skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A Viacom VP even complained about the "fucking assholes" at YouTube — because the company "enforced its repeat-infringer policy concerning a Viacom marketing account that had received multiple take-down notices from Viacom's legal department."

Merely reading this sentence is making my eyes cross. Is it possible for this case to become any more absurd?
I wish the copyright holders would get what they're asking for -- no more free advertising on YouTube. It's probably true that YouTube grew quickly because people could watch 3 minute clips of The Simpsons or whatever, but now most of the good videos are independently produced -- quickly making the major media companies irrelevant. (I still like "normal" TV shows, but there's less and less of a reason for the writers to work for a network and not for themselves.)
Looking at it from a money perspective is backwards. The idea is to pay your living expenses so that you can focus, not give you any kind of salary (at least that's my understanding).

The rate seems like a good commitment filter as is.
When I worked at an ad agency, we used to generate names for things with people. Same sort of strategy though... think up some words that mattered to the brand, brainstorm combinations, and iterate.

I'm not sure why you would get a computer involved though. Why not just take a few minutes and think up words with your team, and then play with them until you have something you like? You can't possibly evaluate unlimited possibilities, so why not scope the games to words, phrases, and ideas that connect in your brain?
Allegedly, "The Japanese use a string of nonsense syllables which imitate the sounds of unknown languages, especially Chinese"

http://www.omniglot.com/language/idioms/incomprehensible.php

^ Worth noting that 'chinpunkanpun' is the word; the rest of the phrase is accurate Japanese.
I've only been here a short time. But I agree. I come here to find interesting tech articles, hacking, coding, whatever. I understand that the other items could be of interest, but really, after the 3rd facebook privacy/apple is the devil discussion, I think everyone has had enough.

It seems like we could meet everyone's needs with a simple tagging system.
Why should Viacom be responsible for their own actions? THEY MAKE TV SHOWS!!!!
Logitech Google TV Box Embarrasses Apple TV
But it is pretty damn common, just maybe not on Facebook.
A very interesting, if thoroughly depressing examination of the state of journalism today. The Gawker episodes do not make anyone look good.
They're not going to want to be excluded from being able to push video to the millions of devices out there that are WebM devices.

It's conceivable that when someone says they're assembling a patent pool, that means that patent owners are selling/transferring their patents into a non-practicing corporation, which will then litigate. Since the patents are now held by a non-practicing entity, Google's revocation is meaningless.
Google spreadsheet:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ak_L_zLqm09sdGQ0bXBC...
Here's a version that does a socket.gethostbyname before it hits the whois server:

http://d14hvpftrmzdxx.cloudfront.net/namer-ns.py
I woke up to my girlfriend playing this.

Awesome :)
I thought about that for a whole when that post first came up, but came to the conclusion that there really isn't one. English would be the closest example of what people say they can't speak, but there's no "it's xx to me" that I'm aware of...

Except of course for the phrase "it's your mom to me"
Thx. This doesn't look very easy, but for reference :)

http://www.bbgeeks.com/blackberry-guides/taking-screenshots-...

Next time I'm with someone with a blackberry, I'll take a look.
Adsense at that scale has interesting challenges, but I don't think it compares in scope to indexing the web and making it accessible.

Agreed that it is a far from trivial problem, but the dataset is relatively limited in comparison the biggest hurdles are to get it to match up with a reasonable ad on first delivery within a given timespan, to track all the statistics and especially to combat click fraud in the network.

But in the end, without a search engine to display those ads on google would be just another advertising agency, and in many ways they are.

A better example of an interesting challenge would be to transform google news in such a way that it would show you only relevant news. There is a lot of room for improvement there and it would boost natural language processing a lot to have the tech to do that.

Any piece of tech has interesting components, but that's a relatively small part of the whole, and the money is made in the drudge-work, that was exactly the point.

From a start-up perspective, the 'core' engine of the product is probably relatively complete by launch day, but the infrastructure to make it scale, to market and monetize it, which is going to be a whole lot less sexy, is where the money eventually will come from.
I did something similar when naming my first company (davcro). I was inspired by Adidas, which was derived from the three letter prefixes of the founder's first and last name: Adolf "Adi" Dassler.
Maybe they're preparing for the future. In a few years a $200 subsidized iPhone might be a high priced product compared to a free with contract Android phone. The iPad at $499 might be a premium device compared to a <$200 netbook. The sales of traditional PCs will eventually start to drop as these other devices fill people's needs. We're probably near the high water mark for the Macintosh. Standalone iPods are already starting to seem old fashioned. How many more years can they rely on that market to exist? It doesn't seem the iTunes Store has ever been especially profitable for Apple either. They have to bet their future on the iPad/iPhone.
Facebook working on 'simple' privacy settings
I think the really interesting thing about the alumni network is that it's not only growing in size, but experience. At this point there are companies inside of YC that have grown larger and been around longer than Viaweb was, so not only are you able to get advice from folks other than the YC founders, there's an emerging set of people who are in some aspects more experienced. (Though, naturally none who have seen more early phase startups up close.)

That's one of those surprising emergent properties that I think will be of increasing import as the trend continues upwards and also has an effect of distributing the load on the YC founders.
Actually, it's quite possible to entertain an idea, accept, and joke about it.
The world's most stressful job
It's interesting that almost all of the reasons apply to the written language. I took Mandarin in college and found the tricks I was taught to learn the characters were mostly useless. You simply had to memorize everything by brute force.

The spoken language has a simple grammar and aside from the tones you can probably get to a passable level within a year if you live in Beijing and actually interact with people in Chinese.
Usability.gov - Usability guidelines for (government) web designers
I thought he was referring to the meta-type 'Ask HN' posts . . .
MonoDroid - Mono for Android Beta Program
I kind of think you're countering yourself here.

Just like only showing relevant news is an interesting challenge, so is only showing relevant ads. Advertisers don't want to show you ads you're not interested in; they want to show you ads you'll actually find useful. In many ways, that's a much more interesting challenge than showing relevant news.

Extending the advertising example, it's also a very interesting challenge to show people that highly-targeted ads can be a good thing. Just like it's an interesting challenge to convince advertisers to use your ad platform. Although they are not technical challenges, they are very interesting business challenges.
Or not. See, that's the beauty of this, I have no interest in sharing anything on any particular site. That said, simply doing searches on my username will yield results both by myself and my father.

I have no interest in taking it further. This isn't Facebook.
> [Viacom document] "User generated content should never be monitored. Something that can't bear enough repeating is that the User Abuse Team and Atom Entertainment in general, does not and should not, actively monitor any of its web sites for content violations regarding content submitted or generated by its users."

The uglier this gets the harder I laugh. There are some real gems in an earlier article[1].

> In addition, "Viacom has altered its own videos to make them appear stolen, like 'footage from the cutting room floor, so users feel they have found something unique.'" The final result, says Google, is that there's just no way to tell, short of a notice from the company, what works must be taken down.

Viacom deserves every bit of grief they are getting and more.

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/smoking-guns...
Yes, here in the US it means that, too. "night, night" was the first thing I thought of.
It does seem like they could have done a better job at having tools like submarines and containment devices nearby and ready to go for cases like these. They should consider it a cost of doing business, to be ready to move quickly when the need arises. It does seem like one of the most critical factors effecting how much damage is going to be done to the environment and to their balance sheet is how fast or slow they get the spill contained or stopped. Stopping it within a day or two after it started would yield a huge improvement over letting it go a month like this. Surely, from a dollar standpoint, better preparation makes sense, not even taking into account the ethics of it.

I also don't buy into the excuse about the physical constraints they're under in trying to stop it. Those physical constraints should have been known to them before they built the platform in the first place. They had plenty of time to analyze, prepare and invest in solutions for a failure scenario like this. Deep water? Yep, that was pretty obvious before they built the thing. Oil would come out at high pressure? Yep, that was knowable beforehand too. Divers can't operate at that depth, only machines? Ditto.
Ah, I wasn't aware it was so deep.
"After retiring in 1991, Rudin wrote about his early life, turbulent war years and math career in an autobiography titled 'As I Remember It.'"

Rudin's autobiography is quite a good read--certainly much easier going than "baby Rudin" (Principles of Mathematical Analysis), which is a masterpiece but not for recreational reading.
It's not even that. It just says unnecessary details are unnecessary.

It's better to think of it as a rule for constructing theories than for evaluating theories.
$20k is enough to get a boatload of applications. YC is limited by the # of people they can invest in, NOT by the # of applicants. They are constantly turning away great startups due to having limited slots. Upping the amount they invest per startup would only help them if they took commensurately more equity ($80k = 24%+). With limited slots, they are simple trading great startups with lean-living co-founders for great startups with a higher price tag.

Who isn't applying? The YC process is -- survive 3 months on ~$20k. Survive 3-4 more months as you raise more money or get to profitability. Presumably you have savings or friends/family you can borrow from. How about a HELOC?

Honestly, if you can't find some way for 2 people to survive on $20k for 6ish months, you're probably either a pretty lousy life-hacker or you've had some bad luck. Either way, you're a bad bet compared to the alternatives.

But, again, if your startup is badass compared to YC applicants, fundraising shouldn't be a problem.
What happened to "There are no stupid questions"? Why beat up on someone who asks a (seemingly) legitimate question?
Interesting. I guess I need to learn more about oil mining tech. I was under the impression that after the initial strike, most of the pressure is released- hence the pumps we use to extract it.
Some of us have dropped out of top MBA programs (Dave and I were at UChicago) to participate in YC. And I haven't regretted my decision for a second. Most of my entrepreneurship focused MBA friends would trade in a heartbeat (and some have applied to YC). Although they are definitely selective the top 10 MBA programs take in ~5000 students a year while YC will only take ~200-250/yr at 35 companies per session.
The "indexing the web" aspect is more of a systems engineering problem than a core algorithm problem. Scaling and systems work usually appeals to a completely different sort of engineer than those who develop algorithms.

I would argue that developing the original work for displaying relevant adsense ads would appeal more to the algorithm developer than scaling out search would.

Edit, I re-read your post and you seem to realize this so I don't understand where you were going with your comment in the original article.
I wasn't aware it was so deep.

To describe a little bit better my sentiment- they are an oil giant with tons of cash facing a crisis. I'd have expected a faster reaction. I'm aware it's not an easy task, but they hardly lack resources. I was chalking the slow movement up to bureaucracy.
Or produce an organism that can eat spilled oil.
> A surprising discovery from this name search was that there seems to be a certain name-iness to some words.

A while ago, I was testing just this assumption in the context of writing a plug-in for a writing program (think Scrivener, not TextMate). I spent a few weeks marking words, names and gibberish as "sounds like a character name", "sounds like a coherent proper/common noun that wouldn't do as a character name", or "is gibberish." I then fed this training data (about 100,000 data points) into a bayesian classifier. The results were okay—it would agree with me to about 80% accuracy—but I gave up on it because I didn't know enough about ML to improve the error, and brute-force scoring another 900,000 words myself just to get a possible 5% improvement seemed a bit bleak.

If anyone is interested in the data set, I could dig it out of storage; it's probably heavily biased toward my preferences in what constitutes a "good" name, though (my backup plan, if it turned out to be a completely subjective evaluation, was to get people to do about a hundred ratings through a website, and then cluster their "creative aesthetics" against others' to help them find people to work with.)
It totally depends on how much you raise, who your investors are, who YOU are, etc.

But your salary needs are a reflection of your commitment. i.e. if 3 founders raise $500k, $50k salaries give them a ~15k/month burn rate fully loaded, approximately. $100k salaries give them a $30k/month burn rate fully loaded. The difference is the ability to hire two solid ppl.

Which do you choose? Is your lifestyle more important than 2 hires? Alternatively, if you don't need to hire any more, how much runway do you shave by making $100k across 3 founders?

Investors also want interests to be aligned. Low pay early on means that you're motivated every day for growth (because revenue or a larger investment round means a raise). They'd certainly rather see their money invested in growth than in founder lifestyles.

Of course, every situation/investor/founder is different... But yeah, expect to take a big pay cut.
Google chart:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvg&chs=500&c...

I put 500k for the < 1 million people. I didn't know what to do with JFK, so I put him as 500k too. I duplicated Grover Cleveland so that the count would be correct. When I tried to add axis labels google said the url was too big.
For example: "Give me an example of this" can be a perfectly polite request in Chinese.
TamperData is ridiculously useful. I suggest everyone check it out.
There is a crack team of scientists on the project now who have no idea what to do. BP is fucked, and they know it. It doesn't matter how fast they didn't respond because nobody inside of BP or otherwise knows how to fix the problem.
>Why is Lyons so bitter?

People who say that other people are bitter are usually just bitter. The guy is a technology columnist and he talks about technology. What a huge surprise.

>And as developers, why should we be excited at a knockoff?

Humorously just yesterday Daring Fireball and other Apple apologists were pointing out that Google bought Android long before Steve Jobs had his iPhone epiphany. But yes, the iPhone is a knockoff of Windows Mobile, and numerous other phones that came before.

> Unlike Microsoft, Apple has not tried to force people to run its OS.

What. A. Load. Of. Shit.

Apple saw that they had a hit with the iPod and they hung onto "Mac only" for as long as they could, and remarkably it was fairly successful. It isn't accidental that iPhone development is Mac only. Apple does cross promotions with large brands to make iPhone applications, trying to build a world where not having an iPhone means a second tier world. Adobe's cross compiler was a huge threat to that.

Apple is worse than Microsoft ever dreamed of being. They got by with it because they were cute and tiny, but that time has passed. They don't get the free pass any more.

>I understand that some people don't like the situation they are in

Sounds like you're the one that doesn't like the situation he's in. But I'm sure you'll come into all of these discussions to set people straight.
Ask HN: Java Programming Book
Does anyone know of a great online programming book that I can use to begin learning Java? I am going to be taking computer programming courses next year and want to get ahead of myself! please let me know what you think! Thanks!

Something that has good explanations
I worked in Affinity Lab in DC for about 7-8 months, and I loved it. I ended up moving out of DC, and hence left Affinity Lab.

Working there was great. There were lots of people there working on all sorts of creative projects. The creative energy was a great motivating factor, and often times there were people that could help you through whatever business or technical problems you were facing (well, technical problems required someone to know what you were working on).
> Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial, to the point of nonexistent.

It seems like that to native English-speakers, because English, unique among Germanic languages, has nearly dropped its case system and has thus ended up with a more-or-less purely analytic grammar, which is similar to Mandarin. I'd like to hear how 'transparent' it is to a native Greek or Lithuanian speaker.

> One can argue that languages spread "hardness" in different aspects.

All languages need a certain amount of complexity or else nobody would be able to express real concepts in that language. It would be either a toy or an adjunct to some real language. (Compare SQL to Prolog, or pure regular expressions to Perl's extended not-regular-anymore expressions.)

To take a concrete example, human languages either have a complex case system (like Latin) or fixed word order (like Mandarin, or (to a lesser extent) English). The same information is conveyed either way: Which words go together, such as which verb or adjective is connected to which noun.

> For example you can tell if a word has something to do with the sea, even if you don't know it means "anchor".

How is this affected by Simplified Chinese? Is it less effective?
Icons for your web apps
Scapegoating is really easy in cases like this, after the fact everybody, including BP knows how it should have been done instead, but we are where we are.

Every time something like this happens we learn, and this time it may well prove a lesson so expensive that there will be a moratorium on this kind of operation in the future, simply because the cost of any failure is higher than what we as a species, and as stewards of the planet can afford.

Even the drilling of the relief well is not 100% sure to work, the timescale on which it is happening is slow enough that significant damage to the ecology around that leak, and possibly much more than that will occur.

I hesitate to even speculate about how bad this could get.

But given the fact that there always was a risk the only question you can ask is how much difference any of that would have made and the answer is probably not very much.

This is uncharted territory, and as much as I'm pissed off that this happened (because I don't think they should be drilling there in the first place!) I'm not going to point the finger and say they could have done that much better.

Anybody that thinks they could have done better should start a deep sea drilling company tomorrow.
i'm hoping the viacom emails were typed on blackberries.
Chinese major who later worked for years as a Chinese-English interpreter and translator replying here.

Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial

He didn't say that, because Chinese is chock-full of difficult grammar. Take a look at the page count (847 pages) of the book A Grammar of Spoken Chinese by late Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao. His book is thorough, but by no means exhaustive. Li and Thompson's Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (713 pages) is familiar to many English-speaking students of Chinese. It too is far from exhaustive. Many of the mistakes made in speaking standard Chinese by second-language speakers that impair understanding are GRAMMAR mistakes, and that is true even of native speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects") who don't know Modern Standard Chinese as a first language. And almost half the population of Chinese, according to a survey by the Chinese government, self-rates as unable to converse in Modern Standard Chinese.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...

Moreover, despite what that article says, written Chinese characters are frequently a barrier to understanding among Chinese citizens from different regions too. There is first of all the problem of high rates of illiteracy in China, because of the old-fashioned writing system Moser mentions. Many literate Chinese persons tend to write in the regional vocabulary and grammar--there is that again--of their native Sinitic language when they write, and I have seen numerous occasions of Chinese people traveling out of region and not being able to read hand-written signs at markets or even printed official signs posted by the local government.
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The absolute profit numbers are misleading. These companies have huge capital investments, so the return on capital invested is not excessive but about average for other capital intensive industries. All companies try to reduce cost, so no surprise that oil producers want to minimize "serious financial drain", i.e. the cost, of maintaining pipelines, etc.
Let me put it this way: if you have any BP stock I suggest you sell it, and if you plan on eating fish in the next 10 years start your prayer wheels and hope that someone comes up with something really smart that hasn't been tried and discarded yet. If you live in the south-east of the United States and you have survived hurricane Katerina then I really sympathize because nobody should have to live through one, let alone two disasters of this magnitude in a single lifetime.

Out of control doesn't begin to describe the problems they are having there.

They can hardly plug the hole with cash, that's not the problem. The problem is a viable solution.

When someone suggests exploding a nuke to see if that will cure it and he's not immediately sent off to the funny farm you know there is a real problem. Especially when you think of what could happen if that option were to fail.