skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, having just read (and responded to) that comment and then seeing the story, I find it a bit irritating the way a reasonable comment is taken out of context and turned into a sensationalistic headline.

The way I read PG's original comment was not "There Is No Bubble", but rather "Internet companies are a lot cheaper, smarter, and overall better than they were in the 90s".
How many companies have the whole chain and cash assets to pre-pay > 1 billion USD in components?
> It [the Watson-esque computer for mathematics] must not only put out correct formal proofs. It must be allowed to put out papers like we do. And these must be right often enough to be interesting, but they need not be perfect.

This answers the question, I believe. Are all human mathematicians in jeopardy? No.

May we need less human mathematicians in the future and maintain a strong mathematical community? Likely.
I am an experienced Rails developer and evangelist. I much (NB: opinion) prefer Rails over everything else. If you would be so kind to share details or code (if possible) I might point out what you are doing wrong, and why Rails seems not to work for you.
Sony executive says company has no plans to abandon Apple's iTunes
I agree.

(Macintosh : PC with MS Windows) in 1995 = (.NET+C# : Java) in 2010

The latter is cheaper and has more choice, but the former fits together so much better.
this is so meta.

I'm writing a post on HN about a article about a post on HN.
Reschedule the interview at the new company. Lie to make it sound as though you have no other choice.
But this isn't a purchase. It's a rental. Apple really needs to get crisper on this.
When they publicly announced their intention to move to DRM-free approximately half the lifetime of the service ago, and have since succeeded in driving that plan to fruition, it's hard for me to find much to fault. They couldn't have gotten the service off the ground without DRM and the decision to push for non-DRM was a surprise to most. How could they have done "better"?
I just don't agree NIH programs "damage the economy" and I've provided concrete examples of how it has done the opposite. Also I am pretty sure any grant writing process is definitely based on merit. We'll have to agree to disagree.
His proposal, Thomas J. is a brilliant idea! Sure, mathematical notation can get much more complex than that used for language but it has the preciseness that language lacks in syntax ("I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know."), semantics ("Iraqi head seeks arms"), pragmatics, etc., which I think may compensate for this difficulty.
Jeopardy genius Ken Jennings on what it's like to play against a supercomputer.
I think this company will completely pivot and focus 95% on groups.
Choice quote: "Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman."
Agreed. I don't see why Apple would reject apps that connect to external sensors. There are already many such apps that use Bluetooth (eg Wakemate) or the headphone jack (eg Square), although getting approved to link up with the bottom port is supposedly a pain. If you want to take advantage of the closed nature of Apple's platform, you have to push the kind of apps they don't like. So far, that's mostly just home screen customizations and pirated games, I guess. Google Voice was looking like a killer app not-available-on-iOS but Apple backed off of that one.
> anyone who is surprised that someone like Microsoft would want to avoid GPL'd software on their platform is kidding themselves

It probably isn't even that they particularly care about avoiding the GPL, so much as that GPLv3 intentionally forbids distribution for use in locked-down devices (which, contrary to all reason, apparently is not considered to count as discriminating against a field of endeavor...).
Paul Graham: Dot-Com Bubble Was "Dumb Leading The Dumb"
It only provides 25.5W and the MBP power supply is 85W.

And it is not optical and it cannot drive a display. I think this patent is to combine power and Intel's Light Peak.
Computing will continue to aid mathematical discovery, proving (useful) theorems like Four Color, or even formulating their own (useful) theorems before proving them.

For example, in Einstein's Special Theory, there's not a lot of deep mathematics (relative to the General Theory) so it's not too difficult to imagine Watson taking the problem and axiomatizing (just to see what would happen) that light speed is always constant (which is the key to everything else that followed).

But what about Descarte's insight that geometry could be described by algebra using a coordinate system, giving birth to analytic geometry? Or proving that it can't prove all true statements in arithmetic (Godel)? Or even asking the question?

I think we're a long way off from doing something like that in a machine.
All due respect, but I think that's retrospective bias talking. It feels obvious in hindsight that it was a bubble, so those conversations with bearish people are amplified in your memory. The fact that some bears existed proves nothing; no matter what is going on in the macro-economy, at any time in the last 20 years Nouriel Roubini et al. would have been happy to explain how it's all an illusion, we'll all be eating out of trashcans in two years, just you wait.

While the music was playing in the late '90's, the cautionary voices weren't any louder, or taken any more seriously, than they were at any other time. They weren't even all particularly focused on the Internet boom; much, much more pessimistic sentiment at the time was focused on Russia's sovereign debt default, the currency crisis in Asia, or the LTCM bail-out.

As for the Internet stock valuations at the time, many people reasoned that if you looked at the entire investment in "new economy" companies, all that was required for those investments to reward their holders' level of risk was one Microsoft. This was essentially true, by the way, and if you stuck to your guns and held onto Amazon from its local peak on 3/31/1999 ($86) you would be up about 120% today ($188).
Wasn't there an article on Slashdot not so long ago where some researcher had done a random sample of Android apps, and 50% of them were phoning home (sic) your private info?

--

The big Linux code repositories are an interesting case in point. I'll straight up give them the benefit of the doubt that there is no spyware or malware on them. But isn't there again this tension between the custodial and the wide open? I recall people complaining about the more tightly guarded ones being hard to get new stuff onto them, everything was out of date. Whereas on the more chaotic free for all ones you would often encounter problems with different apps requiring different versions of shared libraries.
Except - unless I misinterpreted it - PG didn't quite say that. He pointed out the differences between the tech bubble then and what's occurring now. Sure, I'm nitpicking, but I think it's an important distinction.
If there's a bubble, it will surely be different than before and isn't it a bit early to make sweeping predictions? PG didn't make any.
Is this a full-on bubble? No, it's probably nothing like the 1990's. But I still think the truth is that today's monetary situation is creating an incentive to chase yields, and it is not out of the question that this is showing up in VC valuations just as it is showing up in commodities.

The fact that these valuations seem to be stemming more from the money others have put in (or said they would be willing to put in) rather than the revenue of the company itself ought to arouse deep suspicion. Yes, I understand part of a valuation is examining the pricing signals being sent by the market, in this case VCs, for the particular company. Still, look at Twitter. Some valuations for it have come in at $10 billion when it's been admitted their yearly revenue is $150 million. If Twitter were to IPO at that valuation, that means 99% (+/- for whatever other assets they might have) of their float would be pure leverage. For many other tech start ups, the same sort of situation exists even if the magnitude is not as great.

For those down the line in the thread talking about the better development tools/programming languages/hardware in relation to this topic, let me ask: how do better development tools justify higher valuations? Certainly, I'd rather be developing a web app with Python/Django today than in ASP in 1995, and running it on today's server hardware with today's replication and load balancing strategies. There's no doubt the development cycle for many kinds of applications has been radically shortened. Yet, the revenue model for many of these internet companies is only slightly clearer than it was in 1998. That is not true of every company, only some; but it is true of enough that I think it is cause for concern.

Experimentation is a wonderful thing. It is the only way the economy advances and people's lives become better. Part of the "startup industry"'s job is to provide that experimentation, and by its very nature most will fail. The problem is when the investment community begins to pay a large speculative premium for that. Even if the resulting "bubble" is not an economy-destroying one as it was in 2000 or 2008, it can still do a great deal of harm.
Just do it. You'll probably burn a bridge but it doesn't sound like you're thrilled at your current position.
I disagree, perceived benefit of the contribution outweighs errors in grammar. Try refactoring your language parser to improve single pass absorption rate.
Go to SF. Look, there's 6 other people in your current office. Assuming that your software project is ready, you have a 4 days (counting today) to bring someone else up to speed on it. Make an excuse, call in sick, or just tell the truth.

Also, don't forget about doing both. Is there some reason you can't VPN into your office from SF and give the demo virtually?
I'm no fan of the language myself, but you're going overboard to try to dig a reason to trash Java out of this.
Some examples would make for a better argument.

Funding an $86M proxy war through SCO is the only example one needs, really.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents
Y Combinator's Paul Graham: Dot-Com Bubble Was "Dumb Leading the Dumb"
There may be no bubble, but there's definitely an echo.
CloudComputing en Español
None of these are wrong or unhelpful, but it's telling that not one of them touches on the market's pain points, a notion of what problems customers are budgeting dollars to solve, or even really a notion of what things people will pay for.
Just the title alone is funny coming from Techcrunch, "makers" of the "crunchpad".
Thinking about this some more. Anonymity is required for democracy to work properly. Citizens of a society need to be able to speak candidly without fear of reprisal. That's just the way it is because power attracts the corrupt and the corrupt will use their power to silence dissent. Egypt could not figure out all of who was posting things against the government, so they just shut down the whole internet to try to stop anonymous speech. In the US there seems to be more control of networks and Palintir is a defense contractor that sells software to figure out who is talking to who and what their real identity is. I am sure Palintir will be making lots of sales to governments right now that don't want to see the middle east revolutions that are occurring right now happen in their own tyrannical dictatorships and corporatocracies.

The HBGary scandal involves multiple companies, not just the token one (HBGary) which has been "thrown under the bus" as a sacrifice and distraction. This is going on right now in other companies as well, so punishing HBGary doesn't slay the dragon.

Corporations and governments are gaming the anonymous free speech system by astroturfing, persona management, sock puppetry etc. There are armies of people posting fake opinions in an effort to manipulate public opinion and steer it towards agendas which are not sincerely held by the people posting them. They are posting only because it is their job and they are being paid. This activity is very destructive to democracy because it alters things from being the true will of the people. It is tantamount to election tampering.

It is critical that the public develop a response to this in the form of tools for identifying this activity.

One excellent tool is Anonymous's randomly discovering and the publishing incriminating emails. This activity is beneficial to democracy. However, its success is highly dependent on random chance and luck. It is also very illegal. Right now law enforcement is doing everything they can to track down the people who uncovered the wide spread and insidious wrongdoing. Punish the whistleblower is probably not going away.

The public also needs tools which are legal to use.

There are efforts right now to "build a new internet" that preserves anonymity and thus free speech. That is good but more is necessary.

Another thing which is needed is for Palintir-like systems which can peek behind the scenes, uncover connections between posts, patterns of posting and patterns of speech, to be written and open sourced. These systems can be used to identify sock puppets. They can also be used as a weapon to unmask the anonymous and attack free speech, but they are already being done to do that. We need these tools on both sides now to level the playing field.
Sorry, you both make great points. What's the context surrounding that Greenspan quote, though?
To me: yes, it sounds like a bad plan.

Do you really think 'and, make a job offer I am assuming / hoping' is sufficient grounds to burn the ship you are on?

Are you convinced that postponing that meeting a day or even a week could cost you the opportunity of that new job?
Examples: YouTube, any random news site, most blogs, deviantArt

Real life tends to be this way. I have avoided a number of political discussions lately because it's obvious the people around me have no clue what they are talking about but they completely sure that they are right and that anyone that disagrees is wrong.
Exact my thought too, Greplin seems to be open to public signup yesterday, and it will be really interesting to see which social search will take off. Google seems to provide a superset of what Greplin provides (your own social data plus your social network's data), and Google definitely has the advantage of being a bigger name, which might mitigate some users' concern about privacy or security; on the other hand, Greplin is really focused on this one particular service and employs a really straightforward approach, which might actually be more preferrable to other users. Google's social search might be lost in a whole slew of other services, unless they focus on marketing and education about it.
Show HN: Twitter graph monitoring over time, SocialGrapple
Ever wanted to track who unfollowed you last month? Or who followed your competitor last month? Or how your social graph is growing over time? SocialGrapple does this.

I've been working on SocialGrapple for a few months (since stepping down from imoveyou.com, YC2010S), this week I got the core product to the point where I'm proud of it so I want to show it off: http://socialgrapple.com/

I wrote up a blog post with some screenshots that will get you an idea of what SocialGrapple looks like:

"SocialGrapple snapshot: @limedaring's social graph growth after her HackerNews publicity"
http://shazow.posterous.com/socialgrapple-snapshot-limedarings-social-gra

Screenshots:
http://i.imgur.com/OzTIb.png
http://i.imgur.com/tghcT.png

The gist of it is: I pull the account's social graph every night (soon to be every hour) and do a diff from the last known state, then create an event log based from that. Then I do a bunch of graph operations like intersection between following/followers to determine stalkers/stalking/mutual, annotate the feed with metadata useful for skimming/ordering/filtering, intersecting two accounts to see how growth relates to somebody else, etc.

Backstory: I built Tweepsect some years ago (http://tweepsect.com/) which lets you intersect your followers/following as it currently is. It's still one of my most-used projects, and a lot of people were asking for more like support for larger accounts, data over time, charts (a lot of people use Webnumbr to track their follower count over time), track who unfollowed them (qwitter and similar stopped working months ago). This is where SocialGrapple comes in, with an angle on competitive intelligence too.

I would love some feedback. What would it take to get you as a paying customer?
I think there's a confusion of micro- and macro-readability in this thread. You are describing micro-readability, IMO. I've read lots of code where it was clear what each line of code did, but not at all clear what the end result was, or why it was being done.

Furthermore, there's dramatic disagreement about what is actually more readable. I have an ongoing debate with a coworker about the relative readability of

widgets.each |w|
return true if w.can_frobnicate?
end
return false

vs

widgets.any?(&:can_frobnicate?)

He insists he can read the first faster and more easily than the second. My contention is that he isn't actually reading the first, but performing a visual pattern match and guessing what it does. I've actually found examples where this seemingly-trivial idiom is implemented incorrectly, which I think supports that claim.

At any rate, though, as long as readability is subjective, I think all the rest of this debate is in question.
Underground Elephant
Clickable links –

Blog post: http://shazow.posterous.com/socialgrapple-snapshot-limedarin...

SocialGrapple: http://socialgrapple.com/ (Make sure you have a look at the blog post first)

Screenshots: http://i.imgur.com/OzTIb.png http://i.imgur.com/tghcT.png
Kind of makes you sick doesn't it?
Ideally anonymity should not be required for free speech but I know currently in the real world it often does. I want to push for this to be fixed though. For example, I once thought of collecting things like Reddit AMAs and turning them into an Acid test that see if an organization can tolerate it when made non-anonymous.
This is not necessarily 100% true. Process isolation affects your user's experience in an indirect way. As web apps become heavier and heavier they adversely affect each other more and more. Many times your sites perceived lack of performance is due to another misbehaving tab. Its true that standards support improves the singular experience of your site, but process isolation improves the combined experience of the web as a whole and allows everyone to do more impressive things.
"It's just ruby."- My favorite quote from one of the best Ruby programmers I know, who at the time had very little to no experience with Rails.

I'd say any framework has a "steep" learning curve, after which things just become easier and easier.

A problem I often see is that a lot of people try to learn Ruby through Rails; And while that may work for some basics, a lot of things are still going to be "magic" until you understand Ruby itself a little better.
True. Some problems are not painful enough for people to take out their wallets and pay to solve.

Yet it is the founder's responsibility to make sure the benefits of their ideas are measurable and outlined in a way that makes people take out their wallet and pay ;)
Google is doing exactly what it should do, and what is standard industry practice… Silently dropping mail is generally considered to be bad, and I don’t know any major email service providers that do it. Hotmail sometimes does it, but usually doesn’t.

Rejecting with a 5xx code is the correct response when you don’t want to accept a message. It is your server that is generating the backscatter by accepting the message and then ultimately bouncing it.

Email forwarding is just generally not very good. If you can avoid it, do so. Perhaps you could use Google Apps for your Domain?
Fred: "If they were fired or laid off, they would be a problem. Don't interview the unemployed."

Wilma: "If they are currently working, they are disloyal. The unemployed may have been laid off for no fault of their own. Don't interview the employed."

Bjarne: "...Maybe instead of guessing, we should just interview the ones that seem qualified, and if they're unemployed we can ask what happened at their last job, and if they're employed we can ask why they're looking for a new job?"
There was a recent update a few days ago. Check Windows Update.
Twitter: Let us use t.co so we can get rid of short URLs
Consider the famous 100 year old paradox: this sentence is false.

Watson won't be able to assign a truth value to this gramatically correct sentence, but would it have the insight that it just stumbled upon a philosophical problem that's solved by narrowing the notion of truth it uses (Bertrand Russell).

In other words, a machine may not be able to examine itself in the way that humans can when certain problems arise.
And who will you trust to implement such a system? How would you prevent gaming? How do you prevent someone from bribing the operators?
Thanks, I am aware of the history. My point, which you've confirmed, is that nobody actually knows what the penalties are, because they were so light or non-existent.

You could argue that it scared Microsoft enough to keep their head down for a while because there was a lot of talk about forcibly splitting Microsoft.

The strain on their image and wallet was largely self-inflicted. They were caught with their hand in the cookie jar and they were saying "we've done nothing wrong, we know not of the cookie of which you speak".

Ultimately they didn't need to fight as hard as they did (appealing, using delaying tactics to drag it out, pissing in the European's porridge etc), but in the end all they got the equivalent of a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket.
Leave it to pg to keep a cool head:

There are some concerns about a new budding tech bubble as some startups have reached titanic valuations — Twitter, for example, was recently reported to be worth around $10 billion — without having a business model nailed down. But those cases are few and far between, and there are fewer investors in those types of companies than there were in the late 90s, Graham said. The amount of money companies are raising today — relatively speaking and adjusted for inflation, naturally — is less than what companies were raising during the last tech bubble, he said.
Attachments.me searches email attachments
If there even was a bubble occurring it is only in the seed funding stage and not the IPO/late VC stage which ended up affecting much more than just entrepreneurs and investors.

The amount of money being invested/risked is much less than it was back in the 90s, and as Paul remarked the quality of entrepreneurs and investors is much better. Most likely lessons learned from the 90s
I don't think there's a bubble. But I'm getting seriously bored of social analytics, location-based advertising and glorified todo list startups.

There's so many more interesting problems to solve!
W3.org Paid Links for only $2500-$10000 **edit Nofollowed**
Can I get a link on this page?
Yes. Premier and Major W3C Supporters may have links to their sites from this page.

Premier Supporters have made a contribution of 10000 USD.
Major Supporters have made a contribution of 2500 - 9999 USD
> Google builds a durable tablet for academics and scientists to research in the field with. Because of Android's open nature, it would be trivial to open up an entire ecosystem of sensors and data loggers that would integrate.

Apple has kinda done this via the dock connector. For example I just bought one of these to turn my iPod touch into a sound level meter: http://www.studiosixdigital.com/iphone_measurement_micropho....

The bad news is that it's not compatible with the iPad or newest iPhone/iPod touch so possibly Apple is removing the external interface capability.

edit: there are also ODBII interfaces although I don't know if they work with the newest iDevices