skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the baby gender business idea, why not offer a 100% money back guarantee for all wrong predictions, no questions asked. You would be right half the time, and that should be more than enough profit considering it costs nothing to run.
Dogfood software moves to a dogfood cloud.
From 678 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74898

9 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795886

Also 9 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795768

Actually, I think that last one is the same link as this ...
How writing a compiler not cool? Just because someone uses a book and targets the JVM, which is a great target platform for a lot several reasons, doesn't mean they aren't doing it just because it's fun.
Just think how much more i'd get done if i didn't waste time reading seth's stupid blog.
Uncollectible books that entered & exited bookstores quietly in the 1950s-70s
20 (More) Daily Sources for Design and Dev News, Tips & Tricks
Summary: Someone at the W3C had enough of a pulse to wrest back the reigns from the Ted Nelsons that had spent a decade leading it off into useless fantasies. Here (a couple months ago) one of the primary fucklers is smashing his toys and throwing a tantrum.

Microsoft's decision to not implement XHTML was absolutely the right one -- draconian error handling would have fucked the web. 'tag soup' is not particularly hard to parse in the first place.
Thanks for writing this, Arvind. I've often tried to explain what was good about LJ to other technologists.

LJ is largely shunned by the technology elite. I think this is because it doesn't meet their needs -- it isn't a very good platform for increasing one's personal authority on a topic. But the privacy culture was superior.

For most non-technology-elite, privacy is sine qua non. At my former job (Upcoming.org), we allow everyone in the world to see what events you are planning to attend. The event also displays a very public list of all those intending to attend. Techno-elite users like this because they are often looking to be highly visible at certain conferences, and even make connections with people they barely know yet. The elite of certain music and social scenes also want this. But user testing showed that this freaked the average person out quite a lot and they couldn't see the use of it. For them, social data was inherently personal and private.

It might be that everyone in the world will eventually live a little bit like the techno-elite, and want more random connections and live more in public. But for richer, more personal relationships, we will need some sort of cross-site privacy system.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=692437
Good that more devices are getting multi-touch.

That being said, this device is not a game changer. Its a mee-too. Which is great. It'll force the innovators to innovate more.
Meaning ... they do?
The daily mail is known for attention grabbing and publishing wildly inaccurate stories.
The Nutritional Impossibility of Australia
> 3gs for best experience

Yes cause the only the 3gs (amongst iPhones) has a compass. So that isn't really relevant to the discussion of what the iPhone introduced to the world. Other phones had a compass (and GPS for that matter) a lot earlier.
That is illegal. What would be more interesting would be to offer to return twice the money, less an admin fee of 10%. While on the surface that appears to break even(ish), you can rely on inertia for people not actually to ask for their money back.

With the 200% guarantee, that might not even be illegal.

EDIT: Finally got to read the actual article and realised that this is already covered. Sorry - /mea culpa./
I'm buying it because I found clear, comprehensive literature explaining the fundamentals of the JVM severely lacking (suggestions welcome, however!).
I think the big issue is that it's easy to do in developing countries, so this could possibly result in a lot of DIY panels. Even if this has no flaws beyond that, I don't think we'll see this appearing on US or European roofs. (Well, apart from the alternative crowd who'd probably flock to Cherokee Hair Panels)

Wonder how long the hair lasts. If you continually have to rethread your panels, valve-style...
There were dozens of Lisps before Common Lisp, including Scheme. Is there a reason why there can't be any Lisps after it?
Price of hair really varies depending on the quality required. If it's being mulched down to make the commercial solar panels, then it would likely cost next to nothing. However if you need high quality, long undamaged strands it's going to cost you, because you're going to be competing with an existing market (wig, mannequin and certain dolls are typically made with all real hair), which will drive prices up significantly.

I believe the ultimate ideal for this would be to make the hair easily replaceable by a person. Quite literally grow your hair X inches long, cut, hold out straight and clip into place. This is likely to be sold out in poorer countries where people haven't handled technology and need a simple way to maintain it. However the countries that would typically require this are somewhat blessed by the near perfect black of their hair, because blond hair has little to no melanin and would be useless, even brown hair would reduce efficiency greatly.
I can't believe metacity is 50,000 lines of C code. I always thought it was so bland and minimalistic.
The trend for online classes will continue to increase, however universities will still require faculty. College classes are not one-way broadcasts, they are interactions. Perhaps rather than 'dismember', the web will 'dismantle', ie, remove some of the brick-and-mortar requirements, but certainly not all, and certainly not its staff. Faculty are what make a university good.
1. Don't monetize. Hype yourself up to make it seem that monetization is trivial, but maintain that you're going for growth right now.

2. Monetize and hope to hell it's not a disappointment.

Once you try something, it becomes a 'known'. And for several startups that could be "we know we can't monetize this very well".
'opens up' made me think there was some sort of API. There is not. Its just /another/ closed system.
What law does that break? It seems the same as any other infomercial product's claims: "If this product isn't the best widget you've ever bought, or you're not completely satisfied for any reason, we'll refund your money"

In this case, if the prediction is wrong (not the best widget/customer not satisfied), they can get their money back.

Come to think of it, the prediction claim isn't much different from most test prep higher score guarantees.
Methinks you are hiding form customers. Not displaying any clue on pricing is the best way to not get any feedback. Unless you are overwhelmed with prospect and have a good reason to hide from new ones, I suggest some soul searching in this regard. If nothing pops, refer to "customer development" by Steven Blank.
Yes, I agree that fearlessness and inspiration sound like ridiculously simple qualities to have. My point was that people are made up of various strengths and weaknesses, and it's rare for anyone to have the requisite full toolbox for self-made success. In that case, self-improvement type advice doesn't seem so weird.
It doesn't matter if he claims it will sell more. If it sells less, it's self-evidently D.O.A. Don't move the goalposts.
I'd bet they're making quite a bit of money now just in licensing fees to use their logos (among many other possibilities they're not going to reveal).
If I get the essence of it right YC offers personal counseling to overcome the fear of failure

YC offers product and company advice, not "personal counseling". So no, you don't have the essence of it right.
devinitively it is =)
It's also the exact same argument that Google shouted from the rooftops with their home page.
Usability: Critical for Processes, not just Products
Stevey answered the WHY question a long time ago:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food...
Hacking the webOS
Hardly, they're reading DC not AC, the ballast will induce a few milliwatts (at the max) in the wires and at 50~60HZ this will likely be within the margin of error on a hand-built solar panel anyway. (Ed: The electrical meter likely wouldn't detect the interference as AC is generally self-cancelling interference on a DC line, unless diodes are in use)

Induction between two wires is exceptionally low. Unless the two copper wires share the same ferrite core, you'll get diddly squat out. Noise in an electrical signal, is very different from noise in power, which would require an actual imbalance in the AC outputs, IE a power plant running at 50HZ and one running at 55HZ will produce a very unstable power supply.
Metadata Performance Exploration Part 2: XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, ext2, and Reiser4
$39.99 for a 44 paged PDF? On Amazon.com I can buy a hardcopy version of Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (2nd Edition) for $86.29 and its got (according to amazon) 1000 pages.
On the subject of Nigerian scammers, the inclusion of their cat food racket in District 9 was a hilarious touch.
Upvoting for presenting an actual working alternative rather than a juvenile blog post.
Interesting. So the internet could already be a super-intelligent entity but it's decided it doesn't want any more progress, so it gives us pictures of kittens, and twitter. Sounds plausible.
Having never shopped with Zappos before, and having never visited the new "Zeta" site until I saw Andrew's take on it, I think I have somewhat of an advantage in looking at this redesign.

I value functionality much more highly than design. Having said that, both the old site and Andrew's redesign are almost functionally identical in my eyes. They both let me do the same things (the things that I would most want to do when coming to Zappos) in almost exactly the same way.

Sure, Andrew's looks prettier, and as I said it does not negatively affect my usage of the site, but as many of you have already pointed out, if his redesign doesn't bring in more conversions, it would be useless to spend any time or money on it.
How To Spread a Rumor
Oh. I thought it was going to be something like bovril (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovril)
This is how the swine flu scare works.
This is a scam. Take a look at the toc to see how many pages are devoted to the interpreter, the VM and so on. It is impossible to learn how to write a complete interpreter or compiler, (leave alone VMs etc) in such a small "book".

The blurb says

"Become the next Guido Van Rossum, Matz, Larry Wall or Rasmus Lerdorf by creating your own revolutionary programming language in a few days"

yeah right! :-D.

If anyone is really interested in learning to build an interpreter or compiler, here is a book list to work through in order.

(1) SICP (do all the exercises in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5). There is an incredible amount of learning there. Once you've done this, you can write a basic interpreter/compiler for languages with s-expression syntax. [The semantics can be anything you imagine]

(2) Essentials of Programming Languages. This will teach you how many language features work (lazy evaluation, object systems, static type systems ..)

(3) Lisp in Small Pieces - how to implement byte code compilers, macro systems, compilation to C, lots of good stuff here.

(4) A book on lexing and parsing so you can give your language any syntax you want. I prefer Modern Compiler Design by Gries. If you understand the first three chapters you can write your own lex/yacc equivalents. (the book has a lot more to it than these chapters, but it is the best I've seen on lexing/parsing).

(5) Now take a look at the source of your favorite language. ((Lua and the lcc compiler (it even has a book explaining its design) in particular, are very educational).

(6) If you are REALLY serious about optimization, Steve Muchnick's book, Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation.

I have all these books and have derived an incredible amount of learning and joy from them.

yes it is a bit of work, but it is fascinating journey. Enjoy.

EDIT: If you want to go deep into type systems (say you want to grok Haskell's type system from first principles, (or add OCAML like modules to your language, say) Benjamin Pierce's Types and Programming Languages - You are in good shape to work through this after you've finished EOPL
I don't know if the science behind this is sound, so assuming that it is:
According to the article the panels are expected to be manufactured for 1/4 the cost of current panels of similar wattage. But it also says the hair "...lasts a few months", which means that they are much higher maintenance than silicon based panels which last at least 5 years with current designs.

So TCO may be higher for the hair panels, especially if longer strands of hair are needed.

As far as the validity of this goes, I need more hard facts before I can make a decision. Those hair strands aren't packed in there very tightly, so getting 9v/18W out of that panel is fairly unbelievable.
Fred Wilson Is Doing Something Right
The current New Yorker issue has an article on Zappos, pretty interesting: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/14/090914fa_fact_...
I don't agree with all of the details, but I think the author is dead on with his point. I've been thinking for a while now that in about 5 years people will be asking "How do we save the universities?" instead of "How do we save the newspapers?".

The biggest difference is that the initial costs for an education startup are orders of magnitude larger than the costs to start a news aggregator. Still, it's only a matter of time before someone figures out a clever hack or a big enough tech name makes a serious effort at solving the problem.

I don't think major educational institutions will disappear any more than I think that the New York Times will close up shop. The college experience can't be replaced by online classes. But if a less expensive alternative existed, a lot of people would probably take advantage of it. The more people that get degrees online, the more accepted they'll become.
A Tale of Two Pitches: why the best VC pitches are discussions
Universities aren't in business of educating, they are in business of:

1. Pre-selecting the best, so that employers don't
have to spend money on the selection process.
2. Getting similarly-minded people to know each other.

The education is just a ruse, really.
Inteview with John Fadely, a partner in the Hong Kong office of Clifford Chance
Major flaw in this argument: college = information; information = newspaper; therefore college = newspaper. A better analogy would be college = information + experience; newspaper = information.

I don't know about everybody else here, but the major reasons I went to college were:
a) my friends were going
b) I wanted to meet new people
c) I wanted to expand my sphere of knowledge, i.e I wanted to get the hell out of the town I grew up in
d) I wanted a job I liked, but didn't know what I wanted to do

College provided this, in the form of a lot of other students who didn't know what they wanted to do. Because I didn't take classes online I went to London and Paris, made close friends from other areas of the country. I was exposed to new cultures that my mid-western, white-bread town never had. I learned culture, I made connections that will never be lost, I interacted, face-to-face, with people, everyday.

So much of college comes from the unique atmosphere created by academia. While the smear of ink and crinkle of cheap paper may be called an experience, I don't think it's even remotely comparable to a true college experience. And while the web can certainly provide the information more efficiently and inexpensively, it cannot provide the experience.

I don't doubt that online classes will continue to grow, but I don't think (and I certainly hope) they will not replace traditional brick and mortar colleges, but instead augment the college experience.
Why Python Pickle is Inscecure
Please remove the sexist remark from the headline to be taken seriously.
That seems even more illegal... You're describing betting on a coinflip with a 10% vig.
It will go up to $49.99 after 500 copies will be sold (ok, another marketing tool I guess)
what is the point of "user experience" on an ecommerce site if it doesn't boost sales?
The 'something more' might just be luck. Imagining that there's some Nietzschean superhero quality you can cultivate in order to succeed where many people just like you have failed is a kind of magical thinking.

When you drive to work and hit all green lights, do you search deep within yourself for the elusive quality that set you apart from the red-light-stopping masses?
I am designing a (hopefully) revolutionary programming language. (At least, revolutionary in its target domain; a general purpose DSL, if you will).

To do this, I am not reading a 44 page PDF to tell me everything I need to know, instead I'm reading thousands of pages of material(1), I've been prototyping code, talking to people and reading a lot of Lambda the Ultimate discussions. You just can't learn all the fundamental concepts, all the theory and the practical details (language and implementation/compiler/vm) from 44 pages...

1: Some of the stuff I've been reading especially for this:
Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming - 930 pages of fundamental programming language theory.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - 657 pages of Scheme goodness.
Advanced Topics in Dataflow Computing and Multithreading - 460 pages of research.
Countless SIGPLAN papers.
God knows how many web pages and random PDF's.

And thats just the theory, I've yet to get reading the actual COMPILER books. Near the top of my list is the dragon book - another 1000 pages.
Fast data transfer using homing pigeons
Maemo 6 isn't a device, its a platform or operating system. And my estimate is that first devices for M6 are announced in 2010Q4, so lot of things can happen before that.
Got some URLs for the "Ted Nelson" / "fucklers" thing? Curious about the politics here.
The science is rather sound on this; melanin has been shown to produce a photosynthesis effect with ionizing radiation. Incidentally, this likely means the solar panels would actually be able to work at near maximum efficiency on partially cloudy days, even on a lightly clouded day it should still work well.

It generally takes much less water to deflect visible light and reduce the efficiency of a silicon solar panel than it takes to absorb the UV that is producing power through the melanin.

What I believe is important here is the melanin. If an efficient and stable way is found to manufacture a melanin-based solar panel, it could be used in a wider range than many traditional solar panels. I suppose the ideal would be to produce a traditional solar panel that is transparent to UV, allowing it to be caught in a melanin-based solar panel. In theory you could double the power output of a solar panel and extend its power production into cloudier periods.
Finally, a worthy competitor to the iphone OS.
Acquire the revenue makers.

Maybe Twitter is just waiting to see which API user makes the most money, and they'll just BUY them.
I get the feeling a windmill and water tower might be a more durable, effective and all-around useful solution for those areas.

Anyone who found it cost effective to wind human hair around terminals by hand every few months likely has more basic needs to be met than simple electricity.
Don't forget Peter van Roys excellent Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming
Great slides, and having tried nearly all of them, this is my favorite Window Manager.
I think it's OK to continue doing the "same old" if you're good at it (and/or love it), and you continue to improve at it. It's also good to go out and try new things to change things up on occasion.

If you always stick to the "same old", you'll miss unique knowledge and experiences. If you're always jumping from one thing to the next and never staying focused, one never really gets "good" at any one thing.

It's a balancing act, really. IMHO a good way to measure if you're succeeding or not is with your overall state of happiness.
Nice project. If only OpenTick were still around as well. The combination would be nice.
In conversation with a UK lawyer it would be deemed illegal as you are misrepresenting the "product" for which you are taking money. It's effectively the same law as covers items sold where they are clearly intended for a particular purpose, but then try to claim no guarantee that they are, in fact, fit for that purpose.

UK law is very broad in its protection of consumers against "products" that are presented in a deceptive manner.
Your advice is good, but you're being a snob. The complexity of a simple compiler is not that high. My language (http://plausible.org/nasal) has a core of about 3-4000 lines of C, well under the size of the Unix kernel explained (very well) by Lions in his classic book.

Sure, language design is a deep field, with lots of subtlety and complexity. And people spend years studying it. That doesn't mean that every language requires a huge tome of background to implement.
I think Maemo 6 would be announced much sooner than that. It is very like that it would be announced in the maemo summit scheduled on october this year in Amsterdam.
Ask HN: Is the OS stack a factor when developing deployable apps?
For my next project I plan to develop a web service that is aimed soley at the enterprise.

While I'll also offer a SaaS option, I think most companies will prefer to install on their own servers. I was wondering for this scenario, if I should stick with .net/Java or installing configuring PHP/Ruby/Python is an OK requirement.

I'm well familiar with ASP.net and RoR but was leaning on RoR for this project (as my day job is .net and wanted a change) but I have that nagging voice in the back of my head saying most companies won't bother installing/configuring RoR to use my product. Any experiences?
Exactly. The point is that the laws as framed may not cover that situation. Having checked with a UK lawyer friend, though, it would almost certainly still be illegal in the UK, and the only reason I say "almost" is because everywhere, going to law is a lottery with unreliable odds.
The source to Lua is quite good, though not commented heavily. There's a roadmap by Mike Pall at http://www.reddit.com/comments/63hth/ask_reddit_which_oss_co... , and some other notes on the Lua users's wiki at http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaSource . Lua has been kept small for embedding, and its designers are adamant about portability, so the code is very clean. (It's also one of my favorite languages.)

Also, _Modern Compiler Implementation in ML_ by Andrew Appel (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/ml/) is quite good. It uses SML, but is pretty understandable if you're familiar with OCaml or (perhaps) Haskell. I found it vastly more readable than the Dragon Book.
"Don't forget Peter van Roys Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming"

yes I have this too. But I haven't worked through it so I didn't want to reccomend it blindly. Many talented hackers(e.g Peter Norvig) say good things about this book so I am sure it is great. The language it uses (Oz) is a bit flaky wrt syntax but VERY powerful.

Another recent lovely book, though a bit on the formal side is Gifford and Turbak'S Design Concepts In programming languages. (Another 1000 + pages !! - the road to compiler gurudom has many 1000 page books to work through!).I am working though this and I am enjoying it thoroughly. I hope to finish it by the end of this year.
I find a lot of inspiration from other really well built apps. Often finding something that somebody has clearly done RIGHT motivates me to do the same.
Seems more like a prank than like a scam... Anyone tried actually buying it?
Yeah, it kind of reads like ParrotSecrets.com for hackers.
To be fair: most students aren't going to college strictly for education either.