hackernews

“Take the whole of Wikipedia, in it’s unstructured - well I should say semi-structured - mass of data, structure it properly creating schemas on schemas of semantic relations amongst articles, and expose a clean API on top of it. Keep source...

“59th International Astronautical Congress – http://www.iafastro.com/?id=680 Space elevators on Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator Leaving The Planet website – http://www.leavingtheplanet.com/ Australian Senate space report – http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/c source...

“Canalys also reports that Apple grabbed the No. 2 spot in smartphone operating systems, as the next table shows. Nokia’s Symbian still dominates with 46.6% market share, but that’s down sharply from 68.1% last year. RIM, Microsoft (MSFT) and Linux source...

“And behold, then came a new web browser known as “Mozilla”, being short for “Mosaic Killer,” but Mosaic was not amused, so the public name was changed to Netscape, and Netscape called itself Mozilla/1.0 (Win3.1), and there was more rejoicing. source...

“Ideally, it’s a Wikipedia for library index cards: say a new books comes out, instead of having thousands of libraries around the world come up with the same (or very similar) index card for that book (therefore collecting all the source...

“As an IBM PC historian, one aspect of my hobby is archiving gaming software.  (You can take that statement to mean anything you want — whatever you think of, you’re probably right.)  At the 2008 ECCC this past Saturday, a source...

“A key reason for Facebook’s success was a very well thought-out access control system.  To see my Facebook profile you either had to (1) be a friend as confirmed by the profile owner or (2) a member of my network. source...

“ Paste bin websites allow you to share short text snippets, usually code. They are enormously popular on IRC channels where dumping many lines at once into an ongoing chat ("flooding") is considered uncouth. Paste sites take that text out source...

“What do serious statisticians use for doing their work? They all use R. R is an interactive programming environment designed for data analysis. It has its own language (which can confusingly be called S for historical reasons), its own large source...

“Personally I couldn’t care less, I guess this feature was demanded by users with poor mental rotation skills. Don’t get me wrong, I use emoticons a lot in emails and I see the value, but I don’t really care whether source...

“Over a period of about a month in the Spring of 2008, researchers at the University of California, San Diego and UC Berkeley sought to measure the conversion rate of spam by quietly infiltrating the Storm worm botnet, a vast source...

“A remake of the famous Budweiser “Wassup” commercials from 1999-2002 is making the rounds at YouTube as a brilliant ad for Obama. It touches on unemployment, health care, the stock market, the war in Iraq and the environment, all in source...

“An intriguing design process discussed this afternoon at the MobiKUI workshop: Paul Coulton introduced this basic way to think about mobile sensor-based applications based on the exquisite corpse model: you take 3 dices, throw them and it gives you the source...

“I’m a Linux geek, have been since 1993 (Slackware!). All of SmugMug’s datacenters (and our EC2 images) are built on Linux. But the current state of filesystems on Linux is awful, and it’s been awful for at least 8 years. source...

“Hampton Catlin of Unspace is probably best known in the Rails community for HAML, Sass, and Make Resourceful. He recently launched his first iPhone app, iWik iPedia. iPedia is a $0.99 Wikipedia browser that has sold over 50,000 copies so source...