skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
New York doesn't have its own currency, immigration, and customs. It's also primarily English speaking, as is the US as a whole. HK isn't just a city in China. It's already economically developed.
GWT for client side code + Wicket for server generated markup / stateful pages + Google Guice + Hibernate (or MyBatis if you prefer a more low level but simpler API) + PostgreSQL. This does everything I need.

All the modern Java tooling goodness minus the J2EE nonsense.
Not certain what's unfair about it - if we accept that the human contestants would have scored comparably to Watson (if they had the opportunity), then the competition really does boil down to who has the fastest thumb. I can't imagine it would be any more entertaining to watch IBM throw the match by intentionally crippling their player.
Exactly. I know a recent startup that did their initial build-out in Lisp. Then the CTO left, for whatever reason, and then the remaining leadership team seemed to decide to rewrite the stack in Java. They probably thought, "Hey it will be easier to find people." Yes, it will be easier to find bad people. Are their great Java people? Of course. But the total number of resumes you're going to have to wade through, and the ratio of bad to good, is going to be much higher with Java than with Lisp.
I won't talk about left and right because I'll get confused.

If you want to exit after 90 degrees, outer lane. If you want to exit after 180 degrees (straight through), either lane. If you want to exit after 270 degress, inner lane at first, then start indicating you are exiting, perhaps moving to outer lane before exit. The latter sounds confusing, in practice it isn't, mainly because other people will be expecting it.
Engaged with Arranged
How about "subscription pricing"?
Apple doesn't even come close to having a monopoly.

Microsoft most certainly did have one during the browser wars, and were leveraging it to get people to increase IE marketshare.

With Windows on the desktop, you didn't really have much of a choice but Windows if you were going to use pre-package software, play games, or do business. With the iPhone, you've got tons of competition - Android, RIM, and WP7. If you don't want to work in that model, nothing forces you to, either as end user or VAR.
In the meantime, we will be collaborating with our market peers in determining an appropriate legal and business response to this latest development.

Eurozone based content rights holders such as Spotify, Vivendi and Amazon should take this to the Directorate General for Competition. iTunes music enjoys a dominant position in online music sales. ITMS operates on only ~15% net margins [1] the other ~15% attributed to marketing, R&D, bandwidth, support etc. App store or video margins should be even lower due to increased bandwidth, hosting costs, editorial review, etc. Clearly Apple's own content businesses would be unsustainable or would constitute dumping if forced to pay their public rate card for the payment platform.

Traditional remedies like content divestiture or substantial regulatory oversight could stifle innovation and raise consumer costs.

Instead:

- Allow end-users to specify an alternative root trust authority.
- Unbundle application signing from packaging, allowing N signers per binary
- Allow application side loading.

Effectively this would allow a competitor like Amazon to sidestep Apple requirements but only if they were willing to provide the entire infrastructure - payments, app store, bandwidth, support etc. Other root authorities could potentially be an open industry alliance, a privacy organizations like EFF, FOSS signers like FSF, code auditors like OBSD, security firms like Kaspersky or Secunia etc.

Apple as an apple signer would be able to continue to select and sign applications arbitrarily to maintain a high user experience, mandate platform changes, provide preferential payment terms to in house content businesses and avoid breaking out detailed incomes and revenues in public.

Competitors would gain a plan of last resort to split from the ecosystem if the only alternative is exiting the platform entirely.

Consumers would gain from competition driving down margins and overhead, alternative signing would discourage consumer unfriendly behavior by trust authorities.

Simple to enforce, easy to implement, solves competition concerns even in markets that haven't developed yet.

[1] http://seekingalpha.com/article/90735-how-much-will-the-app-...
You can rebuild indexes in-place in even the free versions of SQL Server.
Domain name resellers - They're still partying like it's 1999
Two minor issues:

Clicked on "another random clue" after reading the first one. That disappeared on the following clues.

Having to use Twitter/any other common ID is going to cause people to shy away. Let me register for my own ID on your site.

Otherwise, I love the idea!
Well, a couple notes:

1. Living together doesn't necessarily increase productivity. If you actually started a company together, one of your homes/rooms would probably become the startup's 'home' anyways.

2. Living with him will quickly tell you how well you'll get along in the long run, something crucial to business. If you find out you don't work/live well together, you can move elsewhere next year.

TL;DR- Go for it, live with him. Worst case you learn that you don't really want to start a company with him.
No.

IBM has little to no interest in or tolerance for consumer facing web sites. It tried developing a consumer web search in 1996 called "InfoMarket" and killed it weeks before launch (and killed off IBM's own web site search in the process as collateral damage).

While IBM does support a few sporting event web sites (which IBM has down to a routine), I don't see IBM doing anything with Watson facing the general public. Perhaps as a gimmick for a short period of time, but not a general service.
This kind of opportunity doesn't come around often on HN, so for the sake of karma, I have two big Tolkien related sites http://planet-tolkien.com and http://the-hobbit-movie.com/ for anyone interested :)
Moving from .NET to open source improved the quality of code and people I worked with.

A lot.

>rewrite the stack in java

A rewrite was a bad idea to begin with. They shot themselves twice in the same leg. GG guys.
If you room with your potential co-founder, you risk the danger of creating an echo chamber ( http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=echo%20chambe... )

Plus starting a company is enough stress, don't add to it by having the stress of rooming together.
"their network" is the apple phones that access the apple store. No other devices can access the Apple store but Apple devices. Therefore, "their network"
There's a high-level overview in this paper from AI Magazine, Fall 2010: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs124/AIMagzine-DeepQA.pdf
So the game turns from "the absurdly smart computer stomps everyone" to "the absurdly smart (but deliberately crippled) computer may or may not stomp everyone, depending mostly on random chance."

That doesn't sound like a great improvement, imho.
What are we eating? The truth in our food.
I really think there is some valid anti-trust possibilities here.

No. Apple has plenty of competition for the app store. First of all from the Android app store. Second, the entire internet is competition for the app store.
The article doesn't state the domain names in question.

For instance, some domains are worth more than others especially LLL, NNN and dictionary .com's.
I'm not pointing any fingers, but the security industry both on- and offline has long had problems with snake oil.
A counter-offer would probably do this person a lot of good.

Negotiation isn't a you-offer, I-offer one time thing.
SQL injection and MD5... on a "security" company? In 2011?

I'm sorry but thats just egregious. Thats like being a bodyguard and not even putting a lock on your own house.

The rest of the attacks could have happened to anyone. We all know its best practice to use many different passwords but most don't because its more convenient to only have one or a few. And if the email is coming from the email address it should you could brain fart and give up the info without thinking.

But the first two parts of the attack should NOT have been possible for them to even pretend to call themselves a computer "security" firm in 2011
The difference is that I notice when Windows updates, and I don't notice each time that Chrome updates.
Yeah I've seen a lot of people misunderstand defensive programming and validate the input to every method. Defensive programming style can create disastrously verbose code, particular in OO languages with people who don't really get OO design.
And, as I predicted, it only came to buzzer reflex, which computers unsurprisingly excel at. On day 2 (today), Watson was only beaten to the buzzer three times when it had the correct response above its confidence threshold.
YouTube is working for me, albeit rather slowly.
Why the spoiler? Do you think everyone watches it live? We are in the age of the DVR.
How I see the site is probably more like a dating site that connects service providers with customers based on a geographic location but with a unique twist. Where might I be able to research these open source clones a bit further and do you think there is something that may fit in this realm?
The Y-Combinator app is very unique you can easily see what PG and his team are looking for.

I doubt TechStars or any other incubator is looking for the same traits, or understand people the same way.
It's not unfair exactly, but it certainly ruins the impressiveness of Watson's ability to come up with the right answers. I highly doubt Watson's accuracy is even close to Brad or Ken's, but the buzzer seals the deal.

It's less impressive, just like a computer sorting 1000 integers faster than a human is less impressive.

edit: added "not" after the first word
quick clarification - you need to have at least one founder who is a current or recently graduated Stanford student (enrolled within the last 3 quarters, including summer).
the comparison to google seems, um, awkward?

"IBM holds more patents than any other U.S.-based technology company and has nine research laboratories worldwide. Its employees have garnered five Nobel Prizes, four Turing Awards, nine National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science."

admittedly, they've been around longer, but they're not exactly playing with crayons over there.
Speaking as a former straight-to-EE-out-of-college employee:

I didn't experience any of the "not very nice"-ness you're referring to- my coworkers there were and are actually really nice folks.

I did, however, leave because of burnout.
How to make the buzzers fair: If two people buzz in within time T of the question being read, randomly select who gets to answer. The value of T would be somewhere on the order of 200 ms, to distinguish between the two cases of "waiting until the question is finished before buzzing in" and "racing to figure out the answer the fastest".
> The development of the universal application is being by a Kauffman Foundation grant of $200,000

If it's not too late to bid I'd gladly create a common startup application for a mere... (pinkie in mouth)... $100,000. I know, I know, I'll have to invent some sort of form technology, and some way to submit data to a web server of some kind. Perhaps invent some sort of database. This stuff is costly, folks. R&D. Could take years too. And there's no guarantee we'll succeed. But the challenge, it excites me. That and $100k.
They could revert to the old rule where you could buzz in as soon as you thought you knew the answer. It's hard to tell how long it takes Watson to come up with answers right now, but switching to the old rule would introduce an interesting dynamic where Watson would have to decide whether to spend more time chugging data or buzz in.

Also, this would be pretty artificial (no pun intended), but they could analyze previous all-human Jeopardy! episodes and figure out average buzzer response time, and perhaps incorporate that into Watson.
If 2x the money wins the race, then get 2x the money. A good idea has a case that can be made for it and, at least, an expectation of the value you will create. That is what you (and others) invest against. There shouldn't be such thing as "they have more money" for an idea that you expect to generate well more than that investment. There is only "they were willing or able to get more money". This isn't trivial - believing in the projections and selling your passion and networking to find investors are all really hard.

Losing to the competition is a possible outcome, but not necessarily the "likely outcome". Anyway, the way to manage that is still to execute better. Competition helps teams that need competition to rise to the occasion, but rising to the occasion is what is needed. Without it, losing is the likely outcome whether there was competition or not.

Seems like the argument for 1st mover advantage is: first mover = funding = success rather than first mover = success. sure, I do believe that funding can lead to success -- any resource advantage leads to success. Yet, I do think first mover advantage has some more important benefits. Things like taking most of the market out of the gate (why would we need a second brown fizzy sugar water?) or defining the landscape (oh, a good carfax score is what tells you a used car is good). I think certain circumstances make first movers better and others make 2nd, 3rd or later-movers better, but an absolute is pretty hard to prove.

I would say you need customer feedback or maybe expert feedback. Some sort of feedback always helps. But, so does vision. However you get to a good product is how you need to get to a good product. You just need to know and do that. The reason feedback - specifically from actual customers - is usually chosen is because it is more on the science side than the art side, but I surely can't knock those people and teams that can deliver product excellence due to vision, luck or art.
From the descriptions I've read, Watson only buzzed in after it believed it had a solid answer. If it was significantly less accurate than its competitors, it wouldn't have spent the entire match buzzing in before them.

I'm afraid I don't really understand the decision to trivialize the fact that we now have a computer that can answer general-knowledge natural-language queries quickly and about as accurately as a clever person. That's a Big Deal.
Why Outsourcing Doesn’t Mean Employee Retrenchment
Outsourcing is often controversial due to the perception that it might cause job losses however the fact is that outsourcing is vital for both the creation of new jobs and maintaining current in-house jobs.
Do you know of other retailers like ThinkGeek?

(I like ThinkGeek, but I'm curious if there are other, similar stores.)
these are all my thoughts as well. i didn't mean to suggest their marketing affects/suggests anything really. i just can't see who they're targeting with the posts. was there anyone who needed convincing that ie has less features? how does this benefit them?

in my completely unqualified opinion, i'd have guessed they'd be better off persuading the growing wave of users who are switching from firefox to chrome.
Apple at the Front of the Battlefield
..outside the safety of Cocoa, there isn't even a standard way to ask an object what class it is or what selectors is responds to.

Yes, there is. The Objective-C run time lets you do all of this. It is in C and not Objective-C. But, NSObject is barely more than a thin wrapper for these functions, anyway.
Kindle magazine subscriptions are only available for the Kindle hardware itself, IIRC.
Assuming the goal here is to have the Free Exchange of Information:

Step 1 is to own the hardware that serves up your information.

Step 2 is to own the path that your information travels upon.

You are correct, Step 2 is a significantly more difficult problem to solve, but this does not mean that we should not try to solve Step 1 while we have an opportunity to do so.
You could just change the game completely, and allow multiple people to answer simultaneously if they buzz in within a couple of seconds. It looked to me like Watson would be pretty competitive in that game, too.
Which StartupDigest issue(s) do you ignore and why?
What about just removing the timing element altogether, effectively making every round into (possibly iterated) Final Jeopardy?
Understood.

Does anyone know what these IBM supercomputers ultimately are used for after they're done winning Jeopardy or beating Gary Kasparov? I'd imagine something top-secret for the US government, but it would be nice to know exactly what Deep Blue is doing now.
It's unlikely they'd infringe on Tolkien's copyrights, at least in the US:

Tolkien was re-editing because in that year, Ace Books in the
United States published an unauthorised edition. The Fellowship
came out in May 1965, the other two volumes in July. 150,000 copies
were printed of each volume! The main text was reset, and introduced
new errors, but the appendices were reproduced photographically, and
thus contained only the errors already there. Ace Books were exploiting
a copyright loophole which meant they did not have to pay Tolkien or his
publishers any royalties. Houghton Mifflin appears to have imported too
many copies, and the notice they contain, 'Printed in Great Britain'
meant that the texts were deemed to be in the public domain in the
United States.

http://www.tolkiensociety.com/tolkien/tale.html
What I _do_ know is Apple has unambiguously signaled what they will be doing. They don't have a great streaming solution yet, for music, or movies. So they have some gaps in their portfolio of offerings - if I'm correct, we'll see a Netflix and Pandora competitive application being offered fairly quickly - possibly in the next release of IOS.

It's unclear that apple really wants to enter the pooled subscription content markets. Clearly the main, first target here is Amazon Ebooks and their exclusive content deals. Elsewhere, everything they've done so far indicates that they'd prefer to sell or rent individual content this gives them reliable margins, no large upfront licensing costs and lower bandwidth costs. Instead, they may see services like Pandora and netflix weakening the demand for the music and video stores.

Purchased DRM content provides a long term platform lock-in, monthly subscription all you can eat has lower margins and provides less advantages to the platform.
Blekko - http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/04/stealth-search-engine-blekk...
For anyone who understands the true dynamics of Jeopardy!, Watson simply isn't impressive as a Jeopardy! contestant as it's being made out to be. I'm not minimizing the awesomeness of Watson's language processing, because it's great, but Watson's performance on Jeopardy! is only as impressive as a hypothetical competition where Watson and two humans fill out a worksheet and compare who got the most answers right.

During tournaments of champions, Jeopardy! is not about how many correct responses you can come up with, as all competitors will know the vast majority of them. It's all about timing. I don't know the exact statistics, but it seemed like Watson knew about 75% of the correct responses. I strongly suspect the two human contestants knew a greater percentage. On day 2, it just came down to timing. Watson was only beaten to the buzzer three times when it knew the correct response.
Who wants free books?

I'm a member of the Internet. Web pages have disrupted publishing and text distribution in a big way.

One of the things we're experimenting with now is how to build links and get relevant search results. It'll drop the price of all text to $0.00. The text version can be read on nearly any device, but if you want a hard copy, you can use a printer.

This is but one experiment. We've got other ideas and eventually text will lead to images and audio. Please comment anywhere.

More info on the project at http://w3.org/
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/So-Is-This-Where-Verizons...

It's not a technical failure but just a reality of the economy and increased competition from cable with DOCSIS 3. To the same point cable has backed away from FTTx deployments. (not that they were ever that committed in the first place but most had serious plans on the drawing boards for the near future)
Is there a difference between Developer & Designer?
Getting Started with Lead Scoring and How to Optimize Deployment
Oh man, this looks /really/ cool. but the battery life? that's going to be a problem. I had a Matsucom brand OnHandPc back in the day, and it'd last a few weeks on a set of (replaceable) batteries. ran dos. It had a little joystick /and/ a bunch of buttons around the side, so it was fairly useful.

anyhow, an important use case for me, if I buy this, is using it as a bluetooth vibrator. I'm a SysAdmin and on call; but I'm not single. I want something that will wake me up without waking up anyone else who may be in the bed at the time. This means I need to wear the thing while I sleep; which makes charging... difficult.

I would give up color in a second if it would improve battery life.

Of course, I could aways just use a bluetooth bracelet at night and this during the day, but I'm bad at remembering things. I want to minimize the number of things I need to remember to charge.
reminds me of something gabe newell (co-founder, managing director of valve software) once said: "a game won't be delayed forever, but a game can suck forever."
Soliciting Opinions
I do not see any information in that scenario which would cause me to rethink my product or marketing strategy.
> the IBM team could be pretty well assured of success once they got Watson performing well enough.

That shouldn't minimize the accomplishment of actually performing well enough. If Watson were fast on the buzzer but couldn't answer accurately, he's be pretty far in the red about now.
It would probably be better to just linearly go through who gets to answer.
http://twitter.com/#!/tenderlove/status/37665907648110592

I think the responses here, and especially this blog post, are completely out of line. Yes, he's a community leader, but he still has the right to write lazy code to solve problems quickly. It's not like he published it as a gem, blogged about it, and tried to convince a bunch of people to use it. It was just a tweet about a fun hack.
I didn't see this anywhere on your website: is the watch water-resistant? I know you're focused on the programmable aspects of the watch but to me this is important information.
Late to the party, Intel insists history will repeat itself in mobile
That would give a more precise idea of just how many of the questions Watson was able to answer correctly, but at that point the discussion starts to feel like people proposing changes to the rules of chess in order to screw Deep Blue.
Are you hooked up with CL? See if they will promote you as a third-party app on their page. They benefit too!
http://goo.gl/IbHu

"In the United Kingdom, about 5 per cent of the population do not have bank accounts. In Australia, about 7-8 per cent of the population do not do banking.

In India, there are a total of 31 crore (Rs 310 million) savings bank accounts, but given the number of multiple accounts, the number of people having savings bank accounts cannot be more than 20 crore (Rs 200 million).

This means around 85 per cent of India's population does not have access to financial services in a cost-effective, transparent and fair manner."
I don't think so. I would hope the clue writers were purposefully made unaware which clues were being written for the Watson episodes. I don't think they seemed unfair, either. They seemed like normal modern Jeopardy! clues.

Also, I am highly confident that if you simply had Ken, Brad, and Watson fill out a worksheet with all the clues written on it (thus bypassing the central game dynamic of buzzer reflexes), Watson would get the lowest score.
What kind of project do you have? First-entrant, stealthed or not etc?