skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's another suggestion: wireless electricity. There's the new Sony wireless tv but it's an idea that should've picked up way more than it has, especially for stuff like cell phones.
Patent for Dyson's new fan
You can even make one without knowing about FOL.
I am offended by this post, mostly because math and I generally don't get along. I think very procedurally, and the math-y abstract way of thinking about things seems almost at odds with this. Obviously, abstraction exists in programming, especially if you're using a functional language... which is probably why I feel more at home with oo languages ^-^.
Funny, I was thinking about almost exactly the same topic just yesterday. Much of the problem absolutely has to be patents. I have several awesome ideas which I will never put one second of effort into because I know I would get patent trolled to death and none of them are software related.

If we TRULY wanted to evolve mankind at the fastest rate possible, we would instantly share new discoveries and methods and allow anyone to use, profit or build upon them with no restrictions. The conundrum is that, while this greatly benefits mankind, the inventor gets the proverbial shaft. Sadly, I don't see this problem being solved any time soon.
As a G1 owner (which I do love), I would love to get my hands on an HTC Hero and hack it to work on T-Mobile....I've never wanted to switch carriers until I was disappointed with the MyTouch (forgot the HTC hardware it runs on). I think T-Mobile could of done so much better by bringing in the slightly higher priced HTC Hero and kept the G1 as their entry level model.
I find the "email this" link to be extremely useful for when I want to read something, but don't have time to right now.
Not true. Since most hardware and software manufacturers dropped their support for Win98, users have been forced to move to WinXP (that, and the fact that their old computers got so mucked up with viruses/spyware that it was cheaper(!) to buy a new computer than clean off the virus/spyware mess).

In other words, s/Win98/WinXP/ and you will be correct, but that was tptacek's point exactly.
Already in the guidelines

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

is "Please don't submit so many links at once that the new page is dominated by your submissions."

I think reader ennui resulting in a more rapid response of ignoring submissions (or downvoting comments) is the best control on this, rather than any automated solution. In other words, I think current community standards of behavior are working well enough on this issue. Automated deduction of karma may not do much to stop spammers, but readers actively flagging spam posts helps, because a sufficient number of flags autokills a post.
I see it more like a personal internet forum. Forums are great tools but you can never get all your friends and family to use the same one. Maybe wave can fix that.
But what happens when there are three ice-cream sellers?
I used to admire such humanitarian actions, but I've come to question the effectiveness of it. Bill Gates, and many others in the West like him, want to prevent suffering in the world, and I admire that, but I think it might actually create more suffering by creating means for more people to survive and create more offspring who in turn end up being just as poor, suffering just as much, creating an even bigger humanitarian crisis.
The triad diagram with the OS between the user, the hardware, and the software is especially informative.

H S
\ /
OS
|
U

Why is OS there in the diagram? The OS is just software! Make a compiler target and programming environment the OS!

This has been done before. Symbolics Lisp machines demonstrate many of the technical advantages of this level of integration. Unfortunately, they also show the disadvantageous economics of special-purpose hardware. Most Smalltalk environments have a very good abstraction of the underlying hardware, which is the way one can have this level of integration without the special hardware trap. In fact, you can mostly just treat the VM like it's the CPU. That triad diagram should really be:

Hardware
|
Software
|
User
Essentially Mac users get used to the upgrades, which are much more incremental, fairly painless, and much cheaper. Mac OS X also seems to actually get faster (Quartz Extreme, launchd, 64bit+LLVM) with every major release, rather than slower.
That ideas are expensive, it's implementations that are valuable.

The smaller and narrower the idea, the easier it is to implement. Just keep whittling away more and more out of the idea and just boil it down to its core essence, so that you shed as much of the expense of your idea as possible. This makes it faster to implement, and once you've implemented it funding is easier (plus, you won't have time to work on code once you start looking for investors, they're even more expensive, and the more ideas you have to explain to them the more expensive they get).

So yeah, ideas are expensive. Don't worry, nobody will steal them, so share it with the world, if they tell you it's a bad idea, thank them, they just saved you a lot of time and money.
Wisdom!

Research and requirements are worthless without sales orders.
Maybe we could convince them to use a system like http://akvo.org which has reporting tools from projects that have been funded. Soon we will have SMS field reporting tools as well, so you don't even need an internet connection to do it.

Disclosure: Yeah, I am a cofounder of Akvo.org.
The application to politics is especially relevant: "Anthony Downs noted that Hoteling's model could explain political competition. ... As with the ice cream sellers on the beach the political candidates will choose a political position that is virtually the same as their opponent's. Furthermore the candidates will be driven to select the political position of the median voter."

This jives with gut intuition, that in the end the differences between Republican/Democrat aren't really that great.

Would love to see this as an interactive applet or widget where you could adjust the locations and quantity of sellers (or politicians).
The Graph Theory which is actually useful has been absorbed into Computer Science, and long abandoned by Mathematics.
I wonder when they will start mapping the inside of public buildings.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the original post, but I'll go with it...

You also have category theory, proof theory, model theory, recursion theory, type theory... They all fail as "foundations" because they all emit paradoxes. In some cases these can effectively be ignored because they don't play into anything (ZFC, for example), and in others they can be ignored because we can work around them (e.g. category theory).

In fact, few working mathematicians actually care about mathematical "foundations" because there is no way to know if they are "correct".
Are you using a hard drive password? Those are easily crackable as well as they usually have a vendor supplied master password. Do you mind giving more details?
It depends on the voting system too, though. This doesn't happen so much in systems that are not "winner takes all". In Italy, you can happily vote for the hammer-and-sickle communists (or the extremists on the other end) and they'll pick up a few seats in parliament; it's not like their representatives need to win in any one district - it's enough to get a percentage of the national vote. This has both benefits and its own problems, as well.
Couldn't a secure token (ala RSA SecurID) theoretically be used in some manner to prevent this attack?
Procedural programming is still mathematical.
Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 server edition improves cloud functionality
Many browsers and OS combinators suffer problems when Java applets are automatically launched.

Please add a [JAVA] tag in future.
Two of them get together and manage to keep the likely thirds marginal?
You mean: "thanks", Rupert.

But a sincere thanks to you for explaining to get there via a google search.

Which raises questions (besides the 'why am i out of loop'?):

• How did you know about the "via google" phenomenon for this article?

• Is that true for all/many wsj articles?

• Why does Rupert love Google referrals?
Make sure someone has a final call in the company. You can even divide it out: person a has final call on product design, person b has final call on scaling issues,etc. Even if you have 50% equity each, designate it through voting shares or just a bylaw.

A two person bureaucracy is a sure fire way to ensure things never get done as fast as they should. Joe Kraus' story in Founders at Work touched on this. I believe Vinod Khosla told him the best thing to do was break the equity up where someone had a final say (They all held equal shares before that).
In what way is ZFC paradoxical? One could certainly accuse it of being arbitrary (given the independence proofs) and incomplete (given Gödel's 1931), but I wasn't aware that one could derive a contradiction in ZFC. Russell's paradox, for example, is not a paradox in ZFC but a proof that there is no set of all sets.
Having worked as a startup "product guy" for the last five years, I think there are some good answers to the original question.

Several notes:

1) If you fall into the trap of thinking that engineers, technologists, CEO's, and others can handle this role, you'll just be part of hundreds or startups that don't have their act together. I've sat down with way too many startups who both don't have a handle on the marketplace or customer needs and have poor processes in terms of planning / prioritizing release cycles and roadmaps. While others in the company should have a grasp of both of these elements, the key point is correctly identifying the first part (i.e., customer needs) and then mapping it to the second (i.e., the roadmap).

2) The person who fills this role should be fairly well-rounded and be sort of a weird breed in that they actually are comfortable (and good at) talking with people (customers) and yet can get down into technical details. I wouldn't go as far to say that coding is necessary but surely mocking up initial wireframes and UX should be considered as part of the job.

3) Related to terminology, I'd try to stay away from using labels like "project manager" or "program manager." These are way too broad and make it seem like the role is more focused on logistics and coordination. Above all, this role is strategic...keeping the trains running on time is just one aspect and arguably, not the most important.
Even easier to get around.
Truecrypt uses your passphrase to decrypt the key which is then used to decrypt the disk.
With a ID tag it would just match the tag generated number with it's own algorithm and then decrypt the disk .
All the evil maid would then have to do is add a line to the Truecrypt loader that said if key=999 unlock anyway.
As someone currently studying math in a masters program, I am a huge fan of mathematics itself and of programmers learning at least the basics.

With that said, it is not necessary for a working programmer to know large amounts of math. I have known more than one programmer with a successful career that never studied any math beyond the required introduction to calculus and had long since forgotten most of that.

In short, I think the study of mathematics is very helpful to a programmer in both the general sense of improving their overall thought processes and in the specific of helping with certain types of problems, but it is not necessary for most.
Well that's not entirely true. There has been a vast effort to make a foundation for mathematics with the various set theories. Naive set theory is usually used as a language for creating the mathematical primitives most working mathematicians deal with.
CTRL-[ works as an alternative.
The market. The market. The competition.
How about some Category Theory? That's used in the theory behind type systems, if memory serves me. On the other hand, it's a field that even mathematicians refer to as "general abstract nonsense"...
Why aren't YOU selling a £200 Coandă effect deskfan?

Because there is probably no market.

But the real questions is, "why does a Coandă effect desk fan need to cost 200 quid?" Answer: because there's only one on the market.
This lets the target (and his collaborators) know he is compromised, and may make any information gained worthless.
Nginx module to turn it into a long-polling message queuing HTTP push server.
I would say that statistic and probability theory are probably the most important thing to learn for anyone that analyses data, yet most programmers are clueless and statistics isn't that popular in CS programs (at least the one I had or have heard of).
It's not overpriced, Dyson has to be quick making some money before the Chinese copy it and sell derivatives on every corner of the solar system.
The three get together, but the middle one get no clients.
post your question on the intellij forum: http://www.jetbrains.net/devnet/community/idea/ideacommunity

and if it doesn't do what you want, I suggest writing a feature request. I have gotten quite a few features this way.
Reminds me of the old movie Forbidden Planet. The aliens made a computer system that responded to thought - the civilization wiped itself out in a single night of unconscious thought. You should see it, it's a fun old sci-fi movie.
One of the reasons to have the machine is actually to prevent Russian hot-headed generals from pushing the "launch" button too quickly. That is why the existence of the machine wasn't really made known to the West. It makes perfect sense to still keep it online. Perhaps, because it is online, we haven't seen WWIII yet.

> Who is controlling this system now that the Soviet Union is no more?
I would guess a branch of FSB or FAPSI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAPSI).

> Is there any reason not to tear it down and, if not, why hasn't it been?
They will, as soon US will tear their systems down.
Favorite online lectures and presentations
I agree, there was a vast effort, but that was decades ago. As I said, most working mathematicians don't concern themselves with these issues and just stick with ZFC.
Ads drive Google's profit way up
There is a game theory course on itunes U that covers this more in depth during one of the first lectures - worth taking a look at if anyone is interested in delving deeper into this sort of thing.
The one in the middle forecloses on his house.
One of these? http://www.academicearth.org/lectures/search/game%20theory/
Water runs downhill. The shiny proprietary awesome gadget that apple made last year had been duplicated this year, and that will be mass marketed in a dozen varieties next year. Apple is readying a new shiny proprietary awesome gadget. Water runs downhill.
Next Generation Web Based Telecom Applications | Web Technology I/O
A flexible syntax introduces ambiguity, which forces me to think even more. Consider this simple example (which may be wrong for all I know):
x = foo bar, baz

Is it x = foo(bar, baz), x = {foo(bar), baz} or something else? I could probably derive the true meaning by looking at surrounding code, but I shouldn't have to.
I know it is in the guidelines, see text above. I'm posting this because it is in the guidelines and that does not seem to be enough.

The fact is that a small minority of the users posts a large majority of the links.

The last 210 links (and ask HNs and so on, I should have probably removed those), posted.

(16 hours, so not a full day):

30 spammer
20 cwan
7 edw519
7 alexandros
4 jacquesm
3 wallflower
3 vincentchan
3 kloncks
3 fogus
3 flemlord
3 dreemteem
3 danw
2 wakeless
2 vorador
2 twampss
2 sinu9i
2 rizzn
2 prakash
2 justlearning
2 j_baker
2 dragonquest
2 bdfh42
2 bastian
2 anon84
2 amayne
2 abraham
1 wglb
1 wattersjames
1 treskot
1 tocomment
1 the_flesher
1 tape4backup
1 surki
1 suprgeek
1 superchink
1 spahl
1 soundsop
1 skmurphy
1 silkoddyssey
1 si2
1 shamiq
1 seven
1 samqam
1 robg
1 rng
1 rayvega
1 rarestblog
1 prabodh
1 papyromancer
1 olliesaunders
1 nulheron
1 noneucitizen
1 nkojoe
1 newacc
1 nakajima
1 muriithi
1 mshafrir
1 mrshoe
1 mmaunder
1 mikefrancis
1 mikecapone
1 mickeyben
1 michekyben
1 mhil
1 mayank25may
1 matthewer
1 mark_h
1 manvsmachine
1 malvosenior
1 mahmud
1 lukosan
1 lmacvittie
1 lionhearted
1 kvs
1 kingkawn
1 kgermino
1 keyist
1 karthikm
1 jv2222
1 joshwa
1 johnrob
1 joepruitt
1 jnoller
1 jimmybot
1 jgrahamc
1 jcthoughscream
1 jayro
1 jackfoxy
1 imperator
1 ice799
1 hikari17
1 hellyeahdude
1 hadley56
1 grinich
1 gord
1 gluejar
1 foxycoder
1 forsaken
1 fookyong
1 davidw
1 damon10000
1 csomar
1 cicoriordan
1 chanux
1 catch404
1 cake
1 brandonwatson
1 blazzerbg
1 blasdel
1 billpg
1 bensummers
1 balend
1 baha_man
1 artpop
1 arijo
1 amichail
Ask YC: Do we need to file/pay US taxes (Canadian corporation)?
Short version:
Do foreign corporations need to pay US taxes if they use a US-based credit card gateway?

Long version:
We're about to begin collecting payment at our Canadian-based startup (pagerduty.com), but have run into a bit of a snag. All of the Canadian payment processors we've found that support recurring billing require us to handle the CC numbers during the initial signup process. This creates a PCI compliance requirement that we're keen to avoid.

We'd like to use a US gateway that allows recurring billing without requiring PCI compliance (e.x. Braintree), but unfortunately they are all asking us to provide an Employer Identification Number issued by the IRS. Apparently, it isn't difficult for foreign corporations to get an EIN, but we're unsure what sort of tax obligations filing for an EIN will create.

Has anyone else gone through this process? Can foreign corporations collect payment using a US gateway without incurring US taxes?
Depends what you consider trivial.

I don't touch any of the Bean / Spring / 'enterprise' madness. Perhaps that's the difference.

Exposing fields everywhere isn't really a maintenance hell, it's simple enough to find everywhere that accesses the field, I'm not sure why adding getters/setters is so much better :/ Sometimes it makes sense when the get/set does more than just modify a field.

Things like SimpleRemoteStatelessSessionProxyFactoryBean are clearly madness, and give Java a bad name. Also reinforce the silly opinion that to write Java you must use an IDE.
In a similar theme, virtual reality has been tested to relieve phantom limb pain from missing limbs.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/29102443.html

It's amazing how adaptable the human body/mind is sometimes.
Why is single value Calculus on his list of things that every programmer should know? People learn it early because of how important it is to the hard sciences, but it isn't particularly important to computer science. I would definitely move it down to the list of specific applications that you can learn if you need it.

I would also be inclined to have basic probability theory join combinatorics for the simple reason that the two subjects are so closely related that you tend to learn about them together. However statistics should remain a specific application of mathematics.

Otherwise a good list.
13 Productivity-boosting Outlook utilities
Huh, you're right, there is Java in there - I had no idea, it looked like simple image files. Couple questions for more savvy people -

1. Why would the author do that for static images?

2. Is there any way I can see that going forwards to warn people? I'm running Chrome/Win7, and didn't even notice.

I looked up the source and there it is -

<P><CENTER> <APPLET CODE=hoteling1 HEIGHT=100 WIDTH=400></APPLET>

</CENTER>

But it really makes no sense why the author would do that - it's just a straightforward, somewhat boring image. Thoughts?
Chronicle the Growth of Mint.com from 2005-2007
It seems a lot of over-posting comes from the famous "karma: 1, created: 30 seconds ago" accounts, so it may make sense to impose limits based on time as a user. (Karma may not work as well, as I could imagine a spammer creating 100 accounts and using them all to upvote one another's submissions.)
Opening Black Boxes
If banks want to lend their capital to people who can't repay, who am I to judge?

However, we should consider not helping them, if it fails.
Why Chile Is More Economically Free Than the United States | Cato @ Liberty
> Do foreign corporations need to pay US taxes if they use a US-based credit card gateway?

No.

> Has anyone else gone through this process?

Yes

You can request an EIN here:

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fss4.pdf?portlet=3

or call:

Internal Revenue Service
irs.gov
Telephone Assistance for Businesses
Toll-Free 1-800-829-4933

You might be able to get an exemption as well, which you can then give to your 'gateway' provider.

> Can foreign corporations collect payment using a US gateway without incurring US taxes?

Yes, absolutely. Your business is taxed in its home location. Even if you would have a US corporation owned by a Canadian one (you may need this in case of opening a US bank account for instance) you will have to file US taxes, but you will not be paying any, you'll need to consult with a tax specialized lawyer for the precise details on that though, how you set things up is critical.
This is already well studied and modeled as the median voter theorem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem
What we have now is the product of exactly what you are advocating: doing nothing. So how do you think it will get better?
What it really should, and does, look like is:

Hardware
|
OS
|
Software
|
User

Your OS is there to provide protection between programs and provide an interface to system resources. The OS is "software", I suppose, but it /is/ fundamentally different than, say, your web browser, in that OS code runs in kernel mode and your web browser runs in user mode. That's a huge difference in access to system resources, etc.
Whenever I suspect I might be somewhere where there's a keylogger running (public terminal etc) and I absolutely have to enter a password anyway, I just use the mouse to enter it out of order (and click away to throw in some random junk) while typing it in. Thwarts screen grabbers and keyloggers.
While the walking distance is not optimal, there is an upside. The ice cream vendors will be driven to differentiate their ice cream lines, and the beach dwellers will be able to comparison shop without walking halfway across the beach.
Pricing it anythng lower wouldn't tie in with the Dyson brand. Could you imaging if they were selling these at £20, who then would want one? Everyone who needs a fan already has a fan. But if you have one of these £200 toys sat in your house, you're sure to look cool and feel cool with that fanless air blown in your face.
Stand up for yourself.

Don't make any mistakes big enough to kill the company.

The moment you realize you can't pay a bill talk to the company you owe money to and explain to them exactly why. Then offer to work out a payment plan. You'd be surprised how many companies are just happy your communicating with them and more often than not will work out a payment plan you can handle.

If deep inside you are not 100% about a decision or direction, do something about it. If things don't work out, make sure you won't be able to blame others.

Be very cautions about the impact of hiring full time employees. Once you hire someone who needs healthcare and a 401k your company ceases to be an innocent hobby.
The article never proposes specialized hardware at any point - indeed, a central idea is that a Forth-based OS would port well to a multitude of architectures.
Awesome feature. I just wish you didn't have to have a GWT account to use it. A lot of webmasters who would have run it out of curiosity (and possibly found something wrong with their website) aren't going to bother.
Not as high-tech, but that Power Mat [1] device seems like a good example. I remember reading about it a few years ago, and just saw the first commercials for it this week.

Its a good premise for a blog, and would have plenty of topics. Like all blogs, it would depend on whether you stuck with it long enough to get in the groove.

[1] http://www.powermat.com/
I am glad Europe is as boring as it is.