skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Local Dish Discount and Discoverability Startup Munch On Me
Wanted to share with everyone my new startup, Munch On Me. Looking for feedback! We have many features coming in the pipeline. Berkeley, CA is our soft launch to learn what works and what doesn't.

http://www.munchonme.com
Well, some cases are more difficult than others. High amounts of stupidity are more challenging.
I always wanted to generate a simple service that classifies websites. Something where you dump in the HTML/URL and it returns something like "agriculture"/"government"/"retail"/"education".

I already have a set of a few thousand classifications at hand. What would probably be a good algorithm to run it through? I assume I'd use something like webstemmer/boilerpipe/... to extract just the main text first.

What I am a bit uncertain is what I should do after that. My guess would be that I isolate the nouns/adjectives with the highest frequency and do a clustering with my already categorized dataset as training data.

Does that somewhat makes sense?
If yes: any recommendations or alternatives for libraries (preferably ruby) or just algorithms themselves (k-means, svm, neural network...)
Thanks! I am hoping to get back to the Complexity book soon. I want to finish the section on agent-based modeling (and I need to remove some of the stats material that I poached for Think Stats).

Clojure looks interesting, but I don't know much about it, so I probably won't do anything with it soon. But part of the reason I use free licenses is so that other people can adapt my books.

Nicholas Monje is working on Think OCaml (http://thinkocaml.com); that might be the best version to translate into Clojure.
Is this the first Offer HN where someone is charging for their offer?
> 5. Make small change to the code on the off-chance that it might solve the problem

Guess and check, supported by a scaffolding of tests is not the path to being a better or more professional programmer and this is precisely what he's advocating against.
I actually made synchtube -- thanks for the shout. Was thinking about putting in a voting mechanism eventually. Nice to see frozenhot implemented it.

Ironically I also did a Show HN today (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2344151) today as well but only got 1 point :(
I've been very impressed with the speed, UX, and functionality of FF4. Yet, I still haven't switched.

I don't see how you are getting Chrome crashes though. I NEVER get a Chrome crash (but I also use Flashblock)
I know! They took a good Chrome UX idea and only half-implemented it. There's a good 10px up there being totally wasted. Google would never let that happen.
It depends on the type of bug, sometimes its just simple quirks or something you've done incorrectly like the wrong pointer arthimetic or trying to write to a null pointer or something along those lines.

However, a lot of the biggest headaches are conceptual and in which case taking a break from the computer almost always helps I find.
If they interviewed one of the scientists whose name was on the paper, wouldn't that count?

My answer, as a former journalist, is that whether or not that would count would depend on how well the reporter prepared for the interview. Good preparation for an interview of a scientist who just published a news-making paper would be reading the paper before the interview.

It's just as easy to cite papers on the radio as in print to make the paper findable, by saying something along the lines of "a paper by A. Smith and B. Jones published in the 1 April 2001 issue of Science." That's not a complete citation format, but Goldacre's complaint in the blog post submitted here is about mentions of papers where perhaps an author was mentioned, and perhaps a journal title was mentioned, but the date of the paper was not mentioned, and a link to the paper found in a press release was not reproduced in the online version of a print publication that often carries links to other online content.

After edit: I agree with you that you are responding to an exaggeration in a comment to the submitted article, with an example of a news organization that does better at fact-checking than the news organizations mentioned in the submitted link, and I too think there are happy exceptions to the tendency in some places for journalism not to cite published research. Here's wishing for more journalism to emulate the best current examples of careful research and meticulous citation of sources.
Ah I didn't notice it as I turned audio off.

Now I managed to spot it. The park is actually Makuhari Kaihin Park (幕張海浜公園) in Chiba, not in Tokyo (that's why I was not aware of it).

And yes it is on reclaimed land, the homepage of the park in fact mentions liquefaction.
Ganhe 3 premios (45)
Not trying to be mean, but sometimes I wonder how many programmers actually have friends outside the industry. This happens when I read titles like "Numbers everyone should know" and then find out that it's numbers like the time needed for an L2 cache reference or how to optimize for low write contention. Does anyone realize that this stuff is about as esoteric as it gets?
Sorry if the title is confusing. I did not want to be dishonest. Shall I rename the verb 'offer' to something else?

I can help in small issues for free, but I cannot do huge gigs for free of course.
I did. Not in a "here's why you're wrong" confrontational manner, nor with lines in the sand, but I did raise many of the issues. It got me nowhere.

I don't think I'm an alpha male, though I wouldn't step as far as "not worth keeping". I make decisions about when to confront and when not and sometimes they're the right ones, sometimes not.
for me rvm is the only sensible solution for production. We run mostly on Ubuntu and ruby is really broken on Ubuntu/Debian. We use a custom puppet script to setup the whole environment with rvm/passenger/apache.
http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/the-full-...
In many ways the responsiveness of the machine can work against you. Back when the Amiga was a hot machine to work on there were two compilers Lattice C and Manx C, Lattice was the one sanctioned for development and it took a long time to compile and link, Manx on the other hand compiled really really fast. A number of developers discovered that the fast compiler had a weird effect of making it easy to try lots of things quickly, rather than contemplating what you needed to do next.

Then recently Randal Munroe published an XKCD cartoon on attention deficit management [1] which when I saw it, it really resonated with this same experience. Basically by slowing things down, quality improved. Clearly there is a fundamental principle here somewhere, something along that lines that there is an ideal pace for development (perhaps unique to each individual) where going faster or slower than that ideal negatively impacts quality.

[1] http://xkcd.com/862/
Two points:

First, if your product truly is amazing then there is nothing wrong with cold calling someone to alert them of it's existence. Particularly if you are offering them free use of said product. In fact, if your product truly would enhance their lives you owe to them to let them know about it.

If someone cold called me and offered me 25 hour days I would not call it spam.

Second, do your best to warm the cold call. At least narrow the distance between you and your prospects. You would be surprised at how connect you really are. Just remember specifically who your target is and how it can help them. Tell everyone you know to look out for these types of people and see if you can't get 5 minutes of their time.

Bottom line, targeting the right type of person with the mission of improving their lives is not spam. Mindlessly sending out requests to anyone and everyone is spam.
It drives me nuts when people 'fix' things by making the symptom go away without understanding what causes that symptom in the first place.
... Until then, it's a USO (unidentified superconducting object). If it were real, ...

Funny, USO (say like uh-so) means false or lie in Japanese.
I thought the same thing until my "put()s" were slow as hell on App Engine. "Oh hey this is just like mysql_query()! I just call entity.put() and everything's fine!" Not!

When it comes to parallel operations over multiple machines ( most startups at scale will run into this problem ), these numbers really can come in handy.
And OS X Lion's new "hidden" scrollbars.
Maybe someone could make paper based IDEs, like notebooks that have columns to trace variables, rows for declarations at the top... Edit: terrible idea, just look for a suitable jotter in the stationary sections.
Most of Google's ad money comes from the commercial searches, i.e., digital camera, diapers, etc. Those are the searches that advertisers bid on and people click Google ads.

A "non-commercial" search loses that entire opportunity.

So in short, IMO - madness.
I think you'd want something like LDA. See https://cwiki.apache.org/MAHOUT/latent-dirichlet-allocation....
OMG/JK: Storming The Paywall
And sometimes it's just a bug.
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h96000/h96566k.jpg
> if you just destructively modify and return a copy of the source

Then the caller can no longer reference the source without observing the fact you've mutated it -- you'd have to guarantee they've dropped all references to the now-mutated buffer.

How do you ensure the mutation doesn't leak out like this, breaking all the nice properties?
Sales calls -- especially in the business to business market are part of the game. If you don't do it, you're giving yourself a severe disadvantage.
Easy Rails OAuth integration testing with Omniauth and Capybara
Easy there turbo. Was responding to 'bhousel' who wrote -- "Projects" are for fun. Projects may become elevated to "startups" only if they make money.
Some documentaries and university lectures could be interesting. I'd like to see those get selected.

Maybe Khan Academy, too?
Great implementation. I had the same exact idea for a while, but I didn't really have a feeling for it.

Suggestion: Run commercials during the 20-30 seconds in between videos (while users are voting).
What an interesting idea...puts on list of things to do sometime
At this point we just trust the users & see how it goes. There's a "freshness" to the system that should make places drop off the list.
If you have a wide monitor that displays 1200px or more and the fixed width is 800px, it becomes ugly as it gets bigger. The header needs a maximum-width.
This isn't a new observation, and as a few people have pointed out in this thread, some of the more digitally-aware news organizations are working on this problem actively.

The Knight News Challenge gave out grants this year for people to tackle the problem of verification and trust in online news, and I met someone from Mother Jones who was working on a system for documenting primary sources.

I also gave a talk last year proposing a standards-based solution for this at a journalism/tech conference in Philadelphia. My thoughts about it are here: http://beatpanda.co.cc/blog/2011/01/31/show-your-work-fillin...

More importantly though, I'm seeing a lot of potential customers for disruptive news startups right here in this thread.

Look at how many people don't trust the media. The challenge, if you want to make paying customers out of these doubters, is to not only deliver the news, but to give people a reason to trust what you're saying.

Journalists showing their work would be a good first step towards that.
Well if anyone wants to learn more from Jeff Dean than just twelve numbers, here's a talk he gave at Standford about Google's architecture and system building in general:

http://ee380.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/videologger.php?target=101...

The slides for the talk: http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/101110-slides....
You're discounting the context. If you read the title as "Numbers Everyone [who reads this site] Should Know" then it makes more sense.

If you're complaining about the Hacker News title, then:

a) It's the linked article title, so it would be inappropriate to change it, and

b) HN shows the domain name of the link in parentheses after the title. The article was pretty much in line with my expectations for a High Scalability article with that title.
Other thread is dead, but it was indeed a hoax:
http://blogs.forbes.com/kashmirhill/2011/03/17/thinkmodo-the...
I can't speak to your specific use cases, but on hacker news (or a blog about scalability) I think it's completely reasonable to have such a title. It's not link bait. Anyone building a system (e.g., for a startup) or maintaining/extending an existing system should be aware of these numbers -- if for no other reason than that they are fully aware of any tradeoffs they are choosing to make ("well, optimizing for seeks on write is premature at te moment, we need some users first, but I can at least add a level of indirection to prepare for future improvements." or even "yes, I know this will require refactoring as soon as we have XXXX users, but f-it, we gotta get to market. Let me notify others of the iceberg I'm building and why.")

Knowledge, properly applied, can be power.
you don't ask to be treated differently, you demonstrate that you're worth being treated differently. an attitude like "its not my fault, i'm just a developer" isn't helping.

Damn right. A kick in the pants for which I thank you.

CEO said he didn't intend on having me attend investor meetings because blah, blah I was too green. I figured I'd work hard for 6 months and change his mind. Never happened. At the time, I didn't see the need to go to investor meetings, didn't see that they'd be a good use of my time. But now, with a CEO who meets with customers and investors alone, he actually can call all the shots unquestioned because he's the only one with knowledge of what they need.

He was actually honest with me, before I even started, that he didn't think I was true co-founder material... by saying that he'd not be bringing me in on investor meetings. I was just naive and thought I could "prove myself". And I only got to double-digit equity because of going on deferred cash for so many months (far more than he thought it'd take to get VC). I just let myself deny it, figuring I'd win him over with 12 months of hard work. It never happened, and now my attitude is weak, my work ethic has become mediocre, and I just need to change everything: circumstances and attitude.
No reason not to have relevant commercial ads on non-commercial organic results.
There's no reason the logo couldn't be aligned with the content, while still allowing the header banner to be full width.
Share HN: Ideas you would like to develop but you won't
I happen to have a lot od ideas all the time but I don't have time to develop them or simple I'm more focused on something else.

For instance an idea that I had a couple weeks ago was a dating site for people studying abroad.

Share yours
Real programmers have day jobs? :)
Cannot apply video to the application. privateposterous.com is rejecting mails.
Hi guys,

I am trying to apply for the Y Combinator Funding Application and sent a video to private@posterous.com to finish the application however the mail is rejected.

"Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:"

Any idea how should I proceed in this case?.

Thanks very much.

Jose Vigil
RoamTouch CEO
When used correctly a debugger will help you unravel the root cause of a problem, I don't see using one as a route to just fixing symptoms.
I think the author assumed readers were programmers. That's OK in a trade publication.

Indeed, every programmer should know those numbers.
100% agree, I write my best code in the shower, as I'm getting ready for work :)
So if I search for "newborn diapers", I will get awesome non-commercial results about the history and science behind diapers from Wikipedia and sponsored ads to the right? And what about a blog with affiliate links? Is that commercial or not?

While I know it's fashionable now to talk about Google's demise and craptastic results, this idea seems like a solution looking for a problem.

Sorry to rain on el parade but just not feeling it.
How we are making Umbie Office Lean
'Show HN' bombed, but this got me on the front page
On 3/18, I posted this, with the title "Show HN: Correlated - Help us discover surprising correlations":

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2340921

It got 3 up votes, and they were all from my friends.

Then, a day later, I posted this, with the title "Explained: The MySQL query that powers Correlated":

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2342664

That made it to the HN front page.

Part of it was probably the timing (Thursday afternoon versus Friday evening).

And part of it was probably the teaser headline.

But I'm curious what others think: Could it be that many HN readers are tuning out "Show HN" submissions?
Why Digg Failed
2-4 status checks a day, and you have not launched? That is dysfunctional.

Thank you. It's a bit much. I've observed that it leads to the micromanagement death spiral: status checking leads to low productivity leads to a further sense (on the manager's part) of the need for status checks. Too high a ping frequency leads to a work environment that's about "beating" the checks, which is shitty going both ways, an awful way to work (from an employee's perspective) and a terrible work ethic (from a manager's viewpoint). If you manage people like children, they either become children or get out.

I really let myself slide, staying out of a sense of loyalty, even though the negatives turned me from an A-player to a B-player to now a middle C. I want to be an A-player again. If that means changing jobs, so be it. The nice thing about this job search (as opposed to others) is that I have a job and no urgency.

I really enjoyed this job for the first 18 months, though. For all the negatives, it was fucking fun as hell at first, even though I was living on very little money. Then we had a panic point when we discovered how terrible our first technical hire did his part, and how much work that put between us and a launch. (No one had, to that point, audited his code. Ever. The guy is very smart and has been programming for 10+ years so no one, myself included, saw the need. Lesson learned: a programmer can be smart as hell and have years of experience and still be bad in his specific role. Trust but verify.) I disagreed with the CEO on how to manage this awful code (he wanted to use it and put me into kludge/workaround hell, I wanted to rewrite) and lost, so I dropped to a 9-to-5er because I was pissed about his decision, and then the insanely-frequent status checks came.
There's a 35% off code on the website (which is very broken in Firefox).. does it get better than that?

EDIT: Hmm, it only applies to the e-book only version.
Richard Feynman - The Distinction of Past and Future
What you do is very nice, but I think there are better places to publicize your services.
My thinking behind this was indeed to somehow bring a TV feel to the web.

But I am actually leaning towards adding even more interactive features to the site. We already have TV. And Youtube and other sites are already moving in the direction of what you describe(eg. Youtube "leanback").

I believe that this is the wrong approach. The web makes it possible for viewers to interact in new ways, and I think that there is a lot of potential here. I believe that the future of TV-like entertainment will be something that is very interactive/social and game-like. People have already suggested that I add to this site points and game like features, which I plan on doing, among many other interative features.

Also, I have even more long-term plans for expanding beyond video, but that is for another comment :)

Thanks for the input!
Good point. I've never worked in a truly large company before. For me, 100 is "large". Most people probably call that medium-size.

I have nothing against working for a funded startup at this point.
I have a piano standing next to my PC. The most productive days are those on which I play/compose/improvise the most…
If by madness you imply there's no market for it, I'd disagree. However, the idea isn't new: http://blekko.com/ws/+/about
Digg was awesome.

I remember when I created an account on the site. A friend kicked a link my way from Fox News of all places ... that mentioned the site alongside Slashdot. In my job at the time, crowdsourced sites focused on technology were very useful. I left the site about a year after they decided to open up to general news. My fear was that it would become what many of the emerging Web 2.0 news aggregation sites became: a political activist haven. Within several months (not overnight as I had feared), it had ceased being a useful resource. The breaking point was when there was no way to configure my profile to filter out crap-political-commentary. I wrote them to have my account removed (something that couldn't be done with a few clicks at the time).

I had taken it out of my daily "sites to check on" in 2007, but after reading some commentary about how "all of the Web 2.0 sites had become BIASED! (OMG!)" in early 2009, I visited the front page (now without an account with filters setup). The top stories of the day were dominated by nearly everything that a former female candidate for vice president had made.

I love Hacker News because despite its growing popularity, it has maintained civility and avoided (most of the time) entries focused entirely on politics.
Even if a robot lasted for only a few hours it could still be extremely useful. If nothing else, it might allow the emergency workers to tell for sure how much water is in those spent fuel pools.
You may have just persuaded me to change the location of my piano...
Thanks.

I gotta say that the drop in my motivation was gradual. I posted this above: the first 18 months were great. A lot of coding and I had a hell of a good time. When we hit a panic point the CEO made a decision that I thought was bad, and became a 9-to-5er during the 6+ month shit project this bad decision generated, mainly because I just couldn't work on it for longer and saw no point in putting in more ass-in-chair time to keep up appearances. So he started ramping up the status checks (to 2-4 per day) on everyone. I think this high-frequency checking had more to do with our panic point than anything punitive, because everyone else got hit with more pings, but it felt punitive. And when status checks are that frequent, it's hard to be more than a 9-to-5er. An 8-hour day with frequent interruptions is, IME, about the same as a 13-hour day, in terms of fatigue, in coding flow. Much less fun and far less productive, too.
Is there any evidence that lisp actually is better than other languages at AI?
Ask HN[Feature request]: Show all posts by domain
It would be great if the domain shown for each post, such as (techcrunch.com) were a clickable link that would show all posts that point to that domain, the same way reddit does it.

(As an aside, as reddit is OSS (code.reddit.com) why not modify to HNs needs?)
Understanding and using Amazon EBS - Elastic Block Store
The only difference between you and Payne is the density of your startup advice. He jammed it all into one post, while you've diffused it over XX entries. Otherwise, the spirit of your posts and Payne's post -- namely, that you and him both have Great Advice To Offer -- is the same.
Libyan Forces Approach Benghazi
I find I solve the trickiest problems in one of three places: Walking my dog, taking a shower, and laying in bed trying to fall asleep. I find that stepping away from the keyboard, and my programming environment entirely, allows me to let go of all the basic assumptions I hadn't even realized I'd been making.
What do you mean by, "Possibly true"?
The idea that Payne is looking for hits is ridiculous. He's managing a company with tons of media coverage--one blog post won't change a thing for BankSimple.