess the catch-all "hypercomputable" is suitable. Thanks, naveesunder
and yet at the same time, they get offended if you try to check their readyState - you can't win!
CBSE Grading System
This seems to be arguing that they're at the wrong point on a continuum. But there can be more than one "right" part of a continuum as well -- the model of a small, focused team works, but plenty of big companies use huge numbers of less-focused teams, and those also work.

The incubator model could be another local maximum.
Software patents are very open to interpretation.

I mean, come on, a patent on using XML for defining a document? That is pretty broad. i4i likely chose Microsoft because they're a big target with a big wallet. They could just as easily chose to go after the authors of the OpenDocument spec, but likely wouldn't get anything.
Maybe I'm an odd parent but I'd never stoop so low. Maybe a few would, but it still seems like an extremely small market.

And surely AT&T could just provide a simple "track this phone" service themselves and cut out loopt altogether for this particular use case.
Awesome. This totally precipitated the requisite defensive responses from the younger crowd.

Put this in your pipe and smoke it: press release interpretations (especially of gender studies) are playground arguments, in this case over whether guys or girls are better. If you didn't get it out of your system then, you're probably still in it.

That is, the only people who care about the outcome are those sad, insecure souls who think every generalized test of some self-confirming experiment likely crafted in a Ritalined-up haze by a disingenuous grad student MUST apply to them.

Need proof? What is this experiment testing? Would you put college kids in a computer lab for an hour to test general rules about gender and attraction in society? No. No you wouldn't.

No, HN, this study is not very good, and neither is the silly reporting about it. But if you want, you can have social awkwardness as a door prize.
In twenty years (by the time my son would be graduating), the centuries-old idea of college will probably be gone.

The idea of college as it exists now isn't very old. The idea of centers of study and learning predates not just computers, but also books.
13 hours and not one response ? Sigh.
I would pay 4 bucks a month... if everyone else paid 4 bucks a month and did the same. They won't do that, however.
In the article he claims that he owns the intellectual property. Does that not mean that there should be a patent availble for public study? If so what's the #?
Amazing article! Short version: Recruiters dont want to recruit from large successful companies, because they either breed incompetents (it doesn't matter if you suck when you work at Coca Cola business is good anyway), or psycopaths (The take no prisoners culture at Oracle, EMC), or paranoid politicos (Intel)...
Ask HN: How do you explain how programming works to complete non-techies?
I didn't realize just how hard this was until my company had an offsite yesterday where they let the sales people and the engineers play together. I guess I normally hang out with people who have at least been forced to do Java or Matlab programming or something in college, but a lot of paradigms I thought of as common knowledge aren't.

The best example we came up with (for explaining how a large web site works) was an Excel spreadsheet analogy. Imagine a spreadsheet that has a bunch of graphs constructed from the data. The spreadsheet is our database of all of our data, and each graph is a different web page view.

Programming is pretty interesting, and I think non-programmers would really enjoy knowing what's going on. Too often though, I think explanations go right over their heads, and they've learned to not even bother asking.
>>This is why I believe AI is much farther off than most people think: to understand AI we must first understand ourselves, which is much more complex than at first take.

I saw an interview with the director of the Blue Brain project. He projected 10 years, before they can emulate a brain...

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/08/henry-markam-project-direct...

"Computational Neuroscience over the past 50 years is a theory driven science, while Blue Brain is biology driven. When we reach the human brain, human-like perceptions and motor actions should emerge automatically. The model brains will be able to learn to do what we human’s can learn to do, perform complex decision-making, manifest emotions, intelligence and personalities. We see these all as straightforward emergent properties of the brain. Self-awareness and consciousness may also emerge if this phenomenon depends on neuronal, synaptic and/or molecular interactions. Anything that depends on the physical elements that can be measured in the brain should emerge if we are successful in building it accurately enough. If we inject some theories of brain while we build it and ignore the biology, then we are back to square one with computational neuroscience and we will almost certainly fail."
I'm not sure that would actually help. Assume a person guesses a 1-10 number, and there would realistically have to be a fudge factor to account for personal tastes, a bot could guess "7" and be correct enough of the time. A fairly large solution space would be needed for an effective captcha.
Silly. So very silly.

First of all: he doesn't use his definition of intelligence consistently. According to his usage of the word a being can be truly intelligent, and another one can _appear_ perfectly intelligent but be in reality a dumb machine that merely simulates intelligence. That's his chess example. But he _defines_ intelligence as the science of making machines do things that lead us to believe they are intelligent. A chess computer that outsmarts me most definitely fits that definition of intelligence.

He continually makes the claim that "Technological artifacts do not have a will or a desire". There is no reason to assume that you need some primal force to get a will or desire (perhaps any sufficiently complex system will have a will or desire as a side-effect), and there is no reason to assume a will or desire can't be perfectly emulated.

He claims that there are no signs that computer processing speed will eventually overtake that of the human brain. I say that computer processing speed is undeniably improving rapidly, and that the number of tasks that computers can do is rapidly increasing. Unless there is a hard limit somewhere the assumption should be that we will be eventually overtaken.

Computer AIs can play Chess, Checkers and Super Mario. They can create art, and compose music. They can drive some vehicles, and land planes at night. How about science? Some proofs are made and proved correct almost entirely by computer. Some proofs are so complex they can only be verified by computer. In many research fields a single human is almost guaranteed to contribute nothing. A computer, on the other hand, can probably brute-force his way to many new discoveries.

He again makes the claim that computers are innately unable to feel compassion or empathy. Only to finish with the dumbest remark of the article: "I don't think they will be very good at faking fouls", which is clearly a matter of basic game theory. And I think that robots will completely crush humans at soccer, even if they lack strategy. The moment robots are good enough to take the ball away from a pro human player, they will be able to do so consistently. Even if they run slower and shoot only semi-accurately, they will never make big mistakes. And history shows that in any game where computers can compete the humans have to play (almost) perfectly to even stand a chance (see: Chess / Checkers / Poker). We meat bags with our 100ms+ response times will never be in the same league as robots. Either we will be far superior to the robots, or the robots will run circles around us.
Squishy was a pretty good indicator that it wasn't going to be your typical hacking article IMO...

But if you are insinuating that biohacking is not relevant:
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> relatively cheap

And who said HN has a shortage of humor :)

We know that intelligence can beget other intelligence, just like we know that life can beget life. But so far nobody to my knowledge has succeeded in creating artificial life without starting from something else that was already alive.

Intelligence might pose similar challenges.

> to understand AI we must first understand ourselves,

And therein lies the rub. We may get the mechanics down to every last nut and bolt and we may still not understand how intelligence arises. Just like we can not bring a recently deceased human back to life again. We have all the pieces but we do not know how to put the spark back in.

Compare it with a computer analogy, broken for sure, like all analogies, but it may bring the point across:

If an intelligence is a product of both software and hardware, and we seem to transfer the software through our genes and use that to build hardware that comes 'pre-programmed' then that program might not just run on any hardware. It may make lots of assumptions that we can not easily simulate without starting with a live brain and that would be cheating.

If we can not reliably bring people out of a coma, all the pieces are still there and appear to be 'plugged in' then how can we expect to generate an AI for which we do not even have the pieces ?

If I have a computer running an os in ram that I keyed in one fine sunday morning using the bootstrap panel, and which I then destroyed, next switch the machine off while it is working great you would have to know how I got the initial program in there before you could attempt to duplicate it.

Call it the case of the missing scaffolding, the last coupld of billion of years of evolution put that program where it sits, and from what we can see living creatures can pass it to the next generation in one form or another.

But it seems to be terribly difficult to switch the machine back on once it is of.

To me strong AI and life are quite strongly intertwined, I doubt you can have AI without artificial life, and that in and of itself may be quite enough of a challenge.
Seems like he went from underestimating to overestimating human intelligence.
Soccer robots can move quickly, punch the ball hard and get it accurately into the net, but they cannot look at the pattern of the game and guess where the ball is going to end up.

I'm pretty sure that computers already play sports (minus the robots) acceptably well.
Importance of Gluteal Massage
There is a category for super Turing computation - hypercomputation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation.
There is a whole hierarchy of such problems/machines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetical_hierarchy
It seems to me that this would be Loopt's business model?

I can understand bashing AT&T I hate their service, but I think Loopt charges for their service on most providers.

Oh and the $9.99 per month thing made me choke too. Especially when TomTom has a $99 app.