skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MetaOptimize is hiring contractors for exciting project work building real-world NLP + ML systems.

This is for remote, short-term gigs. You can set your hours. The only requirement is that you kick ass and add value from day one.

We are looking for generalists:

* Hardcore programmers who learn new technologies and APIs quickly.

* Experienced sysadmins, especially who have experience with AWS and EC2.

And also specialists:

* People with backgrounds in machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, and/or search. Medium experience is fine, you don't have to have a PhD.

* Python/Django programmers

* Java programmers

Email your resume and/or github URL to joseph at metaoptimize dot com. I will send you a code challenge that you can use to evaluate the sort of work you will do.

[edit: I am just one guy, doing bizdev + tech + hiring. I'll try to get back to you as soon as possible.]
Don't ask permission to ask, just ask. The worst that can happen is that you'll get downvoted
$9 is (about 30 cents) cheaper than ¢7 and £6 in case people in europe are trying to save some pennies.
Groupon's Tibet Ad - funny, accurate and a stupid mistake
It may be. I decided to poke around and if it wasn't used by Nazis, the idea has thoroughly penetrated the collective consciousness to the point that I can't quickly debunk or prove it via Google. For instance, http://www.amazon.com/Papers-Please-Identity-Documents-Autho... , a book titled "Papers Please: Identity Documents, Permits and Authorizations of the Third Reich". If an author with this level of research is allowed to make the connection, I think I can be permitted it.

Also, historical truth is of dubious value here anyhow, the point I'm making is the word picture being painted, not the veracity of the words being used for the painting.
Yeah, somewhat akin to saying "Noam Chomsky is just a better known linguist". factually true, but misses much.
Hard to say, but a good point. As someone from Germany this phrase is not really connected to either of these two special regimes. It's more a general phrase, rarely still in use (for example for completely different scenarios, since the literal translation is harmless). I think of police and an annoyance if I read that.

Hey, for me this is probably closer to Orwell than to historical reference. I do have to admit that the picture is provocative and stupid though.
Edmonton Iphone Application, Website Design & Software Development Company
Rolling Wave, A Website design, development & Software Development Company in Canada specializing in web application development, mobile phone applications, iphone app development, mobile development, etc. We provide full range of web design & development services.
Two great minds, too brief answers.

However, Kurzweil has written about it elsewhere. I don't know enough about Chomsky to know if he's expressed his opinions on AI in more depth, but he seems to be suggesting AI can never really "think".
Twitter Launches Center To Crowdsource Translations
The Nazis burnt books. Deleting articles on Wikipedia is an electronic equivalent of that.

While it's quite incendary to call someone a Nazi, I think the cap fits in this case.
I'm pretty sure his voice is just a tribute to HAL. I like it.
Bingo. I feel relieved now. Now, I actually recall the iconic arrangement of the letters for LOVE. However, I didn't recall the color scheme.

Thanks for the wiki link.
When that's the behavior of the 800-pound gorilla, then the answer is yes. IE6 didn't know what counts as valid DOM or CSS but everybody else adapted to it.
My point is that we would have to reduce our standards of living in order to stay in the Bay Area, even with two good incomes from a stable company. The costs of housing and raising a family were simply out of bounds with what we wanted to spend. By moving, we get all of the same quality of life for < 50% of the cost.

I don't want to raise my son in a 1-bedroom apartment in the suburbs.
Paul Grim: RIM’s Burning Platform
I didn't mean to sound harsh - I understand the significance. I just meant the technology involved in Watson being able to answer such questions is undoubtedly orders of magnitude more complex than the OCR and speech recognition required to process the question in the first place.

They're playing a "human" game after all, and they're not playing like a human is fed into the computer electronically.
Wowzers!
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For more information visit us at:
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We are based in Chicago.
I'd say go find Herman Martin but it's probably like McDonald's Monopoly where you get the first three and the fourth is extremely rare.
try to name your kids something normal

Normal to whom?

Aside from cultural issues, and aside from the notion that people should name the children to make up for the lack of a proper personal identification system on the Internet, that ship has long sailed. Have a look at your local paper's birth announcements - there aren't many Dicks and Janes anymore. Even older names have "creative" spellings that render them practically unrecognisable.
Ask HN: What's your favorite "About Us/Company" page?
What's the most clever, funny, heartwarming or just unique about us page you've seen?
The other February jobs posts, from barely two weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2161368

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2161360

The number of these posts is getting a little ridiculous.
I liked Kurzweil's response best: "As long as AI has any flaws or limitations, people will jump on these. By the time that the set of these limitations is nil, AI will have long since surpassed unaided human intelligence."

Watson isn't the end, it's a building block. It's true that it's been largely hyped to some degree, but I think that opens doors that wouldn't have been opened otherwise. Chomsky's dismissal seems too quick.
It isn't a vote. ("Articles for deletion" used to be called "votes for deletion", when it was a voting-based system, but that was some time ago).
I agree with many of Norman's concerns.

To the extent that connectivity and access are increasingly becoming essential to a modern way of life, commerce, education, etc. and considering the clear direction towards consolidation, oligopolization etc., ISP/cable/wireless providers increasingly look like natural monopolies. Somewhere on the spectrum of a public national highway system, public utilities, or a regulated broadcast and telecom systems, probably more towards the latter.

There are lots of good reasons for being concerned, and historical lessons abound.
As a Lemmings fan, I really like Pingus. Very much like the original Lemmings in play and in spirit.
You have to respect Chomsky, but he certainly comes off like a curmudgeon here. He can't even be bothered to clearly explain his lack of interest in Watson.

It seems less like lack of interest than anger at what he sees as a misguided approach. I think he thinks that Watson and Deep Blue are "brute force" solutions (hence the steamroller metaphor), while his work on the relation of computation and grammar (and the vision guy he mentioned) actually get at the core of intelligence.

He may think there is a small elegant machine in the brain that understands grammar, and which is of course computational. He may be right but Watson is still interesting for any reasonably curious person. It's not obvious how much brute force you need to play Jeopardy.
Show HN: Octavore, from instapaper to insta-books
I've been accumulating bookmarks for a long time, and often wished that I could save some of that collective wisdom into a more enduring form. With the new Instapaper API, I've finally found a way.

Over the weekend I hacked together Octavore, a mashup of Instapaper and Lulu, a self-publishing website. Now anyone can get their own personalized, dead-tree copy of the Internet's finest! Get a real copy of your favorite articles, stories, and essays for only $12.

Notes: It's built on Rails, so it might be a little bit slow as both the book generation and publishing take a while to complete and block the server while processing. There's no background workers or anything fancy as I only worked with what I knew to get it up quickly.

This is my first publicly launched weekend project, and I'm really excited. Comments, criticisms, and suggestions are all especially welcome, thanks!

http://octavore.com
How is this still getting upvoted, it's practically unreadable borne out as no-one's commented on it.

The hn-books.com posts are starting to feel like a spam site now. All the links on the site are bit.ly to hide that they're referral links. Stop breaking the web, url shortners are there to work around twitter deficiencies.
You have won the internets today sir. It's true, my attitude has been truly eclipsed today, and my quote crushed.

Let me present the spoils of battle to the victor... I will immediately start writing a program that will recursively search wikipedia, perform a google search and then feed those results BACK into wikipedia automatically. Then it will surely be all-encompassing, no? Even better, version 2.0 will automatically categorize that knowledge and as a side effect I will have created Artificial Intelligence. No thanks necessary!

And I hereby swear to never again think that an encyclopedia written and maintained by humans should have a breadth of topics organized at a scale that makes sense to other humans, that's deletionist wrongthought!

(I do apologize for the sarcasm, but seriously not really)
Free Online Jordan Newspapers
You should try Adclays (http://www.adclays.com). It helps publishers sell their ad space directly to advertisers. You can choose between monthly ad spaces or per CPM. You can also add backfill code so you still earn if your ad space is not sold. We take 15% of the sale.

Contact me and i can work out a better deal for you.

Disclaimer: I own Adclays.
Oh, come on. Really?

Making an editorial suggestion is not akin to burning books, not the least bit. If you are a journalist, you don’t get to call your editor a “Nazi” because she decides to not publish your story.

This comparison is stupid and offensive, it trivializes what the Nazis actually did for a cheap and inaccurate insult.

Don’t insult at all, if possible, but if you must pick something less stupid than “Nazi”. Call him “ass”, “narrow minded”, “censor”, “idiot” or whatever, I wouldn’t care at all.
Yes, there is. Would you provide us with a link or some more information?
An obvious jerk who thinks highly of his rockstar status
..And why is the solution you were clearly driving me towards one which takes advantage of an undocumented and unreliable epiphenomenon..

Since when has the thermal performance of a light bulb been undocumented and unreliable? I would think that designers of light fixtures and shades rely heavily on the documented thermal performance of light bulbs, and rate their products for compatibility with a range of bulbs accordingly.
To be fair to Quora, it is their service and not some tax -payer funded government program, so they can accept whomever they choose on their site.

These are their accounts to loose and I don't see why this is even news, or a blog post. So what if you can't come up with a name that sounds real.

For a q&a site these guys certainly get a lot of HN attention.
Greplin (YC W10) Grabs $4 Million From Sequoia For Social Search
Apologies if this doesn't come across as lucid as I'd like it to but I've had a few to drink; IMHO the best traction method for these deals and coupons types of services is to get a loose affiliate model off the ground where you allow people on the ground (read: early adopters) to attract new partner companies to sign up with your service. This way, you're marketing yourself in a dual channel medium (Affiliates gain new partners who'll promote the specials to grow their sales volumes & the affiliates themselves promote the new deals within their own social graphs to get bigger cuts from prospective deals). Your service wins either way.

I'm not sure if this would be applicable to you, although from the information on the landing page it may very well be. Just a use it or lose it piece of advice.

tl;dr This business model could use early adopters as affiliates to gain traction.
I just applied and was rejected very quickly. My email address is in the system if there's anything that can be done from your side.

aid=4D596BA950255
Maybe. The experience and connections one makes out here are often worth it, and you can find very cheap housing sharing a room in the valley, or one of the more remote parts of the city.

Overall, it took about a three months to get on my feet after moving out here, but it was absolutely worth it.
It sounds like he probably has 3 RepRaps.
this new website has a problem, too.

I'm afraid you card payment was not sucessful.
You may wish to try again or contact us with the details below.
OrderNumber TKOL1-345345345345345345353
Error details: 7: Transaction declined..

i tried twice, then got an email saying

If you have placed more than one order in error, please be assured your email has now been logged and the refund will be made over the next few days.
From looking at your examples for disrupted companies, they are mostly disruped by the internet, which was a huge technological change.

Yes , we live in time of rapid technological change , but how soon do you see an internet level change affecting the industry ? and aren't today's companies more aware of the innovator's dillema and can handle disruptive change somewhat better(microsoft has done quite a good job at this)?
You're projecting your own mind design onto the minds of all possible AGIs. You don't know whether it/they will be active or passive or think as an individual or have a concept of rights or have any preference toward slavery.
Game.co.uk - Website Speed Optimization Case Study
Why would someone pay more for "premium branding" on something they print on their own machine?

Granted I don't understand why people pay more for branded clothes either.
The perils and pearls of SaaS metrics
Thank you. I'm about 1 month away from having something people can use.
Happy Valentine's Day from the U.S. Patent Office
NYTimes article on IPv6
Requires location permissions.
Facebook Love Button [Music Video]
Seconded. Moving here will help you find a cofounder, meet lots of other entrepreneurs who can help you, and build relationships with investors. The economic benefits of being involved in the startup scene may outweigh the high cost of living.
That's what IBM once thought about computers too.
Great discussion on wikipedia about this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)...
Since there are a lot of pun-based categories on Jeopardy, I can understand why they would have problems with it.
One of the things I've found about effective promotion is choosing your audience. While I'd love more attention and respect from the HN crowd, it doesn't really translate to sales for me. So, I don't put a lot of effort into promoting myself here. I think it's an important point that a lot of us tech geeks miss: Unless your product is aimed at fellow tech geeks, don't worry what HN people think of it (or of you).

But, since you asked, on http://www.obsidianportal.com we saw a significant uptick in premium subscriptions when we hired someone to manage our Twitter and Facebook account. We brought in someone from our community and he did a great job increasing engagement.

We have a reputation for being very easy to engage, and I do as many interviews/guest-spots on podcasts and blogs (roleplaying game blogs, not tech stuff) as people will have me. I love the subject material, so it's fun to talk about, but it's still "work" and takes a lot of time.
This is a bit outside of the present scope of the site, but how about offering pre-printed yard sales sign for sale online? Possibly you could partner with a site that already provides this and you would make revenue on a referral basis.
One good thing is that it keeps Wikipedia a tertiary source. I personally have a fairly inclusionist perspective, but my perspective is more or less: Wikipedia should cover anything on which any decent third-party source can be found (and it should point the reader to the source, so they can look it up themselves if they want).

There is of course stuff on which internet users can collect useful information, where no current sources exist to cite, but there's no reason Wikipedia has to be the only wiki on the internet. For example, Know Your Meme is an excellent project to document current internet memes, including via original sleuthing by its editors, who try to track down the history of memes and reconstruct their paths. It's not really a tertiary source summarizing the existing literature though; it's a sociological/historical research project. And it's great that it exists. Why does it have to exist on wikipedia.org, a project that has different goals, which don't include doing original research? Of course, memes should also be covered on Wikipedia, but only when Wikipedia can cite some existing published source documenting the information (a news article, a sociology conference paper, anything really).

I guess it seems perfectly fine to me that there's more than one project on the internet dedicated to collecting knowledge, with different goals; I don't see why Wikipedia has to be the union of all possible wikis. If anything, I would prefer more projects with different goals and approaches to exist, rather than everything being so centralized. That way I can go to Wikipedia if I want the tertiary-source take on internet memes, and I can go to Know Your Meme if I want the primary-source take on internet memes. Same with a Wikipedia article on a location versus a Wikitravel article on a location: both useful, but I don't see why they have to be merged into one project (or why that would be helpful).
> Trying to fight it is silly, as there is no mechanism whereby you can authenticate identity online.

Handling fake names or other identifiers is like handling software piracy. You can't prevent it and technology can't prevent it. The pathological cases will do their thing anyway. The best you can do is make it sufficiently inconvenient that the bulk of users will simply go the legit route and the bulk of clowns will go away. Incurring some false positives is a cost, which Quora has chosen to bear.

This is what government itself does for issuing its own IDs. They just have the power for "sufficiently inconvenient" to include criminal charges.
The SR60, which looks really similar to the current 60i model.

I've been through several different sets of foam, some better than others, but they're still not nearly as comfortable as the Sennheisers.
Its funny. My grad school adviser was like this. Think about it. Getting paid the wages of a peon and being treated as one.
Matt,

I use bit.ly links to get real-time tracking. Is there another way to do that? If so, I'm happy to change. Nobody is trying to trick anybody into anything.

If you'd like, how about a big notice at the top of the page that lets people know all links are referral links? There's already one on the main page. Would that make you feel better?

EDIT: I've updated all the pages to include a notice about all the outbound links. Since I still haven't heard anything as far as how to replace the real-time tracking bit.ly offers, it stays in there.

As far as the lack of comments, several HN'ers I know don't comment on SEO on here any more. People just get too irrational about it.

And I should have known better than to feed the comment trolls.
The Broken Promise of Blogging on the iPad
Hey, Matt -

I'm in Denver and interested. I'll drop a line later today, but would you mind letting me know a little bit more about what you need? Websense has you guys blocked behind an overly aggressive filter as "category: none."
You need to look into some serious security stuff on the site. You have directory listings, so I can see all your php files and start fuzzing them. I managed to get some mysql error to dump on input which then showed a little idea of how your were processing. There is no input validation and scripts process and render (your dan page is broke) causing anything else to stop functioning.

Also, I tried to register using the link that says register and it goes to a 404 that tells me to stop hacking the site (made me laugh only because the lack of input validation), so you may want to change that to something a little more friendly.

You may want to consider the following:
- Lock down your dirs
- Sanitize input and strip out all tags
- Setup an approval queue for anonymous user postings.
Nokia CEO Vows to Beat Android
We had two pairs in the office and modded one and not the other. In a blind test two of three actually preferred the non-modded 555's. Our test wasn't great though, 10 seconds of a relatively low quality mp3 and none of us are audiophiles, though the one of us who is the closest to being an audiophile was the one who preferred the modded headphones so, take that fwiw.

If you're going to do it, I found that you have to pull hard, as in really, uncomfortably hard on the foam padding to get it off. It does come off though, and everything went back together fine.
How Amazon Makes Boatloads of Cash by Changing their Site
How much more does it cost them to make their content available worldwide? Couldn’t they upload everything to YouTube and let Google foot the bill? (Which Google would gladly do.)

I don’t know whether more people would donate if they made their content available worldwide but if such a move wouldn’t cost them anything or nearly nothing there certainly wouldn’t be any harm in doing so.
And 'sed' is even easier to say than 'perl regex'!
Best Techie Love song for Valentines Day!
Thanks for sharing Chris, great last blog entry on your site, very honest and to the point. I worked at BigCo for 3 years, quick BigCo, consulted for 7 yrs, started an Agency for 5 yrs, then sold it last year.

Now I'm back to consulting, taking a breather, as those 5 years were many 70hr/weeks of blood/sweat/tears.....get ready for the same :)

Good luck to you man!
Personally, I'd be more inclined to just email my friends and ask them. I feel like I already have too many online services, pages, and who knows what to manage, and it's not apparent to me what added value a page would have for this.

A simple process to create a page probably has potential for a bunch of applications, but I don't think improving your Twitter list is much of a burning need for anyone.
Graphical Artist/Designer who can do iPhone work (screens buttons etc). Extra points for willing to learn the proper methods of cutting PSDs up so we don't have to open photoshop on the dev machines.

Part time work only, good for a moonlighter or freelancer.

Usually a couple week lead time on things, but sometimes would like a couple day lead time (and are willing to pay for that).

Please show a portfolio (email in my profile), and a couple estimates how long/how much the most appropriate portfolio pieces took to do.
Furthermore, he's applying for a position at Microsoft.
I admire your dedication! You don't have too much to lose, but a lot knowledge to gain. Your bootstrapped approach is great and your time-frame reasonable for a smaller project. Good luck!

If I should ever do a start-up again, I'll go for boot-strapped as well. If people give you big wads of money they often try to influence your business too much ... sometimes even beyond recognition. Aw... ugly memories.
> Trying to make obscure things more notable is not a legitimate use of Wikipedia.

Consider a person P who doesn't know about X but would benefit from X if he/she did know about it.

I hypothesize that for each P there is on average more than one X. This suggests to me that making things more notable can aid overall welfare, and therefore ought to be a goal of a universal encyclopedia project.