skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Surprisingly quite good - gets one thinking about physics some and inconsistencies in semi-scientific fantasy stories.

Reminds me of an Eliezer Yudkowsky article talking about how fire and combustion couldn't "not work" in an alternate world that humans could survive in, because similar processes happen in our body. (Can't find that article right now unfortunately, it was quite good - it was referencing a fantasy story where fire didn't exist in a parallel world)

Anyway, paper is worth a read. People with an adept knowledge of physics will chuckle a little, but probably even better for people like me who haven't played with physics much - got me thinking about center of mass, density, inertia, etc. Interesting stuff. Recommended.
wow! I didn't know that. Thanks for the info
Building an Object Collection Manager with the Standard PHP Library (SPL)
I've heard good things about MVC, unfortunately I've been a little hesitant with exploring it. I worked with classic ASP for the first few years at my last job, before we started transitioning to ASP.NET and while I know websites really are (and should be) stateless, I've kind of grown accustomed to how ASP.NET works.

I suppose it boils down to the fact that there are so many technologies out there right now that it's almost overwhelming and I'm more comfortable with sticking what I know, and what's kept me employed. Still, MVC is something that I may look into as some point. The fact that it works so splendidly with jQuery is definitely enticing. I'm loving jQuery lately.
The Increasing Incidence of Cutaneous Malignant Melanoma (CMM) In Ireland
I find that it has greatly improved my sense of direction. I live in an area where the roads are not always a grid (to put it lightly... having lots of lakes is fun for everyone but the civil engineers), and the GPS device has helped me correct my mental map of my area (which I am also relatively new to) several times now where I was off by as much as 30 or 60 degrees in what direction I thought I was going. (Between trees, clouds, and the fact that you probably shouldn't be staring at the sun while driving, if it weren't out-of-view most of the time anyhow, I find most conventional absolute cues to be useless.)

I suspect that rather than being an absolute problem, it has more to do with how you use it. Using it exclusively in turn-by-turn mode, such that it never displays any context beyond the next turn, is probably a bad idea. Using it zoomed out so it shows the surrounding half-mile or so (or more on highways) is what I find helpful. I never wanted to find alternate routes to things before because you just never know what on earth a road is going to do without a map (dead end? immediately shoot off in the wrong direction? who knows?), and the GPS unit is a map convenient enough to actually use. Even when I use it to travel to areas I've never been to, it helps me strongly orient myself and learn the 'lay of the land' in a way that simply driving once through an area, following your host to some specific place, really can't. It's like having psychic knowledge of the area you're in.
Yes, it would be nice if it comes from India, but somebody has to bring in an initial momentum to turn the rich people's/investors attention in India, towards it.
Installing Varnish with nginx, Passenger, and Monit on Ubuntu 8.10 intrepid
How to Shutdown your pc remotely (Windows)
This actually has some interesting implications for Facebook in terms of performance requirements. Since they show you "popular" or "well liked" posts there is no need to constantly update the stream which in turn allows them to be a bit lazier on synchronizing servers and propagating new posts.

I wouldn't be surprised if this (along with many other things) contributed a significant amount to their decision to go this route.
The -S flag was invaluable for me when I was moving from C to assembly. Then again, I used it in an iterative fashion, do something simple -S, do the same thing -S -O1, -S -O2, -S O3, and then a spattering of the different optimization techniques to see how it converted the C to assembly. I miss those days (did I just admit to being old?).
http://maps.google.com/maps/place?ftid=0x80857c242d2f5c4d:0x...

Wheeler Auditorium is located in Wheeler Hall.
I'm not sure this is true, or if it is true, it might not be true in the way the original guy who wrote the story mentioned. He said his app was up about 40 minutes after launch on a pirate site. I get the impression that what you download from Cydia rewrites the system calls, once for all, and does not rewrite each app internally. These apps are distributed binary, yes? So you're going to need a cracker with a disassembler, iphone dev kit and some time to pull out the internal checks. This opposed to doing it once for all on the iphone OS side. I'm betting that's how it's done, and if that's how it's done, then adding those checks will have some impact.
For something like this I would prefer if they took a bit more time to flesh out options, as could find a button to remove things like friends adding other people as friends from the live feed.

Also this should come with a box up the top with specific help pages written up to explain it all, if people who develop and use web apps every day find it different and confusing, imagine the average facebook user.
Do you seriously believe that webapps would eventually replace desktop apps ?
Do all the projects in K&R, then buy a pic board and pic compiler and get on it.
Well I'll admit it right along with you, I miss those days too.

I think I must have coded myself to the moon and back by now if you'd print it all out on fanfold paper (in C, mostly), but the joy of getting a little OS to boot up from nothing is never going to pale in comparison to installing framework X and building some web-app. No matter how successful.

Web-apps make substantially more $ though...
I would assume that it does have performance implications, but that they go in the other direction -- I commented on this here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=879952
1) I suggest that actually the largest-grossing games will be things that run inside of some sort of trusted computing-y system. Right now, the 360 and PS3 fill that role, especially the 360, with its really-pretty-good internal verification systems. I suppose Steam could turn into a setup like that as well. I note MS also pushes the server-side hard, like you suggest, and I agree this has added significant value to their games,making offline play less appealing.

2) Agreed completely, this is happening now, a-la D&D Online. As companies figure out how to forecast revenues from such things, we'll be seeing a lot of this. And, frankly, I think a lot of us won't mind. I kind of like pay-as-you go, personally. It lets me choose how much to spend on the game.

p.s. I love my Kindle.
We are here. I have a feeling we just tend to be a bit more quiet than our web brethren. Glad you like the Nios. I worked on SOPC Builder and a bit on the Nios for a while. It's definitely some of the most exciting things we do at Altera.
This is the developer blog for Twiki, one of the most powerful wikis.

http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/WebHome?category=Developm...

Here are some things to consider up front:

* Pluggable authentication and authorization. In the beginning both are simple, but if you weave that simple assumption into the code, it will be hard to add finer grained control.

* Keep read latency low. This might mean some form of caching. Twiki is slow in my experience.

* Expose all features to a web service interface from day one. Don't weld functionality to the GUI. Side benefit: makes testing your software easier. See:

http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Blog/2007-11-14-how-to-rest

I think you'll find much of what you want by poking around the Twiki site.
re iAccelerator. Caveat Emptor http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=842882
I believe they're just marking tweets as favorites, then pulling only those:

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method:-favorite...
I completely agree with this article. I'm a successful entrepreneur with an Ivy degree, and I've spent a lot of time with Entrepreneurs from around the world. A surprising number didn't go to a 'top-tier' school; by surprising, I mean to say that where I live if you throw a brick at a law firm, marketing agency, publisher, or accounting firm, you will hit a bunch of Ivy grads. If you throw a brick at a successful startup-CEO meet-and-greet, you will hit a bunch of immigrant kids, local 'townies', and 1 time in 15, someone with an MBA, (usually from a top school.) This is so prevalent that at a recent dinner I had with a highly successful real-estate developer, I was shocked to learn that he went to Harvard. I expected him to be a local non-Ivy grad, given his huge self-made business success.

I've come to a similar conclusion that the author of the article does: risk-aversion is real, and prevalent for Ivy grads. This is probably for a mix of reasons -- I could imagine wealthy students not 'needing' the success as much, and poor ones saddled with loans which make risking much harder. I started out in a risk-averse career, management consulting, but I just couldn't hack the lifestyle and people, and left to do something that was crazy and eventually much more lucrative.
I tried the GUI tools. But what I love about the web interface is the ability to CTRL + F anything on the page. And I can also "copy" any text I want in it.
The best way to learn assembly is to do it on a risc chip, then work up to a CISC chip.

So pic, mips, etc first, then X86
highly, highly recommand +1, I'm reading it, it's better than any other program books I've ever read.
It tells you what, how, why, and it tells in an interesting way.
Babar Ali - the man, the legend and his startup
That'd be the day :D Drawings for comments is absolutely a great idea. Sometimes I wish I could "draw" something in my code (Arrows, bookmarks, quick diagrams, etc. beside comments). Think github with this kind of feature.
Venture Lab at Berkeley - http://cet.berkeley.edu/connect/teams

I'm quite sure the The Lester Center at Berkeley has a program too - http://entrepreneurship.berkeley.edu/main/index.html
You're reading too much into it. The points just indicate that around 25 people didn't realize the article was from 2002 until they read the comment so they upmodded
Introducing DBCSS Beta
As a skinny fellow, I tend to agree -- or, rather, my metabolism agrees for me. Counter-point, though: consider the "obesity paradox". Statistically, obesity correlates massively more positively with survival in the face of catastrophic illness (cancer, &c) than for folks with a normal-ish BMI, let alone the scrawny ones. It's probably a less "selective" (in the evolutionary sense) trait than it might be, in that cancer tends to be an ailment associated with at least somewhat advanced age, a time by which most people who are going to will likely have bred.
Google Chrome released for Mac (Official Developer Build)
This is cool. I think we need open source ATMs too.
http://twitter.com/yogi4change/status/5108003634

http://twitter.com/NewChannelMedia/status/5071269000

here are a random couple I tracked down by handle (some I tried to track down, but couldn't find). from the current moment, they are 7 and 22 hours old.
It was at the root of long-standing punditry holding that Apple should license the Mac OS to other PC makers

They did until Steve Jobs killed it.
I'd put money on it being RIM's fault. Ever since they switched to the "bold" OS I've really lost my taste for the brand. I have a 9000 and have to constantly swap both the SIM and battery to make the thing dial. RIM = Fail. I'm switching to Android.
http://browsershots.org
Why Angels Should Charge Startups To Pitch Their Ideas
Does it make you nervous to know that a company with tremendously more resources is moving into your pond?
Evan Williams (Twitter CEO) explains revenue model.
1. Make a social networking site
2. Get it popular
3. ???
4. Profit!
Also, within walking distance of YCombinator (2 blocks), so drop by if you're in the area. :-)
Once nice thing about Android is that you have to give applications permission to spy on you. Reading the useful "unique IDs" (phone number & IMEI) requires the "read phone state" permission. (That is why random apps that don't deal with your phone need that permission. And is why I don't install them unless I can see the source code.)

Anyway, I would not pay for an app that collects my personal uniquely-identifiable information and sends it to an untrusted third party. The pirates have the right idea here.
Nah, if it did I wouldn't be calling attention to it. :-)

Facebook is a walled garden. Whether or not we could beat them on their home turf isn't something we've put a lot of thought into. Fortunately the rest of the web is big.

The thing that solidified this for us at one point when we were trying to pick our target sectors was thinking through the fact that Google can't index Facebook (or any of the other major walled gardens) either and still manages to pull together a pretty cohesive picture of the web.
It's like with any skill obsoleted by technology: as long as everything works now and the uptime of the social system keeps growing, nobody has to suffer. But if, or when, the illusion breaks, there will be many people taking the hit big time.

Albeit a bit far-fetched, navigation with only GPS might be one. Somebody suggested the irrelevance of basic arithmetics in these times of calculators and cash registers. Most of us haven't had their life depend on hunting skills for decades, not to mention the art of keeping lambs and turning them into warm clothes. So there are all kinds of things that just might save us in the event of technological or cultural failure if we still knew how to do it.

But then there's the thing that we can't know what's going to happen. It might be that I will never need to navigate myself anymore, or calculate change. But I can't know. And on the other hand, holding on to old skills just for the sake of security sounds stupid as well. Exaggerating, we might learn to live like cavemen in order to drop any dependence on current culture and technological advances, and then something else happens that we can't handle, and then us cavemen die.

If something happens and humans need to take the hit, there are a few points to consider:

* humans are damn imaginative and very much capable of learning when they have to;

* on the other hand, some of us would just die because they aren't. I wouldn't say survival of the fittest but survival of the most flexible;

* then again, life isn't a right per se -- in the end it's more like a struggle and has always been.

If somebody can't run his life without GPS, he might not do well if his living environment changes. Then again, it might be a good time to learn to do that.

Nobody has guaranteed us that everything's always going to work out for us unless we actually invest time and effort in learning new things and constantly changing ourselves to match the actuality.
I think you mean the license fees killed Firewire. Apple got greedy and lost.
India's demographic moment
Nandan Nilekani, a founder of Infosys Technologies writes about India's "demographic dividend" - the advantage of having a young population
Installing Movable Type | MovableType.org - Home of the MT Community
hmmm...is this a tech cofounder site? a site to find friends? a dating service?

i want to believe in the site--bringing people together in authentic non-slimey convenient ways is awesome.

the mobile part throws me. i barely use my phone and i don't have a sms plan, let alone have a smart phone. is this critical...i mean, am i supposed to be out in the world and suddenly my phone beeps that someone i'm interested in working with, hanging with and/or dating is nearby? i spend most of my time coding in my house or playing goofy sports outdoors--my phone is useless for all of this, whereas email and webpages are helpful and convenient (for funtime organization not playing :-)

why do you want to know my sexual orientation? the mix of personal and professional is....interesting? it's not good that the gender drop down just says "guy" and doesn't look like a drop down. maybe the whole thing looks different on a phone?

the ui fails with FF 3.5 OSX.5. i switched to safari and was able to register and fill out a profile....is something supposed to happen when i click "update profile"?

yeah...so the site in general doesn't "work."

this is a shame. i hope you get your stuff together. a bit of a chicken and egg problem so....
If Apple wants it then, btrfs' license is irrelevant to Apple as long as there isn't patent encumbrance. Apple can dispatch a team of flying monkeys to clone a btrfs implementation under whatever license they choose.

wc linuc-2.6.31/fs/btrfs/*.[hc] says 50k lines of text. Call it 20 flying monkey years of coding.
Mixing code and presentation is a bad idea.
If spam is such a concern - and given that points two and three are basically rehashes of the idea of paygates being spam filters - wouldn't asking for an abstract of the business plan upon submission be even more effective than having that pay gate in the first place?

The reasoning for the article's specious. Money doesn't determine the worth of an idea - and by setting up a money barrier, angel investors are locking out potentially game-changing proposals made by those that would've probably hammered out a barebones version of the product or service with the money they're otherwise tossing at angel investors. Or those that /have/ invested their own money, nearly all of it even, but don't have any left to make expensive gambles like pitching to angel investors.

As for angel investors charging "not doing this for the money?" Disingenuous. Just because you have a few million doesn't mean you won't turn your nose up at the idea of an easy thirty, forty thousand once in a while.
I think the benefits of having a diverse OS landscape are much greater than the cost of a little increased complexity. We already have languages that run on virtual machines, and we have the POSIX standard. Software portability shouldn't be a problem.
what would make you think that popularity isn't real-time?
It was self defense. No jury will convict him.

Edit: for those who don't recall. The clones were intended to speciate and fill all sorts of niches, but they mostly just built the Apple provided reference designs with maybe the odd extra bus slot or two. They then cannibalized the high end and low end of the market.

They got the high end because as Motorola was ramping up each faster chip, Apple would not release with it until they could ship in sufficient quantity to satisfy demand. The cloners had no such qualms and would happily take the piles of money off of the high paying 'must have the best crowd' with the trickle of fast chips at the front of the production runs, simultaneously robbing Apple of the lucrative consumer's business and delaying the time when Apple could get enough chips to launch their own.

The cloners ate the low end of the market, despite their disadvantage of scale, by making machines a little bit crummier than Apple wanted to build, but also by not paying a large enough licensing fee for the OS to cover their share of development.
They aren't fake entries. If you click on the actual entry you can click "View on Twitter" and it goes to the actual tweet that said it.

They're probably just caching the tweets and updating them every so often.
If an entrepreneur isn’t willing to fork over $10K to pitch their revolutionary business idea, I would start to doubt how truly revolutionary their idea is.

Is this guy an angel??? If he is, I doubt he's going to see (m)any good ideas. As for the rest of his arguments, they are all as much crap as this one.

EDIT: Point by Point rebuttal:

1. You'll be surprised how many guys with good ideas lack either the willingness or the ability to pony up $10K for 15 minutes of an angel's time.

2. You won't really be seeing the cream of the crop. They would have already denounced you as worthless and moved on. You'll only be seeing those who don't mind ponying up the dough.

3. Okay, now this one is really stupid. If you can't tell the difference between a guy who's looking to make a quick buck on someone else' money and a guy who genuinely has a good startup idea, then you have no business being an angel.
Everything is doomed if you wait long enough.
Typekit (http://typekit.com/) will rock your world. It lets you embed certain fonts in any browser (even IE5).
I read that far too, but it wasn't very compelling. Getting videos in my IM instead of clicking on a link is revolutionary? They may proove me wrong, but it didn't make me want to download it.
Just let them install the last beta, the RC which was submitted to the App Store. They only difference is if they never bought (or didn't use a code), they can't rate it on the App store.
If you have $15,000,000 in the bank, you earn $3,300 in interest every single day at a modest 8% interest.

A modest 8% interest rate on bank deposits? I want an account with his bank.
OK, you have a point, but I always was under the impression that Google is using Ajax in Gmail, Docs and Maps for user-experience, not for scalability.
He is exactly right with respect to the language concepts. The language analysis is hit-or-miss; but nobody uses every programming language, so it's hard to be informative here.

I can read Perl programs that are more than 100 lines long. It is all a matter of learning Perl first. The same applies to every other programming language.
Apps – App Reviews – App Ratings on blippr
I don't know where the folks responding to this statement by downplaying the significance of the OS by pointing to the increasing importance of the browser and the web in applications are getting this line of reasoning. It's a complete non sequitur.

Sure, web apps and AJAXian techniques may be putting a dent in domains formerly owned entirely by standalone desktop GUI apps.

But your browser is not going to implement your hardware device drivers, I/O subsystems, network stacks, filesystems, and, well, ${insert very long list of other ways in which the OS interacts with the fundamentals of the machine}.

To say, "Ah, well who cares, it's all about the browser now anyway" is really, really missing the point. Maybe Google Docs displaces Microsoft Office, but do you really think you're going to XMLHttpRequest your SATA driver, process scheduler, or IP routing FIB (forwarding information base) away?
Google Social Search Demo
I'm also confused -- we're going to rip out an entire OS only to replace it with a web browser which is, by design, unobtrusive and supposed to operate like pretty much every other web browser. If you're going to do that, what is the point of developing the OS? You'd be much better advised to just ship Ubuntu and Firefox with a custom theme and the metaphorical serial numbers filed off. (Its a bad idea, but it strictly dominates the worse idea of writing your own OS and your own browser.)
The link of the post leads just to all posts on math from Mark Plover's blog. Here is the link to the specific article in the title (so future viewers don't get confused):

http://blog.plover.com/math/gray-codes.html
The low-level aspects of an operating system are now available, for free, to whatever company wants them in the form of Linux. Both of Google's operating systems (Android and Chrome OS) are based on Linux. The Palm Pre is based on Linux. The fact is that even the device drivers, I/O subsystems, network stacks, file systems, and the X number of ways the an OS interacts with the machine are no longer significantly important.

What is important is how the OS interacts with the user. This is where Apple shines. This is also where Google is looking to shine as well. If the user experience can be provided entirely within the browser, why not?
This coupled with the size of the largest stars is truly mind-boggling (much less the size of the universe or the size of a quark). It's amazing how we humans, as primitive as we are, can at least have an idea of the scale of the universe. All through pictures and ideas.