skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
New Book from O'Reilly: Programming Collective Intelligence
The stock market is pretty unpredictable, yet people still try to identify trends.

I think it is too early to give up.
Yeah, and look where it's gotten us. ;-)
The Slope of a Hacker News Thread Going Nowhere Fast
I could do without the Web 2.0 hype, but the table of contents does look very interesting: it's basically an introduction to a particular subset of machine learning/data mining. I'd love to see more focus on solving these kinds of hard problems, and less on rounded corners and AJAX, among the "Web 2.0" crowd.
Its not out yet. I bought it on Amazon and then they told me a couple days later that it would take until November to actually receive it. I cancelled the order.
On average, men's clothing costs more per item. So it's probably better than 60/40 in terms of revenue, not worse.
So how would you enhance video games with these findings?
Thank you for that idea. That sounds pretty cool. You could click "Make a Milestone" and choose the date for it, then the application will countdown until you've reached your milestone, while building up chainlinks.

Or maybe the milestone could be X number of chainlinks without missing a day/week/whatever, and you choose X.
If you're using wordpress, then the "All in One SEO Pack" (http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/) plugin will take care of most of the problems listed in this post.
Heuristics for mobile design
Did you know? Stats about the mobile world today
I love your point - you alread wrote about this topic when in your article "love.html" - how to do what you love...

for me the circumstances for working on my theory must be similar to the cristalls that grow especially good at zero-gravity - the best place for me to think is in the train where i have 6 hours without being disturbed!!!
Mobile TV ads 'irritate' consumers
Unlocking the iPhone (with instructions)
the blog of teanager George Hotz, with the instructions to unlock the iPhone
Desktop internet vs mobile internet: Where are you going?
18 Ways to Stay Focused at Work
It's out-- see Tim O'Reilly's comment (currently the last one):

For those of you wondering whether to buy from Amazon or directly from O'Reilly, I heard from our Amazon sales rep that Amazon is temporarily out of stock, and is in fact showing as "not yet published." She wrote in email:

"Since I've heard from several of you regarding Programming Collective Intelligence and the status on Amazon, I thought I better send out a quick little note to explain the "glitch." As most of you have seen, Amazon's detail page for Programming Collective Intelligence is now showing as a pre-order but just last week it was "available." ... Here's what happened as it's been explained to me. Apparently, Programming Collective Intelligence ran out of stock as quickly as it was received in. Because it ran out of stock so close to the expected pub date, the system threw it back into a pre-order status."
what our lives would be without hackers I wonder?!
It looks like a stripped down version of AIMA (http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/) with two differences: It doesn't cram everything into an "agent based approach" and it gives usable examples right away skipping theory (no 100 pages devoted to first order logic).

In the sample text they mention Hot or Not, Google, Amazon, Netflix, and a few other companies to quickly give a "real world" view of what is useful. The book certainly will get more people interested in doing more sophisticated computations on their data. (Not that I think AIMA using Romanian cities or endless "sue is pat's mother. sarah is pat's daughter => sue is sarah's grandmother" examples make the material seem less useful.)
think of the TV show LOST, where the user actually experiences being a character - out-of-body, in another role, like an actor.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45984
On theoretical physicists and Wal-Mart
I wish that big chunk of bitmapped type he has at the top of every page was antialiased. The ugliness distracts from his thoughts on poker, Guitar Hero, and other profound topics.
Heh, fun site. I just submitted "ultraviolet castastrophe". The first time I saw that term in a physics book, my first thought was "that would make a great band name".
think social networking. think crowdsourcing. think vertical synergy. but don't think all three at once.
"sustainable growth"... that means 'not too rapid', right?
It's about time PHB notice this tiny little fact: they are the only ones looking forward to any sort of meeting.
Keeping a "this year I will do this and that" schedule is about as much schedule as it was ever required.
Windows Genuine Dis-Advantage
Artflock - what Artix would be like in 2007
Economic Disparity by Education
one word. envy
It's good news. This was pathetic from the beginning. They didn't even care to disguise their hunger for power and control. I liked Apple for Mac. I don't any more for iPhone.
I generally agree with your point but in this specific case - design float is actually a very useful site for those of us looking to brush up on web design tips.
I'm not sure, but a part of me doubts it. I think it's all about a very narrow group of people getting even richer.
Video game sheds light on fear
iPhone sparks counter measures from Verizon, RealNetworks and MTV
Vint Cerf, on the challenges ahead
Exactly! "Web 2.0" has somewhat of a bad image because people think of the flash instead of the substance. "Web 2.0" actually has a lot of deep technology to it; I think "harnessing human intelligence" is a technical trend that will continue for decades. The hard part is figuring out unique, useful ways of algorithmically working with user generated data, which in turn would lead to new categories of applications.
It doesn't seem like a "stripped down version of AIMA" at all, IMHO. AIMA is an AI book, this is an introductory data mining book. As such, this book talks about algorithms for clustering, classification, feature identification, collaborative filtering, etc., none of which are really addressed in depth in AIMA. There is a relatively brief section on learning techniques in AIMA, but it doesn't go into much depth, and is more focused on reinforcement learning than on typical data mining techniques (automatic classification, clustering, etc.)
Absolutely! I've gone on the record to say "sleep sovles all problems." Sleep itself doesn't--but waking up with a fresh, calm mind is much more useful than a chaotic, depressed mind that results when you are very frustrated with something.
So, if this is Hacker News shouldn't there be a category for jobs open to any company?
business memoranda:email::twaddle:twitter
I agree, AJAX really is only a tool for whats actually going on in the web right now. A sophisticated website is not one where ajax is at the core, I think its one where everytime the user visits and actively participates with the site, the user experience gets better the next time they come.
Link to the actual article itself...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6960896.stm
We'll see where it sends me on Wednesday.
Free Online Business Courses From the U.S. Small Business Administration
geek - wear jeans to interviews, make clear that I will quit if offered management roles.

Suits, as in clothes, are ridiculous. And most of the time suits, as in people, are just as ridiculous as the clothes they wear.
What with the ungodly male/female ratio in the valley, and most of the males being of the tech/fairly well financially compensated persuasion, it seems that the economics of the area would dictate that a gentlemen's establishment or 10 would be in order...
I note that amichall's involved. I don't want to stoop to ad hominems, but I figured he'd be involved somewhere, given his record.
Web 2.0 Burgers Part II: Your Menu Suggestions!
Google preps own version of Ubuntu
Maybe I'm focusing on minor details, but Arial has never seemed like a dead ringer for Helvetica to me. Or at least no more than, say, Franklin Gothic and Helvetica are the same font. There are some clear differences in letterforms that give the fonts a somewhat different feel, at least to me.

Having said that, regardless of the differences in execution, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that some Product Manager at Microsoft said "Make me something that looks like Helvetica", and the result was Arial.
It is amazing how difficult it is to get non-programmers to understand the affect interruptions have on the art of creating a program. A 10 second interruption really means 30 minutes of vastly decreased productivity, as it can easily take that long to reload a programs universe back into your head.

More often than not, the reload is imperfect and parts of the universe are not restored, leading to more lost productivity as the programmer must recreate the solution they already had worked out. Another subtle side-effect of this imperfect reload are bugs caused by a mismatch between the pre and post-interruption program state.
19. Stop reading this.
I don't know of anything closer than Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun.
Social Networks, Dummy Corporations and the Many Faces of the CIA
I tried to get it from Amazon again. Lets see if they can handle it this time ;-) I'm not going to buy it from Oreilly b/c I get free (amortized) shipping from Amazon and its $13 cheaper.
Google Code Search -- Search Public Source Code
Yes, I believe Jobs certainly would have attracted Andy Hertzfeld without the Woz. Both Jobs and Hertzfeld are passionate user interface designers, with a strong awareness of typography and user experience. The work Jobs have Hertzfeld was in an area Hertzfeld already cared deeply about.

I'm not familiar with the other developers you've mentioned.
Create a game system that pokes you with a stick.
"the defining moment of the Web 2.0 revolution was Google's invention of PageRank"

Huh? PageRank dates from the late 90s. And it's implemented in a compiled language (C++, I think -- not even GC'd).

And it involves elementary linear algebra. Heresy!

Now, as for the book itself. It looks like it tries to cover waaay too much -- support vector machines and other forms of supervised learning, unsupervised learning/clustering, optimization and evolutionary computation, applications to collaborative filtering, along with using particular libraries. There's no way you could cover all that in 358 pages!

I gave a talk on evolutionary computation to a Ruby users group and their jaws literally dropped. Web people don't give a shit about something if it doesn't involve HTTP, a programming language that's currently en vogue, JavaScript, or relational databases (really only MySQL or maybe Postgres).

If you're interested in an introductory data mining book with a practical focus, may I instead suggest Witten and Frank's "Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques"? It uses Weka throughout, which is mature and nice.
Large companies have built in processes for security, which slows down their software development, but also ensures better security than someone hacking together a site from scratch as quickly as possible.

Most of us hackers are jack of all trades, focusing on web design, databases, business logic, and security. It is difficult to be an expert in all areas while simultaneously focusing on speed of release. Just because a company has security experts doesn't guarantee secure software (Microsoft), but in many cases it does help.
Just write a Lisp program to transcribe it for you.
> In that illusion, people hide one hand in their lap and look at a rubber hand set on a table in front of them. As a researcher strokes the real hand and the rubber hand simultaneously with a stick, people have the vivid sense that the rubber hand is their own.

> When the rubber hand is whacked with a hammer, people wince and sometimes cry out.

That's not an out-of-body experience. That's called "oh shit I can't see my hand and he's about to smash it with a hammer!"
Great chutzpah setting the record straight in front of everyone. Note for presenters: Have a contingency plan if your demo breaks that involves something other than insulting a guy who's doing you a favor. Good restraint saying "I wasn't seeing any video" rather than "their demo was unrehearsed and the product didn't work".

Cambridge sounds even worse than I thought. YC should do everything in SV and just have a trip out to Boston for demo day -- although from the sound of it there's not much point, if the Boston investors are such that the East Coast bunch has to move to SV for funding anyway. Good for warmups for the SV investors, though.

If you want to give your start-up the best shot, why spend all that time in the distant-second place (Boston is #2) when you could be in #1?
>Maybe revise something old and unfinished to get warm.

Are you kidding? Everything I've written is old and unfinished.
Holy cow - this could be really good. The content preview is giving me a feeling of wordiness though. Next time I'm in a bookstore I'll thumb through it to see if it's succinct enough.
Yeah, I've heard that's good. Is the Mini-Kanren thing you build a useful constraint logic programming language to use from within your Scheme programs? Sometimes CLP is exactly what you need; it'd be great to have it at the ready.
And there are even used ones available on Amazon.
20. redirect news.yc to localhost altogether.
Seabrook is closer than Foxwoods. It's in NH, and if you can't make money at their hold'em tables then it's probably time to take up backgammon. The downside is that by state law, there are no cash games available other than 2-2 limit. You can still play tournaments for higher stakes though.
Entirely false. And a really old article, too (Jan 2006).

Goobuntu is the name of the OS Googlers use internally (if they haven't switched from GHat). I'm not entirely sure if it even counts as a real distro, since they're not really distributing it to anything but new corporate machines.

Of all the businesses Google isn't in, OS's are about the ones the furthest from what they care about. If it involves someone computing on their machine rather than Google's, it better be driving search engine hits...
Mistake 0: Thinking SEO is more important than good, interesting content.
Link to the actual paper:

http://www.giantant.com/publications/mobile_context_model.pd...

None of the stuff the paper says is a surprise if you've given any thought to mobile space before. But it always helps to lay them out literally. I think that many people realize that mobile platform is poised to be great, but no one's really figured out how to go about it, in addition to it not being as open.

The number one thing I think is important is what was pointed out in #1 in the paper--that all mobile interactions are highly personal. They're viewed as an extension of self, and always on a person. Therefore, any mobile application that fails to be actually courteous to the owner will fail, and fail miserably.
honestly I don't know why you got 5 points since you didn't mention anything about your app besides that your date "almost wet herself"; and I'm willing to bet that there are 5 other teams with the same idea.

Is it anything like this: (porn for women SFW) http://www.cafemom.com/journals/read.php?post_id=378609
No, you're definitely not the only one. I learned at the last YC dinner that pg and the Viaweb bunch had one, too (a pretty clever one, at that).
Not bad. Though from a superficial glance, there's nothing particularly forward thinking or advanced about it, the site is well implemented and designed.

I especially like the color scheme, though a little bright, it gives a sense that art is what's important here.
I imagine we'll get able to get floating holographic-like displays in the future.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...

Here's the list.

The only two I found really interesting was zink and desktop factory. I've had my eye on desktop factory for a while now, and there is a lot of possibility there with 3D printing. However, I think machines are still on the pricey side. It'll still be another two to three years before they have a high enough adoption rate to do something interesting on top of it.

Zink is interesting. Hadn't ever thought about no paper ink. The price of paper will go up, but the number of parts in a machine will go down.
There is also www.etsy.com which is for anything handmade.
Geek.
A Summer Intern's Look Into a Valley Startup
The Entrepreneurs Toolkit: Turning Lemons into Lemonade
Michael Lewis: In Nature's Casino (How Wall Street is trying to quantify the risk of catastrophic weather)
Explicit self drove me bonkers with Python, and still does.
Just because people are interested in "Web2.0" doesn't mean they're not going to be interested in the kind of stuff in this book.

In my opinion, interest in this sort of material is going to be propelled forward by Web2.0. It's not at all true that web programmers "don't give a shit" about mathematical modelling, etc. It's just that there hasn't been much accessible code for people to look at (much of it tangled in obscure, obtuse, proprietary academic and military labs).

It's true that this book seems to be attempting to cover a lot of topics, but that's probably the point: a decade ago, there was no popular concept, let alone interest, in relational databases. That changed because the street found a use for it, as the saying goes.

Anyway, I'll second your Witten and Frank recommendation, cool book.
Seconding this. (Except, the old-as-the-hills Red Hat Google desktop is called GRHAT).

There are many companies in the Valley that hack up an OS distro for internal use, either on the desktop or in server farms. It's not that big of a deal.
Eh, I wasn't impressed... it sounds more like a sales pitch for Rapleaf than an insight into startup/valley life.
One mistake I actually rarely see bloggers make is to use an acronym without defining it. Maybe I'm just lucky.

In any case, I don't see the phrase "Search Engine Optimization" even once in that post.
I thought the same, however it still may be useful as a survey book. It's something I might read as a starting point. Sometimes it's discouraging to slog through a technical paper only to discover that it's not going to help you much.
I'm not claiming startups are efficient. I'm just claiming they're better at producing new great stuff and that big companies suck at it. You don't seem to really disagree about that. Google and Microsoft have many thousands above average programmers with all the resources in the world and they're producing very little new great stuff, as defined by the market. That's why they buy startups as seeds of success, which their companies are capable of growing into big money-making trees.

Microsoft has historically always been this way, even in the very early days. Almost every single one of their significantly successful projects was bought as a seed from a startup and grown from within. They do add a lot of hard work, but the irreplaceable ingredients are done by startups.

Google and Microsoft are in at least tacit agreement that startups are the best way anyone has found to develop great new software.
Well, damn it, now I'm curious. I'll ask: What was this (now decade old) plan?

I've worked on some adult stuff in the past. I have no issues with it but I won't be doing anything in it again. Mostly because it's such a relatively small and boring subset of the world.
I didn't mention Microsoft -- I would not hold them up as a shining example of software development.

>startups are the best way anyone has found to develop great new software

YC's program is 10 weeks. The time ALONE means they aren't developing great new software that other people can't make. Back to your Microsoft example, they were notorious for having people demo for them, then stealing the idea and developing it in-house. (Remember how start-ups were all scared of going into a market segment Microsoft might want?) A start-up isn't even a good way of getting an audience, which is what Reddit, YouTube, etc. were bought for, because chances are your start-up will fail. The reason start-ups collectively work is there are so many of them, a big company can just acquire the winners.

Focusing on only the hits and ignoring the misses is a hallmark of pseudoscience, so if we're going to trumpet the winners let's compare that to the vastly larger deadpool. Start-ups are 10x more effective in producing stuff that goes nowhere. Big companies are automatically better at producing stuff people use than 90% of start-ups for that reason alone.

> I'm just claiming they're better at producing new great stuff and that big companies suck at it.

I think this is a case of "the overwhelming majority of great developers do not work at YOUR company". Numbers alone mean that more great ideas will come from outside your company than from within. More new stuff will always come from everyone not at company X than at company X.

Working at Google doesn't seem to stop people, hired or acquired, from coming up with good stuff, so once again we're back to start-ups being an advertisement of who's dedicated rather than a superior development methodology. I mean there are only so many ways you can just sit there and code, there's nothing magical about doing it in a cramped apartment. And it's demonstrably worse to do it on ramen than on free gourmet health food.

The reason Joe Kraus and others romanticize it is because they were young, it was new and exciting, and they were doing it with a bunch of their friends. That's a good recipe for getting something done, but the code's going to be a mess if you're inexperienced, and worse if you're rushing to a demo. Out of large numbers of people getting something done, some of those will be a lot better than others. It's a numbers game. VCs fund, what, way less than 1%?
Attention Economy: All You Need To Know
try it on safari.informit.com free for 14 days.
Due Diligence Checklist
> ...chances are your start-up will fail.

You seem to believe a startup's success is a game of pure chance. Of course there's an element of luck in any complicated process, but the startup game is survival of the fittest. The number of failed runners doesn't detract from the results of the winners.

> ...hallmark of pseudoscience, so if we're going to trumpet the winners let's compare that to the vastly larger deadpool

The statistical odds are only really interesting in an academic context. The fact is that the startup process is able to do what big companies are simply incapable of doing. Even with virtually unlimited selection of the top people in the world and more money than some countries. This is the crux of my point.

> ...once again we're back to start-ups being an advertisement of who's dedicated rather than a superior development methodology.

Developing great new stuff is not about creating the most amazing source code. It's about the results of the work. Intense dedication is certainly a huge factor in creating great stuff and it's something most employees of big companies lack and successful startups have. Why doesn't intense determination to develop something great qualify as a methodology? Sounds like one to me.

> ...some of those will be a lot better than others. It's a numbers game.

Can you spot the contradiction?
Business Plan Templates
I am thoroughly fed-up hearing this self-serving tripe from investors.

If all I am looking for is financial independence (say $3M), why would I trade an 80% probability of success for a 5% probability of achieving 100 times that by selling out to VCs?

Sure, my expected return is 6 times greater, but now I need approximately 31 (=log 0.2 / log 0.95) bites at the cherry to guarantee an 80% probability [1] of success. That's 6 lifetimes of startups for a serious serial entrepreneur (most of us have energy for one, maybe two, startups).

Unlike VCs, who invest in a portfolio of companies, I don't have a portfolio of lives.

[1] This assumes only two outcomes from a VC-backed company: zero return or $300M exit. Obviously there are a range of returns, but this is a reasonable approximation since VCs have no interest in seeing low returns - they'd rather kill the company than waste their time.