skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed that it should be simple, but it seems that there's enough room for error with security, sessions, etc, and enough functionality that needs to be built out that's common (mass email, sign-up email, sign-up verification email, for example) that I'm quite surprised that I'd have to build out my own solution.

I'd imagine a few open-source php classes and one or two standard DB tables would do the trick, and maybe a simple interface for managing users and emails.
Google's list of losers: YouTube and six other businesses that aren't making any money
The words "Google killer" might not have been uttered in public, but if you read over old Powerset press releases it's clear that's the positioning.

The executives talk about "revolutionizing search" and "changing the way people interact with information."

Gosh, that's just what Google did. :P
Google's headcount soars 57% to 19,000
The results are more-or-less the same, with more bling on the Powerset page.

I don't see a single reason to use Powerset over adding "wikipedia" to my query if I want to search Wikipedia only.
Yet "who is the president of france?" lists Mitterand, Putin, the various Presidents of Ireland, prior to listing the current correct president of france.
andrew chen wrote a really good blog about interest vs. intent:

http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/09/why-...

It's true that a lot of LBS advertising models don't center around intent, but advertisers will still pay a premium for the additional context and relevance of reaching people near the potential point-of-sale. And what about LBS that employ Mobile Search?...
In that light, how are they going to get better if they don't have their flaws pointed out?

I know lots of people inside Powerset and they're all wicked smart. This isn't a critique of them. It's an expression of my disappointment in what has been a massive buildup over the last year and a half.
http://watrcoolr.us

Never "launched" it, but I still think it deserves popularity :).

It's a browser start page that I made for myself (and use) that displays the top stories for a set of most-emailed-like feeds. The feeds have been tweaked over time to yield the most interesting stories at any given time. After all, they were the most emailed ones...

It's not really for news junkies or the news.yc crowd in particular. However, it could work for you as I am in the news.yc crowd. Anyway, almost everyone I have explained it to and that has tried it as their homepage has liked it. That is, I've gotten really good feedback in terms of constant use from friends and family.

So I think there is some non-negligible subset of people who would like this as their home page, but I of course have no way to reach them :)

If you do click on it, note it isn't just one story. You can click the arrows on screen or use the arrows on your keyboard to move off the front story. But if you have as your home page, the latest story will just be displayed.
Yeah, it seems in this case their NLP technology is causing worse results to appear. Google would just ignore the function words.
The big problems I see with biofuel are waste management and chemicals usage.
The New York Times style guide is a handy way to tell: If the Times puts periods between the letters ("A.C.C." for the basketball conference) then it's to be pronounced as individual letters. If the Times puts no periods between the letters ("NATO" for the treaty organization) then it's to be pronounced as a word. That decision is then used to figure out whether there's an "an" in front of it.

The beeb (BBC) works in a similar way. Things that are spelled out are put in all caps ("ACC") and things that are pronounced are put with only a leading capital ("Nato").

Of course, that's just the journalism wonk in me speaking.
In their defense, they integrate Freebase, a hierarchical semantic database, with Wikipedia.

Pretty cool, although it's the results that matter, not the technology.
Just to be clear, Reddit (the .com) won't save software development, especially since the author points to a lack of "rigor" as one of the main problems. That site is a bath of noise and juvenile disputes.

Reddit (the template) might, but it's a lot harder to know.
Lots of, uh, phalluses.
Done. Here's the link for all interested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132026

Note (to all reading this) that it is a wiki so feel free to add anything I missed (or delete anything that sucks). I doubt there are many false positives, but there may be a bunch of false negatives.

I plan to batch update it weekly (probably on Mondays) for the previous week.
resently I released http://www.fictionthis.com/ - "allows you to share ideas and have unbiased input into creating a published work of quality fiction. This open project was developed for inspired members of our online community to create their own version of the story and to rate their fellow authors."

I thinks its a great idea, but traffic has been slowly disappearing.. feedback anyone?
http://brl.codesimply.net/

Inexplicably, when you ask people to name an easy-to-learn language that's designed for web/database applications, they still say PHP.
The analytics 'dashboard':
http://files.markbao.com/cadmium-db.png

The data collection results visualizer (insights):
http://files.markbao.com/cadmium-insights.png

Thanks for your kind words!
Ask YC:  How to avoid trademark infringement with domain names?
What sort of precautions should I take to avoid trademark infringement when coming up with a domain name?

Do I need to search trademark databases in many countries? If so, how?

Also, if a multi-word name contains a word that is trademarked, then is that a problem generally? What if the trademarked word is commonly used
outside the scope of the company that owns the trademark but still in the same field?
Twitter and the Architectural Changes of Life Streaming
Here Come the Smart Maps: Yahoo Opens Local/Map API
Lamba, the Ultimate TA
No real idea of where to take it from here. We have a few ideas that break from the theme of no text, such as tagging and a reddit style interface, and improved ways for the community to segregate out the flock of penises.

We did the bulk of it as a 48 hour coding competition with the theme of 'antitext'. I wanted to make something in Django, and my roommate wanted to make something in flash. So from the start there was no real direction aside from the neatness factor and wanting to see if we could pull it off.

Any suggestions would be appreciated :D
Its not that we're the dumbest generation, but the gap in how we learn is bigger then prior generations. As such, it is (slightly/moderately/incredibly, pick one based on who you're talking about) more difficult for generations that did not grow up under these circumstances to understand. No matter how much you study something, living through it will provide a completely different perspective.

For the past few literate generations, it was expected to have to memorize facts by reading textbooks or borrowing things from the library or other sources for a _limited_ amount of time. And then you would have to read them to find the exact bit of information. Or maybe you would talk with a professor about a topic if they knew about it. Either way, there was a limited amount of time that you could spend learning - the rest had to be dedicated to note taking for later memorization.

Now, we (this generation, myself included) have access to more information on more topics than most of us know what to do with and we can easily search it for the bits we need. There's no reason (from this perspective) why we cant keep a copy of or refer to something for however long we need. We expect information to always be there. We rely on connectivity for what older generations would have spent time memorizing.

Maybe we don't care for specifics nearly as much as we do for getting the general idea of a task. After all, with solid foundations, the rest is simple to pick up, no matter what the task. The phrase "Jack of all trades, master of none" may very well apply to this generation more so than any other generation before us and possibly a great deal that will come after us.

Is this for the best? Remains to be seen. But, in the mean time, go read a wiki article, go google that bit of information you need. Read manpages to find what the meaning of that obscure sed flag is that you need to finish that twitter one liner from awhile ago. Or you can spend the time trying to memorize how to deal with an obscure condition that only occurs when you use cobol for some other obscure system that badly needs a rewrite when you may never run into such a system.
What Google Knows About Spam
"Go ahead, I'll wait."

Perhaps you'd be better off listening to your critics than antagonizing them.
Behind the scenes, each TLD (like .com or .net) has an authoritative top level DNS controller. In the case of .com and .net, that is Verisign.

Any registrar you use (network solutions, godaddy, namecheap) are effectively reselling domain registrations on behalf of Verisign.

.com names are currently $6.86, wholesale. So if you can get one from someone for 6.99, they are only marking it up by 13c ...

As you will see here, prices do go up regularly: http://wtop.com/index.php?nid=108&sid=1378741

Verisign have a monopoly over .com and .net, however the retail registrars work in a massively competitive environment.

You think about all the software and customer support a registrar gives you for 13c per year (or whatever), and how much effort Verisign put in for 6.86 per year?

Of course, some of that goes to ICANN, the governing body... wanna guess how much?

20c per name. Is Verisign onto a good scam?
To add on to that, both those posts are many days old. I've seen this before and I still voted up this post, just because I like it so much. I think there might be a need to relax rules about duplicates, when they appear many days apart.
http://search.brianreily.com - lets you search multiple sites from one bar.

Its been a work in progress for a long time (thus why its a subdomain), and haven't had a chance to do much with it.

So I guess it hasn't _failed_, but it hasn't succeeded.
Experimental Repeatability or simply Open Source?
Most people I meet that have the threads-are-evil attitude are Python or Ruby coders who have never experienced a rich runtime where stable concurrency is actually possible :-)
On the Powerset Preview/Pitch: They're trying to sell.
"No one in a position of importance said this demo was a google killer. It's not, it's basically a technology demo and hopefully a usable tool."

Doesn't matter. In this game it's all perception, and if you're launching a consumer facing product your first major PR volley could be your last.

The caveat above doesn't come through in a headline. And it's little help that PowerSet is solving a problem no one seems to have quite yet. The theme of the day is Google comparisons, but in my mind unless PowerSet is blowing your mind on it's own without comparison, it's dead in the water.
There'll be a big dip when the stock options vest in Aug 2008:

By some estimates, more than 900 employees became instant millionaires when Google went public in August 2004, and that total has likely ballooned along with the stock price. ... By some estimates, nearly a third of the first 500 Googlers have departed, and many more of the estimated 2,200 pre-IPO employees are planning an exit as their stock vests. -- http://www.news.com/Life-after-Google%2C-with-millions/2100-...
Eventually the vast majority of these ad-based sites will crumble under the weight of their own hype.
with all due respect this is just not true. I just did the first few tests and it seemed to nail all of them in the first answer or two in the list.
The reality is that the average person cares nothing for what happens behind the scenes, they care about the results. If you are going to spend 15 million dollars on a Wikipedia search tool and it doesn't offer any significantly better search results than anyone else you wasted money, lots of it.
do your best to not register a domain name that is a specific trademark.

other than that, you're probably going to be in the clear, especially if you can prove the domain name is relavent to your own business name. you'll find that US trademarked words are used in other countries' TLDs for other businesses.
There is literally a book called Getting Things Done by David Allen. The system in its entirety is too hard core for most people (myself included) but the principles are good.
Chunky Iterator: So You Don’t Have to Load All Your (Rails) AR Objects at Once
Oh - I thought I heard an interview with him - he sounded like a founder/owner of it.
Competition keeps the registrars' margins low, but VeriSign presumably controls the base registration price.
It's harder to rent a nice place than it is to buy one. In general, landlords don't take care of rental units as well as they would their own house, and the same goes for the tenants. Of course, we're just talking percentages, but in the end it makes it much harder to rent a nice place.
Apple and HBO Close to a Deal
Yeah, you can send them via email for free. There may or may not be other restrictions that I"m aware of.

Your method, however, requires the user to know the provider of the number. In the application I had made, users could send messages via SMS by just typing in the number.

(Also, at least for my own provider, AT&T, some crud ends up in the message, e.g the subject line of the email.)
Don't you mean the B.B.C.? Or are we calling it the beebuk now? ;-)
Now we know why the superintelligent being called himself "Q".

Another alternative is to name yourself Zed, then emigrate to the UK.
well i thought they were pathetic and you all need to get some lives and stop being fag little nerds with no life and too lazy to stop sitting on your asses...DO SOME WORK U FAGS
http://www.thephotostream.com could change the way people consume their daily web.
So "cloud" actually means "sharded"? Wow, I've never heard that one before.
Twitter for Music
maybe it wouldn't change the world, but if you're into reading multiple local papers "popurls style" http://www.newshoured.com/ might be a friend.
Look at the example of the BBC's style guide. If you're using the BBC guide, then things that are all-cap are said using letters. If we wanted to call it the "beebuk" then it'd be "Bbc" (like "Nato").

We just need all high school teachers to find time between teaching basic literacy to teach kids one style guide for these sorts of things.
Ask YC: What (Natural) Language Should I Learn?
I want to start learning a new language; ideally it should have the same qualities as a good programming language: useful (meaning that I'll actually find other people that speak it), fun to use, and not insanely difficult to learn. For perspective, I am American, so my primary language is English. I can speak conversational (read: mediocre) Spanish, and I started looking at Russian a while ago, but felt like I wouldn't ever really get to use it. Suggestions?
I would be pretty surprised if August was the blow up date. Of those hired pre-IPO, the most popular start date would probably be in June or July, and of course that's the reference point for the vest of the stock, not the IPO date.
I've got something similar to that - http://relovable.com/ - designed to target the parenting niche. Kids grow (zing!) through clothes at an alarming rate.

I never bothered to attempt to market it at all - it was more a proof-of-concept that I could do something with Rails. Still think it has value though.
http://www.imageboard.net/accounts/login/

NO TEXT, HUH?

Just kidding, that's pretty cool. :)
Smalltalker responds to Dynamic Languages Strike Back
Database scaling isn't their problem. Sure they push lots of data around, but great programmers should be able to architect an optimal caching layer between the app and the database.

So now that metadata caching is out of scope here, we turn to frameworks, architectures, and application design. The issue Twitter has is in aggregation of their meta data. People who propose a distributed solution for Twitter obviously miss the inherent nature of Twitter; it's a centralized system. Twitter should remain as it is, but ditch RoR and become more modularized. This is where they start developing real systems; the type of systems they talk about in those mundane CS classes, like programming in C -- that stuff. Modularize the applicaion, develop systems that scream for aggregation, cache the hell out of everything, and start applying some computer science.

Twitter was born as one of those next-gen Web 2.0 "keep track of your friends" hip Ruby on Rails insertbuzzwordhere application. Now it poses actual architectural challenges. It's so similar to the evolution of Facebook. Just take a step back and look at it.
The TLD registries are treated like public utilities and regulated by ICANN so that they can only make "reasonable" profit. I think allowing VeriSign to increase prices faster than inflation when their costs are constantly falling is a little more than reasonable, but at $8 it's hard to complain. These prices, even as low as they are, do preclude certain business models like giving a free domain to every user and making it back on ads.
Yes, we have. What we do is not keyword extraction, our tool suggests tags based on probabilistic algorithms. For example, if your document contains the terms Bush and Obama it should be tagged as politics even if that word is not present in it. Compare to the Yahoo Extraction Tool, for example. This approach will not add new keywords that would help in a search. It's only useful to have an idea of what the document is about.

The main problem is not the algorithm but the input data. Our system learns from millions of tagged blog posts among other sources. The quality of the tags varies a lot, and most of the work we do is about deciding what data to use for training.
http://fidness.com is my little pet project. I've never let it get out to more than a few of my nerd-ish friends, who inconveniently don't do enough physical activity to get anything out of the site. I don't know if that's their fault for being lazy or mine for having an underwhelming site.
Most Asian Americans I know take their "American" names very seriously, as it's their legal, social, and personal identity.

Growing up Asian in the US, I hated when kids always asked me for my "real" name. I have a Chinese name, as well as an English name. Both are aliases for the person and both are "real".
Where did you get that ridiculous notion?

There's a serious problem with how people learning languages... their exposure to their first language has a strong tendency to color their thinking (read: biases) towards/against other languages for the rest of their careers.

Another serious problem is that students end up with very distorted views of what "programming" is by getting only one narrow view of the how things work. Some curricula are over-focused on the abstract, "math" side of the field while others are stuck on the basic engineering side. There's not only a need for both but also the very hands-on administration/operations side precisely so that people get a much more well-rounded experience of the entire picture.
is there any other kind?
dhh recently switched from a macbook pro to a macbook air. does that sound like somebody who's in it just for the unix underpinnings? i think not.
You're plainly ignoring all the posts where the people involved say ROR is not the problem. Caching does not work if the data is different for everyone. Please stop hearing what you want to hear--that ROR is a trendy flash in the pan and not useful har har--as you read and instead take a step back and listen to what the people involved are actually saying.
A lot of people roll their own popurls.com site. I wrote one, too, to teach myself the Apache Wicket framework. This one is for web developers. http://devfunnel.com.

I was going to add the ability to "follow" it on twitter, but I've run out of steam, and no one seems very interested in it. I've moved onto other projects. :)
This site is very, very cool. I really appreciate super-minimalistic UI's like this. I've bookmarked it. :)
Most of those are pretty recent. Expecting big profit from them might be asking too much.
What's with all the domains paraphrasing 37signals? Is there some chic trend I'm not aware of?
Ha... I was thinking about making the exact same thing! I was going to target it for mobile audiences. Yours seems to work pretty well!
Maybe someone should create a site that collects sites like these... abandoned, mostly-finished ideas. People could go there for inspiration and stuff.

It'd be kinda meta if I created such a site, then submitted that site to itself when no one showed up. :)
The Forgotten Philosopher
Crowdsourcing for Doctors
That was supposed to be highly leveraged. Not sure where that 'C' came from.
I have the same problem, but the dealing with them is the hard bit. Depression isn't the sort of thing that you can easily shrug off or power through, and the inability to do so can make for a nasty, self-reinforcing cycle.

What makes it worse for programmers is that our work is essentially creative in nature; progress is not defined by the number of bricks laid or the length of the ditch dug. It isn't possible to switch off your mind and just work at the task; you need to come to the compiler with your 'A' game.

On top of this, it really isn't possible to tell your clients that their projects are going to arrive N weeks behind schedule, because you're depressed. Well, it is possible, but not if you want to keep them.

One of the ways I deal with things, is to try and do maintenance tasks that generate 'little successes' throughout the day. So, even though my code isn't working the way I want it to, getting something else done tends to help get me back in the right frame of mind. Doing simple sysadmin tasks, or just spending half an hour tidying up my office a bit, or making dinner for a friend... it all helps out a lot.

Climbing has also been a big boon for me, because it's a very mental sport, can offer a string of 'easy successes' through bouldering, and provides some much-needed exercise and social interaction to the day.

But until I found ways to help myself deal with things, I could spend months off-line. Depression can be a very real problem, and for people who don't have good coping mechanisms, it is utterly crippling.
Malcolm Gladwell: 12 smart guys or 1 genuis?
That's really pretty cool. However, it seems like it would be hard to hold the attention of people who don't like to scroll down.

I guess that's one of my favorite things about HN. Loads fast and only need to scroll on the most commented articles.
Apple Sells Out of iPhones in U.S., Britain
well i mean if you know english and spanish then the really useful ones are tough i think.

i like spanish, it has a nice sound and is very easy to learn if you know english(a lot of words are very similar) and grammar feels consistent and easy. my impression at least.
obv it has great use too.

the big economies of the future are speculated to be:
china - mandarin
india - ok english we all know
brazil - portugese, also some african countries have portugese a s alanguage
nigeria - english

if you dont want the tough ones(mandarin, russian) and spanish you are already learning then i dont know how big the use is but:
french, portugese, german

i would probably learn spanish really well instead of learning yet another one with limited use.

i mean knowing to speak just the basics of a language doesnt really help you with anything except when you travel.

but im hardly an expert on the matter.
Nevermind what happens if you need to backspace. Almost no one handles going back a box when you've made a mistake.
When is the API coming? I can see us using this quite a bit.
It's easy to pile on and mock people who attempt great things. In fact, that's the usual response. So maybe they are on to something.