skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems to be the most asked question on YC, by far. This may be impossible (which would explain why it doesn't exist) but can someone put together the quickstart guide "Learning to Web Develop"?

1-2 page exec summaries of popular languages and the specific problems they solve. Include links to resources that explain things further. It would help to get a snapshot from 1000 ft. above the situation.

There is definitely a need here.

Thanks
> what would it take to make it worth your while?

1. Alignment of goals - something I really want to see exist in the world?

2. Other people are excited about the product - I tend to feed off of others' encouragement.

3. Belief that this will pay off big.

4. Strong individual recognition for my participation.

5. Those guys already there have to be working at least as intensely as me.

6. Don't want to work with really clueless people.
Good and timely advice. We have been launched for 6 weeks or so, and seeing our growth grow slower than we would have liked. It is good to know other start ups that are doing well, had a pretty slow intial growth for awhile. I guess that means it is time to put a bit more effort into PR and engineering some viral features.
I'm not sure if the conclusion of this piece necessarily follows. Instead, Andreessen seems to parallel the argument Stephen Covey makes in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, that is to be of value a person or a company has to be based on solid principles and values rather than the superficial attributes that seem "attractive". To follow the article's conclusion, though, would mean that if a company is for sale, it's not a good one. There are many valid reasons to be for sale.
Very true, great comment.

I have found that it can be hard to watch a similar product with half the features growing faster than your own. I guess it means your in a good space that people are interested in, but you aren't doing enough to attract those users...
thanks, helpful input
i agree, i'm looking to work with brillant, innovative people
I bring in that for reasons why most people don't think about starting a startup. My argument is entirely against that.
doing it.. making the architeture happen.. but require more help in debugging, and GUI implementation
I only use the left Control key, and I remapped Caps Lock to Control in the Mac OS preferences panel. Works very well for me.
I wonder why there is no Multi Touch or Led displays in the Macbook.
The problem with this is that you are not allowing the user to decide which tier they are in, and you'd probably piss a lot of them off by automatically moving and charging them in the next higher tier.

Overage fees are terrible for user retention, because they just irritate people unless it is extremely obvious and normal in your market to charge such fees.
Whichever one you use, you'll probably need to edit the source to change the probability formula from (n_hits / n_total) to ((n_hits + 1) / (n_total + 2)). That's the correct formula based on an even distribution of probabilities (which is close enough to the actual distribution in most situations for this to be a huge improvement). I can never find a reference for this when I search for one, but you can verify it experimentally with a short program in your favorite dynamically-typed language, or a long program.

For example, if you live in a world with only black and white birds, but you don't know the percentage of each and have no reason to believe it's more likely 2% black than 70% black, or any other percentage, if you see two black birds fly by, that doesn't mean the next bird you see has a 100% probability of being black, but that's exactly the assumption most widely-used naive Bayesian classifiers make.

I modified SpamProbe to use (spam+1)/(total+2), and the results have been good.
Yes, we agree. Lots of good reasons for not starting a startup. That isn't one of them.
80% of the time is spent in the last 20%. the devil is truly in the details.

Honestly, this post itself is a red flag to me. Please take this post for what its worth (I may very well be wrong), but IMHO if you do not already have the resources necessary to get your startup to market already I think you might be in trouble. Adding people onto a project at the end to get it done, usually ends up in failure. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

Plus, your going to have to be wayyy more descriptive in order to get an accurate guage of interest. Why not talk freely about what/where your service is here? Doing that alone should get you some good feedback
Care to explain your reasoning?
Bring billions.

Pageviews, not profits :D
<most sarcasm>

Where do you party/meetup/confer?

</most sarcasm>
I'm speechless. Now I finally understand why all of those poor Americans in makeshift boats are sailing to Cuba or south across the Rio Grande.
I'm a little perturbed by the glamorous aura this article projects. It's like Biggie Smalls does start-ups.

Billion dollar valuation, much love from the Crunch
Time to slip into the Prius, creep to the Founders Brunch
Sucka VCs, start lining up for Series C
My elevator pitch gets a yes by floor three
Beats working all day every day and still watching your children starve to death in front of your eyes. I've worked fast food and custodial and I'll still take that over what billions of people on this Earth have.
Be careful - this is against Google's TOS - it both incentivizes clicking on ads and the $ to charity is an unverifiable claim. I set something like this up about a year ago. It lasted about as long as tokogae.com has been reg'd (~3 days) for that reason. That said, if you've found a way around that, I'd love to know about it.
you and everyone else
Maybe this isn't the right place to ask, but what if you're a tech partner looking for a businessperson? There seems to be a lot of talk out there about evaluating geeks, but how do you sift through all the chaff of idea guys?
Ask News.YC: How to fight features?
Well, it's quite obvious when your product gains some popularity users start bombing you with feature requests. The problem I would like to arise here is how do you handle these requests ? Of course you can gather some statistics then start implementing features that are being asked more frequently. But, at some point you start receiving a lot of controversial feature requests: one group of users claim that the feature they request is more important than the feature requested by the other group, sometimes even claiming to remove feature requested by the opposition. How do you rule out such situations ? Please advise.
Personally, I value hard-working as more important. Smart would just be a side effect.
Anonymous blogger behind the "Patent Troll Tracker" revealed
Sounds to me that you are describing Laplace Smoothing in a Naive Bayes classifier. This is a pretty standard technique for avoiding the problem that you are seeing where the probability comes out as 100%/0% because of a lack of information in the model.
This kinda reminds me of the old argument that Bill Gates earns so quickly, that he'd be wasting his time if he bent over to pick up a $100 dollar bill.

I remember the first time I got a billing rate of over $100/hour. I literally stopped fixing food in my kitchen and started buying carry out food so that I could bill more hours.
If I save $8/hour cooking but lose $100/hour because I'm in my kitchen instead of my office, then I'm effectively LOSING $92/hour. Can't have that.

So I started changing other things. Dry cleaning instead of laundry. Got a maid instead of cleaning my own office. Even cut my hair short to save 3 minutes in the shower.

Starting to see how easy it is to get carried away with the "opportunity cost" argument?

What's the worst thing you could possibility do? Anything that takes time without earning. Which is EXACTLY what happens in an early stage startup. That's why I simply can't let myself revert to that kind of thinking.

If accountants ran the world, we'd still be riding horses to work.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/BayesClassifier.aspx

This is a simple one built in C#/.Net. I fixed a significant bug and raised classification accuracy from 74% -> 96% in my noisy dataset (automobile accident claims). I emailed the author with a bunch of improvements (such as histograms) and some other tweaks but never heard back. Anyway, the bugfix is simple: take a look at category.cs. In TeachPhrase(), move m_TotalWords++ inside the test for "if (!m_Phrases.TryGetValue(phrase, out pc))".

What you want here is to count the # of unique words. The original code was counting the total # of times all words appear.This one change reduced classification errors by 3X.

Cheers,
--Jack
I used to work for a fairly well-known manufacturer of disk drives. In their typical paranoia, they intentionally ensured that our labs had no windows to mitigate the possibility of corporate espionage.
25  Innovations will kill startups profitability and will make the bubble burst in 2008-2018
+1 for content.

-1 for attitude.

We're even.
Andrew Mccallum's Bow library (CMU) is a very robust toolkit.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mccallum/bow/

Very high quality. Multiple people have used it for serious research.
Hm, where I am breaching Google TOS? I've read through it pretty carefully, although I'm not a lawyer, and I can't find anything besides potentially incentivizing the clicking of ads. That is up to their discretion, I'm going to assume it's okay unless they warn me. I've put up a disclaimer though, thanks for pointing that part out.

I'm able to disclose my earnings though Section 7 of the TOS (http://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms) which states:

"You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program."

and I can post my donation receipts for verification. Obviously, this won't happen until after I get the AdSense check, but there's nothing I can do about that for the first month. There won't be many users starting off though, so even if I were a greedy scumbag I wouldn't make too much, and if I actually do as I promise more users will hopefully show up.
Six Sneaky SEO Techniques That Will Get Web Sites Banned
For applications launching soon it's worth noting that Django is in a period of flux at the moment. Ver 1.0 is being actively worked toward and will break backwards compatibility.

I mean, no one is keeping you from working using Django .96, but several of the neater features in the platform (ContentTypes & Generic relations) are a little sketchy at the moment.
I hear you =) Here's a quote from the email (Dec 7th 2006):

Thanks for following up with us and removing the phrase "The more you search the more we give".

Unfortunately, we’re still unable to approve your application for the AdSense program because we found that you are offering incentives to users to perform searches in order to benefit third-parties. This activity is prohibited by AdSense program policies.

AdSense does not currently permit sites that offer financial incentives to users to perform searches. This includes both direct incentives ("we pay you two cents for every search") and indirect incentives to third-parties ("we donate to charity every time you search"). There are a number of reasons for this policy decision, most notably our inability to verify the accuracy of any claims. While we have no doubt that you intend to donate a portion of proceeds to the charities listed on your site, we have no way to verify this with all partners.

For additional questions, I'd encourage you to visit the AdSense Help Center (http://www.google.com/adsense_help), our complete resource center for all AdSense topics. Alternatively, feel free to post your question on the forum just for AdSense publishers: the AdSense Help Group (http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help).
Oh, forgot to mention that you'll want to compute probabilities using logarithms to avoid underflow precision loss (which will introduce classification errors).
example: wordValue = System.Math.Log((double)count / (double)cat.TotalWords);
You already called this argument, but...

... if you can avoid PHP. It will do all those things mentioned above, and more and more Python and Ruby are becoming common.
Features are intricately coupled with usability design - which incidentally looks really easy, but is in reality extremely hard.

What I would do is gather all the feature requests, and see if there is a pattern among them. Often there is. For instance, if you are doing a webforum: One user wants a feature that allows him to change tha background of the app, another user wants to change the border thickness of the forum posts, and yet another want to be able to have his name blink when he posts to the forum.

In this rather contrived example there is a clear pattern: It all has to do with design. And you can implement all the requests by creating a design editor where users can change the look of the site. If you are really clever you can do a javascript app that lets users pick out indivivual elements and apply CSS styling to them, maybe with a nice userinterface that lets him pick colors from a javascript palette, and nice input boxes for border thickness. And you can use javascript to let the user see his changes instantaneously... I'm getting carried away now...

Anyway: If you gather all the feature requests in logical groups, and look at how many requests there are in each group, as opposed to just how many users want to have their name blink when they post to your forum you will get a much clearer idea of where your problems are. Also, you will be able to solve many requests by implementing one feature - which will admittedly be a larger one, and thus more work.

If, on the other hand, you slap features on every now and then in no particular order you will in time end up with an interface that is almost impossible to figure out because there is no consistency. Just look at word ;-)

But as I said: Usability is much harder than it looks.
btw - I think this is why GoodSearch.com uses Yahoo
Good reason to get plants?
You'd think so - but it rarely happens. I did this with my current macbook and only got a few hundred dollars off after waiting ~7months.
Yeah, that is what I meant by browser API. I have no experience with mobile browsers yet - I guess you can't install plugins for them, as with the desktop ones?
http://fevote.com/ has an interesting/digg-like approach to managing features/comments on feature requests, etc
This article is about the importance of getting a rediculous number of major publicity hits, not so much launching early.

Those graphs don't even measure if the product was good -- people often don't find out how good something is until after they sign up for it.
Screw gestures, use keyboard shortcuts instead.
Upmodded for unintentional hilariousness. Are you sure a plague of locusts didn't also descend upon your programmers? Note to self: never accept a programming job from mixmax.
Ouch, I see it now:

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=...

"May not compensate users for viewing ads or performing searches, or promise compensation to a third party for such behavior"

I guess this is why there are other sites that use Yahoo as the search engine for the same purpose... Thanks for the heads up, I'll let you know if I find some way around it. I think I'll leave it up and wait until Google contacts me before switching to Yahoo.

Who knows, maybe I'll write something that allows verification of donations for charities. That might be a good non-profit in itself.
Ruby Fool's Conf. on April 1 2008 :)
If you want to give Django a try, you might want to check out my simple tutorial:

http://www.instantdjango.com

It includes a portable Django development environment for Windows, no installation required, and it even runs from a USB thumb drive. The tutorial walks you through creating a simple website, and explains what is happening each step of the way.

The website is overdue for some updates, and I really need to finish writing the second chapter, but you might find it an interesting way to spend 45 minutes.
exactly right. good publicity and a bad product wouldn't help anything. and if you notice the "new users per day" graph, it settles higher after every publicity hit -- which is a good indication that your product is of value, since the more people that know about you, the more that tell other people about you, the more sign-up for your product every day.

and on a side note, it's also much harder to get good publicity for a bad product.
(Disclaimer: I'm a liftweb committer.)

I'm sorry you were discouraged by maven. I've found maven to be a huge productivity boost, especially when compared to the alternatives. Though I'll admit it's mostly "black magic" to me. Half the time I don't know what exactly it's doing. But since it "just works", I find it really doesn't matter that much that I don't understand it.

Also, most of the "churn" is in new features. There are 6-12 production apps running off of lift's trunk, so check-in's very, very rarely break backwards compatibility. There is an effort to re-work the ORM layer and make it much, much more powerful (it'll be much more than just ORM). This work is proceeding cautiously though. There will be ample warning before the old ORM is deprecated and thrown out.

If you want to give lift a second chance, I'd encourage you to use the mailing list as a resource (liftweb@googlegroups.com). People are very friendly and generally very willing to answer questions.
PROJECT LINKS/POLL

reply only to this message and vote on links below
Ruby :: Classifier gem

http://classifier.rubyforge.org/
Java :: jBNC Toolkit

http://jbnc.sourceforge.net/
Get the Tipjoy Bookmarklet. Tip any site, while you're on it.
We are developing mobile application. The problem we stuck in with is the GUI: what was initially considered as best usablity for one group of users appeared to be totaly unacceptable for another. We were trying to solve this controversity by making every thing configurable. But again we came close to the point where the number of different settings and options is beyond of understanding even a very experienced user :-). I understand that we have to rethink all the concept of the GUI, but I don't see any decent ideas :(. Perhaps we need some fresh look on this from someone outside.
he he, I'm the devil :-)

but no, none of it had anything to do with me - it was all external and not related to the startup at all. Just seriously bad luck...
I'm looking for something that is open source that I can start using right away with minimal configuration... I'm not smart enough to create my own, but clever enough to take somebody else's work and cater it to what I'm trying to do.

It's only for text processing.
FriendFeed is officially launching
He is just figuring out HTML. You are joking right?
Ha. If by "most" he means "least" then I agree.
Can Warren Buffett be my hero?
The one with the simplest interface I've seen is http://divmod.org/trac/wiki/DivmodReverend . Looks very easy to get started with.

If you want to get more serious, use Weka or Bow or YALE or something implemented in a reasonably fast language.
Throw me a mail if you like, I'll be glad to have a look. My mail is in my profile. I probably won't be able to get back before the weekend though.

It's always fun to see what others are doing, besides maybe as you say it will be easier for someone that hasn't been too involved beforehand. It often is.
Scala's association with Java is a mixed blessing, but I think the net effect is positive.

Haskell, Python, Ruby, and OCaml were created in 1990, 1991, 1995, and 1996, respectively. Literally decades of work have gone into building libraries for these languages, in everything from web protocols to cryptography to machine learning. Scala was released in 2003 (and Scala 2.0, released in 2006, was a complete rewrite). Yet despite being so young, having access to any Java library makes Scala instantly useful. The language team can focus on the core language, and any library you can imagine is just a Google search away.

To give two examples: Adding support for AMQP and XMPP to lift meant writing two thin wrappers over the equivalent Java libraries. You could use the Java libraries directly, but the wrappers take advantage of Scala's Actors, which are the best thing since sliced bread when it comes to concurrency.

The JVM is also the most ubiquitous deployment platform ever. Yes, maven is mysterious and I mostly don't understand how it works. But it works, and it gives me a WAR file, and deploying a WAR is as easy as dropping it into any webapp container.

Could Scala-the-language be prettier if it wasn't tied to the Java platform? Probably.

Would Scala-the-platform be viable today if it didn't have full access to Java-the-platform? Unlikely.

It's hard to overstate the importance of the JVM platform to growing a new language. For Scala, it's the difference between a language that is an academic curiosity and a language I can use to solve real problems now.
The Cadillac of bayes classifiers is CRM114--it can use classifiers that are far more advanced than naive bayes, such as clustering, or with hidden markov modeling.
Also, if you're taking classes, you may have free access to Safari and other ebook collections through the school's library.
I think that the 'Douple-layer' SuperDrive on the 17 inch model is an especially convincing reason to buy.
CRM114

http://crm114.sourceforge.net/
Ask YS: Java Platform Book Recommendation?
We're moving some of our Windows-centric stuff to multi-platform environment.

While "Java the Language" is something we're not interested in, "Java the Platform" looks promising, especially due to mature Rhino and Jython pieces.

Which book would you recommend to learn "Java the Platform" quickly? Something less than 900 pages and without explanations of differences between local and global variables? We are looking into a Quick Intro into Java Platform for hackers.

Thank you.
Well, I don't think that social approach for solving usability issues is a good idea. The only you can get applying it is a total misconception. Just take a look on to what "solutions" Nature has came using genetic algorithm :-)
Thanks, yes, that's what it's called.

All due credit to Laplace for the technique, but the word "smoothing" is making me wince, because it makes it sound as though this is some artificial approximation. For the assumption of an even distribution of probabilities, n+1 / m+2 really _is_ the exact probability of the event repeating. Like I said, you can confirm this experimentally with a quick program.
I use Weka in my project. Btw, there is a book about Weka: http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/book.html
What do people here use for boring back-office stuff?
I've been working on an all-in-one system to run my own startup since 2001 (accounting, CRM, taxes, payroll, etc.). It works, and I've tried selling it, but to no avail. Big businesses don't want to trust a startup. Other startups seem like a logical target market, but maybe people are satisfied with what they're using now (QuickBooks?), so they don't want to switch, either. It would be helpful to gather some data to see if that's really the case. I know that in the case of my own startup, I had some custom needs that QuickBooks wasn't able to satisfy. So, have I made a product that no one needs because everyone is happy? Or one that a lot of people need, but that no one knows exists?
crm114
thanks for pointing me to the research, this concept is being modeled for exploration of a knowledge-base. ;-D
More generally, it's equivalent to applying a Dirichlet prior distribution, with uninformative parameters (i.e. all of the parameters on the Dirichlet are equal).

This is important, because while adding a single pseudocount to each column will prevent zero divisions, it's probably not reflective of the true distribution of values. If instead, you add pseudocounts using a Dirichlet where the parameters are set based on some prior knowledge, you can often improve the performance of the classifier (especially in low-count situations), without biasing the results unfairly.