skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you looked at work done on keyword extraction from academic literature?

http://www.nzdl.org/Kea/

It's simple and accurate.
http://www.thinkcomputer.com/software/exponent

Sure beats QuickBooks.
Not exactly sure what you mean but my answer is:

Neither before also knowing how many people attempted to cross each bridge, so I know the success ratio for each.
Maths Toys, inculding non-transitive dice
Is it true that switchgrass doesn't compete with food production? That is, is it really possible to grow and harvest it on land that isn't currently used by crops at a scale that makes it worthwhile?
New Google Service Makes Web Pages Social
Official details of Google Friend Connect
Why did this fail? Also, "Inventors of The Facebook"?
Why Apple Doesn’t Face the Innovator’s Dilemma
We used to think Google Maps KML search would dominate this area. Now I'm not so sure.
I started feeling that way also a while ago. Before the tech boom hit full-swing, the government contractors were the place to be to work with new technologies. It was at SAIC that I was able to get our division to implement a major project in Java.

In the past few years, though, the government contracting industry in DC has grown, but at the same time mired in ever increasing bureaucracy and antiquated tools, systems, and applications. The talent pool shifted quite a bit as well; before the tech boom, there were lots of technies in government, after that, most of them had moved on to commercial work, in many cases elsewhere.

It's nice to hear that there is something going on that will (hopefully) change that, but for now I'm enjoying the fact that Seattle has a much more vibrant tech community than DC, and Seattle's tech community isn't largely classified. :)
Maths plus 'geeky' images equals deterred students
Google "google-killer". Go ahead, I'll wait.

Powerset didn't apply this moniker. In fact, the PR has been trying to deflate it. The media hungers for the fall of the Big Guy, and any story that can play the angle of "The Next Big Thing" gets more hits than, "Check out this interesting startup!"

Maybe we could have managed it better, maybe we couldn't have. My department is engineering, so I don't know. But I'd like to pretend at least a few people are interested in the more moderate but still fascinating reality. :)
Random curiosity: did you change your name from Steve to Mark? If it isn't personal, mind sharing why?
Thanks James. We use Device Anywhere for testing (much wider range of devices in a real network environment, but not free). I'll give RDA a shot today.

The video is indeed too long. We'll make another one or even scrap it entirely.

J-Mango was built because SIM Toolkit/Java Apps were too hard for the kinds of UI's (read non-game) we wanted to build for our web sites. Doing testing for a week is not an option e.g. http://www.livebidr.com was built in about 10 hours with integration to mobile excl. the web design).

J-Mango takes care of the security aspects and device management for you without you having to to think about it (I know it's not shown in the video).

I'll post here when you I have an update. Thanks again for your feedback.
Welcome to the social mess?
Google App Engine tips & tricks
An uninsured Doctor in the House
I don't think RPG (Dick Gabriel) had anything to do with the actual Symbolics corporation, other than perhaps cheerleading from a distance. (I was working at MIT at the time, using the original AI Lab LispMs. Loads of fun.)
Snaptune suffers outage, end may be near
Obviously you are not a Java developer.
Apple: iPhone sold out online in US, UK -- 2nd gen model coming soon?
I can only think of a generic answer for your generic question.
Mostly because people don't know about it I think. And yes, that would be true.
This doesn't increase much the complexity...

Not thinking long about it (5 minutes), but this is how I would do it: Not going muhc into detail (I don't use twitter, just had a quick look at it).

1) 1 replicated system where you can fetch messages by id (complete body with who sent it, to whom, time, etc...)
2) User page: list of ids....
3) Private messages: list of ids...
4) When a new message comes in, write it to a queue. Process those ids and append the ids to the different pages. Multiple processes doing this (each process has a subset of users with the complete list of people following those users). One could add another layer to do bulk inserts.

Could be easily done in Memcachedb. One page view takes x + 1 memcachedb requests (x number of items on page). One can still optimze this by caching (static html pages which are deleted when a page is updated for a user). When inserting, replace existing data by adding the ids.

Everything is nicely seperated. (Eg pages for user 1-10000 are on server 1, etc... Messages can be nicely sperated as well).

Any thoughts on this? To twitter: hire me not him ;)
Why Bother?
Isn't it obvious? It's one character shorter. Just like one of Arc's guiding principles: "How code looks matters: short names, no swearing". Of course, since ones name is so frequently typed, one might prefer something even shorter. Like, "Joe", as a purely hypothetical example. I'm not sure one can go any shorter than three characters for a common male US name.

More seriously, I'm guessing Mark/Steven is of Asian descent (Bao make this seem more likely). They don't necessarily take their American name very seriously, since it's not their "real" name. I've known several Asian folks who've gone through a couple of Americanized names over the span of a few years. Their Japanese or Chinese or Vietnamese or Thai name stays the same throughout.
I've never really paid attention to this field, but I just tried the sample queries from http://20bits.com/2008/05/12/powerset-launches-verdict-meh/ in Hakia. As far as I can tell, Hakia only answers the last question correctly without having to dig through the results.
It'd be interesting if search engines allowed a rudimentary query language for stuff like that.
"The Facebook" was the original name of the site. thefacebook.com still links to it, actually.
I tried it maybe 2 years ago. I signed in a month later and noticed there was a vendor button (or something like it) where it listed my name and address in public location for everybody to see, along with that of all other users. I think it was a list of "vendors" (ie, to buy from other thinkcomp users.) The page was white. There was no way to disable it. I ended up e-mailing somebody to remove my name from the list.

I'm not sure that it beats QuickBooks, even though I haven't tried either product recently. And I wouldn't worry about Facebook.
I made a few calls. Turns out that this can be done, and with an AJAX edit-in-place to boot. It was so easy, my buddy coded it up in a few minutes while we discussed it over IM.

The feature is still pretty rough, really just a demo. But as a proof of concept, it's not too bad. For now, you can reduce your deposit balance and another account's balance automatically goes up by the same amount, in real time.

My buddy was in a bit of a hurry, so he hard-coded the target account--the one that rises--to be his own personal account. But he says that you can try teh feature out and send him feedback.

Amazing how quickly those folks cotton on to helping customers.
That's an interesting concept, treating product design as part of the marketing. It's a type of marketing that's actually useful to the end user.
In a way I'd say yes, since smartness is a hybrid of latent intelligence and how well a person knows the system they live in. The younger generation is not as smart in the critiqued author's system, so from the author's perspective they are relatively dumb. However, their objective dumbness is really a function of the effectiveness of the system they are a part of vs the effectiveness of the author's system.
Ask YC: Why is domain registration so cheap?
How does domain registration work? I mean who governs the process, issues 1-st level domains (like ".com"), besides ICANN? I mean who controls it?

I wonder why don't they jack up prices for domain registration significantly, like to $50/year, immediate pre-pay required without any "parking" bullshit - this will surely eliminate most squatters and free millions of decent domain names to the public. The names they are sitting on are ridiculous - nearly every combination of two English words is taken... The term "domain industry" is absurd: there shouldn't be industries built on top of something inherently non-for-profit...

So.. what stops them from doing that? From raising prices.
Yes, I did. It was previously something Chinese, which I changed to Steven a year or so before, and decided that it wasn't what I liked, so Mark is what I changed it to.

It is, however, my legally recognized name.
You should look for groups focused on recycling and sustainability and promote your site to them as a way to do that. Obviously don't be spammy, but if you get involved in the overall discussion then people will be interested in what you have to say about your site. Look around Google Groups for related communities.

If it's having trouble getting nationwide traction, just focus on a specific region initially (such as where you live) -- do some networking and get the site name out there.
I bet their factz are only based on simple keyword / keyword matching!

They are probably running out of money and need something to show off to get more funding! :)
Very impressive. I was going to say, "for a 15 year old", but that demeans the work--it's impressive, regardless of age, to build something like that in a short time frame with a small team.

And very astute from a business perspective. Every time there is an ad network acquisition my first thought is, "Wow, that must be the last one of those", because there have been so many, and all of the really well-known names have already been acquired. But the reality is that advertising on the web is becoming more important every day, and more valuable every day. It will continue to grow at the same pace as the Internet itself, and so any innovative advertising play is probably a smart one. Mobile advertising is also a world that is currently untapped.

And, interestingly, at least to me, advertising is a market where no matter how many established players there are, there's always room for someone to be "high touch" in a particular industry and be able to build a nice sized business. My brother-in-law works in old media advertising (which has been a well-settled market for over fifty years), and yet he's built an independent agency over the past twelve years or so that employs a number of people and makes plenty of money (where "plenty"==$millions). He does it by building relationships, and doing good work.
Which PR agency has Xobni hired? I like what they do, and I like what their PR firm does even better: Xobni is everywhere!
http://www.imageboard.net/top/

A forum designed without the use of text using just images to communicate with a built in editor and voting tools. Roommate and I made it as a toy for a programming competition, so we weren't expecting grand things. It got grabbed by the 4chan crowd so... uh... yeah. I linked to the best ones for a reason ;)
Apple designs a single, specific product with no more than two or three distinct configurations that looks good, functions well, and is sold at a premium, first and foremost. Then, they collect feedback from users, and make a change in one of their next patches or product releases.

I really believe Apple has user feedback as part of their entire strategy, but not necessarily before a product's release. They release something simple first, and then improve it continuously based on user feedback and sales numbers.

Other computer and electronics companies try to flood the market with as many products as possible, and seeing what sticks. The designs suck, software is rushed (if not still in beta) when the products are released, and lack an overall theme or brand among all products the company has, unlike Apple.
I second this. Very clean but also dramatic. Good work on the logo, too.

The "learn more" section under "advertiser" states that "Cadmium provides a deep data collection system". Did you design something of an analytics dashboard as well? If it looks half as nice as the rest of the site, I'd be impressed.
http://www.mygrub.net

Like Yelp, but more for blogging about restaurants, instead of writing reviews. I noticed that people were using the 'review' space in Yelp to write about their own personal experiences which were irrelevant to the review. So, I thought there could be a market for this.

This was one of the very first websites I created and left it more or less half finished.
'Ask not if the recession will affect your startup. Ask if your startup can affect the recession.'

(This is quote is being published by the author under Creative Commons Attribution license)
Well, some of them do raise prices:

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/05/12/why-yahoo-boostin...

... but prices can't rise too much, as long as costs remain low and there is a lot of competition.
1) ICANN & ICANN accredited registrars. 2) Market forces are stopping them from doing that (fortunately), though Network Solutions is still selling them at $35.

Domain tasting was the really annoying thing - that's fortunately been eliminated (Details on the problem: http://tinyurl.com/2ogtxb (bobparsons.com))
http://www.flugpo.com

We have this Social Classifieds Network that is trying to inject more trust in to online classifieds but it's hard to get above the noise of craigslist and kijiji. Not a failure yet but not a success either.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you're not an artist?

My mom paints. She doesn't do it because she has a point to make with her art or because she wants to radically change society. She does it because she enjoys it: it's relaxing, mentally stimulating, and ultimately satisfying.

Which incidentally are the exact reasons why I program. Sure, there's the whole money and career and changing the world thing, but when you get to the bottom of it I do it because it's fun.

I don't seem to be the only one who thinks so (http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html)
Memetics: The Nascent Science of Ideas and their transmission
That's a great idea, and a great domain name. You didn't go forward?
If we subject Hakia to the same (very limited) tests that the other article about PowerSet was using, Hakia often performs even worse.

For example, here's Hakia's results for "Who is the President of France?":

http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=who+is+the+president+of+f...
Al?
Yeah, please add that "what music do you program to" question to the FAQ if you're so kind.
No. There is no dilemma, and your question is nonsensical. You're all tied up in unrelated concepts: "Open Source", "end users vs. software developers", "money vs. chefs", "applications vs. tools"--all of these things are utterly orthogonal questions.

Open Source software can, and does, make money. Our products are 95% Open Source, and yet, our revenue is growing at a very rapid clip. MySQL was acquired for 500 million bucks. Red Hat had $300 million in the bank last time I paid attention and have made numerous acquisitions over the years. IBM makes plenty of money supporting Open Source products. Sun has Open Sourced everything they offer over the past few years--nearly everything Sun has invented is now available in an Open Source form. These companies are bigger than the majority of companies folks here at News.YC will build (not all, by any means).

Tools companies also make money. Sun and IBM and Oracle make loads of tools acquisitions...sometimes for tens or hundreds of millions. That aint chump change. There have been quite a few YC companies "betting on the come" of Ruby on Rails or Python Django or JavaScript taking a place alongside Java in the enterprise market. So far, Heroku is the most visible instance of that, but there will be others.

So, stop conflating a bunch of different questions, and things might begin to become more clear. Build something people want, and build a business on it if that's what you want to do. If you aren't passionate about end-user apps, then don't build them--you would very likely fail anyway. If you like Open Source as a development model, then emulate the success stories in that field (e.g. build something in a really big market, make the Open Source model work for you rather than against you by building a modular architecture that is easy to extend, make your users love you rather than want to fight you and fork your software, and figure out a way to monetize that doesn't piss off the community).
I'm a writer. When I write, I try to avoid things that have already been done for precisely that reason. I would hate to show somebody something that wasn't new and stimulating for THEM.

For me, a part of the fun of making art is creating things that other people truly, honestly enjoy. I think the same would occur with programming.
Novel pointing devices?
The RSI in my right hand is getting pretty bad recently. My arm aches all the time, and my fingers are sore when I use them. My thumb joint has started clicking :-(

I finally figured out what it is I'm doing this time (there have been times before, when I've had to adjust after getting into a bad habit). This time I'm exclusively using the track-pad on my macbook-pro and, to get better accuracy, I'm resting the weight of my hand on the tip of my thumb while I use my forefinger to mouse.

Yeah, I know it sounds dumb. It was completely unconscious though - I've only just noticed I do it.

I think I need to get a new pointing device. I've tried many normal mice, and I went through a period of liking track-balls for a while... is there anything else that might be better? Something different from all of the above?
Couple of options here:

1. The Microsoft deal fell through, and their stock plummeted

2. The Google deal never materialized, either

3. Q1 ad revenues, while up YOY, seem to have slowed with the economy

4. Since it only applies to existing customers, and not new ones (although, after the first year, wouldn't a new customer become an "existing" customer?) it's the old cable TV trick. Come on down for $9.95 (for the first twelve months only). Extended use may cause diarrhea, headaches and dizziness. If symptoms persist, call a doctor.
Encyclopedia of computational intelligence
Welcome to capitalism.
Not that it was built to change the world, but I've personally been very happy with http://www.iheartquotes.com/

It was a two day project to bring the Unix fortune program to the web. You can browse online but I've gotten more use out of the API which I turned into a Twitter bot and include in my .bash_profiles.

The Paul Graham tag:
http://www.iheartquotes.com/tags/paul_graham

On Twitter
http://www.twitter.com/iheartquotes

In my .bash_profile
curl -m 3 http://www.iheartquotes.com/api/v1/random
Writing your own Toy OS
Colorization Using Optimization (impressive results)
Read this some time ago, and disagreed with the depressive look at things.

I often go through phases where I don't feel like doing anything. That's more than made up by the fact that when I do feel like working, I work harder and faster than 20 people.

Peaks and troughs are not a problem so long as you learn to deal with them.

Daniel
This had nothing to do with our PR firm, just a happy user and a follow-up from a blogger that wrote about us months ago.

However, this: http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4840840&affil...
is the result of a PR firm. We just hired our first PR firm 3 weeks ago. We use SutherlandGold PR
The Stable Marriage Problem - A Mathematically Optimal solution to Marriage
Linked Lists - Incompatible with Parallel Programming?
Nothing world changing, but the pastebin I wrote recently, I find it pretty handy for sharing js snippets

http://paste.arandomurl.com/

it shows the page rendered above in a frame below, you can test snippets of javascript / css in it, processing js works as well

http://paste.arandomurl.com/4826dda37f28b
Is this true? My server sends SMS' to cells without problems. I've been sending them to email addresses like 6175551234@vtext.com (for a verizon cell). Is it because my volume is low that I am allowed to do this for free, or because I am using the email address format?
Real Silicon Valley Fight Club
I noticed that -- cool. Better news than seeing the NYC Tech Meetup sold out and expanding from 400 to a bigger venue that could support 600, while DC Tech Meetup hovering around 20. NYC/DC ratio can't be that bad!
http://lifeshelf.net

It's basically a web version of Delicious Library (not del.icio.us. Think delicious monster, mac fans).

I didn't really launch it per se, so I can't say that it failed, but if I don't have people using/looking at it, I'm finding it hard to convince myself to fix all the egregious bugs.
perhaps it was a "loss leader" for them before (cause they included so much) now they are sick of the loss
10 Tips On Choosing a Startup
1. I don't think the demo is a Google killer, but you can't deny that that's how Powerset-the-company has positioned itself in the market. Any product they launch is going to be viewed in that light.

2. Even if I restrict the Google queries to site:wikipedia.org Powerset does no better. That's why I said, even at face value, I just don't buy the product.

3. Excuses. You guys have been parsing Wikipedia for over a year now. I remember the days of "Who did PeopleSoft acquire?" versus "Who acquired PeopleSoft?" This current product is still on that same level.

I have a background in computational linguistics so I understand the scale of what you all trying to do. But the best the web developer in me can muster is a big shrug.
I'm not sure if this is so much 'lisp character' as it is the character of people working on or in something esoteric, challenging, and powerful.
Now you're talking! You can call me "Al" from now on, thanks.
Improving Type on the Web -- Removing Widows and Orphans
I think apple has a great lead and will for sometime because the same reason Google does.

- they were first to market with an "ah-ha" Idea; when google search worked it was an "ah-ha" for many people and most stuck around - today you see google as a "verb"

- when I first saw the Ipod it was an "ah-ha" moment with the wheel and the way to legally get music built in. Although I have come to realize that their weak point is their proprietary format.

- what I'm trying to say is they both have something that others can't easily replicate, its not a feature or killer product (Although it started that way) its now a "Brand" and a huge chunk of users that adore them.
I think that the point is being missed here. Adobe's intentions probably have little to do with player development and a lot more to do with Silverlight & Canvas.

Adobe's hope is that opening a platform with 98% penetration will further increase platform acceptance as the standard for rich media on the web.

Think about it from a developers POV - let's say that you're making a choice between two rich media platforms on the web - both proprietary, closed systems that require proprietary plugins and code built on proprietary languages. Tough choice, eh? Maybe you pick the one with a language you're more familiar with, or one thats been really hyped recently.

Now consider a slightly different scenario: What if you had to choose between an open, standardized platform built on an open language with open-source tools that can create applications that run on the web in any browser or your mac, windows or linux desktop. How does that compare with the proprietary choice?

Adobe has consistently moved towards an open solution both for its development tools and its platform, no doubt in response to competitive threats. Microsoft is trying to inch that way as well but seems a step behind.