skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a completely anecdotal data point, I read a bunch of tech news sites (preddit, newsyc, engadget, etc), but I had never actually clicked through to read anything about Powerset, and had no idea that they'd been working for a year or two.

It's (just about?) an impossible task to get anyone to switch from Google, so the _only_ chance they have is to imply that they are in fact different, much better, and yes, Google-killers. So, while I agree with the article in that the results aren't there yet, the only way they're going to get any traction is if they're simultaneously making the product better and screaming very loudly that they're awesome.

So, while they may have under-delivered, I don't think they've over-promised, because I still haven't heard any message, and still don't care much. I'd be more than happy to give'em another 30 seconds in 6 months to see if it's better than "key words wikipedia".
They had to take the 20 millions. why? 20 millions for an eye candy, that's a lot of money already. IMHO.
http://www.pokerup.us
Poker-based social community. Find and create home poker games, online poker games. Poker league management and promotion for pub poker and online tournaments.
I had a friend who really hurt his wrists from coding too much, and he switched to a Wacom tablet. It was a little strange to watch him mouse around a webpage with the Wacom pen, but he claims it helped him tremendously.

Otherwise, learning the keyboard shortcuts for your favorite programs might go a long way to help you reduce strain.

Also, I haven't personally used it, but I like the concept of this mouse, it slides into your laptop's PCI slot (probably not too good for the wrists, though):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000G1D8HU/ref=cm_rdp_produ...
Return of the Statically Typed Languages
"Drop the mouse altogether and learn VIM/Emacs."

Seriously, you can almost completely avoid having to use the mouse. I have tons of key shortcuts set up in Gnome, I call all my programs from the keyboard, etc, so it's not that hard. Plus, it will save you a lot of time.
Omnigraffle for wireframes etc. http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/pro/
Twitter Digest - read Twitter updates in a more manageable fashion
The creator's blog post on it:
http://blog.persistent.info/2007/08/twitter-digest.html
Of course all of you Hacker News Monday morning quarterbacks have taken a website from launch to Twitter's current level of traffic, right? If so, please let us know which site that was so we can compare your experience and your decisions against those of the Twitter team. If not, perhaps you should go and do that first before sounding off on Twitter. No, I'm not a friend of Blane Cook's, nor am I a Twitter apologist -- I don't even use the service. But I do respect startup founders and builders far more than their critics, and I know that website architecture -- like most things -- is always easier in hindsight.
For perspective, please read the Hot or Not story in "Founders at Work," then read Teddy Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" quotation that Arrington is so fond of. (And yes I realize that reference is ironic given that Arrington started the pile-on against Blaine Cook. Arrington should try to remember that "it's not the critic that counts.")
A new breed of tinkerers mix science and craft to make things both goofy and grand.
Cool stuff; there are lots of other techniques that also do pretty well.

This really highlights how insensitive we are to color fidelity in images. The granularity of the marked images is very low quality, but, the results are very good. This is the same reason that for JPG and other image compression techniques, you can downsample the hell out of the color components with no apparent degradation to the image quality.
If I'm going to read an opiniated piece, it might as well be insightful.
That'll be $120; no need to tip me.

http://www.digitalfilmtools.com/powerstroke/
Myths, Lies, and Truths about the Linux kernel
anyway, http://zemanta.com is doing a good job in this area...
Some of those observations were interesting, but I'm not sure how they fit together, and I didn't come away with a clear understanding of the author's arguments for statically typed languages...
Clickable links:

The first round:http://audiblesmirk.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/tournament-1st-...

The second round: http://audiblesmirk.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/tournament-roun...

The third round (quarter finals): http://audiblesmirk.wordpress.com/2008/04/03/tournament-semi...

The fourth round (semi-finals): http://audiblesmirk.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/java-tournament...

The fith last and final round: http://audiblesmirk.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/java-tournament...
Google previews Friend Connect. Run Open Social apps on your web site.
http://www.merawaala.com
create,share and embed comparisons .. kind of like a youtube for comparisons
Indeed. This is downright inflammatory.
http://www.euroreports.net/

Free Websitesubmission By H. Google Earth Community My Promotion And Sponsors Immobilier Et Annonces Immob News, Videos, Images Gratis Telefonieren Und Grat Charlie Bit My Finger - Agai Das Ende Der Demokratie Literature Alternative Medicine, Duthel Which Secret Service Is Watc More Than 10 Million Custome SWISS 'Air' Is Not Switzerla Thinking The Unthinkable Ping Now Free By H. Duthel Streets Of London Hostonnet.com DE GAULLE, Charles Bei Uns Finden Sie Was Sie.. H. Duthel, Author, Philosoph Addictomatic Www.lycos.de YouTube - MarleneDuthel's Ch News About News Gadget News Author And Philosoph Bestseller Adressaufkleber - Ask YC: Have You Built A Goo H. Duthel Released New Book: 20Minutes.fr, Information En
Global Secret - I Global Secret - III History and philosophy of.. AgoraVox le média citoyen Die Herausforderung “Man’s of Honor” Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend
Being able to run your social apps outside of Facebook or Hi5 and on your web site seems incredibly powerful.

The example they give is guacamole lover who wants to build a community around her guac recipe site. She adds a OpenSocial a widget that lets her friends rate the recipie postings, if you opt-in those reviews get pushing pack into your news feed.

Their demo site:

http://loveguac.com/guac1.htm

Seems like Orkut is doing all the widget parsing/generation. Curious how that works with FB/Hi5 and how they deal with security since the widgets are js.

Here is the video introducing Friend Connect:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIEwUxMrJ4Y

And finally here are some examples Google gives, can't wait to start playing with this:

* A cooking site - Review a recipe and provide comments which clarify or improve it. Add a recipe to a social recipe box that appears across multiple cooking sites.

* A musician's site - Post pictures from your latest concert on the band's site, and communicate directly with your fans.

* An extreme sports site - Play a motor cross game, then compare your score to friends and other site members.

* An academic site - Discuss and review articles in context with colleagues and the broader community. Filter the discussion to colleagues only, or widen your view. Forge connections with new participants whose comments seem particularly insightful.

* A shopping site - Read expert reviews and tips right next to the camera you're thinking of buying, and find a friend who has already purchased the same item.

* A philanthropic site - Cultivate a community around your cause, post pictures at fund raisers, let donors connect, and involve their friends.
Emacs Tagging
Great, check it out!
Steve is talking about the "link-time inlining" (see the original quote) which is not supported by any mainstream C compiler that I know.

Inlining in the same translation unit is possible though its application is too limited to explain why C is faster than dynamically-typed languages.
That's also true of Xobni, or any new application. Plugins may face a lower uptake barrier, but it depends on the organization. MS effectively forces businesses to upgrade Outlook every few years, and without the stick (and carrots) that MS wields, it can be a challenge to get anything new into a business.

But, it's true that a small company can deliver to the people who will upgrade or install new tools in ways that a large company generally cannot. But the slow adopters are going to be slow adopters no matter who builds the application.
Is Harvard Just a Tax-Free Hedge Fund?
No, they are a university.
I am not saying that other manufacturers are not capable of building stuff that way. But they don't let you assemble your desired PC via web. OK, except maybe for powernotebooks, but I don't know them well enough to trust them yet.
My understanding is that Joyent, Twitter's host at the time, helped them significantly with the dtrace stuff.
Yeah, this guy is clueless. I could do a point-by-point on how he's wrong, but I don't have time to nitpick everything. What about this: Emacs users need to evolve? To what?

There is nothing else like emacs. Sure emacs lisp could use some help (some of us are working on adding coroutines for parallelism), but that doesn't mean it's dead. If anything else were like emacs but better, we would all ditch it.

Summary: this guy is fucking clueless. He's an IDE-wielding weenie that has only ever used Java. Great.
His argument boils down to "I like Java, and saying that it's only around for political reasons is wrong. After all, I like it! Yeah, it's true I've never bothered learning much about anything else, but still... my opinion is somehow relevant because I have a blog."
MooTools is a fantastic library, with very solid motion tweening and decent documentation/examples. jQuery is also a very solid library.
Just curious, what sucks about Prototype? It basically fixes everything that's broken with Javascript, which is about all I want my framework to do.
Simple fun site to review companies.

http://www.pingmycompany.com
Highly recommend Omnigraffle for functional specs / wireframes. You can just move UI around so much faster in a wireframing / diagramming paradigm.

Gimp / Photoshop is good for the visual design phase of things. This is really the way to get to the next level of polish.
The iPhone Effect
accidentally downmodded, sorry
Inbox backwards.
This must be the most stupid reply I've read on this site. Read pgs essays? Which one? How is that related to marketing? Is pg a God where reading his essays will lead to salvation?

Someone asked a specific question about marketing. If there is an essay by pg related to this, then link to the article or STFU.
"Caching does not work if the data is different for everyone."

I think caching can work, but at a different level of granularity. Rather than cache a person's full timeline, which is composed of multiple sub-feeds (each of which requires a database query), cache the data from the sub-feeds themselves, then recombine them on every page load. This would significantly lower the number of database queries, as each cache element would be invalidated only when its "owner" sends a tweet. This solution would be much more CPU intensive on the application servers, though, and Ruby may not be the best tool for the job if that were the case.
By a Gamer for a Gamer - jdome
E-loanshop.com - Loans, Personal Loans and Consolidation Loans.
E-loanshop offers a huge range of consolidation loans, loans, and personal loans. Bad credit history? They can still give you a loan for that special holiday!
The Failure of Cambrian House
I think although the crowd may produce interesting creative ideas, it needs the energy and the determination of some few people to make a project succeed. Your opinions?
Thank you for linking to that. I found it incredibly fascinating and it got my gears turning.

The similarity between the mechanics of sleep, and the mechanics of the 'disconnected from inputs' model-building phase (which I call 'dreaming') of Restricted Boltzmann Machines* is astonishing.

(see for example Geoffrey Hinton on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=90154).
Writing, Briefly
I think it's a positive sign that some of Google's initiatives don't make much money (yet?). It shows that Google is taking risks.
Well, one of the things you need to do is to ensure you set the right expectations in the people you work with (whether clients or otherwise). If you know that you can't work 100% all the time, don't set yourself up to deliver as if you could. Make sure deadlines are appropriately fuzzy and flexible, and take on the kind of jobs where this is appropriate.

For instance, one of my clients is quite happy to be flexible as to when I do the work for him, because I always do get it done and get it done faster, better, and cheaper than his other alternatives.

Finally, when in a down phase, what I find is I can't concentrate on "big stuff" - things like coding a big piece of functionality, that requires a lot of concentration and follow-through, and I simply can't summon the motivation to do it when I'm in a trough. But there are many other things that need to be done in life (particularly if you're running your own business) and a programming 'down' phase is a great time to power through those on auto-pilot... things like paperwork, blogging, reading, calling on people (clients or not), tidying up your office/home, doing some sport, etc.

Daniel
Wow. I am deeply impressed by that.
First time reading this. I found it completely amazing.
I wrote about my take on this site..."Inquisitr - I am Inquisitive!"

http://bonchibuji.blogspot.com/2008/05/inquisitr-i-am-inquis...
Session variables without cookies
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now if i was an investor, i would buy in.
Wow, you managed to find the one remaining page on paulgraham.com that hadn't been submitted before.
"who president france" also gives worse results. It seems to work best when you type: {who, what, when, why} <sequence of words in page>

If this is the case then users would require the least training and get the maximum benefit if Powerset had a pull-down menu with {who, what, when, why} before the familiar search box.
By accident. Stumbled across this essay via another site (Venture Hacks I believe), so I submitted it. Lo and behold, it hasn´t been done before.
Thank you for posting this on YC! This is exactly the crowd to post this for! We're nerds so we must like space, right?
Photoshop and Illustrator here as a Windows guy.
Persevere: JSON Storage / Application Server
Awesome job. Pie charts are generally not the way to go, though.
I think some of these projects are better than whats out there. This one is pretty interesting IMO.
Look - raising it from $9 a year to $50 wouldn't deter people from squatting/parking. Think of it from a parker's perspective: you have a portfolio of 1000 domains and, on average, each domain makes you $200 a year. You currently pay $9/yr per domain leaving a net profit of $191,000 ($200,000 - $9000 in fees). Changing it to $50 per registration definitely means you make less profit but you still clear $150,000 a year so you shrug your shoulders and do it.

However, changing from $9 to $50 for someone who owns one domain as family website, for example, means a lot. You'll lose a lot of people since $50 is real money and $9 can be thrown away (in a lot of people's minds). Of course, when these people don't renew their domains because it's too expensive, the squatters buy them and now you have even more squatted domains.

So there's no easy answer to the problem...
I didn't much agree with this guy's post, but here's where he really lost me:

"Javascript is on the verge of becoming part of the assembly language family, and toolkits like GWT are making sure that this will happen before too many developers join the pool of low level language victims. I'm sure you can relate to that stigma."

In the first place, JS is a neat little language that, with a few (okay, a lot) more libraries could easily serve as a replacement for Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. Categorizing it as 'low level' or 'assembly' -like seems like a terrific mistake.

In the second place, the assumption that someone would rather work with Java/GWT than JS seems a little provincial. His point seems to be that he would rather code Java than JS, GWT makes that possible so .... everyone will use the tools he prefers. I think there's a flaw in there, somewhere.

In the third place, what 'stigma' is associated with the 'assembly language family', and/or what makes someone a 'victim' of a 'low level' language? Everything has its place, and while it's only rarely useful, a background in ASM is an excellent foundation for a programmer's knowledge. ASM is also useful for solving the occasional nasty bug, understanding security vulnerabilities, working with bytecode, and reverse engineering for fun and profit.

The third point may be minor, but it really poisons the whole article, for me.
they shoulda shown fun recolorings. like making people's faces orange
What is wrong about powering America?
Yeah, I mean this is what Im so surprised at. This kind of capital invested in a university research environment would have produced so much more, and I should know.
Don't you see that Google is just too good company in the sense of (http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html). YouTube is a charity.
Not big or world changing but something I would have thought people would find useful. It's a mortgage calculator that actually works out the useful numbers for you, i.e. repayment costs taking inflation into account, discounted periods, extra payments and a nice graph at the end:

http://www.maggenhoof.co.uk/mortgage
Who cares about your homework? You should be saving the world instead.

(Hope this helps.)
My hairdresser is from Korea. His name? "D".

Beat that!
You can still play nethack. But you'd better not start that habbit.
But, we like to reserve one character identifiers for variables used in loops and such, right?
Hi-tech tool spots child drinkers
Humans are extremely sensitive to color fidelity. Look closely as those processed images.

You can tell that something is "off" about them, because while the algorithm is extremely good, it can't reproduce the true color gamut of reality, or even of a low quality jpeg that is based on a real photograph.
Protect Your Files With TrueCrypt 5.1a On Debian Etch (GNOME)
i wouldn't go so far as to say it saved twitter
So Much for Crowdsourcing
Mathematics in Movies
Ya, but I forgot the link since I haven't visited it in a while. :)
animation might be an interesting direction to go in.

great concept, i'm glad some crowd picked it up. seems like something 4chan or ytmnd would dig.
Ask YC: Share purchase reversal?
I worked for a company that gave me 5% in equity stock. I didn't like the way things were going at the company so I decided to sell my stock and move on.

A guy agreed to purchase 1% of my shares, and has paid 62.5% of the agreed amount.

Throughout last year and this year I called him and asked when he would be paying the balance.

In March he said that the company is not going too well, and he doesn't have any money to pay now.

Today I got a call from him where he told me that he wants to void the contract. Does this mean that he wants his money back? Is this legal? This is 11 months after the original agreement.
"But seriously, if you're going to do a comparison at least go apples-to-apples and site-restrict to wikipedia."

That might seem logical from a technical point of view, but your users will want to find answers, not search wikipedia articles.
that's simply the mysterious way in which 4chan operates. but it's a good observation. maybe this tool can attract a different niche audience if there was a way to create a fresh, empty canvas forum that wouldn't intersect with the current website in too many ways.
WorldWide Telescope Launched (by Microsoft Research)
What are the Keyword Matching Options in Google PPC Services?
Google AdWords is one of the most popular Pay per Click advertising programmes on the web today. Millions of advertisers all over the world use it to get their sites listed on top ranks of paid search listings.
It would be interesting to see it used on genuine black and white photos rather than desaturated colour originals...
Why are food prices rising? [flash]
Microsoft star gazing
OK, I'll be the first to admit... I had to look up the meaning of "anaphora".
He uses too many semi-colons for my liking.
Article summary: Programming Windows threads is easier because there are less datatypes and therefore less functions to learn.

I disagree with this. If you're doing multi-threaded programming then you've already reached a certain level of complexity and you're probably concerned about performance. An larger threading API is the least of your concerns. I also find it humorous that some of the comments state that POSIX threads on Windows are slower. How would you implement POSIX threads on Windows other than using the Windows threading API? How could this ever match performance?

For an objective comparison, I refer to some very vague and outdated performance statistics from QNX. A long time ago, QNX had a benchmark to showed that Windows could perform 10,000 context switches per second, Linux could perform 100,000 context switches per second and QNX could perform 400,000 context switches per second on the same hardware, which was approximately 100MHz Pentium specification.

Parties including IBM have made significant improvements to Linux. This would close the gap between Linux and QNX. However, I find it hard to believe that Windows could outperform Linux on the basis that Windows has to support some awful legacy code with complete binary compatability.
Load Balancing & QoS with HAProxy
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html explains public relations. You'd get addition benefit from reading the whole set of essays.
Why the Enterprise Won’t Solve the Web 2.0 Revenue Problem
Interesting and quite useful. I have made so many false starts on starting a blog of my own, that I have lost count. Being a founder of a software startup, I know I have to start blogging sooner than later, but (this may sound really weird) so far I have not had the courage. This essay will help me organize my thoughts and take me closer to "putting pen on paper"
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Mozilla Stealth Data Project Could Be Just What The Internet Needs
As your attorney, the best advice I can offer is to get a better attorney than me.

So why are you asking here instead of asking an attorney? I'm assuming it's because you don't want to pay a ton of $$$.

I've touted this a few times on here: Pre-Paid Legal plans for $17/mo can really help in situations like this. I have one (their small biz plan) and it's ideal: I never have to think about whether it is affordable to ask an attorney for advice or to review a doc/contract.

Link: http://wserver0.prepaidlegal.com/newCorp2/legal_plans/legal_...

I don't work for them or sell their plans but I think their service is worth every penny.

my advice would be to sign up, call an attorney, and get some solid legal advice. Cancel it the next month if you wish - they don't require contracts.
Advice for amateur mathematicians on writing and publishing papers
Hacking Sides of Builldings (and Sidewalks)
when i was in college i created the site, icantspelldostoevsky.com.

it was kind of a play on words, there was never a correct way to spell dostoevsky, and since he was an existential man, the site was meant as a philosophical discussion playground. think wiki for philosophy, but at the time wikimedia was not around yet, and i used bulletin board software.
Sound Machines Direct
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I didn't get that impression from this comment. It just struck me as someone very interested in talking about Lisp.
So you're not using aif or awhen I bet.