skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is karma for people even useful? Personally I rarely ever look at a person's profile, and if I do, I'll probably click on their "submissions" overview anyway.

Therefore for me, points on messages would be sufficient.

That way it would not be possible to frustrate users by depleting their karma (second time I witness this on news.yc, last time it was juwo).
Google shareholders say "Go right ahead, be evil."
I thought it was a joke at first. I have no idea why he's there since in my view the conference's credibility takes a bit of a hit with his inclusion as an "expert."

... waits for the requisite MC Hammer jokes, lyrics, and one liners.
I can't recommend ledger, http://newartisans.com/ledger.html highly enough. It is definitely a hacker class tool: command line based with tons of options, transactions stored in simple text files, and very flexible. That said it provides full double-entry accounting and every report you could want including output suitable for gnuplot. Oh and of course it's free and open source.

I've been tracking both my personal and business finances in ledger for years and couldn't be happier.
For how long will people believe Bayesian filtering stops spam? It's just a cute theorem that in no way can compete with human intelligence. Or do you think some probability calculations can outsmart a spammer?
http://www.myspace.com/bandsintown

More of a teaser than a real marketing tool at this point. But you never know. Can't hurt.
What Mobile startup would you like to see?
i'm against downmodding. i wrote here about a relative popularity system before; i'm all for relative-everything.

you don't need to downmod; you just need to be relatively worse. what happens to new users you ask? that's dealt with by another method; sticks out tongue.

but i think downmodding looks like something tacked on as an afterthought, being an opposite of "upmodding." when you're broke, you don't have money. when you're in debt, you still don't have money. if some comment is modded -3, it's bad. -50 is bad too. but you don't really care that one is 47 more bad than the other. while there is a case for, say, making a severly bad comment that just takes away all your credibility, first of all it's unlikely that would be the doing of a sane user, and thus the second, such a user is probably something of a troll; if your service is open-registration, there's nothing to prevent said troll from registering again, receiving zero credit, essentially excusing themselves of all debt. it just violates common sense.

i would go on but i'm teetering right now. in conclusion, abolish downmodding.
Damn, it is scary that they didn't accept those obvious guidelines. Google is being evil after all - not a good thing for those fighting for freedom in unfree countries where Google operates. Hopefully this breach will generate enough bad publicity for Google that they will reconsider.
We are a Mobile Media Startup. Think of a stripped down SplashcastMedia meets your mobile phone. We are launching soon. we also have fun Mobile pet projects on the side.
Hammer is an advisor to stealth Internet start-up Dance Jam.

Whatever that means. What would Arrington be saying if someone else's conference included MC Hammer?
Just use a dictionary or spell checker for spell checking. The google "did you mean?" is a fallback, not a true spell checker.

I wouldn't be so forgiving about bugs in GMail's dictionary though.
you are right; point taken.

the thing is, well, as a casual observer, i have noticed that in USA, take tv ads for example, you would hear the company name repeated over and over. Overstock.com Bigredo.com hotels.com... blah blah. In Japan, I recall a higher frequency of ads, static and TV alike, go "search for blah."

but yeah, i have zero research behind that claim.
Or maybe downmods just don't count toward karma. Or count way less.
I've also setup a LinkedIn group for startups and any News.YC folks are welcome to join.

It was a pain in the butt to get created, but there are 600+ members now, so might be useful.

Of course, would be happy to join the News.YC group as well when it's up and running.

You can join the group via this link:

https://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/2877/30950504D0B7/
Fair enough. It's as much about relevancy as it is about the level of discourse around here. And, whatever the value of the post, it's led to to thoughtful and even handed discussion so I'm hard pressed to complain about the latter.
Apologies for redundancy but I make a contradiction right here.

I'm against downmodding beyond zero.
into beta, myplaylist, compile your images and music quickly into your own playlist
What happens if you only have one idea?
Just clarify what I'm sure some might suspect - Matt, I definitely didn't vote you down to keep you into second place ;)

I've noticed this happen a couple times to users on the leader board - and it's definitely not cool. Karma shouldn't be that important...

I'll try & read through your comments to repair the damage.
Half of Americans Barely Use New Technology
Did tlb add a pseudonym?

http://tlb.org/whyspamcannotbestopped.html

Stop may be a little strong of a word, but people will keep believing that Bayesian filtering helps fight spam a great deal until someone comes up with a better idea.
a gossip mobiel http://teenwag.com/mobile
I was reading this stuff with interest, then:

"A C programmer, by contrast, can't do anything useful except as a member of a team".

Don't you think this statement is a bit too strong?
The list of browsers you can test on includes MSIE 5.0 and 5.5. Do people target these browsers anymore? How old does a browser have to be before you say: I'm satisfied if the layout is a little off, as long as it's legible?
lol.....it better be a good one
Akismet doesn't use Bayesian filtering.
if you only have one idea you've got bigger problems
Apple, others draw legal threat over media players
This is the first time I know of that someone has sued a company for not using its products.

"MRT, based in Santa Cruz, Calif., argues that its X1 SeCure Recording Control technology has been "proven effective" as such a protective measure by plugging the "digital hole" that allows even copy-protected music streams, when played back, to be captured and potentially copied. The company says that because the companies are avoiding use of its purportedly effective product, they are violating the DMCA."
I've found it relatively useful as feedback. It's sort of fun to see which posts get points, which don't, and which get tased.

If a solution to problem is necessary, I would first suggest scrambling the order of the leader board and hiding the Karma. At least, hide the Karma from the leader board listing itself. That would preserve recognition for the top contributors but there'd be less competition for the #1 spot.

Oh, and I like being able to downmod a post that was stealth-edited after I made a response for the sole purpose of saving face at my expense.
I knew it sounded familiar.

N.B. Regarding the Lisp vs. C issue: the original author, Ron Garret (formerly Erann Gat) is a well-known Lisper. He used Lisp at JPL for many years before political forces rendered its continued use there untenable.
Great idea; I joined. But, uhm, how do you use this? I've trolled the LinkedIn site and can't find anything about how to see a group's page or info.
here is an idea for a new startup, webbased quickbooks clone
Ok, I found it buried in Settings. For those of you playing along at home, the URL of "groups you belong to" is:

https://www.linkedin.com/secure/settings?groups=
I think karma points function a bit like an "efficient market" Your karma points are what they are. In the long run, everything evens out to what they should be.
Groovy/Grails vs. Ruby/Rails vs. Python/(something)?
I am a Java+GWT programmer, interested in exploring Groovy/Grails. Seems like an easier transition & a solid platfrom (the JVM) compared to RoR. Anyone have any experience with it to share?
Bayesian filtering or any other heuristics comes at a price of occasionally loosing important messages, no matter how good those methods could be in reducing spam.

And to my understanding, the best method so far is the statistical (voting-based) method that many large email servers run.

And there is one philosophical problem that TLB doesn't mention: we ourselves haven't figured out yet what exactly is spam. Is there a good universal definition of unwanted mail that should be filtered unconditionally?
The nice thing about Bayesian filtering is that it makes spam possible if and only if it's worth reading anyway. If spammers realize that the only way to get past a filter is to make their message statistically indistinguishable from something useful, they may decide that the best way to do that is to make it something useful.
And to my understanding, the best method so far is the statistical (voting-based) method that many large email servers run.

That's Bayesian filtering.

http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

As to your last point, I know what I consider spam. That's all that is important to me. That's part of the whole point of Bayesian filtering. Each user can personally teach the filter.
The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines
In which countries do you think that would have allowed them to operate?

Unfortunately, all countries have problems and this isn't as black and white as the link seems to imply.
The other Joost.
About 5 years ago I heard Bill Gates give a talk proposing a system to charge 1/10th penny charge for anyone to send you an e-mail. After the e-mail is accepted, you can excuse the charge for anyone sending legitimate e-mail...but spammers would wind up with many thousands of dollars in bills.

Seems like a genius idea, wonder why I haven't heard anything more about it?
cool!! that's totally it. now if they'd only get this in my gym... =)
He he, thanks. I have no idea who would be so motivated, but you were definitely NOT suspect with me!

No worries, just an experiment - new data, even if negative, is good ;)
That's interesting to know. Feel comfortable elaborating any?
Marc Fleury: My view on why "Microsoft is Dead"
Examining Zoomable Interfaces (not just for maps?)
What an arrogant, ignorant jackass. PG doesn't know what the hell he is talking about. He sounds stupid explaining unions the way he did. I guess that's what happens when you surround yourself with sycophants and yes men.
this is the company they ve most recently reviewed
http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/06/dumbgroups2.jpg

Sersiouly though, it's a complicated issue and the suggestion to reject the proposal may simply be because it needs revision.
http://teenwag.com 4 ideas in 1 site
Google is has always will be evil
How long do you think it would take facebook to build an app better than Mosoto? You could say "why won't facebook just buy them?" - they could, but nothing says facebook has much inclination to acquire; they do have inclination to expand their mission.

Like its been said before, startups that rely on other networks without explicit agreement are calling for trouble.
What happened here?

"Schmidt and founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin together hold 66.2 percent of Google's total shareholder voting power, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing. All three are members of the board of directors, which has recommended that shareholders vote against the proposal at the company's annual meeting on May 10."
Voting is not Bayesian filtering. Not everything is Bayesian filtering in this world. And yes, I read that article.

Self-learning algorithms suck, because they are not intelligent. Even if you had a human spam filter and you had to teach him/her what's important for you, even that kind of filter would give you false positives from time to time.

The whole Bayesian filtering business was doomed to failure for very obvious reasons.
I am just considering giving up my exploration of Grails.

A lot of it seems like fun, but I am not sure if it is mature yet. My progress was very slow because nothing comes natural to me anymore. At the moment I don't know how "save" cascades in GORM. Maybe I am just not made for the Rails type of programming: seems I want to be in control of everything. With Hibernate, I can explicitly define the cascades, plus it is very easy to find out what to do in the documentation.

To be fair you can probably fall back to configuring Hibernate directly with Grails. I think I would rather have a classic Spring/Hibernate application and replace some parts with Groovy/Grails than the other way round. One thing I also don't like is that Grails doesn't use Maven (or gaven or whatever they will call the groovy replacement for maven they will surely eventually create). I am used to not putting binary libraries into subversion any more and don't want to go back.

My other source of frustration is that I couldn't get my grails application to run in Eclipse and therefore I couldn't debug. Also the Groovy plugin is extremly basic, all it does is syntax highlighting, for all I can tell (and debugging, if it would work). Also, Grails produces the longest exception stacktraces I have ever seen, looking for the source of the error in there is no fun.

I feel a bit pathetic - surely I should try harder and dig deeper into Grails, but somehow I can't motivate myself to do it.

That said, I still think it would be 1000 times more fun than classical Java development. I guess I'll just wait for a few version jumps and then I'll try it again. Wish I could find the time to contribute to grails myself.
"If Weebly was a Web 1.0 company, the founders would be billionaires already."

Poor logic.
Spam was never absolutely useless (except those special messages that check your address for availability), and some people do buy fake Rolex watches or cheap viagra pills. These offers may or may not be legal, and that's a different kind of problem. Unsolicited mail can be useful to someone, or otherwise it wouldn't exist at all.

The real problem with spam, again, is that you will always receive it unless you clearly define what's important for you, or maybe what's not important - either way. Is that possible?
Take this with a grain of salt, as I haven't tried Groovy/Grails, but in my experience several of the other rails knockoffs were the genuine Rolix's of the framework world.

Rails is not perfect, but ruby and leadership by innovators who think a little different made it what it is. Will you see that in me-too frameworks? Will they ever do more than copy ideas and stay a step behind?

Plus, the difference between a dynamic language and java is something like the difference between travelling at light-speed, vs. faster than light. In Java you travel (code) in a straight line. In Rails or a dynamic language, you can fold space-time so the destination point is only a few lines of code from where you are now. Cleverness gives you more leverage in a dynamic language. ROR is solid enough, and Jruby can run rails now.

Eric
Actually, Groovy isn't Java - it's a dynamic "scripting" language that runs on the Java virtual machine (just like JRuby or Jython) - precisely the reason why I want to try it :)
Interesting suggestion of trying to use Rails with JRuby. Has anyone here tried that?
PHP anyone?
Are you confusing gross and net use? Spammers value responses, and they can maximize those by either a) sending more spam, or b) getting more readers per message. I suspect that a) is finally becoming prohibitive because every new message trains all the Bayesian filters out there -- so it might work better for them to have fewer, weirder spams. And why just inject randomness into your message when you can inject usable order?

The kind of people who read spam now are the kind of people who mass-forward jokes, so I can imagine a savvy spammer hiring comedians to write topical jokes, and appending a Viagra ad to end. They can 'beat' Bayesian filters by wrapping their spam in a message people will actually read and possibly forward.
It seems to me that most of the people here work in Ruby/Rails or Python... what about PHP? is this dead or something for the startup world?
Google's making enemies... and becoming "the new microsoft"?
Groovy is great for writing unit tests for your Java app.
The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines - SPECIAL UPDATE
I'm not talking about fighting spam. I'm trying to understand what is spam, because unless we understand that we won't be able to stop it.

Let's say you got a message that offers SEO optimization for your web site, and you are not a SEO expert. The message has a decent business writing style, there's a signature with a decent-looking contact information with an postal address, email and everything. And the message invites you to click on a link. Is it spam or not?
Innovations may come out of MSFT, but they come out in the form of papers and research, not in the form of products. MSFT does not produce innovative products. It produces innovative research, and because of organizational dysfunction never the two shall meet.
That wouldn't fix the current situation, since if you wanted to reduce somebody's karma, you just downmod their positive submissions. Almost all submissions are positive, so nevermind. People with mostly negative submissions are probably spammers anyway.
Let's not make it binary. There are unsolicited commercial messages that we like; there are unsolicited noncommercial messages that we hate, and there are messages we wish we hadn't solicited -- I think filters should help us exclude email that isn't worth our time to read, and let us read the email that is (in fact, rather than a filter I'd hope we could some day have a 'prioritizer' that gave us interesting, critical stuff first and that deleted less meaningful messages if we ignored them long enough).

Your SEO example illustrates what I'm talking about: it may be one of those offers that is worth the time it takes to consider it, so you'd hope that a spam filter wouldn't bounce it. On the other hand, I dislike SEO and worry that the users I'd get from it are lower-quality, so I wouldn't want to bother. This is why Bayesian filters can (and should) be somewhat personalized. An invitation to a conference might look like spam to 99.9% of people, but that other .10% shouldn't be punished for having strong but unconventional preferences.
How can they justify operating in a country like China where their technology is used directly to target political activists? I see no possible excuse for this. They are providing the most efficient and effective censorship and political targeting software ever created.
If I were Larry/Sergei/Schmidt, I'd vote against it too, just because I get annoyed when random shareholders try to tell me what to do with my company. When I first read this in a different context, it was worded so that the shareholders who weren't otherwise involved in the company brought up this proposal to force the company to do this stuff. IMO, even if I were going to follow the general intent of the proposal, I wouldn't want these random people who bought a bunch of stock to start snooping over my shoulder all the time.

Furthermore, the measure seems likely to prevent the governments of said countries from allowing Google into them at all. It is debatable whether having a censored Google or no Google is better for oppressed peoples.
I highly recommend JBoss Seam:

http://www.jboss.com/products/seam

It is quite stable and mature (granted it's around for only a year or so). I've already used it in 3 different projects and IMHO this is the best web framework for Java. The community is very active, and it's leaded by Gavin King (from Hibernate fame).

Apparently Seam supports Groovy now (I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising):

http://blog.hibernate.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2007/05/07
If that were the case, why didn't they mention that, in principle, the proposal was good but needed to be revised which is why they recommended voting it down in its current form?
And you think that none of that is going on in the United States or other western countries? Should Google refuse to operate in the US because some of our laws are bad?
A censored google targeting political activists does nothing good for the oppressed people. It only makes ad revenues for Google while helping the opressing government pull the wool over their subject's eyes and jail and/or kill their political enemies.
There are a number of problems with it. First, it won't actually affect spammers unless nearly everyone is using it... what could force them to accept the charges? Second, it's turned out that even the email systems that ask people to confirm they sent something (which spambots can't understand in general) are too much for many people to bother with, so asking them to join a system in order to pay a fraction of a cent for each email they write would likely be too much trouble.

Lastly, spam filters actually work really well. I get roughly a thousand spams a day to my primary address which has been continuously in use for ~7 years, and have to "mark as junk" maybe two spams a day -- the rest go straight to my junk folder.
Um, when was the last time someone in the US was thrown in prison and/or executed for a political opinion? This happens in China right now, and there are already several cases where they used Google and Yahoo information to do it. Hence the very justified outcry against a US company directly aiding such an evil Government.
If you've used 3d packages at all, the zooming interface is pretty familiar, even for 2d data/layouts. Many 3D packages (especially maya or shake) use them to elegantly manipulate large graphs, images, etc.
Python on Planes all the way. http://pythononplanes.com/
Updated the title to take bayesian out.

I too would definitely want to hear more about what Akismet does use... That is, if you want to tell us ;)
Python on Planes is my framework of choice too! Seriously though, you can do pretty much anything with any of these frameworks - so pick the one you seem to like the best and build something.
Ok, so you hope to teach your filter that you are not interested in SEO (because you know that "decent" companies rarely advertise themselves by sending spam). What if one day someone you know writes to you personally and offers just friendly to optimize your site because she thinks it doesn't show up in Google results? And let's say there will be some link, too. There's a chance this message will hit the thresholds and you won't see it.

Another possibility could be that we are discussing this by email and we use plenty of those "bad" words. Now get it: Viagra, Rolex watches, SEO, efficient email advertising ;)

I'm arguing that the only way to stop some really shitty mail is to force senders pay some price. Could be money or maybe some computational resources (say, MD5). The recipient (updated) would be able to see exactly how much time or other resources were spent on the given message. The more resources the more important the message. 1000 iterations of MD5? Ok, that must be someone I know personally. 10 iterations? Looks like an ad sent to many recipients. That's it.

But computers become more and more powerful. Fine, in 5 years you will be able to raise your thresholds and require, say, 10,000 MD5 iterations to catch your attention.
That's really good news!
In S.F., it's all about Java
I'm currently working with Turbogears (http://www.turbogears.org) which is a (real, no snake oil here) python framework. It's not perfect by a long way but it pulls together some really excellent technology from all over the python world.
Google faces shareholder vote over China (Includes case of Chinese Yahoo victim sueing Yahoo)
Entrepreneurs vs. wanna-bes at Sparkplug 9  bizhack
So? 3 points and no answer?
My favorite feature of Python on Planes is the one liner it takes to make Reddit. It's just Reddit.new(). It even figures out the databases for you automatically.
A good start point can be submitting the webapp to techcrunch and read/write web