skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You speak as if people are either unaware of the problem, or acting as if "you don't need 64-bit for (some dumb reason)". It has been clearly explained that that is not the problem. Stupid cracks about 4GB are not called for at this point. If you're upset about it, that's fine, if you're upset but not upset enough to fix it, that is also fine, but don't act as if the problem is "not enough sarcasm from earl".
People seem to be conflating client with network. There is no reason that we can't have "web apps" that use a sandboxed client like the browser that isn't hamstrung by the limitations of html and css.
Apple Devs change name after legal threats from Apple
Forgotten Warrior..
That suggestion is (perhaps) in the users' interests, but it is directly against the customers' interests. Follow the money: prospective employers pay to identify/contact people who are actively looking for work. They are not interested in paying to contact people who will not accept job offers.

Prospective employees pay nothing. They are not the customers of this system. It will serve their interests... when it is reasonably practical to do so without trodding on the toes of the paying customers.

Prospective employers are not worried that prospective employees might find themselves suddenly separated from their previous employer -- indeed, that is sort of the general idea.
Do Internet Petitions serve any real purpose?
The Five-Second Commute
I'm particularly interested in using this to help trigger lucid dreams. For the past few years, I've had a song on my playlist that I've trained myself to always ask if I'm dreaming when I hear it. The idea being that this song would play at the right time during my sleep cycle to get me to realize that I'm dreaming.

However, so far I've had trouble triggering the song at the right time. Perhaps this app will be configurable enough to play an MP3 when I'm in REM?
When I looked into this a few years ago dyndns.com was a good affordable service.
I am actually a pretty good sleeper. I naturally sleep about 8 hours a day, and if I wake up naturally, I usually wake up feeling pretty good (haha...people are going to hate me for that).

The problem is when I go to bed really late and/or need to wake up earlier than I would naturally. As it turns out, I am more affected by when I wake up in my sleep cycle than I am by how long I sleep. If I need to wake up at 7:30am for a call with east coast people, the wakemate would wake me up at "around" 7:30 (you can set a hard stop), during the point in my sleep cycle in which I am most amenable to being woken up. It's the difference between feeling like shit, and feeling like I woke up naturally.
Trying to Save the Web's Shortcuts
Basically "facilitated communication" means "someone else takes the guy's hand and makes it type words on a keyboard." Not an exaggeration. Right up there with homeopathy.
Quake has taught me more about how to confront pressure and competition than my entire academic career.
Great question. Thank you for challenging my assumption. I thought they'll have to charge less at least at first because they'll have a smaller pool of candidates.
Or "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401383/
- Over the summer Dropbox raised a $7.25 million Series A round from Accel, adding to $1.5 million in seed money it brought in from Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator in 2007

- San Francisco-based Dropbox has just 20 employees.

I wonder why they need so much money. If the Freemium model is working, shouldn't they at least be breaking even?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=960480
World's oldest intact computer is turning 60
We call these mobile agents. It's a fun paradigm for programming certain types of systems / apps.
Slashdot's "Apple Releases iPod" news from 2001 is similarly funny looking back: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
No more free bugs
Marketing? They could be huge if more people knew about 'em.
and it's a big tourist trap now, usually with a line out the door on sunny days. weird. folks, it's just coffee!
Given Flash's atrocious performance profile, I'm surprised and impressed that this works at all. That being said, it chews an entire core on my computer to render the game at about 20fps, and the audio is nearly a half-second latent. Another way of looking at this is that Flash bytecode on a Core i7 today has caught up to half of where native bytecode on a Pentium I was 14 years ago.
or PG-G-G-G-G-UNIT!
I plan to. I'm shopping for an RV at the moment, and plan to hit the road on January 1st, and I'll be blogging about the process of going mostly off the grid while still running a company. Switching to polyphasic sleep will be a minor change in comparison, and so I'm cramming a number of life alterations into one bunch...since I won't have any habitual behaviors that remain unchanged, I'm going to take the opportunity for self improvement on all fronts (eating, exercise, environmental impact, getting out of my comfort zone, etc.). I've read that people have an easier time altering habits, like smoking, when they are out of their normal routine, like when they're on vacation.
I read this move as meaning that the corporate Starbucks stores are all alike, and therefore in high-density areas where there is actually competition, people will naturally gravitate toward a "local" option with a more unique and "local" feeling inside. I agree with this opinion, and the move is a good one for the company. Even though these new "local" Starbucks are still highly regulated "corporate" creations.
> Monitoring should be in place to achieve this.

For uptime monitoring, I recommend site24x7.com. Excellent, reliable service. I tried alternatives, including Pingdom, and they were rather disappointing.
Where did you get the idea to trigger lucid dreaming with a song? I am both very musically oriented and a frequent lucid dreamer, and I rarely ever have any music in my dreams, let alone any sort of recognizable tune. I'm talking months between each such event. Unless you frequently dream about music already (as we are all different), I would suggest sticking to the more conventional triggers.

One of these events took the form of a dream that I had written the most powerful, moving song ever, one that could forcibly move people to tears due to sheer awesomeness. Bear in mind I'm not talking about an abstract assessment, but a deep belief that this was awesome. For once, I managed to actually drag the song back up to the waking world, whereupon I discovered that my brilliant song was, in two-second-long quarter notes, the following incredible melody line: C, C, D, C, repeat.

(The full moon seems like a good one to me; I get a lot of circles in my dreams, only due to my science-fiction viewing proclivities, they tend to turn into Stargates.)
Sounds like ChromeOS.
I think PG thought it was some sort of other video camera service that provided its users with a wealth of features.
Raising money isn't always a reaction to bleeding money. Maybe they've nailed down their customer LTV and customer acquisition costs. In that case, they'll want a big stack of cash to start buying up customers whereever cost < LTV.
Heh, we basically understand each other now, a couple more illustrative examples always helps point that out. And yes a preprocessor to convert operators to functions would be quite useful.
Dropbox is hands down the best piece of software I've installed in the past few years. It's the first product I've ever been able to recommend to both friends (geeks) and family (categorically not geeks whatsoever) without having to change my explanation of why it's so awesome.

Congrats guys!
There's a great little story by L. Sprague de Camp called "Lest Darkness Fall" that is almost exactly this. An archaeologist from the 1930s gets stuck back in the 6th century A.D., and "invents" the printing press (among other things).
ubiquitous seems a bit of a stretch... :)
Not hard to fake typing for an unconscious person. Check out the video.
I wonder why they need so much money.

Pretend I have a machine where you insert a quarter and, a year later, a dollar pops out. Do you a) insert the quarter you have in your pocket, wait a year, and then put all four quarters back in or b) go to the bank, borrow as much money as they'll give you, get it changed into quarters, and start stuffing the machine?

A freemium startup which has a good idea of what customer lifetime value is and what customer acquisition costs are is, essentially, a quarter-into-dollar machine.

This factor becomes particularly acute when the ultimate goal of the startup is to sell their quarter-into-dollar machine for some multiple of the number of dollars it has produced in the most recent year.

[Edited in response to the above post going grey: Please do not downvote the post above me. He isn't being malicious. The big picture strategic view is non-obvious and many smart people need to have it explained a few times for it to sink in. If you wish to correct the misconception, either explain it or upvote an explanation.]

[Edited to add: P.S. The expert on "(LTV > COCA) + source of capital => blow the doors off" is Dharmesh Shah. He has been banging the drum for a few years now. Example: http://tinyurl.com/doors-blown-clean-off ]
I remember reading a few years ago that China had a lot of difficulty obtaining organ donations because they still used the outdated notion of heart-death, rather than brain-death, to determine legal death. As a result of that (and other factors), around 90% of the organ donations in the PRC came from executed criminals. Organ transplants are cheaper in the PRC, so they were one of the larger destinations for so-called "organ transplant tourism." I don't know if they've updated their definition of death or not (hard to find recent info), but the issue with executed criminals is still apparently an outstanding international concern.

This article, and this issue, is another example of how science continues to challenge our deep-held assumptions and viewpoints, by making edge cases increasingly relevant. In this case, life-or-death important, not just for the organ donor, but for the recipient as well. It's a hard decision to have to throw a loved one (or their ventilated but oh-so-lively-looking cadaver, depending on your point of view) under the bus based on statistical likelyhoods of greater good.
The article makes no claims as to the brain activity of the man. He is debunking that this man is able to communicate beyond simple yes and no. The only "talking" this man has done has been through FC, a practice clearly shown to be bunk.
Just because you don't know it doesn't mean they (twitter folks) don't have one.
2.6.2 as well. I liked this little snippet, though I grumbled a little on the inside and would be appalled if I ever found something like that in serious code...
Why do people get so uppity about BMI? It's a range. 20-25 is the healthy range for most Caucasians. If you are big-boned and have big muscles, then 25 is a good weight. If you are slender, then 20 is a good weight.

Sure, there are guys who are 30, and think they are pretty fit, but they are generally also pretty fat.

There are a few serious body builders who can get past 30, and still be fit, but they are the exception not the rule.

Something like 30% of Americans are obese. Compared to 14% of Canadians, and 9% of French. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity There might be a few more linebackers and bodybuilders in the USA, but I think it's mostly just fat people.

Measuring percent of body fat is probably better, but you can't do it on a set of bathroom scales.
How would this differ from iframes?
I know it's horrible in practice, and I really can't see a valid use for this particular case, but forbidding things like this (or other things like multiple inheritance) just because it can be abused has never seemed like a good idea to me.
Well seeing how it was mentioned all over the media like Dr. Phil, 37 Signals, and Wired, Associated Press, G4TV, etc... I would say it is far more ubiquitous than the zeo.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sleeptracker
They're forced to take the class, that's it. I'm not saying consistency would be requiring them to eat healthy - I don't even know how that would be possible.

Their argument was the healthy environment one. If that was consistently their intention, they would have healthier options on campus.
The class itself is a good idea, but they should have everyone take it unless they either "place out" of it by passing a physical and written fitness test or get an exemption from a doctor saying they can't do it.

To try to single out particular students for it is not only poor policy from a stigmatization perspective, but is also ineffective from an educational standpoint, especially when they use a metric as coarse as BMI. Having a low BMI hardly means that one is fit, healthy, or knowledgeable about any of those things.
The article on msnbc references both the PET scan and the facilitated communication.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34109227/ns/health-more_health_n...

Not sure why Randi got so upset (or which report set him off). Even if the typing is a fraud, the injury and the realization that he was locked-in don't seem to be.
Can I get one with GPS?
I appreciate the tone.

That aside, you are assuming growth is constrained in some way that money relieves. IE they need money to promote or they need money to support their free users until they mature into premium users. Either one of those is a sufficient answer.
This is beyond outrageous. Check out the video here: http://tinyurl.com/ye9d9lp
The bus is a terrible place to work. Usually I prefer to read or listen to music/podcasts. But when I'm obsessed enough with a project to work on it during my commute, I often get quite a bit done just because I have no internet to distract me. And when I know I'll be working on the bus, I make sure I have already studied any documentation I need (and saved a copy to my laptop) and have a reasonable idea of the next 30- to 60-minute task I can accomplish. So it forces me to plan and prepare well, too.
Is this really any different than the "diversity" classes that some schools make freshmen take?

I don't see any comparison ... what point are you trying to make?
Maybe they did nail down the lifetime value of a customer. But I doubt they nailed down the acquisition cost.

It's not like you can pay to have your customers refer more friends.
Awesome, glad I could help.

Whitney's got a great sense of community and really does her homework when writing. She interviewed me and a bunch of other designers to put together an article on process vs portfolio.

The book I've been referencing lately to programmers and just non-designers in general is The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams. It's an overview of the concepts of c.r.a.p. - contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity.

http://carsonified.com/blog/features/design/how-crap-is-your...
Right. It's hypocritical to punish students for being overweight, yet at the same time market KFC to them (or allow KFC to market to them, if you like).
I just noticed. When a submission is dead, you can't get to its article. Since it was a different article, I thought it would be good here.

Sorry for posting the dead submission, I guess that's why I was down-voted. I didn't realize that about dead submissions.
What OS / Flash version are you running?

I got 78.2 FPS on 'timedemo demo1', on an i7 920 @ 3600MHz, Flash 10.0.32.18, Firefox 3.5.5, Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. It was perfectly smooth. The audio lag (~200ms) seems more likely an architectural latency issue than a performance-related one.
I wonder how lucrative the market is though. As hackers, we're naturally inclined towards products like these.

If actigraphy is an established sleep-study technique, then you have to wonder why there aren't more players.
When I briefly lived in Seattle, I loved to work in the coffee shops there. They were idea with lots of tables, great wifi, and tons of power ports. They came in two varieties:

So quiet that you can hear yourself think
So loud that everything turns into white noise

Since moving home to San Francisco, I've found the coffee shops to be quite lacking as a place to work.. Probably by design since the cost of business here is twice that of Seattle for cafes. So I work on my balcony when the weather is beautiful. Sometimes I'll take my laptop to the Atrium in the new mall on Market St., or to one of the hacker or shared worker spaces. I like having other people around who aren't trying to talk to me when I work.

However, since purchasing a very comfortable Kinesis keyboard and a 24" monitor, I'm finding it harder and harder to work on my 13.3" laptop.
Charming Python: Easy Web data collection with mechanize and Beautiful Soup
A Single Search Index Would Speed Up The Entire Internet
i always thought that's what "blog" was.
Dropbox Raised $6 Million Sequoia-Led Series A In October 2008
I'm pleasantly surprised by this. Now if we can only get properties...
Failed founders don't learn much (show some studies)
"1.3 million gigabytes" - is that correct? If it is .. wow!
That was my first impression too, but I wonder if we're being a little bit too uncharitable. Retrospectives like this have value, even if it's mostly just for the person doing the retrospective.

Also, most of these mistakes are pretty broad, philosophical statements. It can take a while to discover that you're on the wrong track with something like this. I'm guessing that if he keeps at it for another 15 or 20 years, he'll do another 2-3 complete reversals on each of these positions as he realizes the world is a lot more complicated than it seems at first. I know I have, and I've only been at it for 5 years.

One thing that struck me: his career seems totally optimized for the "custom business app, database-backed CRUDscreen" programmer. Which IMHO is a pretty boring subfield to optimize for, but different strokes for different folks. I think his perspective would be a lot broader if he did heavy algorithmics (a la Google or finance) or startups, though.
The foundation have been out to debunk this 'facilitated communication' for a while. This is a high profile case that mentions it, hence a good opportunity for people to learn what a hurtful lie this type of thing is.
arXiv.org might be the place to search, depending on the subject area. Only been around since 1991 though.
Its not as hard as you might think. I'm sure Patrick (patio11/bingocardcreator.com) knows the cost of acquisition for 1 customer. If you're good with AdWords, its pretty doable.

Anecdotally, I've heard Amazon shoots for $23. Thus they'll put basically unlimited money into any system bringing in customers for < $23.

You can run into a problem of volume though, i.e., you overfish the pond. Then you'll need to find new sources of customers (e.g., Facebook ads if you've only done SEM).
I'm betting Dropbox will be the biggest YC exit for quite some time.
"PG-13" was given consideration until focus group testing found the name to be lacking in street cred.
For those, like me, wondering why this sounds eerily familiar:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124386

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/02/my-favorite-lia.html

It's great to see it posted again - though I do prefer that original overcoming bias version. I can only speculate as to why it received only 30 points two years ago. The key differences seem to be a) the linkbait title, b) the bolding of random sections within the post itself (which I found made it uglier to read) and c) the picture at the top of the post. Of course there's also d) we had fewer people.

I don't know what it is, and maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems posts like this tend to attract a lot of low-signal comments. Perhaps this can be used to our advantage: every few weeks, pg could let a few really linkbaity and low-grade posts past the filters. Pictures of cats, or something equally fun but inane. Something from the top of Digg. Everyone who upvoted such a post would have their voting rights suspended. Would this help or harm the quality of posts here?
True story I heard from some Amazon engineers.

Amazon doesn't (directly) monitor whether their servers are up. They just look at the revenue graph in real-time, and if there's a noticeable dip, something's wrong.
Yes - it's easy to think of ways that you would monetize it. Hmm, I wonder if this could be a prelude to retailers outsourcing inventory management completely to third parties instead of managing that in-house?
I don't think it's hurtful in this case. The guy is much more conscious than the family ever thought. The PET scan verifies it. If they also believe he's talking, well after 20-something years I don't think that's the worst thing in the world. But sure, FC on someone who's essentially brain dead is a different horrid beast.

Randi does good work. In the case though I think he jumped in too quickly.
Twitter's revenue plan:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8369459.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2009/nov/20/twitter...
Can someone in the know comment on the soundness of the scientific principles behind this product?
Perfect example of what I'm talking about :)
my grades tended to be either A's or F's, as I either understood things right away (such as, say, calculus) or gave up on them completely (trigonometry)

Me too. I used to think it was cool to make no effort at all but still come first - although, away from school, I put a lot of effort into coding, and was really proud of seeing deeper, solving difficult problems and getting results.

In changing this, one concept I've used is: value inputs, not outputs.

Side note: if one places RPG's in the same category as books and movies (in which the reader identifies with the protagonist), they can be seen as having a mastery orientation...
It theoretically permits optimizations where multiple parts of the code using the same, say, string literal can refer to the same literal. I don't believe for a moment that this is actually happening in Java, but immutable literals are not uncommon in this class of language.
What's Worse: Hyperinflation or Deep Recession?
Is this Hacker News? I mean, I understand why I saw the article on several other news aggregators yesterday, it's not really the kind of topic I expect to see here.
My Favorite Paul Graham Quotes from Business of Software 2009
People are being accused of raping their children (source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs/transcripts...) based on facilitated communication, while these same children can't tell you what a key is if the facilitator didn't see it. When they design easy, simple tests, these people can't pass them. The fact that people continue to insist it works is stupefying, and understandably upsetting.
I really like the idea, but putting "(works on all phones)" on your front page is kind of shady if the actual requirements are bluetooth and internet access and third-party app support. No phone I've ever owned has all those features.
Case in point: Touhou.
Successful startups turn into big companies (Really successful ones do it more quickly than you expect). If you've worked at a big company in the past, you're going to be more comfortable with that transition.
Even more bizarre is the fact that this runs on my Turion64 X2-whatever running at 2.0GHz exactly how Quake originally ran on my 90MHz Pentium clone.

I feel like I've just jumped back 13 years.