alecdibble

They actually mention on the front page their plan for the iPhone 5 in regard to the rumors.

Because publishers want your money. This is actually a HUGE problem in academia that has yet to be disrupted.

    "we believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process... We are simply observing that if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available."[0]

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_publishing

It wont seem spammy if it is well executed. Just make it easy to unsubscribe from the tips without unsubscribing from the book notification. Also, make it clear in the first email that the recipients only signed up to get notified about the book but that you thought it would have been useful to send periodic tips. Also be sure that the tips have are posted on the web, so they can be shared and viewed without having to reference an email.

One big suggestion is to have an easy link from the blog to the main site. I know it gets said many times on here, but it is a very big turnoff.

As far as the app goes, I really enjoy the design. I also really like the concept and hope it works successfully for me

Edit: You really need to be more detailed about how the friends process works. I assume it only works with Twitter at this point because the app wanted to access my account. However, there is nothing on the website (that I could find) about how this worked. I would highly recommend creating a less awkward friending mechanism. As of now, the community aspect is useless to me because I don't want to spam my email list with invites.

This is the only part of the article I don't agree with:

    In the end, it wouldn’t have benefitted me to stay in school longer, and Y Combinator was too good of an opportunity to pass up.

How do you know there would be no benefit to finishing your degree? It may be beneficial in the short term. However, you have (hopefully) many years to live and making a guess like that is silly, in my opinion.

While I think it is admirable that you got into Hacker News and are following your dream, I think there is something to say about learning to focus and get decent grades, even if you are not into it 100%. It shows that you can stick to some form of an obligation and follow through with something that you may not want to do.

I can't remember exactly which VC said this but here is a paraphrase: Not making it through college when something new comes up doesn't bode well when I give you a ton of money for a long term commitment. Will "something else" come up during that time?

The issue is that it would be much harder for an algorithm to figure out whether a line was something you drew or the grid lines of the paper, especially if the orientation is off. If the algorithm only has to look for a dot pattern with a known relative spacing, it makes the problem much easier.

In my own experience, diet had a much more dramatic effect on my day-to-day mood. Switching to basically a slow carb diet helped my mood and outlook tremendously.

EDIT: I wanted to add that exercise also has a great effect on my mood, but only temporarily. By following a consistent diet that (in my case) is low glycemic and high in protein, the stability of my mood was much greater than exercise alone.

I do not have time to read the whole paper right now, but one question I have about the results is the prescribed exercise. In my experience, the type of exercise I do can have very different affects in how it makes me feel afterwards. For example, my mood is stabilized for much longer if I do 15 minutes of interval sprints rather than a 30 minute run. Cycling will also make me feel much different than high-weight/low-rep weightlifting.

What I am getting at is that if the "exercise" routine was run for 30 minutes 2 time a week, I could easily see how that would not affect depression. However, if it was a regime of HIIT or heavy compound exercises (squat/deadlift/bench), I would be very surprised if people didn't see long term mood benefits.

Patent reform will most likely have to come out of the legislative process, not the judicial branch.

The grids or lines on the notebook are dotted. Their algorithm knows the geometry of those dots ahead of time, so it can exploit that fact to figure what the orientation is suppose to be.

Bugs: Typos Upgrades: Sequels

I feel like this same effect could apply to most things that are "addicting". When something is taking time away from a relationship, it is most likely going to cause problems.

Things that cause similar problems in excess: Porn, Sports, Friends, Alcohol, Drugs, Consistent but time consuming hobbies like surfing, Startups ...

What I am getting at is that basically anything could cause similar problems, though the exact side-effects could be slightly different because of differing situations.

Growing up in a small surfing community, I witnessed surfing to be a pretty common relationship problem. Many were so addicted to surfing that they wouldn't spend enough time with their families.

I just loaded the app up. I really enjoyed the beginning animations and how the gestures were taught. I personally feel the gestures are intuitive and easy to pick up.

Congrats on the launch!

Actually, the title isn't wrong, it's just misleading. When you read "new form of matter", your first thought was probably liquid, gas, solid, plasma, (something new here?). However, those refer to the "state" or "phase" of matter.

Form: the shape of a thing or person.

Basically, they have "formed" a new type of matter, which is simply the way in which the atoms are arranged in thermodynamic equilibrium. They are not referring to discovering a new "state" or "phase".

Just bought! I was looking for a book EXACTLY like this yesterday. I got lucky that HN pushed one into my lap.

There is a lot of history related to Tesla and Wardenclyffe (the place they are trying to buy). After reading the history of Tesla, I believe that it is a historical site worth immortalizing and memorializing.

The wikipedia article on Wardenclyffe has some info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower

I assumed driving meant moving on land with a (most likely) combustion-powered platform that was connected to the land with wheels. No wheels and no ground contact sounds like hovering to me.

Thanks! That is quite the discount.

Or maybe he is fascinated by Tesla's life and is willing to use his own publicity powers to help a related cause? But no, that doesn't make any sense.

I have read quite a few biographies on Tesla. Unless every single one of them are wrong (they all had citations), the inaccuracies of that Forbes article are not even funny. Do they always post articles that haven't been fact-checked?

Edit: Just saw The Oatmeal's response. Good for him, but I doubt many of the people that read the Forbes article are also going to read the rebuttal.

I didn't know flying and driving were synonyms these days.

That's really interesting. The industry is in a different place compared to when I was familiar with it.

It's street legal [1] and supposedly fits into your average sized garage[2]. You can't really drive a Cessna down your local neighborhood.

1: http://www.terrafugia.com/images/photogallery/March10_2012%2...

2: http://www.terrafugia.com/images/photogallery/LeavingGarageW...

It's kind of hard to drive helicopters down the highway.

It's expensive to manufacture silicon at semiconductor quality, even when talking about polycrystalline wafers. (Monocrystalline wafers, used for "chips", is even more expensive and prone to defect." People are increasing production of polycrystalline silicon wafers but the demand is much greater than the supply, even with this increase. The cycle basically goes like this: polycrystalline gets more expensive because of demand -> supply increases -> prices go down (in theory) -> demand increases -> polycrystalline gets expensive again.

This is an endless loop right now, as the total amount of possible demand is >> than the growth of polycrystalline foundries. Furthermore, LCD displays also use this form of polycrystalline silicon, which doesn't help with the demand problem. Decently-graded silicon is inherently expensive to manufacture because of the process involved.

The takeaway is that if these metal-oxides are cheaper to produce, even if they are more expensive for the raw material, the cost savings would carry over to the products. Equally relevant when talking about solar cells is how much energy is needed to produce the cells themselves. Right now, an enormous amount of energy is required for silicon solar cells. Helping the energy crisis doesn't help if something takes that much energy to produce. (I do not know the ratio of lifetime energy output versus energy to manufacture but I am sure it's not very good.)

The takeaway from this article is that they came up for a technique to use cheaper materials instead of silicon. This is significant because silicon is very expensive and every increasing demand is also increasing the prices of it at a very fast rate. I took a class on CMOS Digital Design where the professor went over manufacturing overhead for a processor. The cost of the silicon alone was astounding, not even taking into account all the other overhead that comes with the process.

Unfortunately, like a lot of other research in this field, its real world applicability may be relatively limited. One of the reasons for this is that so much time, money, and infrastructure has been put into modern silicon semiconductor manufacturing that no one really wants to touch anything else. It could mean starting from scratch and requiring massive amounts of R&D and process planning to break even.

The real breakthroughs come when someone keeps the existing silicon process in mind and makes discoveries that use the existing infrastructure. That's the kind of research that really "changes" things.

If someone could come up with a manufacturing system that was cheap and easy to swap out or modify the process, they could literally change technology as we know it. If you could have the capability to scale processes easily, a lot of the really cool and cutting-edge research could get implemented on a large scale.

EDIT: I graduated as an electrical engineer and have taken several clean room processing classes, in case you were wondering.

I completely agree. In college, my first set of Linear Algebra courses were taught by the Math department and were completely algebra based. Later on, taking the engineering LA courses where they stressed the geometry of all the operations really cemented the concepts and simplicity of LA into my mind.

tl;dr: Anytime you find yourself making an assumption, stop. Educate yourself on that assumption and then move on.

I had a very similar problem when it came to learning. I am very fast at picking things up, so I often skim and assume certain things based on context. This has caused me several problems especially related to large projects and some implementation details. However, I have found a very effective way of getting around it.

When I am reading something and I see something that I can define by the context, I make a point of at least wiki'ing/googling the point in question.

For example, I was doing some embedded Linux stuff and working with some IO using sysfs. I could do what I needed and had a general understanding of how sysfs worked (based on context/assumption). However, once I learned up on sysfs and how it was implemented, it gave me a much greater understanding of what I was doing with the IO and how I should handle it according to my end goal.

The difficulty is in the details. Normalizing would have to account for a variety of different variables such as location, average age/customer base, average revenue per customer, etc. Furthermore, you would need all of that data many different businesses to even be able to build your normalization.

Sure, you could do a subpar job with the normalization but then that will increase your false positives and decrease confidence in the method.

> Step one is to realize that being homophobic doesn't make you "terrible people". Three hundred years ago pretty much everyone was racist, sexist, and homophobic, but were in general as decent people as we are today; they just had some terrible beliefs, and terrible behaviors that came along with those beliefs.

Are they really decent if they were racist/sexist/homophobic? Just because people were nice to others that didn't fit into their hatepool, I do not feel that makes them generally "decent". No matter what time period you look at, there were people that didn't agree with these "social norms". I would call the such occurrences "decent people".

I understand your message about party differences/etc. but I feel there is a line that can get crossed between differing perspectives and hateful behavior. The latter should not be tolerated, in my opinion.

Rotten Tomatoes aggregates reviews from several different sources to determine a final score. Amazon mainly just employs user reviews.