skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From a ways back, but still a pleasant memory:

Richardson, Dean; Gibbs, H. M.; Koch, S. W., "Computer simulations of fully cascadable picosecond all-optical logic using nonlinear semiconductor etalons"

IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics (ISSN 0018-9197), vol. 27, March 1991, p. 804-808.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1991IJQE...27..804R
Quote - Freeman Dyson on the role of failure in technology
Amazon bring Kindle to the PC
Can you also offer a plan that just charges for API hits. I don't really understand limiting the number of users and pages unless you are hosting pages yourself too?

Oh and your sliders appear to display incorrect numbers while in the midst of sliding (at least on chrome for linux and mac).
Introduction to Algorithmic Information Theory
Remembering DEC: Memoir from Co-Founder Harlan Anderson Due Out in November
Ask HN: Making an application work offline
I have been in talks with a prospective client about writing an application. Its a simple CRUD application, with a requirement that it needs to go offline (the client's business is a mobile one, and one that involves auditing equipment. They occasionally find themselves in underground basements or buildings that may potentially block off internet access).

I have considered several options the two primary ones being Gears On Rails [http://code.google.com/p/gearsonrails/] or Adobe AIR.

I was wondering if anyone here has had any experience writing such applications, and if there was any advice to be given. I am open to considerations for other technologies, but I am not sure what those would be.

I will admit, I am not sure if this is a question for HN, but I hope it is.

Many thanks in advance.
The Geek Atlas. I'm proud of it because every single review has been stellar, and I've heard from many happy readers. Although the peer review of editor, publisher and critics is welcome, there's nothing someone who's creative likes more than feedback from the end user or reader.
Link to my previous post for signing letters to the congress.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=895121
Can you elaborate about intelligence in the context of signaling social status please? And provide links to books/reading? I am very interested in this
No. Sex, in and of itself, doesn't solve anything except horniness. And the horniness comes back real quick with a vengeance when you're college aged :-)

Do everything possible to get out of your room and meet women while you are in college. Be neatly dressed: doesn't mean trendy or a fashionista, just wear ordinary clean clothing. Join clubs, take up a hobby, randomly walk around with a smile on your face.

BE PLEASANT. Seriously. Practice smiling if you must, but no one wants to talk to a grump. Talk to people. A big mistake is to confine yourself to talking only to attractive people. Talk to anyone who will respond and shut up if they don't. Say hi to that strange chick at the bus stop: the one with the lazy eye, a unibrow and a humpback. She's a person, be nice to her. Greet people with a "hello" and a smile, hold doors for strangers, help the old lady with that heavy bag of catfood.

In short, become a nice person and people will want to be around you. Once that happens, the whole women/intimacy/sex thing tends to take care of itself. The species has managed to propagate itself basically forever. That wouldn't happen if it was terribly hard to hookup.

In order to meet girls, you have to talk to them. Most of them won't just walk up to you and bite you on the ass. Get out of your shell, stop worrying about being awkward. Trust me, the women are also worrying about stuff that you would think is trivial: we all have our insecurities.

Wasting money on a hooker is avoiding the responsibility for changing your own life. You'd be better off spending it on a therapist.
Isn't apple just as bad with itunes and the palm pre?

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/67615.html?wlc=1256230659

Google isn't immune either

http://phandroid.com/2009/09/25/cyanogen-gets-cd-from-google...

None of these companies are golden. Buy what works for you.
Not for me... (unless you haven't pushed the button yet)

Firefox 3.5.3 on Karmic x86_64
I've actually got a manuscript at a journal right now. I'm a CS guy, but I work in public health, so my paper is going to be in an epi journal. It was some work (2 years worth) on analyzing open ended text responses (you know, at the end of a survey, "is there anything not covered here that you would like to tell us?") Mostly methods / descriptive (that means not too many earth shattering conclusions), but it's a cool feeling to be a first author on a published paper.
I think the best paper that explains the magic number (0x5f3759df) is http://www.lomont.org/Math/Papers/2003/InvSqrt.pdf

Lomont traces the history of the algorithm and the possible way that the magic number was derived - including more magic numbers (0x5f375a86)
Great Html Email Templates
Salesforce has never particularly impressed me.

But by far the worst UI has to be the Authorize.net one. It is absolutely miserable. And they're HUGE, and super high profile. Why can't they have a decent site?

Godaddy's upselling isn't really "UI", but I'm not a fan of them either.
Yes, they will get sign-ups because designers and coders know about them. But if I went to ANY of my web design clients from the last 7 years, I would have to say that maybe 1% or less of them EVER heard of 37Signals.

That being said, it looks to me like a bust in the making because if only other designers are looking at your $100 per month "ad", then it's actually working against you.
Magic Sine Waves
Leonardo absolutely nailed his subjects. So give a little credit to Lisa del Giocondo. Maybe she had just sat still for too long.
XML: YAFF, YADT, or Whole World?
It's not going to help you solve any underlying problems, but it will at least lead you to one big conclusion: sex doesn't have to be a big deal. You'll do it, realize, "hey, that was fun... but not as big of a deal as I thought."

That isn't to say that sex isn't important, emotional, or connecting -- just that most of the time it's mediocre, and not worth the build up that you put into it.

I suppose that could be summed up in the "difference btwn sex and making love" cliche.
You've changed my life..
Another gotcha would be that it would be difficult to rescue since the ubuntu livecd doesn't have that app by default and I don't know of any livecds that do
Check out HTML5's offline features:

http://www.w3.org/TR/offline-webapps/

While it's not fully implemented anywhere, Safari and Firefox implement some useful bits.

It also has the bonus that your offline code can work on the iPhone and Android.
Agree about sliders. The totals don't update until you release the mouse (FF 3.5, Vista).
It would help promote app discovery! And since the gifter would be paying for the app (just like they would if they gifted a song), the purchased app would then be allocated to the recipient's iTunes account.
Got customers? How we almost sunk our startup before it started.
Yeah, it's still not fixed. Appears the same as before.
Ask HN: Will Y Combinator taking Sequoia investment hurt the YC companies?
Does taking YC money blended with Sequoia money lead to unfavorable terms down the line if raising VC?

As you probably know, YC is taking money from Sequoia to help fund YC companies this term: http://ycombinator.com/party.html

Chris Dixon (http://www.businessinsider.com/the-problem-with-taking-seed-money-from-big-vcs-2009-10) and
Venture Hacks (http://venturehacks.com/articles/options-open) put forward the following argument:
Although Sequoia does not get right of first refusal, having a single VC participate in a company's seed funding can nonetheless hurt the company in the long run.

What do people think about this potential downside?
A classic apples vs. oranges fallacy--which is main reason why these horrid comparison articles will never stop being published.
I suppose they could have looked at existing visual design online and offline, and come to the conclusion that grid layouts were quite popular, and perhaps they should support it nicely?

But what they really didn't anticipate was web applications, which is a whole other story, and something for which HTML + CSS is really badly suited.

I feel the author's pain.
The question is: When do you generate the files? Regenerating a large number of file every time you modify something is just bad design (much like regenerating every time a document gets requested). You're better off having a tiny script on each page that checks for modifications when requested and rebuilds if needed (to avoid scripting on the front-end you can use <img> to rebuild for the second request). Alternatives would be to have background processing or batch modifications.
Asking the question kind of means you aren't an entrepreneur. We all know why we do it.
Fucking A. This is going to be awesome :D
Most Trendy Types of Comic Sticker Printing
Promo codes are limited to supress black markets for apps, but with a gifting mechanism, Apple gets the same profit that they would any other way.
"It goes into detail about why praise can be detrimental, and what to substitute for it."

What, then? ;)

"Rewards and punishments are just two sides of the same coin -- and the coin doesn't buy very much. What is needed, Kohn explains, is an alternative to both ways of controlling people. The final chapters offer a practical set of strategies for parents, teachers, and managers that move beyond the use of carrots or sticks."

Has anyone read those final chapters and could tell us whether there are any actionable alternatives in there at all?
Would you still write that letter if they were instead targeting RIM or some other manufacturer of phones?
Your analogy is flawed. It would be more like:

I spent 40B euros figuring out how to and and digging a well to get water to my parched village. I add a bucket, but the water is still kind of muddy. I'm the only well, though, so I do well enough.

Then someone comes along and digs a well a couple hundred feet away, adds a pumping system (so they can sell more water) and a filtration system (so the water is cleaner). Nobody wants my water anymore. So I'm about to go broke.

So of course, instead of making a better pumping and filtration system, I sue the guy making the better well. At least, that's Nokia's position.
Took me a while to figure out what you were selling. You should make that more clear on the homepage.

I also wondered about this paragraph on your features page:

As an added bonus, when you use BitysBox for static image hosting, you get a built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN). We use Amazon's hugely popular S3 storage engine, which means that images are delivered by servers around the world. This makes your websites render even faster, with no setup required.

1) S3 isn't really a CDN, so this isn't really true

2) Product name is misspelled in the first sentence
The technology market is nothing like genetic selection - too small a population for statistics to work, VCR vs BetaMax the loser won.
ALso, the mathematics of the bicycle is well understood; its all innovation in manufacturing and materials now.
I completely agree. Not only this, they should also let developers provide individual discount coupon codes for their apps the way you can do on your own website. We have users who are helping us with testing and we want to give them our apps at 50% or 75% off but there is no way to do it.
Memcached - Report Card for an Open Source Project
Civ on the iPhone sucked away two weeks of my life. It's a great port and reminds me more of Civ2 than the newer ones. I'd recommend the download on your winter break ;)
What I don't get: the iPhone came out in, what, 2007? Why is Nokia only just now getting around to suing Apple over these patents?
How does that explain Bill Gates, the world's greatest entrepreneur who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth?
This is exactly why patents are not good for the world. Imagine if the iPhone was never built because they respected these patents. The cell phone industry would literally be 3 years behind where it is now.

Patents do not encourage innovation, they smother it.
Improving the Rubinius Bytecode Compiler
In this post, I’ll explain what I’ve been doing and how it relates to getting Rubinius ready for 1.0. We recently released version 0.12 and we’re going to be doing releases about every two weeks. If you haven’t built Rubinius yet to check it out, head over to our download page and get started!
The conclusion was well-put:

"As with many new technologies, they overestimate the short-term impact, but underestimate what will happen in the longer run."
hard not to agree, isn't it?
"Emopreneur" - great coinage; if you're not going to take the domain name, could I?
What a load of horse sh@#$%.

Zeldman is basically trying to explains why he doesn't have any drive and hasn't had a breakout success: because he's so well balanced and normal and all the successful people in the world have some sort of a mental defect.

Really?

It's not possible to be driven and well-balanced? Everyone who is successful didn't get enough love from daddy?

Even if he is right who cares... we're all adults now and have free will. My life kicks ass and I'm driven like a mofo.... and it has nothing to do with money or fame... it has to do with solving problems, building a great team and having fun!

Jeff: save the dime store BS and get back to coding some dope shit. Keep trying... as some point you'll get that big exit! Don't give up!
Tool of the Day: ReadFresh: Stay on Top of the News
I'm new to blogging so I really appreciate your comment. Let me just say that while I agree with you for a lot of things (like rounded corners and gradients), I still think that they could have handled the layout system better at the time when it was created.
Getting a viral std is 1-way function. You'll definitely get HPV and maybe herpes.

If you are socially awkward that means you have terrible body language. Read a few books about body language. Why don't you work on your social circle, get more friends then you will get invited to more parties, then when girls meet you they will be more open to you because they met you through a friend. Beyond that join a gym, smile, be funny, not desperate and your girl problems will go away.
Looks wrong for me too, Chrome 4 on Win7.
Maybe they were busy making products and trying to sell them? Maybe Apple's lawyers were stalling them and Nokia let it slide?
eb, we're an iphone app/hardware start up. email us info@phonehalo.com.
I was hoping that this would direct to a could not connect to database page.
That's true, you need CloudFront in order to CDN-enable your S3 buckets. It's not too much more difficult to set up, though, just need to flip a switch on the bucket.
Why Software Development is a Craft
> It's also nice to have be able use your own text editor.

There is, for example, a FireFox plugin to let you edit a text-area in any text editor. It's called It's all Text: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125

I use it to pop up a Vim window any time I'm editing a lot of text or doing heavy formatting.
The primary goals of these apps are not so different, which is why I think comparisons can be meaningful. Consider how they describe themselves:

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing.

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor--and more.

The "and more" speaks volumes about the complexity of Emacs...
separate snapshots from the senses may feed into blocks of information in a higher processing stream. He calls these the "building blocks of consciousness"
- the brain actually does a middling-poor job of synchronizing events, especially from different senses. Ask any policeman taking a statement. "Did you hear the gunshots, or see the perp come out of the building first? How many gunshots did you hear?"
The Angel Empire Strikes Back – Why pay-to-pitch works
I'm dismissing what you've said based on my understanding of psychology. My anecdote was to demonstrate the existence of someone who does not adhere to your trend.

If you're going to claim ADHD is not a disorder, you need to make actual arguments. Analogies and gesturing at, but not citing, resources is not the same.
That's assuming anyone even anticipated comparability with print media. I think the original vision of hypertext documents was closer to the of text files than that of magazine pages. Grid layouts are clearly not popular in text files. I think if HTML was modeled after what was seen around it, it would look more like Markdown, with correspondingly fewer features.

Not to mention, modeling software interfaces after real-world objects is often a very bad idea.
OK I've read some Amazon reader reviews and it seems like the alternative strategy is to simply give tasks or set goals and leave rewards or punishments out of the picture.

As one reviewer put it: "I believe Kohn realizes rewards are necessary, just not the rewards/reinforcement that have been in use. Learning is its own reward. If this wasn't true, why would these people who reviewed the book have read it? Were they paid to read it? Love is its own reward. Meaningful debate/discussion is its own reward. Generosity is its own reward. Using these as your reinforcers will bring results."

I know this is true, but it doesn't help. Incentives are a side-effect of competition for talent. If a business owner or manager doesn't offer them, people will find the above intrinsic rewards and enjoy them, but will still leave once the competition comes knocking with carrots.
It's not that I disagree with you, but there's also the option of paying patent licenses.
If the live disc doesn't have that "app", then how can it possibly set up home directory encryption during the installation process?
I think there is too much analysis in the article because you'll never find the perfect person willing to work for little to no pay. Just only hire people smarter/better/more experience than you. When you're a 100 person company and you find that your the dumbest one in the entire building, congratulations. You have a killer team.
Well said.

Still though, it's always exciting to know we're approaching that next level of good-enough-ness.
I think that's exactly it. Age eleven is when I first saw my percentile written down, and before then I had some idea that I was smart; but I also knew about the phenomenon of failed prodigies, like Sidis, and I was terrified of failing to live up to my potential. And yes, the idea of a responsibility to live up to it was also there, very strongly.
Still seems smarmy, but worth reading to hear from "the other side".
Ugh, what a knee-jerk echo-chamber reaction.

If there were no patents, the iPhone would have never been built, because Nokia would have kept this IP as trade secret, or not developed it at all. For companies, patents increase the value of R&D investments by orders of magnitude, and without them, most current R&D spending would be impossible to justify to shareholders. If there were no patents, Apple would have no financial incentive (and that's the only incentive public companies have) to invest so heavily in all of the technologies in the iPhone, as they could easily be copied by others.

The world isn't as simple as "competition always yields innovation". Giving companies limited time monopolies on their discoveries (by definition, limiting competition) increases the amount of R&D they do. This was understood hundreds of years go, even before the Copyright Clause was debated, and still holds true:

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

I'm not saying that the spirit of this holds true here, or in every patent case. I'm saying that responding "ugh! patents suuuck!" is too simplistic of a world view.
Many applicants; few chosen. Since almost all are passed anyway, the Sequoia factor is noise.
So, that's humanity finished then. And to think the 2012-ers were so very close, just 2 years out from 'all human productivity ceasing and mankind dying from starvation within 3 weeks'.
>It's also nice to have be able use your own text editor.

It's also nice to be able to use your own text editor.

I really need to proof-read better. I always rethink a sentence half way through and leave artifacts.... :(
Heh - that's about the worst song ever, isn't it? It manages to mix the worst of the country twang, the CB stuff, and that sort of disco-ish chorus line.
I replied to another post with this before finding yours.

One thing we programmers ought to recognize is that it really is all text. From the moment we type on our keyboard to the time it's viewed in the reader's browser. If we separate our presentation layer (like HTML rendering) from our content layer (the actual text with some annotations for things like headers), we are free to edit the content as we see fit and then we can port it into any presentation layer, from a text editor to a blog.

Also, you could always just edit in your favorite editor and then copy and paste, no? Or write a script to take a bunch of flat files and inject them into your database.
There's a big difference between sharding across 30 redis nodes, where your application has to be shard-aware, and your ops team has to manually handle failover, etc, and using a database that looks to the app like a single system. In other words redis's story here isn't really any better than sharding a relational db, and everyone knows how much that sucks.

So saying on the home page that "Redis can do [sharding] like any other key-value DB, basically it's up to the client library" is inaccurate. Distributed key-oriented databases like cassandra, voldemort, dynomite, riak handle all of that so it's totally invisible to your app, including (at least in Cassandra's case, and I think dynomite) adding nodes to the cluster.
This may get voted down as it hasn't gone through anything resembling a review but...

My blog. It's the first thing I've ever done not on the school->college->job path that gets set for us when we're young that I've stuck with and done (I think) a GOOD job on.
I don't think there's that much mystique around getting rejected by VCs right after coming out of YC -- most of the YC companies don't raise VC immediately.
Looking for Software and Hardware Hackers
www.phonehalo.com We're an early stage start up getting ready to release our first product, Phone Halo. We're looking for software hackers who want to do smart phone apps & hardware hackers who want to do Bluetooth/MCU development. Email us if you're interested. info@phonehalo.com
Country Story is more like Farmville would be if it had actual depth... but then it becomes blatently obvious that the idea is simply a rip-off of "Harvest Moon".

That's not to say Farmville isn't fun, it is, but I find Country Story a little deeper.
It is a very big subject. Fasting is a way of training self-will and conquering yourself. It is long and difficult process.

And it is not just about energy or calories. There is also spiritual part.
Windows is like a bad girlfriend.
I think the argument is that since they're all passed anyway they are now passed by Sequoia which may hurt their further chances for VC.
If I interpret their argument correctly, they are not talking about raising VC immediately after YC. Their argument is that, at some point down the line, if you try to do a VC round then the sole VC that participated in your seed round has undue control of your first VC round.
What constitutes abuse? Is simply applying for and being granted a patent for something you've developed inherently abusive, or have they actually wielded their patents in an anti-competitive way? You'll note that they haven't sued Palm or Google over multi-touch gestures, in spite of a huge amount of press claiming they could and would.