skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What NLP features would you find useful (pay for)?
I am a co-founder of news startup called Euraeka. The site can be found at http://www.euraeka.com and I have posted about it here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=670844

The bottom line is that given the nature of the startup I had to implement a number of text processing routines using NLP techniques. I am thinking of developing an NLP API with those features for people to build upon. Here is the list I currently have in production:

1) Text extraction: i.e. given a URL or the actual HTML, strip all unnecessary junk and return the raw English text. This routing can also parse text into sentences, and words/frequency hashes. Stemming is also available.

2) Tagging: i.e. extract the top N representative words.

3) Text summarization: automatically extracts the top N most representative sentences for a given article. Basically automatic text summarization.

4) Cognitive fluency - i.e. a numerical decsription (range 0 to 1) of how difficult is to comprehend a given text.

5) Author intelligence - i.e. a numerical description (range 0 to 1) of what is the estimated verbal IQ of the author of the text.

6) Named Entity Recognition and Extraction - i.e. given a text, mark all entities in it that represent a person, place, or event. Examples would be this sentence: "Secretary <person>Clinton</person> is expected to <event>visit</event> <place>Pakistan</place> to discuss ongoing military cooperation".

7) Semantic similarity between two texts: i.e. a process that given two texts returns a similarity measure on how semantically close the texts are. This is NOT a simple word overlap comparison. This takes into account context similarity which is much more powerful. For example a simple word similarity measure would return no similarity between the text "Senator X visited Pakistan" and "Senator Y visited Afghanistan". However the semantic similarity would return a high number based on the context that both sentences are about similar political figures visiting neighboring countries related in terms of the war on terrorism.

8) Typing effort: i.e. a measure on how difficult was the text to type: i.e. a physiological measure that gives an estimate on how much effort went into typing the text. For instance words that requires typing keys that are far from each other on the keyboard are harder to type then words with keys close to each other.

9) Text mood classifier: i.e. automatic classification on positive/negative mood of the text.

10) Text style classifier: i.e. automatic classification on subjectivity/objectivity of the the text.

11) Topic classifier: i.e. automatic classification of text into general topics like business, politics, science, technology, etc.

So my question is - which ones of those do you think would be worth exposing into an API? Any of those have potential as premium service? Do you have any additional ones to suggest that I can implement?
Ask HN: Anyone self-host their payment gateway?
The recent chargify debacle demonstrated once again how thorny a subject the whole area of billing and invoicing still is for us entrepreneurs.

In both of the chargify threads an alternative solution was mentioned:
Why not host your own gateway, on your own server?

These products were mentioned in the comments:

http://www.opengateway.net
http://github.com/maccman/saasy
http://railskits.com/saas/

(I'm not affiliated with any of them)

At the core they all essentially provide a recurring billing solution that we can install and run on our own server. Opengateway even claims to handle CCs in such a way that no PCI compliance is required.

This was the first time that I heard about shrinkwrapped, self-hosted solutions for that specific task. So I'm wondering: Is anyone here using such a product?

What are your experiences, can you recommend one?

Or is it generally a bad idea?
Next up: Google Maps withdrawn.
The problem with abolishing patents is that while it might make it easier for companies, it would make it absolutely impossible for small-time, independent inventors to advance human knowledge.

Pull the other one. It has a bell attached!
How to Make a Man Go Crazy for You
People generally advice to put in great effort or change or alter your lifestyle according to your beloved. But then don’t you think it is time to think out of the box and set new rules to the age old game of love?
I don't know if we are more adverse than many other professions, seeing as I don't know many other professions that well.

But I do believe that the hacker mythos doesn't make us more likely to join organizations, since the architypical hacker is the lone, but determined and very skilled person. Exactly the person who would loose the most by creating a trade organization.
Well ... FTP was very early, RFC 114 in 1971 going by the titles (http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/) and only coming after (at that level) a logger protocol (had to do with setting up terminal service), terminal services and RJE.

But, yes, anyone who complains about a new boziod protocol should be forced to look at the wonders and horrors of FTP, especially in the context of NATs.
Patents were (sort of) good in the days when reverse engineering was hard, but those days are long gone. Today if you release just about any product, software or hardware, your competitors can tear it apart and easily see what it does. So patents are not necessary any more to prevent secrecy.
Yep, as mentioned in the article, the data is from SpotCrime.
Wow. I've only read 2.5 parts so far, but this is really good. A few thoughts:

1. I think it needs to be made clear that you're talking about "sociopaths" in a clinical sense, meaning people with no conscience. This isn't judgmental in itself. And from what I was reading recently, such people do make up somewhat more than 1% of the population, which probably fits into the right proportion for your theory.

2. Any amount of self-honesty reveals that I'm a "clueless". But I think you paint this in a rather negative light. Because you're discussing things in largely monetary terms, the "clueless" come out like dummies. But I believe that in my case, while the monetary side might make me look like a "promoted loser", there can be other rewards that even the accounting. This is especially true when the sociopaths that I'm dealing with tend to be "light side" rather than "dark side". (although I must also admit to the possibility that I'm so clueless that I've even been hoodwinked in this.)

3. I've perceived glimpses of Powertalk, but I find it tiresome. I don't want to work that hard.

4. The places I've perceived it isn't in business, but in politics (without being judgmental, I think that Bill Clinton was the absolute master of it -- that's an acknowledgment of his brilliance without looking at what he may or may not have used it for). I'd really be interested in an analysis of how these roles play out in the governmental arena. You noted that it's applicable in the "Goodfellas" context; I expect it is also for government, although, at least in a democracy, the roles being played and the masks that define them, must be different.
I do not think any of us are born with the ability to understand the structure of GitHub and Rails projects. These are learned abilities.

How do we learn them? Two ways. (1) spend time on our own. This can either be brute force (i.e. just exploring every folder over several projects until a pattern emerges) or though a guided tutorial. (2) Ask someone with more experience.

As for as (2) goes, when someone asks me a question that I think is trivial, I try to realize that its not trivial to them. This person is asking because they respect my ideas and they think I can save them a good deal of time.

I don't hold everyone's hand though. Sometimes I do respond with "consider searching for X and trying Y on your own". Where the appropriate line lies for direct answers versus gentle encouragement, I do not know. However, politeness, in both cases, is free.
http://TestPlanManagement.com makes testing consistent.
My Art And I
> everyone else's code is hard to read

I agree, and that could easily be "everyone's code is hard to read". Sometimes I look at some stuff I wrote a few years back and want to smack the author for writing such crappy code
Well, to the extent you're appearing to give ebenezer or others in this situation help (it appears I misread your intent) then it's not useful as advice.

It is perhaps not interesting to say that if you offer people more interesting jobs at a more interesting place, you'll get more interesting (i.e. useful) people ... interested in you ^_^.
If you're still figuring out whether or not people are willing to pay for what it is you're doing, then just use PayPal. Or mail paper invoices. Seriously.

Why would you EVER invest a ton of time in a billing system when you're just starting out? Billing is a HUGE time sinkhole. That applies to integrating with another provider (Chargify) just as much as it applies to not rolling your own.

Billing is not your product. Billing WILL make or break your product though, so once you've figured out that a reasonable number of people are willing to pay for it, then make sure your billing works and works well.

Also, if you can't afford $39/mo on a SaaS billing provider, then you're not serious about your startup and it's still just a hobby.
I don't think your first quote from the article does address the danger that the poor will be prevented from suing. Suppose you are poor (or middle class) and have a good case. It's good enough that a lawyer would give it a 90% chance of success. (But there is a 10% chance that something weird happens, as can always happen even if you have a good case.) If I'm poor, I can't take on a 10% of owing $10,000 in legal fees even if the payout of, say, $100,000 makes the expected value strongly positive. In other words, it's not that I can't afford over-priced attorney fees, it's that I can't afford any attorney fees.

Now for your second point: all-purpose legal insurance doesn't seem like something that the poor are going to have bought. Even if the poor were rational and outrageously well-informed, the chance that any given person will be subject to discrimination is so low as to probably make the administrative costs of such insurance too large. However, if you could buy insurance after been discriminated against, then this could solve the problem. It's basically what I suggested in my top-level comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1792791), only it's an outside agency rather than the plantiff's lawyer which takes on the risk. It's not clear to me which format the economic frictions will favor.

Do you know if this kind of case-specific insurance is available in countries with the loser-pays rule?
No, the story is that they can shut down a domain name and there is no appeal that can be filed.

You exist at the whim of the dictator.

To further provide fuel for the fire the author cites and example of them shutting down another URL shortening service because it was being used to link pornography. Something I'm sure Bit.ly is often used for as well.
They have fixed costs (most support comes at the beginning when people are integrating) and low marginal costs. Once a merchant is integrated and using Chargify successfully, only then does it become inexpensive to add another customer.

Besides, once you get your 11th customer, you're paying $9 apiece, not $0.20! Lesson learned, if you have a small number of customers, Chargify maybe isn't for you.
Partner with somebody making the in-car direction/GPS boxes? They feed you the data on where there users are at each moment, you extrapolate route and time, and model traffic patterns.

[do those GPS boxes tell a central server where they are. can they? If it's "just" a privacy issue, the benefit of traffic monitoring would be enough to get people to sign away their location data]

Or just partner with a taxi or delivery firm: their dispatchers already do a fair amount of this monitoring manually, and they already track everything they can about what their drivers are doing. Plus B2B, so /much/ easier to charge serious fees.
Checking to see if Yahoo is back up today is actually the first time I've intentionally gone to www.yahoo.com frontpage in...8 years.
just looked it up. they are in new york for a few days training and then they head to virginia for the 17th
Yes; preparing and doing retakes is orthogonal to reading a prewritten script.
Good old multimedia CDs too.
You weren't kidding... ;-)
Which is why it's at the top of Hacker News?
Do what you can. You won't be the only one using a skype call.
turns out it was only 2009
I disagree with their interpretation of the S&P figures. The inverse correlation looks like the stock market maintaining pretty close to constant aggregate value against that basket of currencies, while the dollars that value is measured in fluctuates.
Haha, I logged into Slashdot for the first time in 4 years to check my Slashdot ID. I remember it seemed so high when I signed up. Now 100K users is par for the course for social websites.
Nothing better than being at a concert, and some idiot chatting on his smartphone with strangers about how great the concert is.

Why don't people just turn off their phones and enjoy the concert/event/whatever?

Meh what is society coming to!
Are there tests in the ActiveRecord code base to prevent performance regressions?
The system is designed by lawyers, and ultimately protects lawyers. This is no coincidence.
This means that perhaps the big VC money will conspire to compromise or overthrow Quadaffi.
I appreciated this:

"Even when you look at software, the best designers like Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Capps, were called software designers, not software engineers because they were designing in software. It wasn’t just that their code worked. It had to be beautiful code. People would go in and admire it. It’s like a writer. People would look at someone’s style. They would look at their code writing style and they were considered just beautiful geniuses at the way they wrote code or the way they designed hardware."

Nice to see a non-technologist with such an appreciation for outstanding code.
At some point along the way, I’m not sure exactly what made me think of it, I had the revelation that the very creation of businesses is a centralized necessity… and, just like anything else it can be improved, refined and perfected.

Congratulations. You've just explained the vision behind http://fairsoftware.net

You skip over some issues with the implementation:

- anyone can join: in our experience, founders are quite paranoid with their ideas, so they'd definitely not let everyone have access

- how to determine who owns what: that's a major problem and I don't understand how you plan to address that. The way we solved it is to copy the way normal startups operate. The initial founders decide on a split, and then keep deciding on more stock issuance as time passes. Call it the manual method. What else do you have in mind?
Should Starbucks Slow Down Its Service?
Hipmunk rolls out more usability updates
Latest on Chargify: 12 mo grandfathering clause & Free Customers
Just receive this email. Highlights are: 1) Free customers not included in customer count 2) Any future price increases will be subject to 12 month grandfathering clause for existing customers

EMAIL:
A few days ago, we changed our pricing so that we could provide better care and additional features to thousands of Chargify customers. Although the change in pricing was the result of careful analysis of the way people have used Chargify over the past year, we didn’t communicate this change properly. In fact, our communication was non-existent, which was a major mistake (you can read more about what I learned from this on my blog and hear from our CEO).

After listening to your passionate feedback on the price change, responding to hundreds of your emails and tickets, and speaking to many of you on the phone, it became clear that we had to make some adjustments while standing firm about not offering free plans.

Here’s what we’re doing to move forward:

Price assurance guarantee.
We now understand that it’s impossible to grow your business if you can’t be sure how much Chargify will cost you. Going forward with our new plans, you won’t have to worry anymore because all plans will come with a 100% grandfathering guarantee for 12 months from the time of a price change. This means that any plan you’re on will be priced the same for you for 12 months from the implementation of a price increase. Conversely, if there is a decrease in the price of a plan, you can take advantage of it anytime.

In addition, we’ve created a special Bootstrapper plan for existing customers with discounted pricing. To learn more about this plan, please visit the subscriptions section in your account.

Free customers are free.
We heard loud and clear that some of you have solid reasons to store your free customers with us for free. That’s why you have our word, right here, that free customers (with active subscriptions or not) won’t be counted as part of your customer count (making them free).

Lesson learned.
We feel awful about how we communicated the price change on Monday and appreciate everyone’s feedback and support during this time. We’ve always been committed to empowering entrepreneurs with the tools to succeed, and this experience has only enhanced our commitment to you.

At the end of the day, actions speak louder than words, and I look forward to showing you how powerful Chargify can be for your business.

Sincerely,

David Hauser
So the idea is basically to open-source a startup? Too many cooks in the kitchen comes to mind.

However, if you say, I own the idea, it's "X" and I need the following expertise: 2 developers, 1 designer, 1 marketing, then maybe you're onto something.

Freelancers that are looking to start a biz can look at all the available ideas and "bid" for the ones they want to work on. Sort of solves the mgmt issue problem we all face as the best ideas should bubble to the top and be competitive.

However, then you're back into siloed operations on a company-by-company basis. The devil is always in the details and unless you're involved in the day-to-day, I have a feeling you're going to miss out on a lot of the details...
Perfect! See you then.
If you have friends that use Opera, I expect so.
Thanks, that means a lot to me. I won't be applying this time because I don't think that I could promise YC a decent shot at getting as much value from me as I got from y'all, but who knows what the future holds.
Golden rule for startup: do not build your entire model on the back of a giant like Twitter. Outcome: They will buy you off (rarely), they will cut your oxygen line off or they replicate your service; in most cases your screwed.
Why We Changed Our Pricing - Definitely Not Greed
Quod erat demonstrandum does not mean "and thus I have proven beyond all shadow of a doubt that I am right"; it means, roughly, "that which was to be demonstrated". The usage of QED is correct here.
The 3.0.1 nested assign bug is pretty terrible; wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to remind your readers to update to it ASAP.
Good article, though there's a hint of "I just had my coffee" in it.

Do programmers dream of O(n!) sheep?
technical erratum: if each node in the list adds all the previous nodes as new objects, then with 4 nodes, the total number of objects is 10, not 24, and the overall order of the operation is O(n^2). It's still cool that he is faster, and cooler that it is using an AST, which seems to me like the right solution.
But then it's not based on the chance of winning it's based on the likelyhood of a quick settlement and the amount they are likely to get.

Suing a council/schoolboard/hospital - likely to win (they don't defend strongly) and likely to be a big pay out (it's not their money).

Suing a large corporation with their own expensive laywers = not worth the risk.
Power with control… control structures and abstractions in Scala
Part of a Scala 101 series, with this instalment covering built-in control structures, List creation, iteration and common List operations, to make a Scala journeyman immediately productive.
Minipapers is a great idea. In many papers the core idea is buried in many pages of ceremony. It would be great to have papers that tried to convey the idea to the reader as quickly and clearly as possible, rather than striving to be mathematically correct, starting with an introduction to the field and motivating the research with current buzzwords.
We need to create the Bun-Bun AI and program it against patent trolls as well as telemarketers. And lets throw in spammers while we're at it.
Clickable: http://justinvincent.com/page/100/how-to-trump-microsoft-goo...
Chef always seemed pretty flexible to me.
World according to San Francisco
Nolan Bushnell on Google's Self-Driving Car
Google's self-driving car will transform the world we live in, the founder of Atari says.
This looks really bad.

The ActiveRecord ORM supports URL patterns that reference attributes across associations. So if you have a "user" with a 1:1 relationship with an "account", you can craft a URL with parameters that directly reference the "account" for your "user".

It turns out Rails has special logic for the case where those parameters include an "id": it looks like Rails will find whatever account has that id, update it, and associate it with the current user.
This reminds me of the scene in "The Social Network" where Mark Zuckerburg sits in front of the Harvard disciplinary board for hacking into house face books to harvest student images.

The Zuckerburg in the movie thought that he deserved credit for pointing out security vulnerabilities in the Harvard network.

I do not believe the actions of these traders (or Zuckerburg) were correct. That being said, I still think their actions have value.

One way we learn is through our mistakes. There are many proprietary electronic trading platforms. Who checks them for bugs? Who checks them for accuracy or possible manipulation? I do not think these Norwegian programmers should be gaming a trading robot. At the same time, the SEC and other market regulators need to uphold their end of the bargain. If they would like to see a fair market, I think they should check trading robots for possible manipulation.
"...a new type of company that anyone can join."

Letting anyone join is the first thing I'd reconsider. I applaud that you're thinking all-inclusive, but most entrepreneurs wouldn't want just anyone joining. They want skilled professionals who are easy to get along with --- people who are more signal than noise.
AWS Elastic Load Balancing: Support for SSL Termination
It happens to me more than I'd like. I carry around my MacBook naked so my fingers tend to be close to the ports a lot. I might have to sit it down and pick it up 2 dozen times a day. Awkward is probably not the right word though. More like painful. It was a bigger issue for me with the old plastic MacBook because all the edges around the ports were surprisingly sharp. The first-gen non-unibody MBP wasn't nearly as bad though because they had nice rounded edges. Not too sure about the new unibody MBP designs since I haven't used one for an extended period of time. Another thing that occurs to me is the MBA design is a bit closer to the iPad or iPhone 3G where the bottom is rounded just enough to make it easier to pickup. I know it's a total niche product and these are very minor things in the grand scale of the universe. Personally I think it's Apple's best industrial design to date. Glad to see so many elements of it in other products.
You should have come to DevHouse:DC - Conrad gave a lightning talk about his book there :D
I don't see it as a disk space issue. Extra stuff installed inherently means more exposure to potential security issues. That's undesirable.
Sats Spot 3 Miles of NATO Supply Trucks Bottlenecked in Pakistan