skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Automatic generation of interesting thing to read?

While I believe in the tech of statistical NLP, I question whether the quality of news articles automatically generated from other news and social media will be all that interesting.

I spend about 3 to 4 hours a week reading through Twitter, HN, and Reddit: half is to waste time in an enjoyable way and half is to find interesting articles to read, new useful projects, etc.

For me, Twitter is the most targeted because I follow people into the same tech that I am into. I also have several blogs I follow closely. A big part of it is enjoying authors' online personalities and having occasional email dialogs.

Can an automated system replace part of this experience? I don't think so.

What automated systems can do is cluster reading material and make good recommendations - but this is different than what (it sounds like) Wavii is trying to do.
This goes more into web marketing, depending on what product you're selling.

If you're looking for just "sales", Adwords is great because you can target very precisely who you want visiting your site, as long as you accumulate enough data to understand what's working and what's not. I currently manage a $150k monthly adwords account. For example, a small/mid sized account could have 20k keywords, out of those, 1k will get clicked on per month, 200 would be the "top 50% traffic" keywords, and out of the 200, maybe 50 will generate sales/leads for you. Those are the things you need to understand on a monthly basis, and as soon as you pick up the pattern for which words are the 200/50, increase bids on the 50 and get rid of the ones you're spending a lot of money on and not converting to sales/leads.

If you're looking for just traffic over a long term, I'd recommend the following:

1. SEO - if you can rank for popular keywords relevant to your site, you'll have new visitors from search engines every day. Depending on your SEO strategy, you can be targeting 5 "top tier keywords" that're tough to rank, or 100 "2nd tier keywords" that requires effort, but not all all-day every-day type efforts. Or you could try to optimize dynamically for hundreds of thousands of product names using good SEO practices on your dynamic pages. Obviously link acquisition is a big part of it as well.

2. Link acquisition - getting a link from a popular spot can cause you a "spike" in traffic for a day or two, and if you can keep writing "link-generating content", you can try to repeat the traffic spike from different sources. There're some "theories" on what type of content people link to, such as breaking news before everyone else, top 10 lists, controversy, useful free tool, etc.

3. Brand awareness - getting your name out so everyone (in your target demographic market) knows your brand name. In that case, I'd recommend buying banners - most work on a CPM basis, which is just a fancy term for "Cost per 1000 banner views". Depending on which source you go with, and how targeted of a website/demographic you want to go with,1000 views of your banner will usually cost you anywhere between 30 cents to $5.

Of course, all this depends on the product/service you provide. If all you do is sell car batteries online, then there's no real reason for people to come back to your site once they buy one.

Good luck,
-- Paul Zhao
Google vs. Microsoft: The battle of Ormandy
"I will pay for actual legal counsel before entering a contract"

That's easy to say - when it comes down to getting a lawyer to review something or making payroll that months it starts to look a bit trickier - especially when you realize that having a lawyer review something actually only provides a very limited form of protection. Of course, if you have external investors you tend to use lawyers more as you have to be seen to be performing due diligence and, of course, you simply have more money.
Totally NSFW. WTF? Bukowski does nail the entrepreneur ethos here though.
Imagine if all your twitter data was tagged by content and author and there was an easy, even automatic way to find new followers based on those tags. Seems like it could add value on top of twitter, given the right number of users.
Keep up with full-disclosure, dailydave mailing lists, conferences, etc and security guys on Twitter. That's it. Oh, and might as well break some stuff while you're at it ;)
Reality: Old Spice sales are down since ad campaign began
"Screen Scraping" seems to be a sort of misnomer here. Essentially they are just loading a URL and extracting the information from whatever is returned. Whether that happens intelligently, or if they are just making specific scrapers for each bank, I have no idea.

But basically, 'look for the number in this div region, this is the account balance'.. etc.
it's really obvious when you're banned.

as an example, I'm banned. enjoy this [dead] post!
I'm not surprised that he's finding Haskell's static typing to be a hurdle. I had the same experience when I started learning OCaml after years with Python and Scheme - it took me a couple days to think in, rather than fight with, its type system. Nowadays, I strongly recommend reading _The Little MLer_ before starting with Haskell or OCaml - it does for static typing what _The Little Schemer_ does for Lisp.

Its type checks can be incredibly useful for finding code needing updates during refactoring, automatically verifying things that would otherwise require writing reams of tedious tests, etc. It's a trade-off, though - you're deliberately structuring your code so that your assumptions can be mechanically checked. This is very much a matter of taste, and I understand having strong opinions either way. (I go back and forth on it.)

Stupid type systems suck hard, though - smart static typing (ML and Haskell) and full dynamic typing (possibly with optional static annotations) both work well, but in between lies pain and misery.

Also, look at the follow-up: (http://tourdelisp.blogspot.com/2008/03/farewell-haskell.html) I feel like he barely tried.
I think the analysis here is close but perhaps slightly off.

1. Your company has to have freemium pricing. - This is a factor that affects conversion rate. It's not so much about freemium as it is about friction. I think the idea here is that you have to have a more friction free offering for the referral, specifically the offer that the person being referred sees. If they get offered something a little extra than what they could get on their own it should be more appealing.

2. Your product has to have wide appeal. - I think what you really mean here is that your customers need to have people they can make referrals to. This is obviously a big factor in the number of referrals made. Who are your customers? A businessman learning Japanese on his own might just not know anyone that would use the product other than himself. Students might know lots of other students who might be interested - which are you dealing with?

I also like the idea tomjen3 mentioned about incentives for both parties. This helps encourage people to make the referral, do it through the system , and helps the person being referred feel some form of obligation to the referrer and see that they can get something out of it.

I'm not saying that "you're doing it wrong" or that if you make some changes it will work, just that maybe there are some deeper reasons as to why it won't work in your situation.
Ask HN: Flipboard + Flattr - would you use it?
Hey everybody,

While taking a study brake I watched a video interview with the Flipboard CEO Mike McCue (Link: http://goo.gl/PIID), while listening it struck me.

What if you combined Flipboard and Flattr? Imagine Flattr integrated in all the content you're sharing (coming from publishers, not facebook photos etc.) and every share or like would "cost" you 1 cent. It sounds strange, but we all like HN because of the quality of the articles posted (and of course the discussions in the comments). Aren't there a couple of articles where you thought "Wow, this is very well written" or "Wow, so much good information in here"? Wouldn't you pay just 1 cent for it? If 1'000'000 people would pay 1 cent, the publisher of the article could make 10'000 bucks, for a one page article. The money collected from the sharing would be fairly distributed to the publishers, after Flipboard and Flattr cut their piece out.

Heavy "sharers" could book a package, like 15 bucks a month, where they can share as much as they want. These 15 bucks get also equally distributed to the content publishers (if you share 80% NYT articles, NYT gets 78% [if Flipboard and Flattr take each 1% off]).

Why am I writing this? Because I think it is an idea, which could work out for the publishers and great companies like Flipboard and Flattr.

Am I doing a Flattrboard now? Nope, just wanted to share with you guys this idea.

So why am I posting this on HN? Because I think MAYBE somebody from Flattr or Flipboard reads this and thinks, hey why not? (And then of course indirectly, I save the whole publishing industry, yeah, no problem :-)

Jokes aside, what do you guys think and where do you see the problems in this idea?
I wonder if creating a local wifi hotspot with a captive portal would be a good way to jump-start these hyper-local groups. So a user logging onto the local open wifi hotspot is re-directed to the local group, which might be Yahoo or Google group - or even a local noticeboard/forum that is accessible only from that hotspot.
You're deep in tautology land. Of course people that had a good experience with startups had a good experience with startups.
You need to remember that people go through ups and downs in their lives. Some years, months, weeks are more productive and successful than others. Some people have all their success early and then struggle later in life. Others are late bloomers.

My point is this: don't get discouraged by all the great stuff you see on HN, thinking that you don't have your best years ahead of you. You can be as articulate, and insightful, and successful as many of the people you admire here.
We're all just drops in an ocean of talented people. Work hard, work constantly, learn always, learn from everything, practice, practice, practice, get a hobby that's not development work, exercise regularly, read classic literature, learn some philosophy, business, math, art....basically follow the model of the Renaissance man, but molded for today's world, don't be afraid of failure (learn always), hate failure, start at the bottom and work your way up so you can learn everything about how the world works, be an opportunist, don't be afraid to step a bit outside of your comfort zone.

Hey, you're just 25, try and relax a little.
Apparently, he did:

> I figured Apple might appreciate a vulnerability disclosure prior to public discussion, which I did on June 17, 2010 complete with technical detail. A gleeful auto-response came shortly after, to which I replied asking if Apple was already aware of the issue. I received no response after that, human or robot.
I recently had a daughter and I've found that there's 2 things going on:

1) I'm generally more focused and efficient when I work since time is more scarce.

2) I'm more motivated now since I've got the little one depending on me. The instinct to provide for another is a powerful one.
Most "screen scraping" these days is just extracting content from web pages.

1) Write a program that can load webpages as if it was a user of the site.

2) Have it save everything it loads.

3) Write a program that can extract the data you care about out of the html and put it into a more useful format (or into a database or something)

Many languages have libraries for this or you can use a tool like cURL or wget. I do this a lot with perl and the LWP family of modules but the sites I work on don't use javascript or dom manipulation... There's so much javascript and ajax out there now though that I'm not sure if you can scrape those kinds of sites with perl.
"However, there are people way more talented than me"

Oh, and one thing that you have to learn to become comfortable with (or at least Zen about)...there is always somebody better at something than me.
Could you expand some more? Why do you 'love' JSP so much after your internship?
Can someone who has more of a network theory background say why this would be interesting?

From an NLP angle, both what they're doing (text classification) and how they're doing it (constructing a co-occurrence matrix) don't sound particularly novel nor do the network-theoretic properties they get from the unweighted, undirected form of the co-occurrence matrix seem to give any valuable insights.

As a comparison, see the
2009 workshop on text graphs
http://www.textgraphs.org/ws10/index.html
or papers such as Gaume et al (2007) Semantic associations and confluences in paradigmatic networks
http://w3.erss.univ-tlse2.fr/textes/pagespersos/gaume/resour...

Did I mention that the physics people totally ignore all the (interesting and non-trivial) existing literature on the topic? It's a bit as if a CS/NLP person would write a paper on an information-theoretic approach to physics while totally ignoring the physics bits in it.
The Truth really doesn't hurt! well said. I am an intern at an organization where everyone is about two decades older than me, and there is a lot I don't know. They don't know what they can expect me to know, and I don't know what they know. I send piles of questions out to anyone who has some spare time and have not once been chastised in return.
I did a (very shallow) evaluaton of the usual suspects in a private email not too long ago, but these things tend to be...well, shallow and very subjective. Great for creating flamewars, but not great for figuring out what to emphasize.

Also an observation I have made is that a lot of people who give advice on how to learn programming didn't learn programming the way they recommend. Well, at least not the programmers I know -- which may or may not be representative of larger populations.

For instance, I learned ver low level languages early; after basic I learned Z80 and x86 assembler and I regularly wrote whole sections of programs in inline assembly (well, hexadecimal op codes) when i learned Pascal later. I understood things like pointers, registers, stacks and clock cycles.

Today most people (including me) will say that people should focus on higher level languags first. To spend more time focusing on very basic language concepts and develop an understanding of algorithms and structure. But during job interviews I've come across candidates that make me doubt this. It is quite common to come across people who can't, say, do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much memory a given data structure will consume for N elements of average size M. One candidate even said that he believed that an object reference in Java was "about one byte long". (And yes, I did ask how many bits in case he confused it with "word length").

(Of course, with "high level" I am not suggesting that you should start introducing closures, type inference and various scoping types the first week. People need a bit of background to find those concepts meaningful)
It should be noted that Haskell's type system supports a form of dynamic typing: Existential types http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Existential_type (among other methods).

Also, static polymorphic types are a superior substitute for many uses of dynamic typing.
'Knocking on doors' won't work - that's just not how money is raised. Even if it got you meetings, the amount you need is lower than a Sand Hill Road VC invests. You need angel investors or 'seed stage' funds. Happily, there's lots of those. You also need a warm introduction from someone who knows them. This you can get through a little networking.

'Venture Hacks' is probably the best online 'how to raise money' resource.
It surprises me that he's complaining about case sensitivity and praising Prolog in the same post - Prolog is case
sensitive, too. All variable names are uppercase. Lowercase names are atoms, what Lispers call 'symbols'. This is where Erlang got that from, by the way. (I like it, but I bet it really irritates some people.)
It doesn't make you any less of startup material at all, it just puts you in a different environment.

The original advice comes because when you're young and single, you are without obligations, nothing to lose, able to take more risks, being naive (which can be good and bad), and being agile both location wise and time wise.

Said that, if you do have a family, I think that has a set of it's own advantages such forcing you to manage time better, likely to go after ventures that are more likely to succeed, and having a family behind you for support.
SaaS and Cloud questions of the week 22/07
It demonstrates confidence in the person admitting to not know something. NOBODY is comfortable sitting there admitting to not knowing one thing after another after another. People are a lot more comfortable admitting ignorance when they don't expect to have to do it often.
Ask a user for his e-mail address (newsletter subscription) while he is waiting for a download. This works well for me.
Ask HN: Require governments to open source their code?
I recently learned that my city's web site [1] was upgraded at a cost of $75,000 [2].

Given the budget, the work described is not impressive. But as a developer, I understand that there are lots of ways a project can become more costly than a set of features would imply.

This story got me thinking about whether it's a good idea to require more transparency with regard to information technology. I would love to see the code that was delivered so I could judge myself whether or not it's worth what was paid.

Does anyone know of any government bodies that require their contractors to open source their work?

I understand that there would be challenges to open sourcing this type of code. I the code wouldn't be designed to be generic enough to run in other environments, and I understand that there are changes that would have to be made in order to obscure sensitive details. But, I do think it would be possible for a government to open source its code base without exposing itself to attack.

As a hacker, would you like to see the code that powers your governments' sites? Would it lead to cost savings and higher quality code?

[1] http://www.louisvilleky.gov/
[2] http://www.wfpl.org/2010/07/21/metro-government-upgrades-website/
There are few things in math that are more important than lots and lots of wrong answers. There are good wrong answers, and there are bad wrong answers, but once you have lots of wrong answers you can start to see patterns and build intuitions.

With lots of wrong answers you can start to be selective and get some really good wrong answers, and then from lots of really good wrong answers you can get some answers that look really good.

Then maybe you can fix them.

Without playing, without building that intuition, you'll sit and stare at the problem and not see what to do, or where to start.

Play, get some wrong answers, then build.
"If it makes you feel any better, my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases."

I'd rather trade ten smart people for one person who ships.
First, that comment is so vague that it doesn't mean much and second, who in their right mind would want those rounds of financing to be invalid?

This case is irrelevant - it will either be dismissed or settled and will have ZERO impact on valuation or otherwise on existing investors.
"It surprises me that he's complaining about case sensitivity and praising Prolog in the same post - Prolog is case sensitive, too. "

There is a very simple explanation for that ? ;-)
The one thing I've learned doing this PhD is that progress IS other people. If you're the only one doing research on a topic, you'll never get anywhere. Similarly, if you launch an awesome website and nobody comes, you're in the same problem.

The wonderful thing about the hacker community and especially ycombinator is the openness and mutual support we offer each other. We create, and we create more with other people. And rather than fighting over what's there we just make more.

So your best bet is to identify your place and roll in this community. Understanding other facets of the R&D economy can only help you, but use this knowledge to figure out how you can contribute the most. The other people here are not your competitors, they are your friends, employers, employees, and colleagues. They raise the bar on you but give you a way to get there-- they're the most important people in the world.
I often see the same thing you do, but honestly it makes me feel better, not worse. Let me explain.

I've had a lot of successes (and failures) in my life. Some I've earned with a lot of hard work and failed attempts, and some just came from my "natural talent and ability" (that's a load of BS by the way). Can you guess which successes were far and away the most satisfying? Hint: it's the successes I had to kill myself trying to get.

Moral of the story? Don't ever feel bad when you recognize a difficult path lay in front of you. Don't feel bad when you see room for improvement in yourself. You have direction and purpose. And when you get there, the reward will be that much more satisfying for it.

You have a shot at success if you work hard for it. You have a shot at success and happiness if you work really hard for it.
This is similar to the very same issues that I struggle with from time to time. I have found, however, that the best way to counter such feelings is to change your mindset. While easier said than done, changing your mindset to a more positive one will do wonders while allowing you to accept the fact that, while you won't be the very best, you are indeed capable of getting close. It boils down to putting on metaphorical 'blinders'. Don't worry so much about what others are doing, but worry about what you're doing. Get passionate about what you do or a project that you are working on. If your projects or ideas consume your mind there's no place for worry.

I've also found that talking to others about your ideas that may not totally understand the tech world and explaining to them in terms they'll understand will help in boosting morale. Often times, people will see with fresh eyes what others (such as those of us here) would overlook otherwise.
Can you explain how the camera under discussion is “designed to be hard to use”?

For what it’s worth, I think it’s fantastic that some companies are experimenting with different digital camera designs. In the digital world, we don’t see the kind of design variety we saw in film cameras. Where are the digital TLRs? For that matter, where are the digital cameras (at all) where manual focus is a pleasant activity? Where are the digital rangefinders with quality lenses? Etc.

Why do digital cameras all need to include screens on the back?
Sort of anti-learning, pro-ego comment reading? :D
I am curious who the customers for this are? How come you need 250k if the price tag is pretty big at 500/month or 5k/month? Why do you need 250k?

If 250k for to last you 1 year (12 months) =~ 21k /month
or 4 medium business accounts or 40 small biz accounts.

If there was some product adoption like you hint at, I can't see why you would be asking for such a small amount of money.

I feel like you're hiding something... "Everyone who knows about the product thinks it's absolutely amazing." and "I do have paying customers"... so where is the money? Is your pricing/business model flawed and you've had some people try it really cheap but not willing to pay those advertised prices?

Another issue I see is "Customers who can understand it love it." Why don't others understand it? Looking at your site it wasn't exactly clear what it does. Does your mother understand it? How about your grandmother? If you can explain it to them, your target customers shouldn't be a problem.