skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe these are just 2009 investment rounds... from what I understand, Tesla has actually raised close to $800 million total if you count debt financing. Twitter's is still less than $200 million total.
Can you put up a page with examples of objects and how much it cost to produce them?

I think I'm like the vast majority of people you'll see -- vaguely aware of 3D printing, but with no sense of what it can produce or how much it costs. If I could look at a page and say "gee, I'd like to make something like that item there, and that price looks reasonable" then I'd be far more likely to use it.
First, Coq isn't an automatic theorem prover, it's a proof assistant. Adequacy is an issue, but (particularly) for computer-science applications it's sometimes possible to use the Coq artifact as the implementation directly. Adam Chilpala's recent work has made some pretty impressive advances in verifying working code.

I think you misunderstand, though: there's no obsession with absolute truth, at least not in the mathematical world I live in. I'm a PL researcher; we don't pretend to absolute truth, but formality and correctness are our cardinal virtues. (Take Coq as an apropos example.) Our proofs are (a) by induction, (b) long, and (c) can involve subtle and fussy steps. And (d), in an ideal our world, our proofs are also the bedrock of high-assurance systems. Proofs with different qualities may be better candidates for a more intuitive approach. In particular, actual mathematicians are probably more interested in the intuitive side of proof than we are. The article is in fact interested in that more intuitive mathematics; Lipton points out that this intuitive mathematics---whether as formal as 4CT or as informal as the vision conjecture he describes---is full of fun surprises. I'm not sure he's worried about the sort of nitpicking formality that I'm into. :)
That is pretty awesome - I've been thinking about doing this for a project I'm working on too. Can you give a rough idea of how long it took you to complete the conversion?
Psystar's suit alleges that since Apple is "tying its operating system to Apple-branded hardware," Cupertino is unfairly monopolizing the market for what Psystar dubs "premium computers," and by doing so "collects monopoly rents."

The suit is specific to Apple's new Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard operating system - which is why Apple wanted it thrown out, saying that the new suit was "essentially identical" to the existing legal imbroglio between Apple and Psystar, which centers on the previous operating system, Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard.

Uhh, that seems pretty straightforward...

Either the judge doesn't understand that there's really nothing different about Snow Leopard or there's some legal nuance I'm missing.
I have a Nokia S60.

I can install apps by downloading a program file and copying it to the phone. Or I can install apps "over the air". In neither case does _anyone_ have to authorise me installing the application.

Nor will I buy any phone that makes me jump through that hoop.
Don't worry about faxes yet; not even business execs use them these days, plus there are http/smtp gateways for fax.
Add an API. That would be sweet! Then this could be integrated with any sort of collaboration web app!
word. so after rebuilding the card box and inserting the cards one by one, the plastic cover is reattached. pretty neat.
The -a option didn't work, but altscreen on in my ~/.screenrc seems to have worked. Thanks!
It seems that the solution will be to develop a means of modding the system while leaving proprietary apps & drivers intact: http://groups.google.com/group/android-platform/browse_threa...

Kudos to the Android engineers for working around the lawyers on this one.
If you'd finished the article, you'd have noticed that it was the second half of the request that the judge rejected. Apple wanted the judge to reopen the discovery part of the precedings to take into account 10.6 which was released after the the discovery part had already closed. The judge said that this was Apple's fault for delaying the release of the OS and declined the motion, the whole motion.
They're completely missing the mark in selling their product, like really really really far off. The only takeaway I got from their homepage is "save $500 over web ex over a year". Ok, that's a +1. What else? Hello? Anything?

So they should understand that there are people that currently use tools like this, and there are people that don't. The people that don't, well, that's hard, because you have to explain how the service can benefit them. The people that do use these kind of tools, well they all have their gripes. So that's an easy sell. Assuming you are focusing on those gripes. Or giving a service of equal quality, but less money.

So, looking at the people that already use these tools (myself included), I need a comparison chart. Tell me how you are better. Saving money alone ain't gonna cut it. Lay out all the reasons for me in as simple a way as possible. If saving money is the only thing you're selling me, well, my only assumption can be that I save money for a lesser quality product.

That homepage is hella cluttered, but isn't doing any convincing.
Apple Rehires a Developer of Its Newton Tablet
Some editors (Komodo) do this for you.
To put it more simply, you're talking to both audiences at once (people that use these tools and people that don't). Thus, the message is cluttered. You need to focus on one, and I would recommend you focus on people that already use these kinds of tools. Cause they're the ones already buying into the idea.
I thought about just reading it, but after having it play for about 5 minutes I realized I really wanted to watch them say it. They're both very dynamic and you get a lot more of the nuance from their body language and inflection.

Also, the transcript has a few errors. They are generally fairly benign, but it was a bit confusing to read "pool" for "pull" and a few of the quotes and apostrophes weren't in the right places.
"even with premium parts"? The more the components cost, the more you save building it yourself. Dell makes the most sense for cheaper machines.
Well, I always just used C-a [ to get into copy mode. Another thing to consider is that once you are in copy mode you don't have to hit or continue to hold down the shift key along with PgUp/PgDn.

I personally don't find that to be an annoyance, though. Especially not when stacked up against all of the other benefits you get from using screen.
jwz says this in the comments:

An important point here is that Palm-the-company used to not be stupid in this way. The way this worked on PalmOS was completely sane. They went and fucked up their whole process when they switched to WebOS.

I assume this is because they hired the majority of the WebOS management team from Apple, pushing out the people who did it right in the PalmOS years, and those new people are idiots.

I'm not sure it's safe to assume that this process is stupid. Palm did, indeed, copy all of this straight from Apple's playbook. Apple's App Store is wildly successful. It may have issues from the perspective of some developers, but that's not the only perspective that matters. Palm isn't trying to make a bunch of developers happy. They're trying to sell phones and make users happy.

Whether you can make users just as happy without requiring developers to jump through hoops remains to be seen. One could easily argue that it's possible, but I'd like to see evidence of that in the real world. I don't think the software ecosystems for desktop computers are a fair comparison. The ecosystems for older Palm devices, which jwz references here, were never nearly as successful as Apple's App Store. Maybe that suggests that the hoops somehow help the user experience? I don't know. But it looks like Palm is assuming that it does.

I agree that this whole process seems completely broken from jwz's perspective, but it's hard to say that Palm had people "who did it right in the PalmOS years" when they never got it right in the category that matters: number of app sales. That could be 100% attributable to the iPhone's superiority, not the App Store's, though.
Now that thousands of (intelligent) people have wasted hours discussing Joel's insane article, can we all just move on? Please stop posting any more of the duct tape articles.
You sir, are a godsend.

Good bye visio!
More duct tape!
How do you overcome the lack of replication?
I disagree with that, because this is "the duct tape programmer" himself, having a say in the matter.
This article is great. I'm going to implement some ideas here.

Question, though. We don't offer a trial–only various demos of websites/apps.

Should I capture visitor's email before letting them see a demo?
That's not what I said at all.

I said that this can do more harm than good to the asker requests this while the company is still actively trying to redirect client requests.

If you can leave it long enough that you can approach them and they say "Oh, silly us, you're right! You left a while ago!" they will be much more receptive.

Like many things in business, this isn't about moral high-ground, it's about seeking the best outcome for yourself while offending as few people as possible.
You make a fine case for not running OpenSSL at all, and a poor case for jailing OpenSSL.

Believe me, if there was a good alternative to OpenSSL, I'd be recommending it. Running OpenSSL in a jail is a horrible solution; but at least it's better than anything else.
I have a strong aversion to most of these suggestions. That's not how I'd like to be treated as a customer.
I can install his apps trivially. I wouldn't because they're largely worthless (there are already a dozen tip calculators) but Palm has said that they'd allow homebrew apps and so far have stood behind it.
Similar to the digital music industry, it seems that the publishers are trying to spin software as something you have licensed instead of something you own. This can be seen very readily in the MDY v Blizzard case that's going on right now. Blizzard claims that they only license the game to you, even though you bought a physical copy at a store front. Because they own the game and you only license it they can say that you don't have the right to modify the memory. You would essentially be bound to anything they want to put in their EULA/ToS in this case.

This does have a very chilling effect on archival systems. When you aren't able to format-shift a piece of media or it is bound to only one player then eventually you will loose access to that media, either through hardware failure or obsolescence.

Copyright law section 117 gives you a lot of rights for software you've purchased and owned, but treating it as a license circumvents that clause and gives the publisher full control.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/you-bought-it-you-own-i...
Can tech personalities break into politics?
The article includes a quote "never take software advice from a bug tracking system salesman", and I think the same entertaining aphorism holds true for methodology consultants.

Both have too much invested in you listening to their advice.
His say basically is that we should all stop talking about programming and actually program things, because we'll all learn a lot more about what actually works in practice rather than what we think might work.

This is incredibly good advice which I can't seem to follow myself. I'm on HN during the workday instead of getting my damn CSS layouts to resize correctly, after all.
I'd like to hear more about how their RAW converter stopped working.
Another app rejected by Apple... This time for political reasons?
I've found your app addictive and useful (I'm prepping for the GRE), but it's a bit buggy in FF 3 on OSX and on my iphone.

1) animation on the word/choices occasionally flashes repeatedly, usually around 5 times in a row, but sometimes requires a page refresh to get it to stop

2) I've found that after a point some of the words are repeated more than 3 times and if I answer those words correctly for the 4th time I get a point reduced from my "words mastered" count

Otherwise, great clean interface. Well done.
You ever look at jwz's markup or CSS? He's solved that problem by bypassing it entirely. Go work on something fun.
I think that all the backend of this uses drop.io's (http://drop.io/) API to get the phone number. This (quite cleverly) adds a simple interface to it.

I would also check out Twilio if you're interested (http://www.twilio.com/).
World Bank Head Sees Dollar’s Role Diminishing
Ask HN: Will mobile support for logins be coming soon?
I sometimes browse HN on my android phone. I'm not sure what percentage of the readership does so but I'm sure it will be growing. I noticed however that at least on my android phone browser logins don't work. Is there any desire to support mobile browsers for HN?
Wow, NEA is in 6 of the top 10. That's what happens when you raise such huge funds.
Networks and Moving Data Centers
Education is actually a huge part of all of this, as I was in the same boat as you a year ago.

Short answer: anywhere from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars. It depends on how fine of quality you want in the part (which is also related to the particular process). If you can deal with some rough edges, it's much cheaper.

Longer answer: We're actually in the middle of making our "How it works" section much more in-depth. Something like this should be on there, especially for purposes of comparison between processes.
His pages also tend to be butt-ugly. ;-) I get paid to make things pretty, or rather to take the pretty designs that interaction/visual designers come up with and make them actually work, across all browsers, maintainably, with a minimum number of bytes.

In return, when I'm not wrestling with CSS I can play with massive quantities of data and a few zillion machines. Not a bad trade-off IMHO.
6 hours. That included translating my layout.html.erb to Haml (but none of my other erb's made the switch).

We've got about 250 template files total (including partials), and a couple thousand lines of stylesheet.
LogMeIn can help people get their PCs, phones etc. to talk to each other
From that I learned something important: programmers rarely need to type fast.

Add a good in there.
They were the first, actually. I didn't know for sure if they were still going though.
SID probably equals session ID, from him clicking around on the site.
Having dealt with many MySQL installations and, finally, a nice, internet-scale Postgres site, I can quite comfortably challenge the notion that MySQL has "great" replication.

It's certainly tough to beat for trivial topology or trivial database size, but, beyond that, MySQL statement-based replication is remarkably fragile. What's worse is, if a slave is far enough behind, it's possible that it will never catch up (hint: think about I/O contention with replication and whether it's possible to separate logs adequately). Once that happens, it's full dump time. Anything remotely fancy, like filtering out certain schemas (which MySQL calls "database," but it's really just a namespace), and a single developer discovering cross-schema UPDATEs, and That's All She Wrote.

With Slony, after learning the admittedly bizarre administrative interface, everything was a dream. Swapping master and slave is fast and easy, even if there are other slaves out there. Full dump? Never heard of it! Certainly, slony does do the equivalent when bringing up a new slave, but the locking requirement is nowhere near as onerous, nor is the overall performance hit. Replication happens at the table level, not the whole database.

The amount of time I've spent fixing broken MySQL replication easily dwarfs the amount of time I've spent learning and experimenting and fixing (after breaking on purpose, usually) Slony.
Das Keyboard manufactures its high end keyboard with both QWERTY and Dvorak layouts!

http://www.daskeyboard.com/
It it certainly possible that by getting fancy with Sass you could lose track of your selectors and styles, but having spent the last several days debugging (Compass-unrelated) style issues with our app, it seems unlikely.

Here's the deal:

* Raw CSS looks exactly like the raw CSS you always had.

* Sass CSS looks like the raw CSS, but is 1000x more readable.

So, the only problem I've noticed is the throbbing pain behind my left eyeball that I get when I have to look at "real" CSS anymore.

(Yes, I do have to search for selector names in my CSS instead of literally jumping to line numbers, but my workflow was never very line-number-centric to begin with.)
I've been on Dvorak for a while now. Honestly, typing QWERTY on my iPhone isn't particularly difficult, as the muscle memory for the tiny on-screen keyboard seems to be different than that of my laptop keyboard. But it would be nice for Apple to offer a Dvorak option.
I hope not. If it did, the "abstractions" would ossify and we'd have to live with their quirks and bugs for the next 10 years. I'd rather the standards people work on defining a useful, reliable, flexible lowest-common-denominator syntax, and the framework people work on making sure we never have to use it directly.
I understand. The primary benefits of screen to me is disconnect / reconnect, and as such it's useful for servers, but local terminals, not so much.

The other advantage of "rich" support is mousewheel combined with selection: with Cygwin rxvt, I can scroll up, begin a selection with the mouse, and scroll down with the mouse wheel and thereby copy multiple pages of scrollback buffer into the Windows clipboard, ready for e.g. paste in to blog article.

The advantage of keyboard-free casual scrollback when I'm writing such articles, checking what I did earlier, is something you learn to take for granted, and is quite obviously missing with screen.
So now when I want to find out where in the CSS file I need to change the font size of an h3, I have to search through all 127 places where h3 is referenced. All you did was point the problem in a different direction.
Phase-change memory chips now in mass production
I think any platform can make both developers and user's happy. I agree and empathize with jwz in that its got to be incredibly frustrating to write two relatively simple apps only to have to jump through hoop after hoop to get them published.

I know I'd be equally as frustrated if I couldn't just get my apps on the store.
Interview with Web Usability Guru, Jakob Nielsen
Beware, Humans. The Era of Automation Software Has Begun
Ask HN: Have you tried cold calling prospects before building a product?
I would like to know if anyone has actually tried cold calling potential customers before building a product?

If you have what is a good number of prospects to call before making a decision?

I just came out of a 100-calls session selling an existing product (that is not tech related by the way). Zero sales later, it was quite a challenge.
I am pretty sure that isn't really an example of "damning with faint praise" - it is clear to anyone that the use of the "duct tape" phrase was dramatic, considering he then goes to describe jwz as being one of those people that just gets out of bed looking good etc... (NOT faint praise !)

That would be "yeah, jwz did an OK job on netscape" etc..
Ballmer Criticizes I.B.M.’s High-Profit Diet
Yeah, just to be clear, when I said "I have heard numerous horror stories about the quality of Lenovo gear since then." I was actually referring mainly to anecdotes I had heard from people relating to non-ThinkPad Lenovo laptops. As I said, I've had no problem with my T60, it's a great laptop for my purposes and I have not purchased a ThinkPad newer than my T60.

My only concern about the newer ThinkPads - based off these anecdotes - is that the quality of ThinkPads may be adversely affected as they ostensibly become more Lenovo and less IBM.
The article is interesting about mobile phones. For interest sake, MTN is a South African company. Mobile phones make things such as informal jobs a lot easier (e.g. if someone wants to organise labour for a project).

The problem still however is price. In China it costs 0.15 Yuan to send a text message – in SA it can be the equivalent the equivalent of 1 Yuan. Voice calls are even more expensive (R3+ a minute – about 0.4 US$). I believe that the price elsewhere in Africa is even more expensive (since some of the base stations run on Diesel generators).

I also don’t think that telecoms growth should be seen as economic growth (it is not always coupled). Telecoms is however still a giant problem. In SA we have huge problems with extremely expensive Internet. This is extremely unfavourable. We have a lot of people that can speak English without an accent at the same time zone as Europe – yet it is too expensive to put up call centres.
The takeaway for me was: 1) use a HMAC instead of using message digests directly 2) don't throw away structure in the strings you sign.
"slower growth + customers migrate to Amazon"

Who is also a public company. You're trying to say that a public company will lose to another public company because it's public...
Obviously something like YC could in principle work outside the Valley, because YC itself used to be. We had to fly startups from Boston cycles to present to investors in Silicon Valley, though, and the more prominent clones do as well, so I think you have to take that as a given.

Probably the biggest disadvantage for startups in Boston cycles was the scarcity of experienced founders there. In our Boston cycles, we considered ourselves lucky to get 2 or 3 speakers of the caliber we get in SV cycles (http://ycombinator.com/w9speakers.html). I would guess this problem is even worse in other towns.
I hardly think that's the case. Most of the C&D letters that Apple sends out aren't followed up by Apple's engineers publicly/vocally working around the legal issues to help the community out.
Jonah Lehrer: Social Determinism - What you do affects your social network
Ask HN: How to find investors?
Apparently I made an error by asking about investors/angels in my first post. I don't understand how I am supposed to go about locating such people.

I am on SSDI disability, and trying to both inmprove the world, and get myself independent again (not really worried about getting "rich" as just being able to feed myself, have a decent living situation, and paying my own medical bills).

If anyone has any suggestions, I wish to learn.

Thank you for your tier and consideration in this matter.

avrPhreaque
aka: Tom Keller
tjkeller@inebraska.com
I don't think so - I recall reading many articles on Newegg's novel fulfillment system (nearly fully automated warehouses). Sure, they do shipping through UPS, but which online retailer doesn't?
Young guns from Google. I know Ethan from Google video days. I like how they bootstrapped it. No full time employees til the product launches in the market. Smart move.

We are living in a new counter culture
This sort of just highlights how the legal process just doesn't have the ability to deal with either the time frames or the technical challenges of the newer industries.

Throw in the ability of things like software to escape easy definition and/or the need for new legislation in light of new paradigms and you basically are stuck.
The Economics of Technology and Labor: Time to Rethink Your IT Program
They were one of several ents from TC50 that said they financed it (bootstrapped) with their credit cards, Kevin Smith style.
Hit control+find and search for Twilio ;)

I do plan on adding twilio, I am playing with their conferencing API as we speak. I'm also checking out an alternative, that looks pretty promising. I'll see how it turns out.

I made it with Dropio as a proof of concept.
A friend of mine commented today had HN a "trending topics" list, duct tape would be heading it for the last couple days...
IPod Volume Restrictions On The Way: Can You Hear Me Now?