skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you followed up with the potential customers you spoke to?

Did they get to see the almost finished product?

It could be dead, or it could be that you're killing it. If you're asking the question, I suggest you may be killing it.

I was in a similar situation in April. I had build a web-app for businesses to schedule their employees. Everybody said it was a great idea, I showed the product around and the businesses said they liked what it did, and asked for a few features to be added.

I ended up getting it into beta testing, and a few more feature requests came in, but the beta testers stopped using it. When I asked them why they weren't using it, I got all sorts of reasons that had nothing to do with the product, more like - this person didn't have access to internet at home (which means that they didn't get the old schedule either), we'll start using it when you have monthly labour cost totals (also something they don't have with excel), etc. etc.

I decided that the product just didn't strike the nerve I was hoping it would.

People can get really excited about an idea and give you a bunch of input and feedback, but you'll know if you've struck a nerve based on usage.
Not working on something full time is not the same as shutting down. Slow for support is also not the same as shutting down.
Right, that was my point (which was written from my phone, so it was terse). RSS is just XML, but to my knowledge, no one's _delivering_ RSS over anything but HTTP in a generic way. Indeed, it's a syndication system _for_ the Web. I will admit, I didn't read the entire article (again, on my phone), but as another commenter pointed out, most of the examples were either pretty-printed data over HTTP, or were services that have never existed in the sphere of the Web.
> I simply don't buy the argument that the algorithms of cognition inherit any substantial amount of functionality from their physical implementation

I'm somewhere in the middle on that. I wish for things biological to be clear-cut and deterministic enough that we can fully understand them the way we understand mechanical systems.

But precisely because the brain is encoded in precious little DNA there is some evidence that there is more to it than meets the eye, after all if 50M of gzipped data can encode the whole thing why do we have such a hard time understanding it.

There is enough repetition in there that some died-in-the-wool reverse engineer would have put 2 and 2 together by now if the secret was in the wiring or in some simple algorithm (ANNs for instance).

Apparent order appearing from chaos is a field that has seen some study and the amount of complexity that can arise form simple starting data is quite amazing, witness the mandelbrot set and other fractal forms.

It may be very hard to short-circuit such understanding and to 'divine' the workings of the formula without first going the long way around to understand the whole system rather than the 'seed' from which it grows. This is not simple mathematics where a simple equation on complex numbers gives you the mandelbrot set, it's possibly machinery interpreting an equation with 50 million terms.

In different terms, given a very distorted (dissected) picture of the 3 dimensional mandelbrot set would you be able to figure out the formula that gave rise to it without prior knowledge of the mathematics involved?

http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/2mandelbulb.html#epi...
Neat idea.

Unfortunately, the mushroom animation doesn't seem to work right on Chrome. He disappears after the crash, but before he talks... And the mouseover events don't seem to work... And on the sample page for that same animation, the clouds don't even appear.
bad title. article doesn't answer why. discusses two failed attempts to find out how it works.
Assuming you have the documentation, or assuming that you can extrapolate from a program in a language that you already know.

If one knows python and is given a program in APL, then likely an insurmountable barrier has been reached. If you don't have the docs the describe the language, the one can try to infer the language by running experiments on variations of the stored program. However one needs access to the processor in order to run different experiments and get different results to be able understand how the programming language works.

We don't have CPU in a form that we can experiment with ("brains in a vat"). We have a 50Mb string in APL*2, a mostly unknown language for a mostly unknown processor.

The other part is that this is not a program but a meta-program -- meaning there are multiple levels of indirection. The DNA does not directly specify the brain, but instead specifies rules for components that would eventually arrive at an assembly (guided by a rich context of voluminous other inputs over an extended period of time) that constitutes a brain.
Well, afaik, people use ºC and not just C.
Foursquare new user setting page: more control to the user
Yes, the survivors are the ones who accumulated wealth. If there are other paths to accumulating wealth, they should have survived as well, but aren't apparent in the sources I've seen so far.

There are many businesses that fail and people who've lost money on equity in businesses. It's by no means a sure-fire way to become wealthy. But from what I've seen it's the main method that makes it to the "wealth" finish line at all.

What other paths have lead to "survivors" on the road to wealth? There may well be paths other than what I've proposed. Feel free to share them with me.
Tell HN: Let me find a clever domain for you.
Since I can't help but procrastinate sometimes, I thought I would put that time to good use. I'll help you find a name/domain for your next idea. (No strings attached, I just find it fun).

I put up a form at http://www.URLologist.com
How much of this would become a non-issue just by requiring the losing party to pay all costs? The way it stands now is really just blackmail. Sure you can spend $100,000 to defend against a frivolous claim or just $5,000 and everything goes away.

I have been in that exact situation. Probably the most frustrating thing I have ever been involved in.
Seems like it depends on your audience in some instances. If you have users that don't easily remember one of these more obscure domain extensions, they'll type in .com and be surprised if they don't get you (even if you told them exactly what your address is). Some of them won't have the wherewithal to drop your name into Google either, so it'd be helpful to have the .com.

I once had an email address during college that ended in .at and I'd put it in presentations for classes. People swore I had a typo in my email address. .me, .in., .at, etc. still seem to be a niche sort of thing.
If everyone were carrying firearms there would be less people (remaining) carrying Samurai umbrellas.
Have you been applying to jobs lately?

Microsoft still requires C++ from their applicants. Nvidia and Intel both require C and C++. Google also heavily uses C/C++. I believe you're confusing "web companies" with "companies." It makes sense for web companies to use other languages, but C, C++, and assembler are things that should be on your resume.

If someone claimed to be a competent programmer, but didn't know how asm related to C, I would seriously question the merit of their statements.
I don't think it can be compared to instructions. More like just the startup conditions, like a rom or something. All analogies that compare computers to biological things are terrible. Mine is as much so as any other.
The problem that I've always found with it is that I've seen it so horribly abused that I'm just not sure that there's a reasonable subset that you can nail down that won't just cause more problems than it's worth. In the hands of skilled developers, you can solve some really elegant problems with operator overloading. In the hands of someone who isn't as good as they think they are, or is more clever than they should be, it's just too prone to making common statements not do what they seem to do, which is part of the unambiguous syntax part.
What are the extra taxes/fees for going to the Caribbean or Costa Rica with the pass?
Videos | It's Vizag
No, people are talking that way because it's obvious to the participants that no one knows how to do the higher level simulation. And there is no hope of anyone figuring it out any time soon.

So people figure why not "run the program" that already exists, and that's what this conversation is about.
More information about the biological effects of non-ionizing radiation from wireless technology is coming out every day. Enough is not being done by cities, counties, states and the Federal Government to protect us from the potentially devastating health and environmental effects. Through the 1996 telecommunications act the telecoms are shielded from liability and oversight. Initially cell phones were released with no pre-market safety testing despite the fact the Government and the Military have known for over 50 years that radio frequency is harmful to all biological systems (inthesenewtimes dot com/2009/05/02/6458/.). Health studies were suppressed and the 4 trillion dollar a year industry was given what amounts to a license to kill.
On it's face, the 1996 telecommunications act is unconstitutional and a cover-up. Within the fine print city governments are not allowed to consider "environmental" effects from cell towers. They should anyway! It is the moral and legal obligation of our government to protect our health and welfare? Or is it? When did this become an obsolete concept? A cell tower is a microwave weapon capable of causing cancer, genetic damage & other biological problems. Bees, bats, humans, plants and trees are all affected by RF & EMF. Communities fight to keep cell towers away from schools yet they allow the school boards to install wi fi in all of our schools thereby irradiating our kids for 6-7 hours each day. Kids go home and the genetic assault continues with DECT portable phones, cell phones, wi fi and Wii's. A tsunami of cancers and early alzheimer's await our kids. Young people under the age of 20 are 420% more at risk of forming brain tumors (Swedish study, Dr. Lennart Hardell) because of their soft skulls, brain size and cell turn over time. Instead of teaching "safer" cell phone use and the dangers of wireless technology our schools mindlessly rush to wireless bending to industry pressure rather than informed decision making. We teach about alcohol, tobacco, drugs and safe sex but not about "safer" cell phone use. We are in a wireless trance, scientists are panicking while young brains, ovaries and sperm burns.
Wait, is Sarah Lane taking over cohosting the show from Leo? I knew she did last week but I thought that was just while he was off taking his daughter to college (haven't listened to the ep, and only occasionally check out NatN).
Top Ten Most Expensive Wines | Top Ten
Ah ok, sorry, I see what you're saying now, just in an ISP context, I thought you meant privacy policies as a whole. Apologies.

In that case it makes perfect sense. I thought about all privacy policies and because there are so many different products out there it would be very hard to have a limited set of policies. But for the ISP subset that could definitely be done.
ITA is awesome, but their value isn't their interface so much as they supply the fare/availability data to practically everyone (Kayak, Orbitz, fly.com, and us, through via Orbitz).
The one example I could find on their web site used sudoko which really requires only logic, possibly with backtracking, in order to solve. I wonder what probability calculations they have put into hardware. Bayes Theorem? Expectation? That one is just inner product.

I suppose the potential uses would be more clear if a language spec was available. It's all very foggy to me at the moment.
LOL, so mistaken it is funny.
No, I would flag it because it was blatant promotional spam of someone pitching their product.
Same for Ubuntu 8.04
I find it fun to play with this one too
- http://www.netsubstance.com/index.cgi
- http://www.dotomator.com/web20.html
The artificial-cell experiment was pretty interesting. It demonstrated that epigenetic information is not necessary for a viable cell.

More than that, though, it's a "hello, world" — although the cell itself didn't do anything useful, now we have the compiler working, albeit expensively. Now we can do experiments like the following:

- removing introns entirely to see if that damages viability;

- inserting the gene you want at a specific place in the bacterial genome instead of splicing it in at some random place.

Basically, it's a "control group" for a much more precise set of experiments than we've been able to do in the past. It's easy to take the ability to do "hello, world" for granted as a programmer.
What you do is an important component of the whole story, it can completely change the meaning and value of the "how" and it give context.
And regarding patio, objectively we are on a completely different level, in his case i was never puzzled by the fact that one of his post reached the first page (does this make me one of those rabid followers?).
No, I'm sure @leolaporte is still hosting with Amber. Last week was just the awkward "make Kevin talk to 2 ex girlfriends at one" special episode
"Erich von Däniken"

The Nova debunking of Chariots of the Gods was epic, and a important lesson to me as a high school student not to take scientific sounding arguments at face value. Also, an important lesson in not underestimating human intelligence and creativity. Most of the debunking was simply figuring out how ancient peoples did things we now think are impossible without modern technology.
Yes, Max/Mark/whoever is maddeningly vague sometimes. I'm not disputing that. I do think his paranoia is a bit unwarranted, but he does seems to value privacy.

Now, if he just outright lied, well then that's shameful. I think the digging that you have done is really interesting, but this whole thing is starting to feel like a witch hunt. He might work under pseudonyms, sure, but at least his apps/etc seem legit.
Whyday: 19 August 2010
I get the feeling HN has more posts on becoming rich lately and frankly I find it not very relevant for Hackers News.

There are have been a lot of complaints about posts not being relevant. But this is a community and what is relevant to the community is defined by the community, and here that is expressed in upvotes.

In other words, if an article is posted here and gets a large number of upvotes, it is relevant to the community of HN whether you personally find it relevant to you or not.
I work at a low-budget company (with a webpage straight out of http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ ), and I'd buy this.

This can be a much easier sell to the higher-ups than a 40.000 dollar study (we've already managed to make some small-cost service purchases - anything under U$ 50 is buyable).
I gave a decent (well, at least a lengthy) answer to this question here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1473748

Basically, getting the raw data is quite difficult, but once you have it, you need to expend a really enormous quantity of engineering work into using that data to get useful answers.

For example, ITA invented a language to describe taxes. That's because the tax code changes all the time and is incredibly complex. There are fares which different entities in the airline industry price differently due to tax code ambiguities. The search problem is really very hard once you have the data.

Now, ITA software does offer their flight search engine as a service: you sign a contract with them and issue queries and they send you responses. I don't know how interested they are in cutting deals with really tiny startups, but they might be amenable. You will of course have to pay in some fashion: maybe a fixed fee per query or pay per compute time or pay per successful booking.
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what's the harm of down voting to -50?
I'll remember that next time someone asks me about my old zombie startup.
> The innovation is that they are on the same level as lists.

I have heard this point when comparing to Scheme (Racket). I did not understand how it applied to CL. I never found an issue dealing with the different datatypes (other than initially learning what API worked with what and what was the proper generic stuff to use).

> P.S. Do you really finish up all your parans yourself???

Yes. I found paredit and its derivatives really annoying, particularly when dealing with strings and other entities. I am not always closing entire functions, so the autoclose feature was also useless to me. I can see how it can both help and get in the way when dealing with [] and {}. I do not have a strong objection to that noise. See below for my real objection to the {} syntax; it is less about the {} and more about the reason for using it.
I don't think that fear is the driving force for the added features... Not at all... Many startup founders get to the realization that they want to venture on their own because they feel that their day jobs constrain and bore them... So, when they finally start working on their own startups, all the gloves are off... they feel like they finally can utilize 100% of their potential and creativity... I believe that is the core reason for all those extra features the author has mentioned. At least it was true in my case :)
You're confusing literal translation with development. Here's a very loose conceptual analogy:

Translation: translating Lord of the Rings into Chinese.

Development: hearing a short plot synopsis of Lord of the Rings and writing your own fantasy novel based on the same theme.

Development really does do something analogous to that. It takes a collection of proteins and rules and, through embodiment within the laws of physics, constructs the phenotype. The phenotype contains vastly more information than the genotype, and two identical genotypes will not produce absolutely identical phenotypes.

There is something fundamental about development that we do not understand. This is widely acknowledged in the developmental biology, evo-devo, and evolutionary computation fields. A closer analogy than the loose one above might be some of the behaviors we see with fractals and cellular automata, though development is less deterministic than that.

Evolution and development are somehow related. We don't quite get that either. But both processes add vast amounts of information and both involve adaptation.
Definitely, losing the Site Explorer API means I've got to find a new data source for some of our internal tools.

If anyone has ideas, let me know. SEOmoz has some kind of API, but I don't know that it is cheap/complete enough to be a suitable replacement.
Exactly. I'm a sailor and a diver, and everyone has a knife. Never, ever heard of anyone getting stabbed in any of those communities. It's just a perfectly normal tool, like a compass.
Look - all the talk of the brain as a "quantum computer" seems to be more full of "bull" than the talk of mind uploading and 700 year lifespans. Quantum interactions happen in all matter that we observe, so they happen in the brain. There is not that much more to it. Neural computation depends on neurons and synapses, communicating with hormones and electrical impulses. If we can model the significant algorithms and feedback loops that determine these interactions, we can model the brain. No quantum computing is needed.

Kurzweil himself would admit that we do not know the details of how all of our technology works. Humans at this point understand very little about atomic physics (we still account for the majority of mass by calling it dark matter and hiding it in a formula constant) yet we can produce atomic explosions. I think that one thing alot of people are missing here is that you only need very little theory before you can apply it. Understanding WHY the theory works is a much harder problem, unfortunately.
It was a pitch, but it wasn't spam. He was just telling you that he had something similar to what you were looking for. People talk about their products here all the time. Heck, Patrick McKenzie's posts about his product are some of the most popular in HN history. Talking about startups is one of the stated purposes of Hacker News. Surely you've noticed this in all the time you've been a member.
That's a specific episode, read the banner

"net@night with Amber and Leo"
This was the most uninteresting usethis.

He barely touched the thing his usethis would be most interesting, the fact that he claims to record so much.

He may be a good mathematician and project manager. but hardly fun for a usethis
The paradox of power
Suddenly elevated status! Two billion dollar companies and 20 years in the valley, is the rest of the world really that cut off to condescend like this?
Looks like the address is there now.
If your goal is to get rid of a bit of the stigma maybe you should start by not calling it "filthy" rich.
I really like the visualization and the sorting by "agony", but there's a few features Kayak has that are must-haves in my mind:

* Flexible dates. Sometimes I have a day or 2 of leeway, and it's often a lot cheaper to fly one day different.

* Flexible airports. I live roughly equidistant from 2 airports, and Stanford also has 2 reasonable airports to use.
Clojure records are named classes that implement IPersistentMap so they're a drop-in replacement for "normal" maps, that also implement an additional interface so the compiler can generate java field lookups to access items without the cost of a hash lookup.

Awesome! Thank you for that. I saw people referring to it as a hash when you point out it is not, so I was confused. I sit corrected as well as happier with the Clojure design.
It's really quite ridiculous. I made the backend to a travel site using data from Galileo reservation system (one of the big ones). At the time, they had a relatively new SOAP-ish API. The data you got back was huge and arranged in ways that are not in any way obvious. Many calls just return what appear to be screen scrapes of 70's era terminal screens, wrapped in XML. It was less than fantastic.

At the time I left the travel agency in question, Galileo was in the process of rolling out a new version of the API, but the few times I tried to get it to work, it seemed completely broken (this was for cruises, not flights, but it was the same general idea).
Yea.. That is the solution sometimes.. but on a fresh install it's total garbage. I understand what they are trying to do, and it's great, but the learning curve is stupid retarded in my opinion. And without a coupon system in the free version it's worthless. But that's besides the point.
The great Yahoo developer experiment is over
Aydin Senkut Comes in Peace, With His $40 Million
Bing's API: http://www.bing.com/developers
I don't know who 'Leo' is, but here is the way I understand it:

Copyright infringement is illegal. Torrent files are not (they don't contain copyrighted information, they contain hashes).

Downloading a copyrighted work using any mechanism, including bittorrent is illegal in many places, but not everywhere.

> But anyway, your argument hinges on the supposition that ISPs guarantee your bandwidth all the time.

No, they have a best effort obligation to deliver what they'e sold. The fact that most of them don't make that effort does not mean they're in the clear.

> If you are buying a strict guaranteed bandwidth, do tell me why it is that the ISPs don't actually say that themselves?

Because it is to their advantage.