skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If by modern science you mean Gregor Johann Mendel and Isaac Newton then yea it's only a few hundred years old. But, Archimedes also believed in testing his ideas when possible so "modern science" is probably not the best term.

Anyway, finding someone who in his youth wrote elegant treaties on the definition of justice says nothing about his latter beliefs and due to our limited lifespan from a historical standpoint they take place at about the same era. I said / wrote many stupid things as I child that I no longer agree with. All it takes is the realization that your assumptions are often wrong to realize that Philosophy is a dead end. However, once you understand that there is little more to be said on the topic unless you concoct a system that lets you ignore that fact. So you might go from "proving the existence of god' to saying it’s a question of faith.

PS: "I think therefore I am" is not necessarily true for a puppet reading someone else’s lines or a part of a far large hole. So, "Do I think?" is about as far as philosophy can take you.
A step-by-step story of Carbonmade's first hire
Hacking the Holidays: Inexpensive Gifts for Girlfriends
Here are a few ideas for how to give a sweet gift for just a few dollars. How do you hack giving expensive gifts?
I feel like Rupert Murdoch should be campaigning against sites like Examiner and ContactMusic rather than Google News - they more closely fit the description he paints of the parasitic organization that makes advertising money off other people's content.
Don't miss the comment starting with "Privacy is only a way to protect you IF THE DATA ISN'T COLLECTED AT ALL." in that thread.
He's right. Find the Technology Transfer office today and tell them what you're working on. Likely they won't be interested and will be happy to give you something in writing that says they refuse all rights.
> There is a range of applications we might call Kantian applications - they depend on time and place.

I quite enjoyed this.
People were not aware of the potential for search before Google. They thought the market for search was over-supplied with options. Evidence is in some 10-year-old Red Herrings that mention: Alta Vista, Lycos, Web Crawler, DogPile, mySimon, etc., etc..

I was hard-pressed to make Google find anything 10-years-old+ from the web. And advanced search was no apparent help. Perhaps fodder for a rival?

Clayton Christiansen might say that out of the niche of a rival which undermines Google's business model rises the Google-killer, or at least -queller.
I recommend reading Christopher Buckley's Steaming to Bambula - though things have changed since then.

(http://www.amazon.com/Steaming-Bamboola-World-Tramp-Freighte...)
Git, hosted by GitHub.
Technology Review: A Blueprint For A Quantum Propulsion Machine
Unis should also have less interest to pull a dickish move than a "mystery" cofounder may. So even if you were technically using their facilities to write your code, if a uni went after you for that it could give them tens of millions in bad PR.

Reputation matters a lot for them. Very different from some random individual who may have little to lose in suing you for stealing his idea for a social network.
Ipchicken
I think the article has good general advice but stuff you should really take with a grain of salt. As another commenter said, lots of counter-examples. When I was reading the "don't build edutainment" bit, I couldn't help but think of Brain Age.
It appears that they take payments in as deposits and then disburse the money when another user requests a withdrawal. This requires either a bank charter or a designation as a money transfer agency. Without one of those, they are running an unlicensed bank. You cannot hold the money as an intermediary in the US without satisfying one of those requirements. I don't see anything on the site about either one of them, but knowing at least a little about the capital requirements needed to get one or both of those I would doubt that they have them. Please correct me if I am wrong, I think mobile payments is an idea who's time is past due but its very difficult to pull off in the US.
M2eclipse: Eclipse is running in a JRE, but a JDK is required
On making money, to a first approximation he is right. Value can of course be created, but the majority of marketing activity ('money making') is concerned with a market share land grab and nothing more.

Banks aren't intrinsically sociopathic, but i think their unique position at the center of all the economic transactions means that they are especially prone to bad behaviour and distortion. They do need special regulatory treatment. You'd put even the kindliest rottweiler on a leash as a precaution, but it would be senseless to extend this to all dogs.
Numbers aside, how many useful apps are there? The ones you'd use on daily basis?
Niklas Zennström Talks European Entrepreneurship At Le Web 2009
We use Zimbra Community Edition at my company.

I like Mail, but I switched from Mail to Thunderbird a while back because, quite frankly, Mail's IMAP support stinks. It is just not very robust. Moderately sized mailboxes lose sync with the server, causing duplicate messages and related issues.

Second problem: iCal sucks for corporate scheduling. Setting up attendees, and viewing free-busy time is ridiculously complicated. Anyone who has used Outlook/Entourage laughs at iCal. Lightning/Sunbird, however, is wonderful. Fully supports CalDAV and the Free/Busy extensions.

I manage about two dozen Macs here and have had this issue repeatedly against a Zimbra backend. I have a few users on Thunderbird 3.0 betas, and those problems just disappeared. Once Lightning 1.0 comes out, I will be forcing everyone to switch to Thunderbird/Lightning on both Mac and Windows.

The Zindus extension for Thunderbird syncs Gmail Contacts and the Zimbra Global Address List to Thunderbird. Lacking this, LDAP search works great against Zimbra.

The resulting solution: Zimbra / Thunderbird / Lightning / Zindus is, as far as I'm concerned, an Outlook/Exchange killer for small to medium sized companies.
Hulu is not at risk. It's a joint venture between the various broadcast networks, not an independent site, and with Comcast now owning a majority stake, it's unlikely that they (or any ISP they have a peering agreement with) would mess with transmissions.[1]

Netflix, on the other hand, is vulnerable - especially since their future business model seems to be aiming for the on-demand market more than the dvd-by-mail market. And the on-demand market is something that Comcast (and perhaps other ISP/Cable company hybrids) would have a strong incentive to try and de-prioritize to help sell their digital cable subscriptions.

[1]Wikipedia: Hulu is a joint venture of NBC Universal (General Electric), Fox Entertainment Group (News Corp) and ABC Inc. (The Walt Disney Company)[4], with funding by Providence Equity Partners, which made a US$100 million equity investment and holds a 10% stake. -> http://www.cable360.net/competition/web/25376.html
Or the law could require both condom use and std tests
Stolen cards is a huge issue. I actually think being a smaller "Penn students and surrounding businesses" type of play would make it easier...there's less incentive for the online-only stolen card gangs to take over.
Good question. I always hit my back button as quickly as possible if I inadvertently land on one of their pages.
It appears the FCC has managed to redefine the definition of an Internet Service Provider (ISP), excluding Google from the category and thus also from its regulations. And so, although Google is in fact the largest ISP in the world (accounting for 6% of all Internet traffic according to a recent Arbor Networks study), it can continue with business as usual while Google's broadband competitors are saddled with heavy new FCC regulations.

The only definition of Internet Service Provider I have ever encountered is the entity that provides internet access to a customer. I pay an ISP and the ISP gives me physical access to their network so I can access the internet. Google is not an ISP by this definition. Google is certainly a huge part of the internet ecosystem, but they don't provide internet service to customers.

I have to wonder if Forbes purposefully tried to redefine the word, or if that's truly what he believes ISP means. I can see how Google (and other entities, like Hulu) might have conflicting desires from ISPs, but that doesn't make them competitors.
I got a good laugh out of that comic, and it's frighteningly familiar for a lot of enterprise developers.

But taken too literally, it sends entirely the wrong message to a startup. In some cases I guess you really do want to swing for the fences and bypass everything that's been done in your industry. However, I suspect that the failure rate among those that take a completely divergent approach is pretty high.

Maybe you don't have to match the competition feature-for-feature, but you do need to match them need-for-need. If you don't address customer needs, good luck with your conversion rate. And in the end, a feature matrix is just one company's articulation of what it thinks those customer needs are. Maybe you disagree or maybe you have a better way, but if the same 70% of features show up over and over again amongst your competition, you'd better find a way to satisfy those needs.

In the interest of not posting a tome, I've elaborated on my blog (see profile for link).
IBM's infamous "Black Team" (2002)
It seems you misread Dijkstra. He uses 'making money' within the context of financial 'industry' and questions the legitimacy of that 'industry' which does not produce any goods, thereby pointing out one of the many euphemisms adopted by financial sector to swindle people out of money. (Of course, one can legitimately disagree here and say that moving money where it is most useful is a useful thing to do and that's one of the good things financial sector does). Between, this essay did not seem to me at all to indicate a hateful attitude towards the industrial world.
A tour of Google's business apps
A few questions and critiques:

This principle of "nondiscrimination" will make illegal any attempt by broadband and content providers to offer the advanced services consumers want - prioritized high-definition movies, games, television shows and music.

Does anyone know of consumers demanding that their ISPs prioritize this kind of content at the cost of others? I've never heard of this actually happening.

Rest assured, these FCC principles will radically transform the way business is done in our information economy, and taken to their logical conclusion could do extraordinary damage to the information economy itself.

Does anyone know of any companies currently doing anything that would be restricted by the proposed FCC net neutrality rules? I thought all of the talk was about preventing future action.

Recent criticisms of the FCC's net neutrality proposal by FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell in this regard are enlightening. "Do you really want five unelected bureaucrats such as myself - none of whom have an engineering degree, we're all liberal arts majors - making these types of decisions?" he asked.

It's funny that this was written by a magazine editor with a history degree.
I visited the RHIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory (they have tours during the summer - highly recommended if you're near Long Island!) and one of the scientists told me that she had never looked at the visualization of one of her collisions. I got the sense that they were more for PR than anything else.
Why would anyone want to use this over mpg123? It is already "minimalist" running from the command line and can donwhatever you need it to do. I use mpg123 all the time, it's great
Virtual Enterprise Smart Phones
Singularity movie is in production, co-director is Raymond Kurzweil
you do need to match them need-for-need

I disagree. In particular, you may not be addressing the same niche that the "competition" addresses.

To use an example I've been thinking a lot about today: it is stupid and suicidal for any startup to go head to head with Google on a core Google competency, right? Well, Wingify just released an A/B testing product which is about 5% as featureful as the Google Website Optimizer/Google Analytics tag team o' doom. It lacks on enterprise features, it doesn't have the Google ops team backing it, etc etc. It also won't be free due to a cross-subsidy from Google AdWords.

Instead of trying to reach feature or need parity with Google, they said "There is a portion of the market here which is untechnical and knows they want to do A/B testing but whom are undeserved by EVERY vendor. We're going to make A/B test easy enough for them to incorporate it into their businesses in a few minutes." With respect to those users, they're going to eat Google's lunch. Granted that might only be a couple hundred thousand customers but, well, how many customers do you really need, anyhow. ;)
Ikariam - Mundo Ny
"For one, the adult film industry would have to make every performer an employee to satisfy the California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health, better known as Cal/OSHA, laws."

This sounds like the root cause of all the problems he lays out with the new law. Not condoms. I don't understand why he frames the article in terms of condoms. I also don't understand why you wouldn't be able to mandate condom use without making performers full employees.
Health Insurers Pay Facebook Gamers Virtual Currency To Oppose Reform Bill
My recommendation: do NOT do it under these circumstances. See, if they own a portion of the IP and you're successful, they'll probably come hunt you down in the future.

So steer clear of this situation because they are not giving you the necessary clarity you need at this stage. Develop it at home on your own computer without using any of the uni's resources and do something else for your project.

The project will probably still kick ass and you'll own the full IP of your company.
I couldn't have said it better myself. The ordering of validations/associations/filters/etc. especially - that stuff can get really messy really quickly.
I remember saying, in the late '90s, shortly before I saw Google the first time, that it was probably pointless to build a search engine as Yahoo had pretty much said the last word on the subject. That was a reasonably common thought at the time and Google proved it was completely wrong.

EVERYTHING on the OP's list is potentially wrong. Maybe he should have said "if you're going to build a {whatever} then don't just copy another's feature set - make sure you solve some problem that the market leader(s) failed to do."
Freenet - The Free Network
The constitution grants them to inventors, who can assign them to others via contract. How is that unconstitutional?
Marginal Revolution (my favorite economics blog) has an entry on this:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/12...
I know I just read something amazing, but my head hurts.
The biggest part is probably location. They aren't going to fly you in for an interview so you have to be in an area that has a yacht industry. This will be Ft. Lauderdale (your best bet), Miami, Palm Beach, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and parts of California.
Go to the docks and pound the pavement. I was walking around taking pictures for my job when I inquired about availabilities crews were giving me all sorts of advice. The stories were so fascinating I was ready to call my office and drop everything. You'll find agencies in these areas that will probably want your CV and a passport photo. Appearance is big component of the job. Captains like their crew looking like the cast of a movie.

If you're looking for a summer only thing there are boats looking for crew. They don't pay you, you'll pay for part of the voyage to cover food, landing, and docking fees. Depending on the boat be prepared to work hard. But the payoff is better ports of call.

Try here: http://www.crewfile.com/
D-Link's Boxee Box vs Roku
The only think i can think of is illness or weakness in the presence of someone you don't trust.

I believe it is universal, although I'm willing to accept there may exist cultures that don't have this desire.

In any case, everyone knowing everyone else's state of health sounds ok, until i think about people i don't like. It's a little too enticing to know about how X is sick, and i don't want X to know that i am sick.

Maybe this is to abstract to be useful.
First: you need good test coverage, so that you can refactor and restructure with confidence.

Then, I would look into dividing up the code base a bit. Usually once you get to a certain size you'll be able to identify useful bits and pieces that could be extracted as standalone libraries. This will also render these more generic parts of your code ready to reuse.

You might also find it useful to divide the application-specific parts into layers and ensure lower layers don't depend on higher ones. These types of divisions allow you to consider lower layers independently. And when you're hunting for something, you should have a feel for which layer it is in first, which narrows your search scope.
The point of the article is that it seems like the law is pointless and only introduces complications and special cases to existing laws. And the simple truth is you cannot stop pornography from being produced, you'll just turn it into a black-market affair. That may be an acceptable problem for certain types of exploitative porn, but for the general body of pornography it's generally a bad idea.
Congratulations on the new hire.

And thanks for posting the step-by-step. That's always interesting to read. It reminds me of that movie, The Day of the Jackal (the 1971 version, I didn't see the new one) -- people want to know the process.

What is Carbonmade's new app that's alluded to here? Sounds interesting. Any hints?
Hmmm... My hostel, which uses OpenDNS (arrgh!) is blocking spencerfry.com because:

This site was categorized in: Proxy/anonymizer

For all of it's fortes, OpenDNS still manages to be really irritating.
The problem is that if the OP's startup is a success then the University will come after him for what they perceive as his abuse of their property. Also if he has external investors unless he has disclosed this problem to them they could well sue him personally - I've been threated by legal action by an unhappy VC and that was also deeply unpleasant.

If I was the OP I would walk away from his code - don't even take a copy of it. I would check with an IP lawyer what measures I would have to take to produce a "clean" copy that the University has no claim over and base whatever I did on that recommendation. At least if you do things that way you have some comeback against the lawyers.
I think that the big take-away from this shouldn't be: "don't build an application in X market" it should be "build a niche application in X market".

There's no way that you can compete easily with Facebook. But maybe there is an opportunity to build a social network for people that specifically don't want to share their real identities. Maybe you can't compete with Word, but how about a word processor specifically designed for vision impaired users?

The internet is a huge marketplace. If you choose a good niche and cater to it then you'll more than likely find a enthusiastic audience.
Yesterday's Dilbert was about how long approval processes take in corps.

This one is also about corporations as well. The 12 month schedule in Dilbert's company includes a lot of overhead that doesn't exist in startups
In addition to this, don't forget that corporations are legal persons.

Edit: In the US and England at least.
Thanks! Glad you liked the article. It was really fun to write.

We're simply wrapping up the new version of our current web app. We've got a lot of other stuff in the mix too, but that won't see the light of day until we can get everything else up to snuff.
How to avoid being blinded by the idea aura
I've had firehose access at the highest level they give to your average developer for a few months now. We've been using it to grab every link on Twitter, but we still miss quite a bit due to rate-limiting (I would say 1-5%). I wonder if this firehose access is every single tweet. If so, it'd be worth paying for.
Based on the video they're tuning model parameters in bulk and screening for best performance at a defined task.
hmm I've seen that design somewhere before... Oh yeah: http://basecamphq.com . At least they uploaded the background images to their own server and didn't direct link them
What about this point?

>Second, condom-only regulation would also encourage a black market in adult film production. So movies featuring no-condom sex would not only still exist, but those actors and actresses would no longer be required to participate in the industry's HIV testing program, increasing the risk of an HIV outbreak in the industry and the population at large. One need only look at prostitution to see what happens when an industry operates underground.
I'll employ a well known Internet meme to describe this article: EPIC FAIL.

Are the current technologies really the answer to our computing problems? Are Linux, Windows and OSX the "final" operating systems, Microsoft Word the "final" Word Processor, Facebook the "final" social network?

No, seriously. I believe we can do better than this. In fact, I believe that the current crop of technologies are just a teaser of something better to come.
Out of curiousity, how does the industry not have to fulfill Cal/OSHA now? Is it that performers are not currently employees and the proposed law would change that?
Knowing how pedantic Dijkstra were, I am sure he was talking about money, not value. (EDIT: gsk is more accurate than I am on this.)

Now, there is a way to literally "make money": producing it out of thin air (this produces zero value by itself). Central banks do it by printing bank notes, the others do it through loans (using a complicated recursive scheme I don't fully understand).

Dijkstra's animosity against bank is understandable: they create money (about 90% of it) out of nothing, make loans with it (for an interest rate, not for a fee), and sometimes even speculate with your deposit (which is 90% created money by them). Despite the current regulation systems, this sounds like an awful lot of power in the hands of private interests.
I've been using the CuteBird theme for a couple years which mimics the Apple mail client design. Now that I have upgraded to TB3 the theme is no longer compatible and the default theme, even with the improvements, just looks bad.
That University wouldn't happen to start with a D would it? I know my university definitly says that anything you do while working on your Senior Project is technically theirs and makes you sign a waiver agreeing to it. However, you situation seems to be a little different if your saying you have some sort of agreement to not use their property to create it.
AT&T wireless admits SF, NYC problems
hmm i've seen that statement somewhere before... oh yeah: the end of second paragraph under "Why I'm Particularly Impressed With This"
And Posterous can be counted as a counter-example too, couldn't it?
Dell Mini 9 modded into motion sensitive, touchscreen tablet
I mentioned in my blog post:

I have to say one thing, though, and it is straight out of the Economic History of Japan playbook: people don’t take copiers seriously, and it is a hard impression to shake once you’ve gotten it attached to you, fairly or otherwise. The design “inspired by” Basecamp is… ahem… well, suffice it to say that it does not demonstrate nearly as much originality as the software does. I’d hate for folks to write this startup off just for that, but first impressions matter.

Rather than taking (deserved) lumps for flying the Jolly Roger, I’d suggest folks to either use an open source web design, one of the attractive reasonably priced templates the Internet is overflowing with, or hire somebody with design skills to bang out something decent for v1.0.