skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nothing much has changed. Most of the talk about the semantic web is complete hot air. It isn't as if this stuff is counterintuitive or non-obvious -- it's just that no-one wants to go through the work of teaching machines to understand language/text without a way to profit from it.
"Hey boss, the company's headed for trouble. Costs are trending towards exceeding revenue."

"Hmm, looks like we need to cut costs. Let's fire the innovation team."

"But boss, without new innovations, how will we manage to stay ahead of the competition?"

"Silly child, we're Yahoo! We have a bang at the end of our name! We don't need innovation."

"..."

"Plus, we can just buy anything that's innovative. Outsourcing innovation! I should give myself a raise." :scribble, scribble:

"..."

"..."

Wow.
Yeah, but where's the achievement then?
Yeah go ahead.
There's this one out called Yahoo.com.

Up and comers. Lots of eyeballs. About to be acquired.
Please - take it elsewhere.

I think this is the kind of posting that needs to be mercilessly snuffed out before it turns YC.news into another reddit.
Yeah, because this site does the same thing that Digg, Reddit, and /. do...
I don't see your point. I don't think you have one. Back under your bridge now.
How low can I go? (upmod submission for visibility)
I want to see what happens with loads of negative karma. As far as I've seen, there is no lower limit.

Reference:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117455

(Then some mod gave me a 40 point boost to call my bluff)
This is the comment to downmod.
I don't think that would work; you would essentially require a filter that could actually understand the subject matter, in order to determine whether the purpose of the stated opinion was to bait people's responses. For example:

"I've thought a lot about that. I would be surprised if current spam filters could work unchanged. There are not enough trolls on News.YC to make it worth investing time in trying to write it in Lisp, but it would be an interesting experiment to see if you could use C++ programming techniques to detect trolls in some large public corpus like Digg or Reddit or Slashdot's comment threads."
I think there's a practical consideration to the single-founder limitation.

Anecdotally, I'm running my own business now. Actually, it's running me, and that's a problem. I really wish I had a partner, not just to take some of the load off of my shoulders, but to motivate me when I get discouraged, and so that I didn't have to be the only one coming up with all the ideas.

Also, single-founderism might indicate that a person is less sociable, or difficult to deal with, or (as in my case) determined to do it alone. Those are all rather dangerous things for a startup.
Have never found Yahoo to be accurate enough though, that's why I'm asking (see op).
I have occasionally found clusty (http://www.clusty.com/) to be useful. It needs some more help tuning its direct search results, but the clustering stuff it does is pretty neat.
Get the best recommendation you can, from the best researcher who knows you personally, and who can vouch for your research skills. Classroom performance doesn't count.

If you have to choose, it's better to have a great recommendation from someone unknown, than it is to have a mediocre recommendation from a superstar.
Boycott Google? If they’re helping Republicans - why should we help them?
I don't understand this. Why not just keep the 'next' and 'prev' fields organized in the same places in all of your structs, and eliminate the need for offsets altogether?
I think this is suggestive of how not-dangerous terrorism is, not how dangerous our workplaces are.
Buttz
This headline is dumb and is likely to inspire a worthless discussion, so I suggest we avoid responding to it. There are many reasons that Google is evil; there are many reasons Google isn't evil and if you want to boycott them I wish you the best of luck.
Eventually you get to the point where all of your comments come out in grey. I think you have to be manually banned for new comments to be dead on arrival though. Maybe there's a threshold though.

There's also the contrarian tactic of giving yters a positive karma bomb. It's not banned in the rules, by any means...
You're right about 1 and 2, but you've got the order wrong for 3-5.

Most grad schools view GPA and GRE scores as an initial, binary filter (with the emphasis on GRE scores), and then use the other criteria to rank the remaining applicants in a somewhat flexible way. A 4.0 from MIT is obviously not going to hurt you, but I wouldn't go so far as saying that a 3.6 from MIT is "better" than a 4.0 from a second-tier school. That's just snobbery.
By just looking at the title I would agree with you, but did you read it? I think it's substantive enough.
I don't really care whether it's substantive, right, wrong, intelligent or not - it's politics, plain and simple, and whether I agree with it or not doesn't matter, it's just a poisonous topic for this kind of site.
> you will be contradicting yourself, because you will have made an assertion about the objective truth of the matter

...unless I assert that morality is subjective. :-)

As for the rest of it ... well, I do disagree. I think Guy Kawasaki outlined it best in his book, "Rules for Revolutionaries". It has a section titled, if I remember correctly, "Don't let bozosity get you down".

A certain amount of criticism that a person will encounter will be, well, wrong. It can even be wrong when it's coming from an expert. You see this all the time in the business world. I can't tell here if you're suggesting that a person take all criticism to heart -- I think so, because of the way you talk about changing to adapt to criticism -- but, if you are, then you're suggesting that a person allow themselves to be buffeted by the winds of the popular and the trendy.

There's no way to always to always be correct, to always do the right thing. You might listen to a bunch of criticism, and a bunch of suggestions, and still make the wrong decision for all the right reasons. Listening to more criticism, and allowing that criticism to further change your habits, doesn't necessarily ameliorate that.

I counter that it's important to know when to accept criticism, and when to ignore it and forge ahead. I also posit that it's impossible to know that, so you just have to make your best guess.
This is silly. It's like saying you should boycott the phone company because they will help the republicans setup some phones for the event. It's not like Google is going to do something Evil© like hack Google Maps to send democrats looking for voting places to Timbuktu. I'm sure Google will be happy to give the same stuff to the DNC when it's their turn.
It works both ways: it shows that the allocation of resources is not rational.
Higher Education Conformity
And the Republicans were smart enough to give Google free publicity and Google knew the negative attention from being associated with the party of some recent insane mass murderers wouldn't actually matter. I do expect this would be truly controversial if Google was officially endorsed in some way by the Chinese Communist Party.

You need to subscribe to relative morality once you start doing business with governments that have killed people.
Is there a government that hasn't killed people?
Can you provide queries where yahoo.com, google.com, and live.com are differentiable to a significant degree? Just out of curiousity, moreso than critique.
Good idea, it's very likely that I'll be near Innsbruck sometime this year. If you stay there - I remember you want to relocate?

What about Zurich, btw., I think there are plenty of jobs there (mostly in banking...).
I live in Zurich. Maybe we can meet for a dring sometime soon.
I will contact both of you.
Regarding subjectivity, if you assert morality is subjective, you don't have a leg to stand on in saying I was wrong. What would that even mean? I was right, for me, or whatever.

Regarding "forging ahead": Scheduling criticism is a different issue, and one well known to writers: if you keep editing the first chapter, you'll never finish. There certainly is a place for that kind of thing. It is really a separate (and large) issue.

-----

Of course you have to use your judgment about which criticism you think is correct. The point is not to dislike criticism generally, or to ignore it. Doing those things makes it harder to find and use good criticism.

To use a YC example, some people have posted here asking for comments and criticism for their fledgling startup. And people have blogged about how this criticism was harsh and hard to take, but made their startup better, so they encourage others to ask for comments/criticism as well.

This illustrates a few different attitudes. There are some people who are too scared of criticism to ask for any. Their startups won't get the improvement that some more bold or open minded people have gotten.

And then of the people who did ask for criticism, many still partially dislike it, which makes it harder to fairly evaluate the criticism (finding it somewhat painful is distracting!), and their distaste makes them overlook some other, more subtle opportunities to get more criticism, that a person who loves criticism would have found.

So this is an important and relevant issue even at an exceptionally enlightened place. There is no magic formula to always make correct decisions, but there are ways of life which are more effective and reliable.
Wired 1.1: An Archaeology
The most important thing to understand about new products and startups
Those numbers were just an example to say that both the gpa and school are factors. That is, an admissions committee would not do a straight comparison between gpas, but would factor in a weight for the school.

This is not snobbery, just the facts of life. I am not saying that a 4.0 student from an unknown school is worse than a 3.6 MIT student. There is no way to objectively know that.

Also gpa matters more than you seem to think. A 4.0 from MIT would do more than not hurt. It would get you admission into a top tier program. The reason graduate programs give importance to gpa is because it takes a sustained effort over 4 years to have a great gpa when you apply. This shows an ability to work hard over a sustained period of time which is a prerequisite for success in grad school and research.

Finally, as I originally said, most undergrads do not have any significant research experience when they apply, and so the recommendations and gpa become more important in those cases. There is a strong correlation between recommendations and gpa, with the difference that a gpa is an objective measure. Most competent students manage to find people who will write positive recommendations for them. Its much harder to finesse your gpa this way. Admission committees are well aware of these issues.
Sounds cool, I'll be there!
Pretzel - I'd be interested in meeting up. Graduated from Leeds last summer, and I've been scrambling round in the startup world since.

Anyone else from the UK, let me know. The Songkick guys held a UK hackers meetup last year, so we're probably due for another one soon. Maybe we could do one in Stratford-Upon-Avon?!
> Regarding subjectivity, if you assert morality is subjective, you don't have a leg to stand on in saying I was wrong.

Well, subjectivity doesn't mean you're right in the objective sense. See, you opened your comment with a logical trick to prove the correctness of what you were about to say before you even said it, and you did so by deciding that there are intrinsically right and wrong moral decisions. I think that morality, specifically, happens to be an extremely subjective thing, first of all. It varies dramatically from culture to culture, society to society, era to era. Secondly, I think that was kind of an underhanded thing to do, and a friendly jest was my way of calling you on it. If I were to pull an equally underhanded trick, I might say that my reply is in fact a criticism of your thinking, and, according to your own principles, you must take it under consideration and use it to change the way you act.

> The point is not to dislike criticism generally, or to ignore it.

This part I like. It makes me really want to agree with what you're trying to say. But, then you go from that, to things like, "...more subtle opportunities to get more criticism, that a person who loves criticism would have found." I have a problem with that, because I think of criticism as a distraction that is sometimes an opportunity. To really love criticism is to dwell on what will ultimately be a distraction.

I really wish I could find my copy of Rules for Revolutionaries. (I really dig that book, and it was signed! Sometimes I loan it out ... rats.) It cited some specific examples of this, sometimes where businesses had too closely followed criticism and been hurt by that, and others where they hadn't followed it, and benefited from that.

So, it's not just scheduling criticism. In the book writing example, sometimes you have to know when to ignore your editor altogether.
I haven't looked at Reddit comments in months. But... Wow. I'm just speechless.
I think what Paul said about "Hacker News readers feel about trolls the way exiles from Cuba or Eastern Europe feel about dictators" is right on the money. sic semper tyrannis

It's actually rather amazing that we are fairly unanimous in down-modding trollishness, without having community guidelines or a big discussion about it.
I think the hardest problem with that approach would be avoiding a false-positive of detecting people who hold controversial opinions as trolls.

The moderation graph between users and comments would be really interesting. There's a lot of information in there to be mined.
I doubt it... some policy will always end up indirectly killing someone. China and the US are a lot more evil than a country like Sweden, though.
10 Tips for Moving From Programmer to Entrepreneur
Not necessarily.

Spam filters routinely filter out emails based on a common set of words that are used without understanding the subject matter. For example, if an email contains the words viagara and store, the probability of that email being spam go up tremendously. Paul's "A plan for Spam" essay explains a lot more. And, from what I understand, Bayesian filtering is at the root of most spam blockers out there.

I'd be willing to wager that Bayesian filtering would be pretty powerful in filtering out trolls on social sites, as well. For example, if a post contains the words "asshole" and "fucktard" the probability of that post coming from a troll goes up exponentially.

If you trained a Bayesian filter, or spam algorithm well enough, it should be able to flag trollish posts fairly easily.
...as of yet. I won't rest easy until Hacker News has 10 million visitors a day and the comments and stories still work out. Which I doubt they will with that many users.
How to have up to twenty people to work together in online brainstorming sessions
Cosmos - Open Source OS in C#
For anyone going to the music, I strongly recommend the best band from Pittsburgh touring nationally, Black Moth Super Rainbow.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=disception+forum

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=disception+forum&fr=...

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=disception+forum&g...

A little forum I frequent... Direct link to the actual domain in the first result on Google.
I can't downmod stories? Not that I ever have too... It's easy enough to post a comments explaining why you don't agree with a story than to downmod it.

And that's where I take my queue for comments. If I agree/ laugh/ enjoy a comment I upmod it. If I don't agree I leave it. If the guy is trolling I downmod it.
Why must someone meet with the person who posted that same weekend?
great words as ever, best place to find feedback is indeed on hits and seeing who reads, not the comments of those that are too lazy to read. As fro slashdot, it used to be my staring portal to the web, but has been replaced by reddit
:-)
>One might worry this would prevent people from expressing controversial ideas, but empirically that doesn't seem to be what happens. When people say something substantial that gets modded down, they stubbornly leave it up. What people delete are wisecracks, because they have less invested in them.

How would you know? How would you know it does not stiffle unpopular opinions?

I think that I would personally practice self-censoring if I would lose karma by expressing unpopular opinions that are likely to be down-voted. I know that I already do on reddit, and there the down-votes are at least only temporary.

Not wanting to lose karma may seem a foolish reason for not expressing your opinions, and at first I din't mind. I kept writing my unpopular opinions on reddit, the down-votes made me put even more effort into them so that they would be above approach. But they' still only get a handful of points whereas one-liners expressing the popular opinion would get much more. So eventually I gave up.

Now I mostly just read a couple of stories a day, and occassionally write the one-liner comment.

As a final comment, I've always been disgusting by the way that people on reddit would constantly compare themselves, always favorable, to their bigger, would-be rival: Digg. Now you do the same thing towards reddit, and I can only shake my head in disgust. Learn to value your site in itself, not as the compare to other sites. It does not need to be a competition.
Yahoo says: "We have included deception forum results - Show only disception forum" (link to the latter is http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&rd=r1&p=%...).

No defense for live.com
On your final comment, it's a pretty universal truth that every community will eventually find a common enemy. It's part of feeling like you're part of something.
Not necessarily. Diebold donates more to Republicans than Democrats. Is this evil? Well, when you make voting machines, political donations are at the very least a conflict of interest.
JRuby RC2 Released
http://www.altavista.com/ - Now run by Yahoo but with less clutter than the Yahoo domain.
I am sorry but you are twisting what I said there. I was meaning immature behavior which to quote the dictionary can mean "Marked by or suggesting a lack of normal maturity: silly, immature behavior."

People often tell others acting like an ass to grow up.

This has nothing to do with being an informative description of children and more to do with PG's troll post, now that is somewhat ironic :p
Doesn't think what? That the Kurzweil book is an interesting read? I think what you are trying to say is that this guy doesn't agree with the notion of the singularity. Fair enough. Though I think his assertion that we aren't in a time of accelerating change is a minority view amongst recognized futurists.
devry ?
I don't think that was what he was saying. I agree that the article contains nothing new.
I feel for the people laid off its not nice happened to me last year but that said its not clear what they did from that article.

did they deal with all aspects of design? or was it just font and logos etc

I can't help but think it would be cheaper to contract this stuff out.
Writing a Facebook Application with Python, Pt. I
Writing a Facebook Application with Python Pt. II
Writing a Facebook Application with Python Pt. III
Just what I was about to say.
I can see what he's saying: to make a great product, basically consider market forces your local gradient, then follow the steepest descent. Surely, though, that suffers from the same problem as the classic version of the gradient descent algorithm: it's easy to get stuck in a local optimum. So I do think your starting point matters.

His example, gmail, suffers from this too. There were many webmail and offline email clients before gmail, the key to its success was its integration with an excellent search algorithm. Without that starting point, it would have most likely been pulled towards some local optimum which had already been discovered. Okay, so Google is full of search experts, so maybe internal market forces would have been different than those of the worldwide market. Most startups don't have that kind of micro-market which takes them to some kind of new optimium though.

Taking the algorithmic analogy further, in practice you would probably not want to do pure gradient descent if it feels like you're heading for a known local optimum, and instead stochastically/heuristically "go against the flow" and experiment with idiosyncratic features.
It's interesting to me that Paul lists humility as an (the?) important factor leading to successful product design. It seems like there would be a natural tension between the courage it takes to found a startup and the humility it takes to be successful.

I also wonder if honesty might be another word for the skill in question - i.e., being honest with yourself about what works, what doesn't, and what's truly necessary.
Sure. You can see for yourself in the source: http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc1.tar
Well you could to some extent make the same argument over any attempts to predict the future. Global warming is an instance that comes to mind. The point of it all is that your assessment of the likely futures can effect your current actions. This sort of stuff can be particularly useful for tech startups.

But to follow your style of argument - it can also be true that some people would prefer not to think of a future that is radically different from the past and present. So they will often reflexively turn away from that sort of discussion, dismissing it as pointless. This is the sort of attitude a lot of people displayed to the internet during its growth.

I personally think there is maybe a 20% change he is close to right which to me makes it hugely significant and deserving of a lot more attention than it gets.
Oh! Oh! I know! Why not run the authentication servers on EC2!? That way they can just allocate more computing resources when needed?

Heh, I apologize for that right there. Just couldn't help myself.
I don't think getting stuck in a local optimum is as important as the speed with which you get there.

Techniques for finding a global optimum of a numerical function are expensive, time-consuming, and often find worse solutions before they find the best one. Do this in a startup, and your local-optimum-seeking competition will crush you.

Seems to me that thinking there is a better solution that your users don't know about (which led you to the local optimum) is exactly the lack of humility that Paul was warning against.
4 hours later: still an error... are WE supposed to create something here on the fly?
Scientists Scan Striking Nanoscale Images
Newlisp
how come the reception for newlisp is so cold(silence) in this communty?is it for the same type of reasons that the french refuses to reform their spelling or are their any "real" reasons?
Is there any fundamental difference in how karma is awarded in News.YC compared with Slashdot?
En espanol, sí. Pero en inglés, "American" es para los de EEUU.

Get used to it.
I think it's a bit exaggerated. Certainly the _average_ assistant professor isn't denied tenure: that only happens in about 10-20% of cases as I understand it.

http://incoherently-scattered.blogspot.com/2008/02/how-commo...
I'm sorry to inform you but you don't get to keep your color if your karma drops below 250... although it is saved and it pops back when your karma passes 250 again. (already did the experiment :) )
I just use Octave (open source implementation of Matlab)
pfft, you're just bitter about the way arc was recieved
Assuming that a significant portion of your time in a software startup is spent programming, a language that makes you twice as productive means you can try twice as many ideas, or develop the same software and free half your time for finding capital or users, or shortening your time to market by 50%, wouldn't any of these be a significant advantage???