skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I accept your correction that there is a difference between "promoting progress" and "coming up with ideas". (By coincidence I just reread http://arxiv.org/abs/math.HO/9404236 which argues, among other things, that progress in mathematics can be helped by not proving facts too quickly.)

I agree with you on the intent of the design of the patent system. However in a world filled with overbroad junk patents, where accidental infringement is much better than willful infringement, there are real incentives for innovative people to _not_ read patents. Because reading them opens you up to liability without teaching you anything you couldn't have thought of on your own.

As for the cost of waiting, you are right that the incentive to wait is an inefficiency in my proposal. However the aim here is to achieve a good trade-off. Obviously more detailed analysis is required to find whether it achieves as good a trade-off as I think it does.

However for many years we blindly accepted very large increases in how easy it was to get a patent without substantive debate, and there is now substantial evidence that this has been a bad thing. So it seems to me that it shouldn't be hard to improve on the current state, and I think my proposal would be an improvement.

Finally I have to say that I don't understand what you mean by "presumption of validity". The way things work now is that if IBM wants me to enter into a cross-licensing arrangements, we both know that they can threaten me with a large stack of patents. We both know that most of those patents won't stand up in court, but fighting it will impose serious costs on me and they are likely to get me on something. So even though we both presume the patents are invalid, the threat is still good.

How would you change that dynamic? If your idea is that they spend their money to validate their patent before I spend a dime, how will we know it has been validated to my satisfaction? In theory that kind of validation is the job of the patent office. However regulatory capture has made that review a joke, and would eventually eventually ruin any other level of review you could add. But if I have to spend money in the process of getting the patent validated, then IBM still can threaten me as they would today.
Last I heard, only C/C++, Java, and Python are supported inside Google. You can run Rhino on the JVM to get server-side JS but it's really slow.
Everything about this project was meta-interesting. I feel like someone could write a very entertaining NYT piece about this project. If this was not posted on HN, I would think the narrative was bogus. However, being posted on HN, I doubt you are feigning hopeless romanticism.

P.S. I am half-convinced XKCD started for a similar reason.
http://xkcd.com/55/
Perhaps developers would make more money and users would discover more cool apps.
Wow buddy, you need to go back to reddit, Digg (seeing that those are the type of places where you see this kind of comments more often) or whevever you came from.
haha -- a veeeeeeeery valid point. we're both comfortable and open with one another right now, so I'm very confident that this would fall into the "sweet" category and not the "creepy" category. I'll tread veeeery carefully though :)
Evidence still fuzzy on cell phones, cancer
My general impression is that Microsoft don't want to make a PC app store, because they'd rather let a 1000 flowers bloom and for the software developers to market them freely. Also known as 'commoditised' shareware where different apps compete with each other.
Just a quick heads up... When the dashboard is "paused", the page is not properly masked. When I clicked to resume, it opened a link in a new page.
I'm flattered that you think that! As embarrassing as it is, I'm really as dorky as described.
Reddit decommissions its last Y Combinator funded server
you might want to rephrase the question then, cuz i thought the same thing other posters did.

i think its interesting enough that it could boost the pr on your product or help create an early rush to put you in the top lists, but if i bought an app using that model i wouldn't really be motivated by that fact alone to recommend it to anyone. for me the usefulness and how much i like the app would still way out-trump any need to get my money back.

if you are going with the idea tho, it might be better if there was a 'reward' aspect not just a refund. like 4x = u get paid 1x or something. refunds are frankly not too exciting especially for an iphone app.
I thought the Nigerians were doing this like 15 years ago.
Just a thought: if said work is of substantial length then you have enough context/space to express all the subtleties by other means. In case of the message limited to 140 characters or email one-liner you need some crutches to the same. Are we trading 5 lines of email for one ":)"?
> Oh, and abiogenic petroleum is pretty much crackpottery, so that doesn't help.

What does this have to do with his post? He was basically saying that finite resources will have an end unless we can confirm that they aren't finite.
Ah I see that now. However, I was unwilling to even click on the "Try it" button, so I would not have gotten that information anyway. The web is too full of services that do the "try-it-free" and then the "good-luck-trying-to-cancel-the-service" that I would highly recommend they disclose the pricing up front.

I did also notice their FAQ had it after clicking around, but again, that still feels like they are hiding it, as that is a link hidden at the bottom of the page in the footer.
You can ask me questions here or on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/a2zte
I'm not sure that esr reached "the top". Perhaps on the speaking gig tour, and yes he's written a couple books.

But he's never achieved what he so likes to claim.

He claims to be a "core linux developer", yet he has no code in the kernel, and CML2 was flatly rejected.

He used to claim that he contributed to GNU starting in 1982, but when I showed that was impossible, he corrected to "mid-80s" (its 1987.)

I think he feels he was on the way up, met his limitations, and has since been scrambling in an attempt to maintain the position he held in 1999.
Cool. But that also means that photoreceptor cells and sperm divide from cells quite unlike themselves, right? Or does that work differently?
I like it a lot. I am looking at a solutions that would help us to track time off (not time tracking itself). Perq has very attractive pricing (10x cheaper than other solutions, I am looking at tracking time off for 50+ employees). Design is very nice and smooth. Good work!
Thanks so much, especially for your ideas. I wanted to avoid any sort of sign up, so I don't actually collect the "crusher"'s name (just the "crushee"). The system will tolerate names within an edit-distance of 2, so many common spelling errors will be ignored (not to mention the added layer of plausible deniability). I also recently added a "really close"/"close"/"sorta close"/"way off" hinting system -- so when you guess, you'll see that the prompt reflects how similar your guess is to the actual crushee.

One thing I'm going to add is a little cookie-based cache of your recent cupidco.de tracking pages, as they start to get difficult to juggle after some time.
Yes. It is not a paid ad. You can read more here..
http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20091110_free_a...
Yep - the difference between yours and mine is 4 characters, including a space.

Language is so sneakily expressive!

You're so right! For example, I wrote out a positive interpretation before hand to prime the reader into seeing what I hoped they'd see. Would it come across the same way if I'd put that interpretation right after? Probably not.

What's going on here is the textual equivalent of: http://www.barryandstuart.com/wp-content/uploads/illusion.gi...
I would suggest finding an open source project you like and contributing to it.
This made no sense to me, and the link to entrepreneurship seemed very poorly explained. Did I miss something?
An intriguing coincidence?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2004/20040319h.jpg
That surprises me. Doesn't LuaJIT simply spit out subroutine-threaded code?
yeah -- that's definitely true. I would have silently swept the project under the rug/archive.org if things hadn't worked out, but we've really started to connect, especially about our respective geekitude-- so I'm pretty confident that she'll think this sweet and not weird.
Put a flowswitch in the upstream line.

Electricity and bathrooms don't mix.
yes that is a definitely good idea. I was busy with a lot of stuff since last update but new release is planned later this month. Among other feature you will have templates. But in a wiki way so you could edit them, reuse them, inherit & co (like mostly I think on mediawiki). Also semantic and linnks between docs will be improved. It's opensourced (http://bitbucket.org/benoitc/couchit/) so anyone can participate :)
You're probably never going to read back this far in time, but, it's coming in the next version.
I tried posting it to reddit (my leisure time goes to: YC, reddit, and embarassing projects like cupidco.de :), but they went into attack mode on me. I figured that was probably because the link was more of a YC sorta thing so I pretended reddit didn't happen and posted it here.

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/a2z0t/dear_reddi...
I meant the normal body text to be honest. Instead of showing off with one frame, why not typeset the whole page in one of the fonts? I couldn't find anything both toned down and "different" in there, but this might come close: http://typekit.com/fonts/392 Give it more spacing and you could use it for "normal" text (or even http://typekit.com/fonts/129 if they want to stay with web2.0-ish sans)
I agree it may be too minimal. For next release I would like to keep the site minimalist but more open. I'm not sure how to to it right now though ....
I might be blind to it, but I don't recall hearing of any newsworthy O'Reilly acquisitions well.. ever. Well, except Esther Dyson's Release newsletter.
I once bought a girl I was semi-obsessed a six-volume set of a series about WWI published three years after WWI. She was a FP nut, so I thought it was cool. I did so even though I knew she was taking a plane the next day. I even wrote a good essay length inscription, informing her that she was awesome.

Sometimes, it's fun to say f*ck rationality. Good luck to you, sir.
The DMCA takedown problem
ACPI general purpose events
It does appear to be a house ad. Or should it be considered public service? Being stuck in an airport with no reception and charge-a-minute wifi as my only means of communication... has sucked before.
you need to work your headline/story here into your site somehow.
And then have it report gallons of water used rather than time. And then sell it to me, because then I'd buy it too.

For added fun, estimate natural gas or electricity usage based on the type of water heater installed. Ok, so that would take this way past simple.
Evolution: The Eight Stages Of Listening
A tongue-in-cheek reply could be "something that has to be done in a short time?"

A programmer using Python (and Ruby, Perl, Lisp, Smalltalk) is usually more productive than one with comparable brain-size using Java or C.
> if you keep using them they'll eventually run out

Peak oil isn't about oil running out. It's about the rate of production going into decline and the economy struggling to handle extreme oil price volatility.
Search Engine Yameoo
On a related note: in my experience, I've always found people of the reddit community to be very smart, but also very negative, and very insensitive, vs. people on news.yc being smart, pragmatic, and at some times...irrational. This is based on real life interactions with coworkers as well as online.
The supply is infinite? Good to know.

(Yes, I understand your point. We will reach "economically unfeasible" before we ever reach "gone", but nonetheless, there is also an absolute limit.)
That reminds me of a joke:

Q: How can you tell the difference between an introverted engineer and an extroverted engineer?

A: The extroverted engineer looks at your shoes when he's talking to you.
Chartbeat also has a free iphone app with push notifications.
I looked into using @font-face for a project a week or two ago.

I ended up not using it because most fonts (i tried a lot) looks really bad anti-aliasing turned off; especially at the small (body-text) font sizes.

If only there was a way to tell the browser to only use the fonts if anti-aliasing was turned on
I don't know how popular a service like that is going to be.

I'm doing something similar at the moment - a combination of Twitter client for j2me phones that beside normal twitter functions allows taking photos/videos/audio recordings and a web site to display recorded material.

I've been live for about a month, and surprisingly I'm not seeing many users recording videos. Most would use it as a normal Twitter client, and some maybe will snap a few photos.
No. It is much, much more sophisticated than that. See this message by Mike Pall, LuaJIT's author for the details:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/58908
If you follow the link at the bottom, there's lecture notes and sample code for a whole FP class. Worth checking out.

http://www.cs.chalmers.se/Cs/Grundutb/Kurser/afp/lectures.ht...
I think I prefer the latter :P. I was a little taken aback by the instant negativity I got there. Oh well.
Hmmm. But, there is still a secret tracking page connected to the public page, right? Shouldn't it be possible to use the secret tracking page to enter your name, and have the changes be reflected on the public page?

Kudos for completely avoiding sign up, btw. If there's no way to do what I described above without adding sign up, then for God's sake, don't do it. You're a champ for breaking the sign up trend already.

The hinting system is such an awesome idea. I'll have to spread this around to a couple of my buddies so I can try it out!
Did it work? Was she touched?
A history of Python packaging
I wrote it, and was actually surprised it popped up on Hacker News. What I was trying to articulate is that treating an operation as an entrepreneur, or in this case a startup, is a method of individualizing the business process.

Business has many 'rules' attached to it, many which aren't necessary to personal or financial success. Entrepreneurs can avoid these rules, and that process can become addicting.

Sorry it wasn't clear, and thanks for the comment.
It's nothing to do with Google and search.
Murdoch sells a lot of cable TV, with Cable TV i have to buy packages - if i want the expensive movie package I have to buy the basic service, then the advanced service then the crappy movie package before I can buy the premium movie package.

On the net I pay my ISP for basic service and can get anything from the BBC and Guardian to HN. If Murdoch has his way and abolishes the communist cancer of net neutrality I will pay for basic network that includes Fox.com then the advanced package to get HN, then premium package to get Youtube.
I suspect that however much I pay I won't the BBC or Guardian !
> I based my opinion almost entirely on my experience, that even a slight change of font can make a big difference in someone's perception.

On paper, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you.

On screen, however, I doubt the odd pixel makes any significant difference. I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise, but I have yet to see any of these professional font foundries prove me wrong.

I do know that I have bought and paid for several pro-grade fonts, which I happily use in print, but which I wouldn't use on a web site even if I legally could. The on-screen rendering is nowhere close to as good as the fonts designed for screen use that I mentioned earlier.
It's OK to charge people money to answer questions for free? OK, sure...
Java instead of python..? ick..

Also, with the resources that Google has I'm a little baffled as to why they couldn't devote some serious effort into getting python up to spec performance wise.
I Dislike Professional Startup Advisors
This. Working for a company with a large audience means that your problem often is no longer getting people to pay attention. Your problem is getting it right, at scale, in multiple languages and locales. This can be alleviated somewhat with internal tests, invite-only alphas, bucket testing, and "labs" features.
I'm being pedantic in using the term persistent, but they aren't necessarily the same thing. I made a blog post about it here: http://jasonmbaker.com/persistence-is-a-subset-of-immutabili...
Hollywood crap movie : Chuck Palahniuk stories :: business as usual : startups.

More meaning, less fluff, more emotion, less middle-management, more clarity, less hiding.
Yea back that it all looked so futuristic. All we really need is a gyrosensor and some processing power. The iPhone app aint anything amazingly special, its the hardware they built that is :P Wait, no its not.
I don't know - I sure hope we get better at communicating subtlety through text, but it seems tough. I, as a fairly sarcastic person, have struggled with this issue for years. When I'd like to throw in some light sarcasm to my online communication, my options seem to be:

* Writing it straight and counting on the recipient knowing me well enough to realize that it's sarcasm - can be seriously disastrous if I miscalculated.

* Markers like :P or :) - communicates my intent, but comes off as overly cheery, especially when used multiple times in the same email or post.

* Something obvious like <sarcasm> tags - kind of spoils the art of it all.

* Make my sarcastic claims so over-the-top that the recipient cannot help but realize I'm being facetious - usually works, but it's a broadsword where I usually prefer a shiv.

I have yet to figure out a solution that allows nearly the same range of sarcastic expression as I can achieve face to face.

(And yes, I really have expended a lot of effort trying to be sarcastic online)
Facebook status message. Enter Twitter. Exit axod.
Write an interpreter/compiler for your own little language. With your own garbage collector.
Uh, SBCL is dynamically-typed.
To be honest, all I can think of is weighing them, but they could be filled with lead! So I guess I haven't thought it through...

However, the Ebay seller feedback count should be of some use. They could only sell a duff coin once (maybe twice) before being busted.
IMHO the major reason single-founder startups do well is because they don't have to deal with co-founder issues.
I'd actually look at sound. Shower noise has got to be pretty close to white noise. A little microphone and some filtering code to distinguish showering from other things, and you'd be in business.
Nah, I don't think it's creepy at all.

I once received a love-letter in obfuscated perl. I married the sender. Good luck :-)
Stem cells are totipotent and can give rise to any type of specialized cell in your body. Cell signaling induces horribly complex signaling pathways that lead to profound changes in transcription of that cell's DNA.

As an embryo, your gonads start in your chest and, through signals from your brain, end up in your pelvic region.

Erythrocytes (Red blood cells) are a great example of specialization. Before they become erythrocytes they have a nucleus. Their nucleus is ejected, their shape completely changes from spherical to flat-with-a-dimple and they are not a red blood cell. Obviously, erythrocytes cannot divide.
sounds more like adaptation to me.
You can manufacture almost anything. We could turn peanut butter into diamonds. But it isn't economically feasible.

The supply of materials and energy is effectively infinite once your scope is beyond the earth.

Animals and plants that can go extinct aren't the same as commodities like oil.
I'm addicted to Entrepreneurship.
Now if "all" the opensource dynamic languages could run off the same opensource VM then that would be something?

The combined effort of all communities working towards producing a scalable & fast VM could make a big difference?

Is it time to think Parrot?
Heh, that's an awesome suggestion. Do you have any resources that would be best for this? Probably the Dragon Book?
A flowswitch is a binary device, it is used in central heating systems to make sure the water is moving when the pump engages, if the pump has failed the flowsitch won't trip so the heater will display a 'friendly' error code instead of burning a bunch of gas for nothing, possibly damaging the burner.

It is simply used as a failsafe.

There are vane based systems that will report actual flow rather than just whether flows or not.

Usually these work with a vane with a little magnet embedded, every revolution of the vane counts for so much water. They're not very accurate though (+- 20% or so, especially if the flow rates vary in a wide range).

A simple hall-effect sensor will act as the pickup on the outside of the copper or plastic housing that contains the vane assembly.

You can get calibrated ones too, these are used in places like gas stations. Those are pretty expensive though.
Are they being sold on Ebay?
Facebook status message. Enter Twitter. Exit axod.

Hi. Good to see the CEO of the company posting on this thread. Just in case you were not aware, Twitter launched before you were able to tag other people in your Facebook status. Tagging a person, however, is just one of many differences between Facebook status and Twitter. There are no hash tags, no lists, and no trending topics on Facebook. More importantly, on Twitter you can get direct access to the words of celebrities and other notable people. On Facebook typically all you would see would be an HR maintained fan page.

There's a big difference between that and getting a direct line via Twitter. I'll give a concrete example. A couple of days ago I was able to ask Jason of 37signals whether he knew of a copy of his talk from Start Up School besides Justin.TV. He responded to me within an hour. Interaction like this is not possible via Facebook status updates. It seems to me that your claim that Twitter built something that already existed isn't true.

As a side note, your tone seems a bit confrontational for what I would have expected from a YC CEO.
That and good monitoring.

I always try to launch services with very detailed server monitoring - I want to know how much memory is being used with what, how much I/O and how much time the CPUs spend doing non-application stuff. I want to monitor response times, queue and dataset sizes and anything that helps me say if we will need more servers, different servers or what parts of the application we should port to amd64 assembly.
The point here is that you'd save a lot of money by buying the guide and thereby allowing yourself to travel. (I'm not saying I'd by the guide because I won't...)
Productive in this context means 'coming up with an idea that Google can turn into a product'. /tongue-in-cheek
Update: They have turned on jsMath, so formulas are now available, see http://mathoverflow.net/questions/16/how-do-i-typeset-mathem...
I just keep an oven timer in the bathroom for showers, e.g., something like this: http://littlebabylump.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/oven-timer...
Only if the reporter wants to go through hoops like that. The more work it is, the less likely they are to want to do that. That's especially so since there's no advantage for them in doing so...
As unladen as it is, it is still very compatible with Python modules.

If Unladen Swallow is to go faster, it would break backwards compatibility with modules written in C. And that wouldn't be as bad an idea as it seems. Sometimes, what you really need is a good API reboot.

Also, a good approach is to prototype in a VHLL, profile and rewrite the rest in lower level languages such as Java or C.
True, the best way would be to have OS support for automatic quarantining of anything from outside until it has been checked.

Vista sort of has this but it doesn't clear the suspicion, so if you download a simple utility (or even a help file) it will warn you every time you open it - unless it comes inside an installer.
You tried the programming subreddit? Maybe with a self post?