skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Netflix and similar algorithms are based on networks (I believe). Since Persons A and B liked the same show, let's recommend the other shows that Person B liked to Person A. They of course have the advantage of a huge database of user preferences, and teams of programmers.

This site allows you to put in one show after you finish it and gives other shows you might like. You don't have to rate other shows and develop a profile. Perhaps simplicity is the site's most important trait.

Our site has a database of shows that have been rated on various attributes pertaining to the type of show and its style. The hope is that rating shows based on these attributes similar to what Pandora does for music can allow for different types of recommendations compared to Netflix and recommending based on a network of user preference links.

Thanks for the feedback.
Wow this tool is just great and something I've always wanted.

Will be using it extensively for poaching clients from competitors. Also will love to see the effectiveness of competitors and my PR campaigns. Can't wait!

I have already signed up for a premium account!
I built this using the Twilio API, which I really enjoy using.

The app is a little expensive; I can lower the price later if I move to a different solution, for example my own asterisk server.

Also looking to use in-app purchasing and/or new subscription model as appropriate for each platform (Android/IOS).
Ask HN: Incubator application feedback 
I imagine many people have submitted applications to multiple incubator programs.

Wondering if you asked other people to review your application submission and on average how many people did you ask ? Was it useful to have them review it ?
> Logo: Lisp's adorable 7-year-old niece who likes to play with her toy turtle. On casual conversation, she proves to be disturbingly worldly and well-informed. You resolve not to let your kids play around Lisp's house. Thinking about using Logo in any serious way makes you feel a bit dirty.

That was hilarious and disturbing at the same time.
Could you tell me how to circumvent AAC copy protection? My wife has thousands of songs she can't easily transfer without ripping all of them, 15 or so at a time, to CD.
That's exactly why I wrote this post. Because on the surface, it seems that a free account is simply a loss leader.

But it never occurred to me, to treat it like an 'SEO'/marketing line item on the budget.

This is fundamentally a different approach and potentially VERY lucrative.

You are absolutely right about SO. When they posted that 80% of their traffic comes from Google, that's when it occurred to me and I then decided to look at Github and see if it is true.

Low and behold, when you search for obscure programming terms, Github comes up on the first SERP for many of those terms in the long tail.

So it is user-generated organic SEO content (like Digg.com) but much more targeted to their market.

Brilliant!
You mean something like this (from a HN thread a while ago)?

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ag-R_ZlGO21NdE9HSWR...

Also related: http://www.builditwith.me/

The problem with idea sheets seems to be that most ideas are terrible...
BrainDriver: A Mind Controlled Car
Doctors do struggle with diagnosing rare illnesses effectively. sometimes with really bad results.

But there's no need for watson. there's already good enough expert systems for this job. for example see isabel healthcare.

The issues in automating medicine are more business and cultural and much less technological.
Use a browser.
http://www.reddit.com/r/somebodymakethis
Logically, the question has no answer. I don't see how a computer won't say no answer in a given "Yes or No or N/A" too.

It already happens for 1/0 answers.
If anyone from Posterous is around: what feedback channel should I use for small feature requests that someone will actually read and respond to, even with a simple "no, we will never do that." ? I've tried http://forums.posterous.com , help@posterous.com , and the feedback link in the site's footer; all seem to have disappeared into the ether. Happy to discuss via email.
I think you missed the point of my post. My question is not why they make money, but why do people value their contribution. Hint: Celebrity driven culture - I get it. That doesn't mean I like it.
Ideas or execution? Know where you fit
Chertoff: Internet Kill Switch Would Be “Troubling”
Simplistic means treating complex issues and problems as if they were much simpler, that's exactly what Jquery and its suit of plugins (including Amplify) does well.
Facebook Adds 'Civil Union,' 'Domestic Partnership' To Relationship Status
PubSubHubbub
__ _ _

PuSH.
That would suck to come up an idea, put nose to grindstone and turn it into a working invention, and then have the patent for it thrown out because a comic book writer had a similar idea and used it for a gag.

So, if Google actually ever tried to sell an automatic car-driving system, would the patent be voided on the basis of Knight Rider reruns, or would they cite The Love Bug (original version) as prior art?
I'm pretty sure they used their real names when signing the Declaration of Independence, but it's been a few years since my last history class.
Is that a Samsung Galaxy Europa by any chance?
No, I don't think so. It was always known that buzzer speed was always an important factor.
I think many people here are comparing the late stages of the dot-com bubble with what I would call the early stages of the current bubble. I remember it gradually getting hyped at first, then it hit a tipping point when pets.com happened (I miss the sock puppet). I also remember a lot of really great ideas being explored before it tipped.

So, I do remember the dot-com boom (in fact I was at a startup in Seattle during it), but I guess I remember the beginning of it being more humble.

I think we're just getting warmed up now and to me all the signs are there. This is when the hype companies are starting to show up. The recent high valuations are going to fuel the fire, and it's starting to get nuts. I don't think the lower operating costs are a factor. Most of the high profile dot-coms blew their wad on marketing.

It's just an opinion though, and it wouldn't be the first time I was wrong. Guess we'll see how it goes.
> Ghostery, a service of Evidon, Inc. All rights reserved.
> http://www.evidon.com, formerly Better Advertising.

Thanks, I appreciate the irony, but No
On a similar note, Barack Obama mentioned in his interview with Fox last week that one of the downsides of being a President is that he lost the ability to have casual conversations with people. A public figure in any domain has to live with this.
Reminds me of the Diaspora gender option conversation. http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2010/11/26/disalienation/
best to buy this before he gets sued for trademark infringement
"I can't keep count of the number of people who I talk to on a daily basis online or in person, at networking events, etc... that acts as if their idea is so revolutionary that they must keep it to themselves. This is utter bullshit."

Not always!

It can depend heavily on what is meant by "an idea".

Here is an extreme example: 'Idea' (A) is a pill, taken once, and safe, that will cure any cancer right away. 'Idea' (B) is actually how to make such a pill.

For (A), there's little or no reason to keep it secret. For (B) there are some tens of billions of rectangular green reasons to keep it quite secret until some good lawyers have done good things with patents.

Idea (A) is just a broad concept of a new product. Right: Mostly there is no good reason to keep one of those secret.

But idea (B) is much different.

I confess: I never thought of anything like (A) as an 'idea' at all.

An idea like (A) is some first cut description of what to do and commonly easy to think of. An idea like (B) is how to do (A). If (A) would be valuable but is difficult to do and if (B) does it, then (B) has the main importance.

In my career, I've only considered cases of (B) to be an 'idea'. Such ideas do need to be kept secret, say, as in Top Secret in the US DoD, secret before have protection from the USPTO, or trade secret.

If it is obvious and easy to do (A), then I would conclude that there was no technological advantage, no technological barrier to entry, and would would have to look for a special reason to try.

I'm interested only in an (A) when no one else knows how to do it very well and I figured out (B) that does do it well along with the other usual criteria -- many people are eager for the solution and ready to pay; can deliver the solution for much less than can get paid for it; etc.

I confess I'm shocked that people here on HN neglect the role of (B).

I was even more shocked when KP's J. Doerr stated "Ideas are easy; execution is everything" and "ideas are plentiful". True for (A), definitely NOT for (B). If have (B) for that cancer pill, I can assure Doerr that the idea was everything and execution will be entirely routine.
Every year new and old businesses go bust. Bubble or no bubble. Good economy or bad economy. Take the average joe, pit him against Lebron James in a half court shoot out, first one who makes a basket wins, the smart money would be on Lebron but its not a stretch to think that Joe would sink it first. In the past bubble bust we didnt know Lebron from the Joes, now we know. We know the skillful people in the space, yes Joe will occasionally sink the basket first, but over time Lebron will deliver. This net growth is not a bubble, yes companies will bust but the Lebrons will still be ballin.
That's a very neat looking concept, and congratulations on getting it out there.

I don't see any link between a dollar price and the purchase of credits, however - could you add or address that?

(It seems you get 360 credits for 8.95 but doesn't indicate how much it costs to buy extra credits beyond the initial ones)
How would this be trademark infringement? Can you trademark math?
That does indeed sound harsh - and unnecessary as what you really want is a better, simpler test.

Add a fiss-buzz style requirement and be done with it.
I'm sure the same thing comes out of Jeopardy "Tournament of Champions" games where a number of very good human players come together. It's just that only regular Jeopardy watchers every noticed those games were taking place.

It just seems more pronounced with Watson because it drew in a large crowd of new (but perhaps one-time) viewers.
80% of browsers need a patch
> If it's not computable by a Turing machine ... it's not computable by a physical computer.

By a physical Turing equivalent computer. True.
The breakthrough will come when we'll be able to overcome the damnation of step-by-step-ness (which is the primitive expression of causality).
Exactly my problem. I drop one when I get distracted by another. My list is long too, so there's always something else to get distracted by. Interested to hear how others deal with this?
So 'simplistic' is right? Would 'simplified' be incorrect here?

EDIT: A spot of googling shows that 'simple' is generally held to be the correct word in this context. I guess 'simplified' implies they've taken something complicated and made it simpler, whilst 'simple' implies they've not made anything more complicated than it needs to be.
Now that's just showing off. Still it's hard to deny Autodesk is good at what it does, I'd love to know just what they have in store for this acquisition.
You shouldn't wait... who knows when this recession is going to end.
Faster than a speeding rabbit: speed, sync, and settings
> the many contrarian (for lack of a better word) choices made in the language design — purity, default laziness, utter rejection of OO.

Haskell isn't a pure language. Its only notable characteristic regarding purity is that it's possible to annotate whether some code is pure or not. Working with impure (and sometimes downright unsafe) is common, encouraged, and widespread. Especially in real-world code.

Haskell doesn't utterly reject OO; if anything, its combination of typeclasses and nearly-free threads brings it closer to Smalltalk or Erlang than many pretend-OO languages (C++, Java, C#).

Default laziness is one of the few truly weird parts of Haskell, and I sincerely doubt the author has done anything serious enough to worry about the evaluation model.
It really depends on what you mean by a bubble.

The classic example of a bubble is the Tulip-mania of the 17th century [1].

The dot-com bubble was ultimately caused by a system awash with dumb money where even the most ludicrous ideas were getting funded. It was a house of cards that eventually came down. It earns its bubble label because two things happened:

1. Funding dried up to the point that legitimate businesses couldn't get funded or failed; and

2. The ramifications of the bubble extended far beyond dot-com companies.

Do we have something like that now? IMHO no. But I think we do have a valuation bubble of sorts. The system is awash with money (particularly Russian money) but what you have to remember is that we're still talking about far less money than in 2000.

In 2000 there were no angel rounds (per se) and companies weren't bootstrapped or funded on $250k or less. It was pretty much straight to a $5m+ Series A due to the (then) high costs of servers, software licenses and bandwidth.

Now you can build a prototype of something for as little as $10-50K. Infrastructure costs are almost zero (for a prototype). The only major cost left really is developer time and $250k will pay for 2-3 developers for a year (at a mix of salary+equity). That same venture would've required an order of magnitude more money in 2000.

So I think what you'll see is that a lot of angels will lose their shirts in the next few years or simply get poor returns. The same applies to the lower end of seed funds. But I don't think funding will dry up to the same extent simply because the market has many more participants, we're talking about far less money (both in total and per investment) and the barrier to entry is so much lower than it used to.

Now, this may translate into a problem where angel-funded companies can't get Series A/B funding and thus fail but with many companies reaching profitability with very small amounts of money the only real impact will be (IMHO) consolidation (today we have some significant players--Google, Facebook and Apple for example--swimming in cash and ready to write big checks even for talent acquisition) and the adoption of more lean-and-mean approaches, which can hardly be a bad thing.

Where ordinary investors could really lose out is on companies like Facebook. The early investors will (and have) made out like bandits but honestly I can see that bubble bursting at some point in the future.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Unless you have a friend with a cellphone...
The Case of the Mysterious Characters
Isn't that exactly what a bubble is?

Ok, not "exactly", but come on: "the majority of startup companies will end up losing money" sounds like a very bubbly thing.
I agree in general, but which of "purity, default laziness, utter rejection of OO" does OCaml have?
I can't believe no one's mentioned http://xkcd.com/810/ about training sock puppet bots to make relevant contributions to the conversation.
> The only people being swayed or convinced by some sockpuppet campaign are those whose opinion is already made of shit.

Social proof is a studied, verified effect, where people's opinions are shaped by the opinions of others at a subconscious level.

Do you hate laugh tracks? Me too. But research shows that people think shows are funnier with the laugh track than without, even if they say they hated the laugh track.

Are you annoyed by every brand saying they're "The Leading X" or "The Number 1 Y"? Me too. But marketing which includes these claims leads to higher sales than marketing without.

When I was a sales puke, I applied this principle to selling add-on insurance for car rentals. I identified a point in my pitch where I could add the words, "almost everybody takes the package". That's all, that's it. In the week when I first applied it, it added almost 10% to my rate of sale and the improvement persisted when I retained those words.

And I was dealing with all walks of life. Holiday makers of all kinds. From backpackers, to CEOs of german industrial giants, to law-school professors from leading US universities, they were all affected by the truthful claim that almost everybody bought the package from me.

Social proof works.
How are they making money? Are they taking a cut out of whatever is sold?
One problem is that Google is too tight-lipped about the Android roadmap even with its manufacturing partners. I know from working with one manufacturer how surprised they were with the pace of the Gingerbread and Honeycomb releases and how this has completely screwed up their schedule.
How to Properly Quote a Client
Do we really need any more prurient speculation over Steve Jobs' health? Can't the media just leave him alone until he wants to put himself back in the public eye?
I can't imagine any startup having a lack of ideas though. It's somewhat amusing seeing this on the front page right along with the how to pick an idea.
Glenn Beck goes after Google
What's with the philosophy hating here. Let the kid study something for his its sake.
Making E-Commerce Real-Time
Wish there were more actual news in here ... all that is says is that the National Enquirer is going to run pictures of Jobs looking frail and gaunt.
Mark Suster: Should be Raising Money Now?
" although surprisingly this confirmation did not give any detail on which patent office or how the Duck story came to its attention"

This may come as a surprise to some, but in the Netherlands certain comics are considered respectable literature and have been for a very long time. Donald Duck, Kuifje (Tintin), Olivier B Bommel and Suske en Wiske are read by people of all ages and social classes. For example Donald Duck magazine is still one of the most popular magazines for college students.
A closer approximation would be "Faw-ill", emphasis on first "syllable", but as a diphthong sound that almost ends up sounding like a shortened "eel". In other words, the "a" sound starts out sounding like it does in "fall", but ends up a hair away from "e" in "eel".

That's how I'd say it with a Gaeltacht accent in Galway. People who learned Irish from a non-native speaker or a different area of the country will probably disagree.
Official Google Research Blog: Query Language Modeling for Voice Search
My best friend applied to Twitter last year and was told that they were only seeking people who were already employed.

The argument that everyone who deserves a job already has it is discriminatory and silly. Those of you who agree with this practice will feel very differently when the startup you're working at runs out of money and suddenly you want to go work for someone else.
Pointing out that a source has a vested interest in the topic is not the same as explaining why his reasoning is wrong.
Haskell isn't a pure language. Its only notable characteristic regarding purity is that it's possible to annotate whether some code is pure or not.

Isn't this a requirement (the use of the type system for annotating purity), not something that is just "possible". And isn't that what people generally mean by its purity?
I don't think I realized the degree and I've been an off-and-on regular Jeopardy watcher over the years. I don't see this subtlety as hurting Jeopardy's brand any though. It does make me wish that there had been a better platform for competition of this sort that would have had a more level playing field.

(The humans actually had some advantage of anticipating the buzz-in signal so I'm not saying that Watson had all the cards. I'm just saying that a lot of the contest hinged on a factor that inherently could not be made apples-to-apples.)
Is Seasteading the Future?
There's something crazy going on in the american start up world. I was astounded that about.me was worth acquiring after listening to the founder of myonepage.com virtually declare it a bit of a disaster as he couldn't monetize it (he's now moved onto bufferapp.com). myonepage.com is practically identical to about.me, founded at pretty much the same time, same idea, good execution. And yet we've got the founder admitting he can't do anything with it.

Some say the about.me acquisition has an excellent team and that's where the money went. myonepage.com is one guy. So you really gotta wonder how great that team actually was.

There's a lot of startups going crazy valuation at the moment with some serious hand waving about business models.

Bubble.

And Facebook will be one of the first to pop, I'm tempted to bet serious money on it. My Dad just joined, he's been a reliable harbinger of death for any popular website.
Yale physicists build an anti-laser
D'oh, none. I originally wrote "…has none of them," looked back and saw "OO," and cleverly "corrected" myself. Thanks for catching that.
Looking for feedback on new Google-finance-style graph-based weather site
We just opened the public beta for http://weatherspark.com, taking inspiration from the interactive graphs available on Google Finance. We'd love your feedback on it.

The site contains all of the worldwide weather station data available back to 1948 (down to the hour!), and makes it available in an interactive graphing interface. In addition to all the historical data, there are also integrated forecasts from several sources, and detailed records and averages (also down to the hour!) that are shown in the background in order to provide context.

The site is intended to serve your daily weather needs, to help inform long-range travel decisions, and to allow geeking out on the raw data.

A few cool random views:

An average day near the end of July in San Francisco (it is cloudy in the morning, clear in the afternoon, and almost never rains):
http://weatherspark.com/#app;a=USA/CA/San_Francisco;t0=07/23;t1=07/28

The monsoon in Mumbai, India (the rain is so dominant that it cools down the air for three months, creating a neat multi-modal yearly temperature curve):
http://weatherspark.com/#app;a=India/Mumbai;t0=01/01;t1=12/31

That cold snap in Dallas around the Super Bowl this year that was all over the news (turn on the wind speed and direction graphs and you'll see the wind change from southerly to northerly just as the cold snap starts):
http://weatherspark.com#app;a=USA/TX/Dallas;t=360209;mspp=900000

Average late July in Houston (the thunderstorms roll in in the afternoon around 4pm typically):
http://weatherspark.com/#app;a=USA/TX/Houston;t0=07/23;t1=07/28

The full year of 2010 in my home town (Madison, WI):
http://weatherspark.com/#app;a=USA/WI/Madison;t0=2010/1/1;t1=2010/12/31

Please take a look and explore the data. Don't forget to pan & zoom, and to turn on other graphs! :)

Cheers,
James
Or S and K

[Edit: Or Y expressed in terms of S and K]
I'm not sure if I agree with the assertion here. Pure speculation, but I HIGHLY doubt this was their strategy when offering free accounts. I think the primary strategy was to get people to use the product, fall in love with it, then subscribe when in need of a private repo. Naturally, people will want to use the tool(s) they're already comfortable using.

Having a kick-butt site, easy to use, and executing like mad-men ---that's what got them so popular and as a result of being so popular and so highly valued, they get SEO in return.

That's my theory and I'm sticking to it until someone from Github says different! :-)

StackOverflow / EE / etc... - maybe a different story. Why? I don't know - just my feeling! And my feelings are valuable! lol
Unqualified people applying is not a problem. The real problem is your application filter. For example, ask every applicant to include a certain character string (maybe the solution to a trivial assignment) in the body of their cover letter, and discriminate accordingly. I'm sure it would work great at most companies.
I wonder if any of the ones we found with Truthy ( http://truthy.indiana.edu/ ) were generated in this way
Canonical to Banshee: either we disable affiliate code by default or we take 75%