Hacker News Reader

asp742on Show HN: Meet the new Ajax IM (with Node.js)

endtwist- Adding some chat bots to the demo instead of linking anonymous users could solve this problem. http://www.alicebot.org/downloads/programs.html

asp742on Ask HN: Y Combinator-esque program in Chicago

I know some angels in Chicago that are interested in starting an incubator program focusing on translational medicine startups. They have contacts and experience on the regulatory/testing end. Not sure what market you are specifically interested in, but feel free to email me.

asp742on Ask HN: Inspirational Biographies

I really enjoyed Isaacson's "Einstein: His Life and Universe".

asp742on Ask HN: What would you put on the wall behind your desk?

Genealogy of Rock/Pop Music http://www.historyshots.com/Rockmusic/index.cfm

DNA Portrait http://www.dna11.com/

Fotoflōts of your own pictures http://fotoflot.com/

asp742on Help HN: Vim text editor install on mac

This is my favorite version of vim on OS X. It uses Cocoa and is fast. There's a pre-built .app in the tarball on that site and a script to launch macvim from the command line.

asp742on First viable compressed air car: get 200-300km per tank of air.

It's like software. If you cleanly separate the front-end and back-end it's very easy to tune and swap out the back-end without the user noticing.

asp742on Andrew Chen: Moving to SF and joining the startup community - lessons from my first year

I'd be interested to hear more about your b'more startup. Link or email?

asp742on Juggernaut self-contained habitat for plants

I'm inspired by his other works too

http://philross.org/ross/index.php?kind0

http://philross.org/ross/index.php?kind040

asp742on We need a Wikipedia for data

There was a rumor that Google would host scientific data

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/google-to-provi.h...

I am not sure if this is true or what the status is.

Open Data Commons has an interesting license for open datasets

http://www.opendatacommons.org

asp742on Opentick: free real-time and historical market data for trading systems and trading platforms

There's a Python wrapper to the C++ API floating around too

http://sctrading.blogspot.com/2008/03/opentick-python-api.ht...

asp742on International Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs

Their main website is also interesting

http://www.textmap.com

asp742on OnStartups: Why I Hate PowerPoint and You Probably Do Too

I agree with Tufte's general point that the problem with all slide based presentation tools is low information resolution.

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

Some presentation suggestions can be found here:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

I tend to only put figures and equations with the necessary explanatory notes in my presentations and discuss the rest. But creating paper handouts as Tufte usually suggests would still probably be more effective, since your audience has something physical to take home.

I think a mind map presentation tool with infinite zoom and pan could be an interesting presentation tool. Something like a high-resolution poster that you navigate in a presentation. It could be distracting to the presenter though.

asp742on Google Jumps Head First Into Web Services With Google App Engine

I am wondering the same. I have a lot of SciPy and NetworkX based simulation code I have been meaning to plug into web interfaces. This could be extremely useful for academic research.

asp742on TED Talks: Jaw-dropping Photosynth Demo

Are there any interesting examples of websites out there that use infinite zoom as a layout for lots of different content like Blaise Aguera y Arca demonstrates around 1:52? Zooming into a picture cloud, zooming into a timeline then blog entries, zooming into a cv then individual project page, etc.