skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is really all based on SMS. You can treat SMS input as command lines on remote server and returns a very short list of the stuffs. The creative part here is how to train users to use it. But at one hand, they will learn it because they have to. So a formatted text input is pretty good for server side to parse.

I saw a video about how a Beijing company use voice and text for translation on cellular phone. A tourist type what he wants to say in English and send the sms to system. The system returns a Chinese text for taxi driver to see. Another system also leave a voice message for listening if it is inconvenient for reading.

At the other hand. unless data plan and smart phone becomes much cheaper in developing world. Android may not influence the current market in short term.
Upmod the good stories and ignore the bad ones. Eventually the bad ones will get filtered out of view as the good stories rise.
Anyone care to enlighten me?

edit: I just reread the article... Let's see, Tom Anderson created MySpace, did war-dialing in the WarGames times, got access to the Chase bank system (apparently with a default or weak password), told 40 of his friends how to do it, and they all got raided simultaneously.

Public figure + black hat hacking in the past = interesting?

There's one thing I found really interesting:

"One of the reasons Anderson would hack into living room sized mainframe systems was to get access to computers that could run a C compiler to learn programming. There were no open source or free C compilers at the time, and personal computers had very limited memory and processing power, so hackers would try to access them on other systems."
>> Hans and Nina Reiser met in her native Russia in 1998 and married a year later.

more a naive american boy than an insane murderer.
It's also a good example of how to not quote a Craigslist article. His use of the pre tag and ghastly CSS means an absurd amount of side scrolling.
That's actually a pretty solid idea. Skirt music copyrights by using YouTube music videos for an online Guitar Hero clone...JamLegend, take note.
14 years old hacking into a major banks computer system in the 1980s, with a group of (40+) hackers looking up to him.

At that age he was bound to let that go to his head and get a little too confident.
Paradoxically, one of the most aggressively (guerilla) simple marketing campaigns runs directly contrary to the whole idea of making a blog entry to try and "inform" people on how to be aggressive when marketing:

Just do it. - Nike

The reason I say all that: more and more companies are trying to be viral, trying to be guerilla, jumping into social niche markets without really knowing how to target users, then slapping the word "viral" or "social" in front of it. Read my words over and over, print them out if you have to:

IT'S NOT VIRAL/GUERRILLA/SOCIAL MARKETING JUST BECAUSE YOU SAY IT IS.

Hosting a non-conformist event, creating a t-shirt, entering contests, blogging just for the sake of doing them, and then calling it marketing wont work. These are all organic things, people flock to these events because they are genuinely interested in your message, not the way you convey it. You should host a non-conformist event because you truly run against the grain, you truly love your work to the point where it's non conformist simply because you love doing it your way.

You should create a T-Shirt for people to wear because your company designer is really good at what he does and he wants other people to see his work. If you're going to slap a corporate logo on there, it shouldn't LOOK like a corporate logo because your designer should have the artistic freedom and ability to stylize it and make it something people actually want to wear. Folks shouldn't walk around with your t-shirt and simultaneously look like a PR rep.

Just do it, but don't do it because you can.
Good point. As wikipedia informs me, "the oldest art objects in the world: a series of tiny, drilled snail shells about 75,000yrs old, were discovered in a South African cave," yet any indisputably fashion art from that period would be irrecoverable by now.
Ah, thanks for the link.
Blocks/Closures For C
Easy. I've just copied your message and added "lol!" at the end. It triggered.
To say fasion/clothing predated language assumes language as we know it arrived very suddenly, and also that this event can be accurately dated. As I recall, neither assumption is generally agreed upon. It seems more likely to me (not that I know that much about it ;) that modernish language evolved over a long period, overlapping with development of other technologies like clothing.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Language]
I'm curious where this meme is heading. First it was ninja, then a rockstar, then what? Be a Q Quarterback! Looking for ActionScript Astronauts and C Cosmonauts! We need Ocaml Olympians and Tcl Titans!!!

I had a phone interview a few days ago where the other person used a line like "we're looking for ninja developers". I mean, its silly when you see it written, and its 100x more so when someone says it out loud.
This kind of hyperbole makes you look like an unmitigated jackass.

You're right. Sorry about the hyperbole.

Why exactly should a single image on the front site make or break your technical case? Have you considered that this might be an indication that your technical case was extremely weak?

I agree with you, of course, but I think you're underestimating how important appearances are to these middle-management types. Especially the ones at service-based companies. They will visit the website to research a tool that I want to use, and if it doesn't look professional, it will get rejected regardless of any technical argument I make. This is true for everyone, not just me.
These days the best way to get a Nobel is to devote yourself to liberal politics.
http://www.perlmonks.org

http://use.perl.org
Sorry, deleted and rewrote the comment to better explain what I was getting at.
Sure, whether you need to work to earn a living depends on the standard of living and risk level you're comfortable with. But I think it's possible to set a reasonable upper bound. Say, around the point where your interest income at a typical risk-free rate, after reinvestment to keep pace with inflation, would put you among the highest earners in the world if it were ordinary income. Defining "highest earners" as those in the top two US tax brackets, that amount is currently around $8-10M, or on the order of 2^23 present-day dollars.

Personally I think on the order of 2^22 dollars reasonably qualifies as well. Maybe that's because of the standard of living I'm used to. Certainly if you have 2^24 dollars and you don't think you're rich, you have a definition of wealth that ignores a major qualitative difference in what a person can afford to do. Above 2^23 dollars, I think additional wealth begins to put you more in the realm of the low-level aristocracy and rulers than the merely rich.
I'll bet that would qualify for the "Name a time when you successfully hacked some non-computer system to your advantage" YC application question.
It's all about quotes. Is it a bug?

I must admit (without quotes) = not stupid.
"I must admit" (with quotes) = stupid.
I think it's an innovative idea, but speaking form just a tiny bit of personal experience, buying and selling pieces of companies (excluding the stock market) can be terribly confusing. Am I buying 10% for my $20,000? Then why is it, one year later (and more stock has been issued/other investors have come in), I have less than 10%?

It could be possible, and thinking about it, it's might even be largely educational for people who became interested in it. But getting people up to speed on the procedures and terminology may be initially difficult.
insane for not taking the deal?
I have been dating someone in the PR biz and these "top 10" style articles are a new PR vehicle. You can pack 10 or more client mentions into one article.
That's just begging the question -- if your income is in the top 1% of all earners, and you still "have to work for a living", then you're pretty clearly not living within your means.

It's quite obvious that the definition of the word "rich" is relative, and subjectively defined. Yet everyone seems to focus on that relativity as if it's some huge, meaningful insight. It isn't. At the end of the day, if you're earning more than 99% of everyone around you, and you still can't pay your bills? That means that you're doing it wrong.
Yup, that's a recipe for bust.
For a long time, I wondered whether Tom was a real person.

It's nice to have a criminal record to go with his face.

Makes him feel a little more real.

He is my friend, u know...
http://freedomainradio.com/board/
...much, much easier than digging a hole and putting the medals in the hole.
Unfortunately Y Combinator only gave us $15,000, not $50 billion so we redirect Yahoo.com or $150 billion to redirect Google.com...
7 Reasons Why The Gym is Better Than Therapy
Concerned With: Skinny Controller, Skinny Model
Engineers do not make $150K a year at a startup. If you happen to run across this rare event, take the job, live on $40K and bank the rest (i.e. don't buy a BMW). Then, 6-18 months later when the company goes down in flames, you will have more than enough money to start your own company.

If you aren't a founder, the best job to get at a startup is some sort of "VP" role after the series A round. These guys DO get paid $150-$175K a year, get the same number of options as the early stage engineers, and don't have to do as much work. As far as I can tell, their only role is to go to meetings with each other. That said, the mere existence of these employees signals almost certain doom for the startup.

My apologies to the YC founders looking for employees, but being an early stage engineer (not a founder) at a startup is for suckers. You get paid paid $10-$50K less than you could at a big company, and your options are going to be worthless or worth far less than you could ever imagine. If you have an entrepreneurial bent, your best bet is to take the higher salary somewhere else and save money until you start your own thing.
Quick example in java:

PreparedStatement stmt = conn.prepareStatement("UPDATE accounts set username=?, password=? where id=?");

stmt.setString(1, "foo");

stmt.setString(2, "bar");

stmt.setInt(3, 49);

stmt.executeUpdate();

As you see, very easy to do, and separates SQL from data.
If he did that we wouldn't be talking about it saying it's cool.
There are some very valid points in there; the inability to perform a successful build locally has caught me on a couple of projects. Unfortunately, as the number of dependencies increases, this inevitably becomes more difficult. If the project depends on more than 2-3 libraries, I think it's reasonable to include the more obscure (obscure = isn't supplied with the top 5 Linux distros & OSX; slow release cycle) in the source code repository, and maybe supply the more mainstream ones in one ready-to-use .zip for those poor Windows folk.

The lack of infrastructure (version control, bug tracking, mailing lists) around open source projects is a real issue as well, and one for which there are no excuses, as sourceforge etc. will supply you with said infrastructure for free. (in money and time) It can seem somewhat silly when it's literally just one guy churning out the odd release, but I think it's appropriate even then.

The main barrier to entry I've encountered is just reading my way through the code so I understand it well enough to be confident enough to change anything. Yeah, documentation would be nice, but let's face it, it's never going to happen.

I've found the best way to get started is to reserve a free weekend...
"FAIL!" triggered it.
Really? On my Debian system, at least an old version of the software is in the repositories 90% of the time, and simply doing:

sudo apt-get build-dep $PACKAGENAME

gets all the stuff I need to build the software, and then all that's left is

./autogen.sh --prefix=/local/test/prefix
make
make install

and things Just Work. I've never had a big problem with dependencies -- other than Xorg, where the issue wasn't with obscureness. The issue was with requiring a number of dependencies from git. That sort of problem really isn't something you can resolve by anything other than documentation.

As for Sourceforge.net, it's bug tracker software has the worst UI I've ever seen. Even email beats it, IMO.

But I agree with you about the need for easier code browsing and documentation. Still, tools like 'cscope' go a long way to figuring out what's going on with the source, and grep + ctags in vim will take you the rest of the way.

edit: fix formatting
The ads for Jane Street Capital are pretty good. (They pop up in Gmail for me sometimes.)

0. They get the job title right. If you're a quant, you know it. Is a startup CTO a rockstar or a ninja? It's unclear.

1. They mention the domain knowledge applicants should have. (e.g. finance, not just the technologies used.) Electrical engineering doesn't really have anything to do with what RedWire does -- sounds more like they're in the marketing business.

2. They describe some specific tech, and explain why it's used. Ads mention Scheme and other languages, explain that functional programming and program optimization matter for the high-performance computing they do, and state that Ocaml fits their needs best. Pretty credible.

3. They give a realistic impression of the workplace culture. Clearly, JSC has a carefully culled group of intense people with heavy CS and math backgrounds, surrounded by even more intense traders. Money and prestige matter the most; candy is not mentioned. One can assume collared shirts and possibly ties are involved.

So I'm not the sort of person they're looking for, and I can tell -- I'm not tempted to fudge an application and add noise to the signal. But if I had majored in financial engineering, loved money, and truly did have Free Electron-level programming ability, this would be enough to get my attention.
For me, the reddit main page sucks, but I do find interesting stuff on programming.reddit.com
Turing did that, also in WW2, with some silver bars.

He never managed to find the exact spot where he had buried them.
Probably not. But hey, I'd support strapping a geiger counter and a hunk of Si-32 onto a rocket and firing it into the sun, just to be sure.

(Or away from the sun, but into the sun is quicker and more fun.)
Random Acts of Kindness: A Social Site I’d Love to See
Perhaps, but gravity comes a close second.
I wonder if Sanj stubled across that by reading http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/08/08/30/022237.shtml, like I did. Sanj?
I had an appointment for Lasik, but chickened out at the last minute (the idea of shooting a laser into my eyes was too much). But then I continued to abuse my eyes with cheap contacts and ended up with a corneal infection which left one eye legally blind. So, glasses are my only option now. Make your choices wisely, and go with the best. I think that contacts are not healthy for your eyes over years of use.
As another former gym rat, 100 pushups isn't a bad idea at all. The ability to do 100 pushups will not make you "bulky" at all. It isn't the same thing as the guys who can bench press 300 pounds and only squat 180. Push-ups are a "core" exercise and if you do them right you're working everything from your pecs to your psoas.

Now, I totally agree with you that neglecting the rest of your body is a bad idea. Most men who are prone to being "gym rats" totally ignore leg exercises. If you're sitting down all day programming, your legs eventually will get totally screwed up, so it is a good idea to do something with them. If you're totally fat and out of shape, walking for an hour per day is more important than doing a bunch of pushups.

I also disagree with the guys in the article. If they gained a bunch of weight, simply doing pushups (even 100 at a time) is not going to burn off what they put on. I don't want to discourage them, because pushups can contribute greatly to overall health, fitness, and self esteem. But, if losing fat is what they are after, they need to stop stocking the fridge with free beer and soda and start a track club.
That presupposes our knowledge of the course of World War II. It's entirely possible that Arab residents of Palestine buried treasure that their great-grandchildren still cannot dig up. If he had to flee, he presumably could have taken the solution with him without difficulty.
I think most people assumed the MySpace guys knew just enough PHP to get MySpace off the ground and then got lucky. It's interesting to see there's a little more to it than that.
This is so wrong it belongs on theonion. This will have absolutely no impact on google, or any other advertising.

Contextual advertising just does not work the way the article supposes it does.
Ah, Jane Street does have great ads, don't they? OCaml and smart people making tons of money together? The stuff of dreams for a Silicon Valley engineer tired of web infrastructure, who never made any money on options and just happened to read some books by Nassim Taleb.

However, the one bit they don't mention, but all your friends who DID take jobs on wall street will:

"jane street is known as a smart firm that pays little"
Y'know, I started reading that post with a view towards making a cynical, snarky comment, but by the end it didn't seem such a bad idea.

You'd need to make sure the karma system couldn't be gamed, though -- either by automated actions (kind comments on everybody's walls) or collusion (two people [or a person and a sockpuppet] conspiring to give each other karma). I'm not sure that's solvable.
> I have 20gb website backups I make every week.

Well, don't use your private cable-line for that. You could push it to Amazon S3 instead?
Are you suggesting that no other government on Earth is capable of, or willing to do warrantless searches?
No, that's not what I'm saying. I just disagree that such fashion is "laughable", at least according to popular opinion. I also disagree that an attempt to wear unlabeled clothes is part of another conformist consumer movement (an indie backlash).

As for your second question, I've bought a few (unlabeled) shirts that I really like from Old Navy and yes, even Target and Wal-Mart.
Higher-Order JavaScript (A Javascriptish companion to Higher-Order Perl)
Oh, I don't know about that, you could have a film which depicted some of the parts of his life which weren't shown in the first one.

Like, say, how he met his first wife. Or most of his business dealings. Or his twenty-second birthday party. Or any number of the interesting incidents which would no doubt have occurred in his life. Charles Foster Kane was a fascinating character who lived a full life, surely he didn't spend his whole time crying over his sled, did he?

The scary part is that I'm actually starting to think this might be a good idea for a movie.
Our World of Middle Earth: Spiritual Direction from C.S. Lewis
Politics is a slow, stupid, emotional, and reactionary method of decision-making.

This is unfortunate as it could hinder the growth of the private space industry, which is one of the most exciting economic events of the last ten years.
This is true if your business plan is a Hail Mary pass for an acquisition by Google, Microsoft, or IBM. That's because the goals of the founders and the goals of the employees aren't aligned; it's broken in the same kind of way as Freakonomics says real estate agents are.

I hope it's not true for startups that aren't drugged out on VC money. I don't know whether it is or it isn't. I can't tell, because I'm one of 3 founders, and the company is pretty much going to do what we want it to.

Everyone says "yeah, but the work is better at a startup". I actually don't know if that's true --- I've been through a lot of startup bitch work (and wiring up yet another web form to MySQL is exactly that), and I've been tempted by some pretty awesome BigCo roles. Our work here is pretty awesome (for instance, we've got people paid to hack on gnuradio), but maybe you can get that same work at Motorola.

This is a huge question and I don't have a good answer for it and I'm glad you brought it up. Outside the get-rich-quick schemes, what can we offer employees of real and lasting value? For a lot of us, it's training and reputation; but I want to keep the talent we're developing.
there's always .me
I voted the article up simply because it was a good piece of original, well-balanced, interesting investigative reporting.
Paper: GargantuanComputing—GRIDs and P2P
The New HTC S740 Unlocked
Working in perfect harmony with the S740’s quick messaging tools… writing documents, texts, emailing and instant messaging conversations feel as natural as they do on a notebook, giving you the freedom to communicate the way you enjoy the most.
To keep it succinct, gravity keeps you from getting your crap into space, while government keeps you from building useful crap in the first place.
indeed I did!
To be fair to the gaming companies, I can understand why they don't want to open their platforms. The infamous Video Game Crash of 1983 has been blamed, in part, on the fact that console-makers such as Atari, desperate to get a large portfolio of games in the market, held very low standards for what games they would allow to be made for their system, leading to outright terrible games like E. T. and worse, outright offensive titles like Custer's Revenge. The desire not to repeat this mistake is much of why Nintendo held tight control over its franchise and, in the US, deleted the edgy, religious and sexual elements from games like Final Fantasy 4/6.

Although, I'm inclined to agree with you. If Magic: the Gathering had gone open source at some point, there would still be people over 15 who play it. However, they'd also have to change their business model.
Hackers attack Iraq's vulnerable computers
The value of an anonymously acquired media player would be a lot higher than either of those two things. There's no market because nobody is willing to pay $1k for an anonymous cell phone when they can just get a prepaid one. But if one absolutely needed an AT&T SIM card, with that budget I'm sure they could forge all the required identification.

Of course it's hard to speculate the difficulty of such forging in the future. But I would think that $10k would be enough to break some human link in the chain.
Good as a sound bite, but as an example, what percentage of YC companies have fallen afoul of government interference problems? What percentage have given up? And so on for other problems.

I'm guessing that the "government problems" group is relatively small, and mostly focused on IP issues, which are quite a can of worms but not quite "the government" vs "businesses". Some businesses use those laws to make their own money, whether we agree with that or not.

Try Europe sometime if you really want to see government making life difficult.

In short, I think the main problem most companies face is "making something people want" and doing so profitably, not "the gubmint".
Stellarium: free open source planetarium
willmott is the best place I've seen for quant/finance discussion:
http://www.wilmott.com/
Nb. has a (required) delayed login before you can post. Very little (if any) noise in the comments - makes freakonomics look like jerry springer.
Only saying that (as the article briefly touches on) companies and governments in Canada and Europe are not allowed to store sensitive data on US websites (by law). Kind of a competitive disadvantage.
reason.com/blog and distributedrepublic.net have intelligent commentators, though reason tends towards the smart-allecky side. You would probably enjoy both blogs if you like the Marginal Revolutions and Overcoming Biases of the world. Oh, and Cafe Hayek.

For legal issues, there's the Volokh Conspiracy. I believe that Eugene Volokh is a libertarianish law professor somewhere.

Is the Becker/Posner blog still around? I believe that both of them have a Nobel prize in Economics.

Greg Mankiw has a good blog, with a good community.

Most of the internet sucks for intelligent discussion. That's what happens when you let any-old-body in.