skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Despite that glaring flaw, the rest of hg is excellent. It functions almost identically to Subversion in the commands that it shares, and the new concepts - branching, merging, etc.

why exactly does the author refer to branching/merging as new concepts?
Paul is really cool man, don't worry about it. He'll probably respect the fact that you tried to make something more than anything.

It's actually kind of hard to upset him. Frankly, he has a lot of money. It's going to take more than one errant script to ruin his day.
You could try a hybrid approach - develop client software, but negotiate to own the intellectual property to parts of the software that are just "utility" and not specific to their needs. I think Matt Raible once wrote a blog post along those lines, but I don't have a link handy.

Edit: Clarification, the reason for this is that you would still make some headway developing tools to aid you in your own software development. If there is no overlap at all though, I think it's up to you to decide which is more important at this point in time. You can always come back to client work later, or always come back to your own product later. It is hard to do both at the same time though, and it may not be feasible when crunch time comes - what do you pick, your product, or theirs?
True, they are applications of machine learning techniques and can be considered "narrow ai".
What I was suggesting is more along the lines of something that can do the tasks of children, see and recongize most things, and understand language. I think one way of achieving that is by "bootstrapping" from understanding of video, If an understanding of what a human does in the video (standing, sitting, limb positions, height, facial expression) in relation to objects and other humans can be automatically inferred, a predictive model could be built with enough data of what a person in any given situation might do. Combine this with robust speech recognition and understanding of the behaviour of common objects I think you would be closer to cracking the goal of language understanding (which I think defines true human level intelligence).
I feel left out that I haven't felt the need to crawl YC...I am merely hiding in anonymity!
I think this is a bad idea, for the following reasons:

1. Threads about moderation tend to be really boring. People discussing things on a forum can be interesting, whereas people discussing the forum on which they're discussing the forum tends to get pretty old pretty quick. If every downmod is followed by a thread about why it got downmodded, including the occasional "oh come now it wasn't that bad" type comment, signal-to-noise will drop considerably, and signal-to-noise is the exact thing which the whole moderation system supposedly exists to increase.

2. Usually when I see a downmodded comment it's pretty obvious why it's been downmodded. Occasionally a worthwhile comment will reach 0 due to the action of one person (in which case, life's tough, suck it up) but severely-downmodded comments always seem to be either belligerent or content-free.

3. Doing so would, as someone else said, discourage downmodding. But rampant downmodding isn't a severe problem at present, and a lack of downmodding potentially could be.
The way I see it, an upvote for an article simply means "notable".

On a related subject - it'd be nice if the system would look for the similarities in voting patterns between the users and use this information to intelligently boost the score (or the position) of new articles on per-user basis. The idea is rather obvious and it has been floating around social news sites for a while now. Digg even got around to implementing some form of it, and reportedly it is working quite well.
Why don't you use emacs for your terminal and hex editor?
The problem with Hadron is that two particles will hit each other precisely head on, which is not what happens when cosmic energy passes through the earth.

Even the project's organizers admit there's a remote chance of destroying the planet through black holes or the creation of matter-altering stranglets.

I don't think the head-on collisions start until 2012 though.
A nice webcalc from the ffmpeg author
Like

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=172701
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182374
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=197644
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=212491
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213891

?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=218782
No control key or ESC key? So much for doing ... anything.
As notauser says, this title sucks, it's about targeted ads. I don't understand why people are so against targeted ads. These companies are going to collect information about you either way, it's (at least for the moment) not illegal, so why shouldn't they use that information to give you ads that don't suck? If Digg wants to determine that I've never clicked on a Snorg tees ad even though they've shown me 10,000 of them and conclude that maybe they should stop showing them, that sounds like a win for me, Digg and the Snorg tees people that are paying for me to see an ad I will never click. Now I can see an ad I might actually be interested in, Digg can charge more for advertising, and the ad providers aren't throwing their money away
How does Jason feel about having his formerly private email list published online?
I like this idea a lot. I would even like a reason to be mandatory.

Over on reddit, I downmod people pretty arbitrarily. Sometimes I like to push a post at 0 to -1 and watch it get sucked down to -20 by the groupthink. Other times, I disagree and don't feel like typing a response. Sometimes I just don't like the guy's username. Basically, I downmod just because I can, which doesn't make for a very good community. (I don't bother doing that here because it's not as amusing. Usually downmodded posts that are good get upmodded, unlike on reddit.)

Anyway, making it harder to downmod someone would be a good idea. It would make a punishing action "harder" on the downmodder, so people would only bother to downmod if they had a good reason. It would reserve downmods for spamming, not disagreeing.

I think.
I try to downmod the offending articles. I've been failing hard so far.
You got modded down because what you said was interpreted as contributing nothing.

Not necessarily. Sometimes downmods are because while the post is good, it's not 100-points-good. And of course, I'm sure everyone has downmodded a comment because you disagreed, not because the comment was bad. (The lack of a downmod button on replies is a great idea. I am always in the habit of dowmodding disagreeing responses on reddit. Just because I can.)
Release Notes for MySQL Community Server 5.0.67
Maybe because it's too much work.
Thanks for the summary, I stopped reading too quickly to grok that.
I was in the 6th grade making websites in HTML on angelfire and geocities for all of my friends. I was also using napster all the time and playing online yahoo chess obsessively.
Couldn't you just create a new HN account?
One difference between good and bad writing is in the organization and presentation of ideas. There should usually be flow or structure, although there's no reason not to be creative about it.
Directory Submission Service
Directory Submission Service Deep Link Directory Submission. Manual directory submission to high PR 3000 directories. Quality 500 deep link directory submission
Take your business seriously or drop it.
That exact sentiment is the only reason I think that some of the big printed media companies will survive. Blogs just don't have good writing. For a publication to offer consistent, good writing is expensive, and a significant number of people will always want that enough to pay for it.
While I agree with you, there will always be people who really just don't want to see a wall of "Congratulations" after someones success-story (or whatnot).

I personally don't mind it, and think it's nice (it certainly feels nice when things like that happen to me), but I can see how someone would not want to see it in the discussion thread they're reading.

"Yes, good job. Enough people have made it clear that the community is happy for this person, yet more people keep doing it"

I would think that as a general rule (especially in congratulatory posts), the upmods from the community would outweigh the downmods.
The link above goes the recent page. If you go to "Popular" (http://askpg.slinkset.com/) it's sorted by the absolute count and will never degrade.

We can easily set how much (or little) time factors into the ranking, but haven't exposed it in the UI yet. We'd like to get to that soon.

It would be nice if we eventually felt like a natural fit for stuff like this, though I realize it's not totally consistent with our positioning so far. Anything other than the ranking and deceptively named menu items that makes it suboptimal?
I think they're so popular here mainly because smart people tend to have varied interests. You have to have a good amount of intellectual curiosity to become a hacker, and that comes before and extends to other areas beyond computer science.

I've spent enough time around them to know that if you get 50 hackers together in a social setting, they talk about a wide variety of subjects. CS often doesn't even come up. I suspect this site has a higher ratio of talk of CS than would be found in real life even among the same participants.

For a site like this to sustain the interest of brilliant people, it has to allow them to roam enough to be entertained while still retaining the core focus. It seems to succeed. If those mass media links were to US Weekly, we'd be in trouble.
John Resig: Open Web Podcast #1
Well, I have all these forced breaks in the form of school and required internships, so it's impossible to fully commit for the next 3 years -- I don't want to drop out. I guess that makes me not-so-serious...but I don't really see what I'd buy with the all-or-nothing approach. It seems like I'd miss out on all the experience/knowledge I'm getting now if I totally shut it down, and I can't imagine spending my spare hours on anything else.

Sorry, don't mean to be rude, just puzzled.
If I have something thoughtful to say about why I up/downmodded a comment, well, that's what "Reply" is for. When I up/downmod without replying, it's either because I don't have time to put my thoughts into words or don't have much to say beyond "I disagree" or "This seems trollish or mean". Forcing me to enter a reason won't suddenly make my thoughts more interesting or take less time.
What does a Hacker look for in a new laptop
I have fairly powerful Desktop,running all different types of os like a charm,I am currently in the third year of my CS Engg., and I wanted to buy a laptop(dont know y ,just felt that i wanted one).So what is a coder/hacker like h/w configuration like( i recently started learning asp.net and already know c/c++ )Is a intel celeron m processor enough for coding needs
and is portability a issue (as u get in an asus eee pc)
Face recognition companies
This is lame and I don't think it is YC material. As someone who's worked on many build systems, I was actually (naively?) hoping for some build status UI ideas. In particular, my current build system that I'm working for needs to visualize a 4D matrix (testsuite revision, impl, impl revision, OS) and I'd love to see what others have done in this area.

Instead, stupid granny pictures. Welcome to the internet, here is the first of an endless supply of stupid.
And i'd go so far as to say that this wouldn't just be good business, it would revolutionize human life.

But from what little I understand of the history of AI, people have been throwing resources at this category of problem for 40+ years and made only middling progress.

Not that that means that people (especially saavy entrepeneurs) shouldn't tackle the problem, I just think that by taking the constrained view (and shooting for the moon) you'd be missing a ton of low-hanging fruit in other areas.

With the emergence of commercially viable computing on demand we're tearing down a major barrier to AI, but I think that throwing the idea out and saying 'Hey! Why don't more of us get together and tackle this problem?' betrays a bit of an underestimation of just how tough this problem is.

That said, I would love for you to prove me wrong =) And as another poster mentioned, groups in the areas of surveillance and security (where the money is, at least initially) are making good headway on the problem.

The biggest problem with building predictive models, as another poster pointed out, is feeding them tagged training data. You could really feasibly load up a database with terabytes of data for most of the stimuli people react to these days (or will be able to in the near future), and even most of the basic combinations. It's a matter of tagging and classifying them in the first place that's the problem. Maybe with enough Indians sitting in front of mechanical turk... scrambles off to a calculator
Questions for you to think about to help make your decision:

- Will the extra money from consulting reduce any worries you have about money, thereby letting you focus on the product more?

- Would consulting save you from having to take a full time job, giving you extra time work on the product?

- Can you consult on something very similar to your product, own the IP, and use it as a way to learn about your market?

- Can you take whatever custom thing you'd be building as a consultant and instead develop a product out of that, and then sell the product to your consulting customer?

- Can you outsource part of the consulting, so you're just designing the software, managing the project, and reviewing their work, thereby saving time and drudgery, and letting you mark up the outsourced hours?

- Could you meet good people consulting? (i.e. are you consulting for a startup or tech company, as opposed to some company in an unrelated line of business?)

- Can you use the consulting gig to learn about tools or technologies you want to use in your own startup? Can you use the consulting to learn about a market that your startup is targeting?

- Can you talk to more experienced consultants and get tips on how to charge more and manage clients better?
Computer Vision Companies
Picking who to give money to is not "deal making," or at least bears little resemblance to the deal making that founders need to become proficient at to gain customers and partners. In particular the exploding offer structure ("make your decision before you leave the room") is only possible when one side in the negotiation is in a highly advantaged position.

"So how can startup founders learn to be good deal makers."
Practice, negotiation training, cultivating a creative frame of mind, preparation, spending two-thirds of your preparation trying to look at the situation from the other party's perspective.
I come here for comments and things people find interesting and worth talking about. 'news worthy' is only a subset of that. There's lots of other places to find news online.

Short items can be worth talking about. Comments are usually shorter than the posts they comment on, and I frequently find comments that are more interesting than their parents.
that makes too much sense.
I was in high school, in a comp-sci course taught by a very good teacher. We used C++. I tried very hard to write a chess AI that learned by analyzing its previous games - I failed miserably, it was fun.

The same teacher taught the "CCNA" class, which was also taught well. I've pointed it out to him before, but Mr. Nesler, if you're reading this, you're probably the best teacher I ever had.

I remember discovering slashdot, and getting my "check what the URL looks like before clicking on it" reflexes. I also remember the "online journal" thing really starting to get popular.

I remember being fascinated by Java.
Declare The Games Open
Massive. Meticulous. Earnest. Daedal Ian. Elaborate. Dazzling, Dramatic, Theatrical. Some of the words I would use to describe the opening of the Olympic Games. There are a few more phrases however, iron-curtained, heavily-politicized, and air-tight.
This guy's never said he's smarter than everybody else, even though it's obviously true. The fact that he went to college early on comes up once in a while because a lot of posts on HN have to do with education and brains, but I have yet to see a post where he rubs it in anyone's face.

But there's a fundamental problem with anyone who admits to having gone to college at 13. It's a lot like being 6'9" at age 13. In that particular field, you're better than everyone else, and it's plain as day. However, unlike being really tall, people generally hate you for it. Smart guys don't get groupies. Smart guys aren't generally popular. There's stigma regarding intelligence, and I'm not sure why.

With regard to Mensa, keep in mind there are only 50,000 members in US, out of a maximum of 6 million that fall into the 98th percentile for IQ. If you tested Silicon Valley denizen, you'd find a lot of people on the right end of the curve. Woz, Sergey, Bill G, they're probably all in the top 99th percentile. In fact, Bill Gates won a national math competition when he was young.

If you mean Mensa people don't rock the valley, you're right, but if you mean 98th percentile folks don't rock the valley, I'm pretty skeptical.

In any case, Colin's obviously a genius. I for one don't hold it against him. I don't really into buy social standards of arrogance and humility; I don't want to overestimate or underestimate myself. I want to be accurate. If I'm the best, I won't try to convince myself otherwise. Likewise if I'm the worst. Colin, if you ever find you need someone to work with but your smarts have scared people off, contact me.
I love your specific examples. This should go in the HN FAQ.
Thanks for the ideas! This is exactly what I was looking to hear more about. I'm going to have to think more about those questions.

The only thing keeping me from treating the consulting differently is that the product business is something that I can work on when I have time and put on the back-burner if it's really needed and still have it generate passive income. Not so much with clients and deadlines.

For the money thing, I've saved up about a year of living expenses, but I don't want to dip into it. Ever. I've heard this gets harder if you're not single, but I have high hopes :).
Don't take tiny bits of work that are due in two days. But if it's a bigger piece of software, you can tell them "It'll be ready in 6 weeks" then you'll have time to do it on your own schedule, assuming you really don't need 6 weeks fulltime to do it. And set up a time limit, and a high rate, for maintenance and bug fixes, so they don't keep calling you six months later to add this or change that.
eBay was far from the first on-line auction site. In particular OnSale was founded a year earlier was running on-line auctions in May of 1995 six months before eBay was founded.
Most of those things seem common sense
India's Y Combinator Clone
"Deals fall through."

At Justin.tv, Emmett has a framed picture of pg with this caption.
I had a thought re: site quality -- which is that a community ends up with a focus whether it likes it or not, as the community hardens and desires a regular feedback loop -- so while Digg and Reddit opened themselves to a "lowest common denominator" and reaped what they've sown....YC started with a focus on hacking and startups. Which is good for YC content, since it means the people who are interested in it are predominantly optimistic, thoughtful, or both.

Lambda the Ultimate is another good example of this; even as it's gained popularity, it's preserved an agenda that avoids language wars and other noisy content. I would say that because of its narrow focus, its quality is even higher than news.YC!

One online community which has imposed some standard of quality from above, without topical limitations, is the Something Awful forums. The strategy there is to use fee-gating and heavy moderation with frequent and somewhat inconsistent punishment. The results are dubious - for some posters it becomes a game to see what one can get away with, and the overall quality is only increased in that a larger percentage of posters take time for spelling and grammar, and obvious trolls get banned, but clever ones do not. Basically, moderation treats only some symptoms of an underlying problem: people treating the online world as if they were sitting down at the bar with 30,000 of their best friends.

That said, the worst elements of YC in the long term will probably correlate to the worst elements of the startup world.
Obama Supporters Prefer Firefox
That's exactly my initial reason for posting this. In the singulariy enthusiast community artificial intelligence is the most important thing we as humans can create (post scarcity, immortality etc).

What I was suggesting is that a "gold rush" type situation form around the building of classifiers, such as that occurred with website creation. There are millions trying to get an income onlne creating content for adsense and affilate programs (and for free with wikipedia and open source). Most will fail at generating reasonable income but in the process a large amount of wealth has been created. The same could be done for classifiers/artifical intelligence. It would require just collecting a thousand or two pieces of data (image/sudio/text) to create a classifier, an effort similar to creating a small website.

The problem is that even in the past there really wasn't a large number of people working on artificial intelligence, maybe just a few hundred or thousand, and computing power wasn't cheap enough to make it work. Computer scientists that do work on it are trying to create more unique algorithms that can be published, rather than creating applications with existing working algorithms (after all they''re paid to create new things, not simply apply what's available). In Larry Page's lecture at AAAS he mentioned that there are less than a hundred people working on artificial (general) intelligence today. (you can see it on youtube).
I would get one of the smallest models I could. I'd also make sure it runs linux. use desktops for power that's what they are good at, notebooks should be portable, meaning comfortable to carry around in a bag for a while. Light as you can get.

About the only thing I would invest in is at least 1G of ram, maybe even 2G. laptops tend to ship with slower hard drives so if you start swapping you are really going to have problems. maybe benchmark your average ram usage on the desktop.

I've found that processor speed isn't as important as most people think, go light you'll be fine, this isn't a server.

last note. I regret buying a desktop replacement laptop.

edit: when I say make sure it runs linux I mean make sure that it's hardware is compatible with a linux install. That same hardware will work good with windows, and gives you freedom of choice later. Or you can just get linux now because linux rules.
CERN rap video about the Large Hadron Collider creates a black hole of awesomeness
Rackspace IPO: Failure or early opportunity?
I was in 10th grade and was already part of the craze. I remember, even in India, it was a euphoria-like atmosphere. Companies offering T-shirts for clicking ads, internet connection for free. Heck, even domain names for free.

Those were the days... :)
I like the commentary sometimes. But I can't imagine having much to say about a 1 liner.

to each their own however.
I find one of the most important things is screen space. And I don't mean a gigantic 17" screen; I mean DPI. I have a 15.4" laptop with a 1680x1050 screen; this gives me room to work. I've seen laptops the same size with 1280x800 screens; I don't know how anyone could do much of anything on those.

Don't get anything too heavy. Mine's just over 6 pounds, and that's already pushing it.

Finally, don't worry about hard disk space; if you need lots, just grab an external drive; they're cheap these days.
Hi comment feed readers. RIP Biographicon (WFP 08). http://blog.biographicon.com/2008/08/03/biographicon-closing...

I just don't feel like submitting it as a story.