skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Paul (icey) and I have been working on a tool that helps people coordinate plans while attending an event. We've put together a sample "Startup School" event for you to play with.

We're still early in the process of starting up, so any and all feedback will be really helpful to us.

The idea for this came out of frustrations trying to keep track of what was going on at a number of events; right now people are forced to coordinate over the phone, twitter, email, texts, etc. We think that having a central location for everything makes coordinating these activities easier.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

If you think email would be better to get it touch with us, it is : support@eventgel.com
Think light wave - sometimes it's an application and sometimes it's a protocol.

da-dish
Law.Gov: America's Operating System, Open Source
/*

Vector3f: class {
x, y, z : Float
}

vec := Vector3f new()
vec x = 3.14
vec y = 6.18
vec z = 42.0 // hey, Java/C/C++/C# guys: look! no dots =)

*/

Uhh, are "no dots" supposed to be a good thing?
It's a good photo, but I would have prefered a link to the original, more informative, page here

http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/05/22/

Google Images is great for checking this sort of thing

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=ea...
Yep. Outlook killer is a great way to put it. I guess Google tried to do that with GMail, and Google Apps for your Domain, but only managed to kill off Exchange (in small businesses). GMail still suffers from many of the same issues as Outlook, in terms of collaboration (though it did solve both the spam and the storage problem). This is a more complete solution that has a chance of replacing Outlook because it's just a lot better.

Then again, Microsoft doesn't need to ditch Outlook - they could just release Outlook Wave - after all, it's all open-source. That would be nice - we'd all win from such a move.
- Utterly dependent on a mouse. This is annoying.
Right. I suppose most folks here are not as familiar with the Buell story as I thought, but this is exactly why I posted this.
He had, what, 10 man-years of experience at this sort of thing, at most? His opposition had what sounds like a man-millenium of experience, and he made A$5M off of them.
That's a quote from the days when Joel Spolsky wrote really interesting stuff.

Before I tell you how we prioritized our list of
features, let me tell you two ways not to do it.

Number one. If you ever find yourself implementing a
feature simply because it has been promised to one
customer, RED DANGER LIGHTS should be going off in your
head. If you're doing things for one customer, you've
either got a loose cannon sales person, or you're slipping
dangerously down the slope towards consultingware.

Set Your Priorities - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/SetYourPriorities.htm...
I apologize if it wasn't clear. My comment was in no way intended to add a cliche to the noise so much as to comment on the music selection. Perhaps robotics researchers would be taken more seriously if they took themselves more seriously.

For example, I've seen dozens of Asimo video clips. Asimo is magnitudes closer to being a sentient robot than this rubber ball thingy, but I've never seen an Asimo video clip that devolved into Hollywood style quick cuts with apocalyptic background music. So, I've never thought to make this sort of comment regarding Asimo.
Weird "Particles" Spotted in Hot New Material
I don't understand how you reached the conclusion that the 1lb of solid becomes 2% of the total weight after evaporation.

Seems to me that it would be 1.01%.
Snow Leopard keyboard shortcuts
GPLv2 - copyright code or contract?
Yeah, you couldn't ask for a more glowing reference.
Avoiding Multiple Submissions
And in Russia, basically, in cash we trust.
Is there a reason why an approximate solution to the dense subgraph problem could not allow

I haven't read the paper either ;] (just skimmed bibliography to get a sense, as I usually do first) but Arora (one of the authors) is an expert on probabilistic approximations, and they do cite 2001 paper by Feige which is standard ref. on approximations to dense subgraph. Also, what they reduce their model to is a "planted" hidden clique variant of dense subgraph, a problem which is hard "on average" and not only in worst case (propety used in crypto protocols also).
Artificial Retina Can Restore Sight to the Blind
Really cool idea, but not very accurate in Mobile Safari yet it seems :(
'Tap the person on the shoulder and say "Hey, do you know you really shouldn't be distributing those?" Take ten minutes to figure out that leading with lawyers is both overkill and one of the worst sins you can commit in this community.'

This makes no sense to me. If Google told me, "Stop distributing our closed source applications" then I wouldn't care whether I was told by an engineer or a lawyer. And I certainly don't see why using a lawyer to do this would be "one of the worst sins you can commit" in the open source community.

With that being said, this article raises good points about the closed-ness of the Android software dev kits, their use of NDAs, and how their handling of Android development has been less open than Google likes to claim.
Scientists study mouse brain while it plays Quake, sort of
I think this is true up to a point with many things. Also, if I spend $9.99 on an app, I'm going to be looking to justify spending the dough. If it isn't doing it for me, I'll likely try to figure out why by spending more time with it -- and often times I'll figure out what I like about it.
Amazon.com Introduces Same-Day Delivery
IPhone to get Wi-Fi, FM radio goodies via software magic
IMHO there should be an option to flag articles as arrogant on HN.
Analysis of a startup by "the office according to the office" author
You can't pay for goods with cheques in the UK but they're still reasonably common. I still handle them when:

* my grandmother sends me Christmas money

* I get an expense refund from the University

* my flatmates refund me bills

* I need to send money off with a postal form (recently renewed my driving licence and had to unearth my chequebook to do so)

* I need to withdraw cash from my business account (there is no card associated with the account because RBS are incompetent morons)

* I put a deposit down on a new (rented) flat, or have to pay rent which didn't come out of my bank account as usual due to some wanker committing card fraud and pushing me over my overdraft limit

I think that's it, but still definitely in use around these parts, just not for 'everyday' transactions. And if my flatmates/family were more tech savvy, that'd all be done via online banking. However, the push vs pull argument does weaken when you consider Normal People -- they are so trained against 'giving out bank details', that if I wanted to send money to one of my flatmates, he would prefer a cheque over giving me his sort code and account number...
Ask HN: Anyone used XtraDB from Percona (instead of InnoDB)?
Has any one tried out XtraDB?

It is supposed to be better than InnoDB and has binary compatibility with InnoDB database files.

Here are a couple of articles on it for those interested:

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/08/13/xtradb-the-top-10-enhancements/

http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7356/1.html
Review a Startup: YouCompete
https://www.you-compete.com

In short: Competition management meets social networking

Problem:
Managing your own competition over the internets nowadays tends to boil down to one of a few broad categories:
- Write your own website
- Buy a template site and tweak it to your needs
- Send everything over email

Solution:
A site for coordinating competitions which combines flexible administration with the social trappings of Web 2.0.

If that's all a little too abstract, a few concrete examples of what YouCompete does:
- Aggregate player activity for a match (Who can attend?)
- Notify you via email when a match is cancelled
- Compute standings by Win Percentage, Points (Hockey, Soccer) or Rating (Chess)
- Coordinate an N-team single-elimination tournament bracket

Sign up and create a league or check out a few of the example leagues we've set up to get a flavor for the site:
https://www.you-compete.com/leagues?q=example

Thanks!
No, I meant LISP and FORTRAN, which is why I wrote that.

LISP as the arch functional programming language, and FORTRAN as the basis for the imperative branch.
Ever since Barnes and Noble introduced this (in Manhattan) a few years back, I wondered when Amazon would follow suit. It's an awesome idea, and not a bad price for Prime members, but I wonder what percentage of available items are in each warehouse.
Note: it's a based on the show Kitchen Nightmares, in which Gordon Ramsey turns around failing restaurants, so we're not talking tech startups, but still startups nonetheless.
I believe simply up voting moves it into your Saved list.

http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=WALoeIII - mine
http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=bhrgunatha - yours
Wave more secure than email
> As an aside, the "do one thing and do it well" camp is a great idea in theory, but in practice sucks. Big companies make purchase decisions, like it or not, based on big feature lists. Products with big feature lists score better than those without.

That is, in itself, a very interesting observation. Reminds me of PG's talk on Viaweb and the use-case for their template language: "users always
want an upgrade path, even though as a rule they'll never take it."

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt
Can someone clarify? He bought 19.9% of the voting shares, called for a meeting to dissolve the trust (what is the trust? Is the trust the same thing as BrisConnections?), then sold his shares to someone who wanted to ensure that BrisConnections continued to exist?

Tricky and smart, but what is the value that BrisConnections holds and to which other people want access? Is it just the two upcoming installments that investors owe?
Sharepoint in clear english: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s12Jb5Z2xaE
Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News
I completely agree with you. We have a lot of apps with >$14.99 price tag and as soon as there is a negative review the sales go down a lot.

I also agree with you with the momentum aspect. If you are gaining momentum a bad review can ruin it all for you. It happened to us on a $1.99 app in education which made it to top 25 in that category but 1 bad review and it was downhill ever since. It will be really helpful if Apple allows threaded review system in which the developer can comment on the reviewers comments and the reviewer receives an email notification to respond and change.
Like all theorems in complexity, this one is saying something that is true only for the most general problems. Reality is, most problems found in the real world are just special cases of the truly generic NP-hard problems. That is why we can find algorithms for many of them (deterministic or stochastic). So, basically the theorem doesn't really say much about the financial problem, unless you believe that the modeling here is 100% correct - which, considering any non-trivial financial scenario, is not.
Anyone here has read it? Would you recommend it?
" CD production was a side effect of the delivery of the content."

The rise of recording technology means that more people can make more kinds of music without having to have a particular set of instrument skills. There are various types of music that are either impossible or just impractical to create live. There's music meant to be listened under non-stage, non-live circumstances (the various flavors of ambient, for example).

So, while records and CDs may have started off as a way to capture a sort-of live event, that's long gone. It may still be true for some, but for many it's an end in itself.

If people are dissuaded from producing CDs or other digital artifacts, they will also be dissuaded from creating art that is best rendered via CD, etc.

"And then there's the tired position of why does the creation of art need to be tied to a market or associated with capitalism? "

Markets are a fact of life. The question is, what sort of (economic) system best deals with that? No matter what you do, people will be trading, and that will include art.

Art is just another human activity, like screwing and hunting. It will find its way into commerce no matter what.

That's a good thing.
Simple Simhashing - My Favorite Trick
I should mention that since this is in an early stage that you guys are welcome to enter data or say you're going to attend events that you don't intend to actually go to. I promise you won't hurt anyone's feelings.
Astonishing news. This is either very good - or a sign that JetBrains is in trouble, and therefore very bad for us fanatic Java developers and IDEA fans.
A few things that I noticed right away:

- While I personally like 24h time for start and end time, I doubt most other people will feel the same way

- The map is tough to read being so short, a little bit of height there would go a long way.

- Links in discussions would be a lot easier to use if they were auto-hyperlinked.

- The "X attending" under the attend this event button is almost unreadably (did I just make up a word?) small.

I think it's got potential, how do you plan on differentiating yourself from something like meetup.com?
I see - thanks for the info. I didn't know the background of the author or recognize the reference. I'm going to read this one over much more carefully.
> is capable of doing the same workouts they did when they were young attribute their ability to work to a committed stretch program.

Said folks may be correct, but that just tells us that stretching is valuable. It doesn't imply that warm up and/or cool down is useful, even if many of those folks do their stretching as part of warm up/cool down.
It's actually a valid point which I happen to agree with, stated with a minimum number of words.

The article says that lower prices imply lower ratings, but the data presented only shows that lower prices correlate with lower ratings. One could equally well draw the conclusion that lower-priced software is of lower quality, hence the bad ratings.
The interface makes me feel very "uncomfortable" and a little confused. You should consider laying things out a little nice - perhaps side by side?

The logo / menu / page title instantly create some confusion and clutter. The timeline doesn't look too user-friendly either.

I'm just commenting on the interface though, I haven't looked at the functionality too much yet.
I wish it were that easy. But it's like saying "Marketing means having a good product, and telling the truth about it." Yes, that's true -- but that doesn't tell you whether you should do 30-minute infomercials or long-tail PPC ads.
Sadly, it is a fairly crippled version. It looks like they open sourced the basic framework and some core modules, but keep the important ones behind the $600 barrier. This may actually backfire as folk's willingness to pay $600 for JSP debugging is questionable.
I've read it and I couldn't imagine anyone on HN NOT liking it.
It's safe to say the author has no concept of how sophisticated CAPTCHA breakers are these days. This would last about five minutes on Gmail before being cracked.
it looks to me like news.yc doesn't ever suffer from "dilution." the editors are very active, they'd kill this in a heartbeat if they thought it was off-topic. it could still happen.
That's cool - and something I've wanted for (and considered writing) more than once.

It doesn't seem to handle key-mappings. Is it open source? Could key mappings be changed? I always map capslock to esc, which keeps me sane...

Keep on truckin'
Thanks for the input!

We'll definitely have a think about 12h vs 24h time formatting, you're the first person who's actually mentioned that and it is a bit of an oversight on our part, thank you :D

With regards to differentiating ourselves from meetup: we're building a tool that takes over once the event has started. Evite, meetup, etc are great at getting people to an event, but tools for organizing random mobs of people are lacking once an event kicks off.

I guess you could say that we're focusing on more ad-hoc event planning than something structured like a Meetup.

Thank you as well for your feedback regarding readability!
Music and masterpieces did exist long before copyright came into existence, however it also existed long before technology to reproduce them existed. Arguing that it didn't exist in the past and it worked fine isn't applicable to current events.

Since 1557 the Stationers' Company enforced the copyright of all published works in the UK until 1709, which then transferred copyright from the manufacturer to the author. Essentially put, all of modern English literature has been covered by copyright in one form or another.

Literature before copyright was fortunate to be read by more than a thousand people. Most of our literary heritage is dependent solely on the work of Monasteries that preserved the works through reproduction for hundreds of years and passed on tomes that would never have survived. The mere fact is, is that copyright followed shortly after the printing press' mass adoption to protect writers from the illegal reproduction of their works on a mass scale.

It's ignorant to argue the world would be better without copyright when copyright has existed throughout the whole of modern western civilization. We wouldn't have many of our greatest works, with original copies still available if it wasn't for the mass production and publication enabled by copyright. Mary Shelley had more copies made of Frankenstein in its first print run (~10,000) than entire authors just a few hundred years before her would manage in their entire careers as an author.

So please, please point to an era of civilization where copyright didn't exist and where mass production of literature, music or art was available and the industry thrived. Because in 1400's a single book was worth equivalent to a farm or vineyard. Universities rarely had more than a few hundred books.

The destruction of the Library of Alexandria would be equivalent to the destruction of a federal reserve. I still fail to see how the argument against copyright always descends into an absurdest world without its existence, where book prices will literally end up costing houses because authors will be forced to make all their profit off of the sale of a single book for a years work. Quite literally it'll be ~$30,000 per book, or copyright will be required in some form to ensure the author is paid his dues.

Culture has never been free, it's just that in recent times it has become free to steal and people have absurdly come to believe that that's how our ancestors lived.
That bloke showed those toll thieves how to do business.

These guys are doing a lot of monkey business and some times it blows in your face, get over it!!!!
Side by side layout sounds interesting; do you mean putting the activities next to the timeline?

So far, this has definitely been "design by developer"; so feedback regarding the interface is most definitely welcomed.
Yes, this is all very much true. In my experience decent users start to dominate the conversation at $5. Now that the word got out there will be more higher-priced apps and it will be harder for me to compete...

Damn! Can someone please un-post that blog post please? Argh! :-)
It's really, really difficult to read because of the font sizes/layout/design. I couldn't get past that so I clicked out. Looks like a useful idea though. Maybe hire a designer?
I'll bet Amazon already has a pretty good idea of which items are currently most frequently ordered with overnight delivery.
Yeah, that's nice. On the other hand, Cooks Illustrated compared off-season supermarket tomatoes to canned tomatoes and concluded that you shouldn't even bother buying "fresh" tomatoes. Who do I trust more, Cooks Illustrated or Penn and Teller?

The issue here isn't about whether your food has some meaningless "organic" label on it. That's a straw man argument. "Locavorism" isn't about going to the market and buying the shit they mark up an extra 50%. It's about not buying low quality mass market out-of-season industrial food.
this is exactly what I want from my users to do. :-)
reliance on javascript
Funny, but I hope you're working on the quality of your search results. This is horrible: http://looklookbuy.com/search?query=canon+powershot+g10&...
To me, a C&D implies bad intentions on the part of the recipient. I would much rather receive an informal request before any legal action is presented against me.
The problem Google Wave solves is MSFT’s Outlook
Why VC Performance Has Fallen Off A Cliff
Too bright and your logo looks too cartoony. Combined with a small font size the site is unreadable. Redo your landing page in less garish colors, and that should be your top priority.
Site seems overloaded. Mirror, anyone? This is awesome news... I was hoping for something like this now for quite a while. IntelliJ is just so much better than Eclipse (this from a paying customer now for about 3 years.)
Google to launch platform for selling books online
Broken: http://pastie.org/656332

Naive attack, but it works well in my testing (ran it about 10 times, 100% success rate). If you have PIL installed, just run it through python and it'll grab an image and print whether it succeeded or failed to verify its solution.
Actually, since I've moved to the Netherlands I've only used GIROs a handful of times, since the NL has an even better option.

GIRO Transfers are particularly handy when it comes to recurring transfers, but for one time payments they're annoying.

The other alternative is one-time online transfers. They're free, and instant. All you need to know is the recipient's account. There are other fields for specifying what the payment is for (PO Number, for example). You can make them recurring.

Banks are responsible for the security, and take it seriously. My bank gives me a thing they call an "eDentifier" which is a calculator-thing that I drop my smart ATM card into. I then unlock it with my PIN number, and enter in the code presented to me by my bank. The device displays my card's response, which I then give back to the website to log in or send payments. With this scheme the bank knows I physically have the card, and that I know the PIN number (better than a signature). This is the most common way, but I once saw another system which confirmed by sending a code via SMS to the sender's cell, to be entered on the web site.

Unlike checks, I can't make the transfer unless that money in actually my account (and the recipient can't spend part of that money thinking it will clear to find out later it didn't). Thus there can be no NSF/overdraft fees. Also unlike checks, it's instantaneous, so the money is never on hold by banks in a limbo state, unavailable to both parties. Nobody has to buy any checks, nobody can be ripped off by check advance fees, and there can be no check processing fees to the recipient.

For all of those reasons it will never happen in America.
That differentiation totally makes sense, thank you for that. I can see this being really useful for something like SXSW where there are a lot of impromptu meetups/gatherings.

Something else that just stood out at me: The margin for the description under the "Activity Calendar" section doesn't seem to match the margins used under those sections elsewhere.
What do you like about it over Eclipse?

In my estimation, Eclipse has more momentum over anything else, primarily NetBeans (which is quite good, actually) and IntelliJ. And momentum counts more over the long run.
Suddently.

However, I had my cow orker try it another day, and we've failed to find a way to visually synchronize project with repository, like you do in Eclipse. Therefore, threw it out.