skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi Bd,
Ironic, yesterday I uploaded a tech-demo of something I call kindling which attempts to correlate articles against news feeds from social websites.

I read a book called Collective Intelligence by Tony Segaran. Its basically machine learning for dummies, very example heavy, all in Python.

He talks about clustering to group like things together in an unsupervised way. The way this works is to build a vector of words from each article and compare these using something known as pearson distance. The vector of words is known as a feature set. Early on you create this vector in a naive way (i.e. eliminate words that don't show up enough and words that show up too much). At the end of the book he talks about feature detection (which I assume is building this vector in a smarter way).

The book really helped me. Pearson correlation is pretty easy to grasp and implement as well.

Good luck.
Ancient Greek Computer Set Dates For Olympics
1. Accountability

Make sure you and your partner keep each other in check. No partner? Reach out to the community and provide them with updates on how your project is going via blogs, forums, etc.
Remember, we're your community too. =)

2. Plan

Plan out your game plan ahead of time. Create a draft or wire frame of how you want your project to look and feel.

3. Baby Steps

Rome wasn't built overnight. Work on the simples pieces first. That will build your moral, and you'll be ready to conquer bigger challenges.

4. Relax

A lot of times I come up with great solutions after a short break. When I'm sitting for a long period of time in front desk, my mind feels confined and tired, which can be demoralizing. Hence, small breaks are good for re-energizing your mind and moral.
I live in Cuyahoga County now and I grew up in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. Yet, the name never reminded me of the word "Cuyahoga." Weird. I was surprised to see that someone else made that connection.
Federal Court Allows Sprint Retail Employees Represented by Nichols Kaster & Anderson
You beat me to it -- I feel like the "is angry" is implied.
Additionally, off the top of my head, Joel Spolsky and Olin Shivers.

Boolah boolah.
Now, I’m sure tons of people will scoff at the idea of not having graphics in their feed. They’ve gotta have that curvy candy coated interface with the flash video about Steampunk Buttplugs posted by BoingBoing blaring right in their fucking face or else they don’t feel alive. They don’t feel young. Dammit, they want to augment that Nerd ADD with a feed reader that goes to eleven!

Rock on, Zed.
would Product Engineers be the right set of folks to lead such initiatives?
Oh, so many reasons. There was a lot of crap online in the 90's, (not that that has changed at all), and you didn't get control over where your ad went. Both website owners and advertisers like control. It makes you feel warm and fuzzy. In an ad exchange, you're both an owner and an advertiser.

Basically, in an exchange, you don't get paid for ads that appear on your site, you get "paid" by your ad appearing on someone else's site. So if you're trying to make money on advertising, thats a problem, because there's no revenue involved. Also, you don't get to control where your ad appears, so its probably horribly targeted and not really doing any good. In this case, only some companies get help from display ads, not all companies will benefit equally.

Basically, people figured out that getting paid for ads on their site and then using that money for a targeted ad campaign (that comes with reporting, analytics, etc) on another site was worth more value than an ad exchange ever gave them.
We didn't win the Y50K either, and I think we were the only team from our year to actually go on and found anything at all.

To be fair, the idea we applied with was kind of stupid.
Right now this is a tech demo. Looking for feedback on the idea itself. If I find I've hit a nerve (i.e. a problem others want solved) then I would like to move forward with the business building route.
> "The music companies were put on earth to make the video companies seem like visionaries," says Michael Gartenberg, research director of analysis firm JupiterResearch.

That might be the funniest thing I have read all day. Sadly it's so very true.
What do 'product' do? The actual design, which is then handed over to engineering for implementation?
His choice of 'recommended languages' is interesting... and not quite what I would have expected.
I don't understand the bit about Mutt not having folders. I use Mutt and have folders. Is he talking about using it with IMAP or something?
knolr
Should You Tell Clients You Work from Home?
The 2008 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry [pdf]
Carl Icahn Refuses To Attend Yahoo Shareholder Meeting
Something like that, yes.

There's Product Managers, Project Managers, Program Managers, Engineering managers.

I think what happens is you have Product guys on one hand and Developers on the other.

Engineering is inbetween and consists of the calculus of tradeoffs both from the technology and from functionality. Most of the people with "engineer" in their title are really developers, that just implement.

Then again, all this Silicon Valley software company mumbo jumbo is new to me -- I'm still somewhat new to this industry...
I am looking for banner exchange sites for my startup.

Your site was interesting at first but there are two drawbacks.

You don't give free credits on registration. We want to use banner exchange to jumpstart our site. We don't have users. We want users. Without starting credits I have a cold start problem.

1 for 1 banner exchange doesn't solve my problem. I want to drive traffic to by newborn site. Another formula would be better.
I can't wait for angry ranting to go out of fashion.
Man, I know there was an uproar when all PDFs were sent to scribd... but having a feed reader link randomly link to a PDF is really obnoxious. For some reason, those links in google reader decide to embed acrobat, rather than opening in sumatraPDF like all my other PDFs.

Can the headline at least warn you? Or link to the comments, and include a PDF link in the body?
Good idea. Did you research your target audience? Because if your target audience is females, you should put more effort into your design approach.

You should read http://www.scribd.com/doc/2629403/Marketing-to-Women-The-Wor...

A summary: as guys (and especially as hacker-types), we don't know anything about what girls like or care about.

Best of luck.
I sense a new startup idea.

A form that reads:

Zed Shaw is angry about [textbox]. [textbox for link].

Posts to all the aggregation sites like reddit and HN ;)
For now, it's an easy way to get traffic. People like it when you're willing to call it like you see it and skewer the mediocre things that surround us.

As an alternative, what's a forceful way to critique the central problem Zed discusses in his rant, namely the practice of blindly copying a (questionable) UI metaphor from another application category, email, without resorting to ranting?

In general, lengthy writing on the web works best when you have a story with a conflict and resolution -- Zed is frustrated by all the products he encounters, and he finally finds one that matches what he wants. Joel Spolsky uses this heavily. The way to promote a product these days, I guess, is to make the story about you, the potential customer, who has a problem the product solves (hooray!). An angry rant fits into that well enough that it's a tempting, easy route.
World's oldest joke traced back to 1900 BC
Amen. Filed under: inherent limitations of Semantic Web data mining techniques.
VideoEgg and LicketyShip were started by Yalies.
My first search, for "lawn gnomes", returned no results. Come on! Home and garden? You GOT to have lawn gnomes :)

Seriously, nice start here. Good use of affiliate marketing, as others have noted. You may want to make the search more flexible and forgiving if PESS provides a way - e.g. I typed in 'coffe machine' and got no results, then 'coffee machine' and got many.
A good hack is to try to give without expecting anything in return. Volunteer, for instance. Make stuff for free. When I was getting started doing freelancing, I made free websites for nonprofits to get practice, which actually turned into lots of money.
Fuck that, it was awesome
Software Project Learning Process
I'm a little disappointed in 2.0. They have massive amounts of really good data, but don't seem to be interested in mining it in any way, such as:

- a recommendation engine for each user

- a tagging engine

- a news aggregator
The name reminds of me of Family Guy (Quahog)
Pets.com CEO: The Five Big Mistakes That Changed My Life and How I Moved Past Them
Efficient random row selection in MySQL
Yahoo's Newspaper Consortium generated 100 million visits to partner sites
I concur on the name being-- well, awful. The design, too, is not great. Branding overall, poor.

/Product/, though: It's wicked good. Useful, possibly profitable, easy. You could carve out a niche here. Froogle has never achieved dominance in the space, nor has any other product search. Good luck.
I can't figure out a python script that will turn bad datasheets (pdf or Word) into good C++ code...
In my head I've always pronounced it something like, "Dell-Issio-Us'

The delicious.com name change could certainly give the site broader appeal. I like it.
What do you mean "are the same?"
I do understand that you're trying to illustrate the concept of "it's so easy, even your parents can use it".

Rather, I'm just suggesting it doesn't belong on a post entitled "Early Adopters Wanted".
The New Delicious (Forgot password? Get lost)
There are a few complaints from people who can’t find their password in the Support Forums. Ironically the link to ‘Forgot your password’ leads to a ‘Sorry, Forbidden. You don’t have permission to access this URL on this server’ page at Yahoo. Try it yourself.
This screams 'sensationalism'.

Yes, an EMP would shut down electronics, etc. It would NOT turn us into a mid-1800s society who has to go back to horse and buggy transportation. (However, I for one welcome our new Amish overlords). Repairs would happen and things would go back to normal - certain areas of the US would be severely fucked, but an EMP would not wipe out every electronic in the US. More likely, a major city like New York would be targeted, with a reasonable range around it affected by an EMP.

First, the range of the missiles Iran has is NOT enough to reach the continental US (the figures from their recent launches were what, 3000km? And from New York, it's 10,000+ miles to the Middle East if I'm recalling correctly (feel free to flame if i'm wrong). First, it's much more likely that if they ARE preparing EMPs, it's intended to be detonated over US warships and/or land bases to throw them into disarray.

Anyway, there's my rant.
I'm not sure this is an either or proposition. I haven't seen many message queue protocols with tools for identity, user authentication, federation, etc. I'm also pretty sure that xmpp doesn't even begin to replace message queuing on the backend, but when you look at what folks like EngineYard are doing with it (basically distributing messages), it seems like the value for them was more along the lines of 1) easy ui integration, 2) well understood problems and tools by developers, 3) well understood servers by admins.

More on the proposal of mixing the two, the rabbitMQ folks have done some interesting work integrating with xmpp. (See their xmpp transport (http://www.lshift.net/blog/2008/07/01/rabbitmq-xmpp-gateway-...), and rabbiter (http://github.com/tonyg/rabbiter/tree/master).

So there we have an interesting mixture of the two technologies, you get the insanely fast message routing and throughput of RabbitMQ while leveraging the tools that xmpp brings with it (users, federation, etc.)
Actually probabilistic approach to it is not that bad: google translate works fine without knowing the rules, just words and their usage statistics is enough to have a rough translation.
Haha, epic fail!
Looks exactly like qwili. Are you guys going to create a new search engine for each vertical and name them all something like qosyf? ;-)
queue-hogger? Is the name one of those random-yet-still-pronounceable-names-with-an-available-.com-address?
It is pretty common for a RESTful protocol to end up with batch-fetching and batch-updating operations. Once you add those operations, you've already violated the "uniform interface" constraint and removed all the benefits (primarily caching, authentication, authorization, and parallelism) that derive from the uniform interface constraint. Once you have batch-fetch and batch-update, those two operations can generally do everything that you usually did via individual PUT/POST/DELETE operations. So, why do you need the separate PUT/POST/DELETE operations at all? It is just more surface area for you to maintain.

Now, maybe you want to combine your batch-update and batch-fetch operations into a single "batch-update-and-fetch" POST operation. Well, that is exactly what WS-* does.

On the flip side, sometimes instead of batching you want to fetch or update only parts of individual resources via some extension to partial GET requests and or a PATCH method. There is currently no uniform interface for those so, just like in the case of batching, you lose all the uniform-interface benefits.

Now, let's say you want to combine your partial-resource operations with batch operations over multiple resources to reduce the number of requests you receive and/or the reduce the aggregate size of requests, so you add the ability to do patching and partial-fetches to your batch-update-and-fetch mechanism.

Now take a step back. Doesn't your batch-update-and-fetch-with-patch-and-partial-fetch look a lot like SOAP with WS-ResourceTransfer? It will probably look a lot like SOAP; not even the newish SOAP 1.2 that actually is somewhat HTTP cache friendly, but old school RPC-only SOAP + WS-ResourceTransfer.

Look at Google's GData and OpenSocial's RESTful API for examples.

And, that is totally ignoring anything to do with transactions.
My favorite line:
"That should be a 2 minute job finding something someone else already wrote on CPAN and another 2 minutes writing a single line of Perl nobody else will have to read again (because they can’t)."
Well... they DID fix it after 35 minutes. After I insisted that it REALLY didn't work...
Do you have a comfortable chair and an umbrella drink?
by the "are the same", i'm trying to determine if the articles would basically be talking about the same/similar topic...

this of course would/might take into account similar phrases/words, possibly similar titles, similar timeframe of creation, possible a priori knowledge about the author (past works), etc...

thanks
The Evolution of Forth (1993)
Q: What's the difference between reading an angry blogger at work and listening to a loud mouth drunk in a bar?

A: They're both irritating, but in a bar, you can be drunk too, so it seems less irritating.
This is dumb, and sadly, proof that YC is slowly turning into Fark.

Also: please delete ComicSans.ttf at your earliest convenience, and say 5 Hail Mary's to the typography gods.
I think the idea as currently implemented would have low usage. Not that its not technically incredible, but I would put it into the category of a hobby site rather than a business. Its a fun thing to do, but people have many, many ways of finding different communities, and actually, its kind of fun to search through the different ones until you find something that fits you back. Are you a TechCrunch person, a YC person, a DIGG person? All of them? Its kind of an emotional thing to find a "community." In order to go from hobby site to business you'd need to get people to come back repeatedly, and searching for a new community just isn't something a person does often. The numbers for a business just aren't there.

However, with any problems, there are always ideas for solutions. For example, if you really did want to turn this into a business, you'd have to solve the problems above. Find people who would search for related communities often, and who want to do it quickly and with good results.

I think one idea would be to focus on your notion of promoting something. The people who do this for a job are PR or media placement people. They might need this sort of thing. When they have a client that wants to get the word out, or wants to advertise to their audience, one important consideration for a P.R. or media placement person usually is" "well, where can we find their audience?" A company might tell them, "well, this is where we usually go to tell people what our new product is." And a P.R. person could use your site and say "have you tried X, Y, or Z too?"

So thats just an idea. Obviously, tuning the site to P.R. people and seeing if it makes sense is a lot of work, but thats really what separates a business from a hobby. This is exactly where you run into the classic hacker's dilemma (ok, its not classic, but it sounded like a nice phrase): turning your mad coding skills into something that people actually want. It can be a coding marvel, but until people actually want it, its not a business.

It sounds like you have the skills down, you just need an idea. Apparently, around here they're a dime a dozen, so if you're here to build a business, your execution skills will come in handy.
Fully Headless Javascript Spec library
BDD library for headless javascript specs, using John Resig's DOM layer + plus some tweaks and add-ons.
Nah, still 8 games under .500.

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/standings

For 16 years running, now. Sigh.
yeah, i'm not sure what the hell he's complaining about. i use mutt with maildir and imap folders, even nested imap folders.

my mutt is compiled with the 3rd party sidebar patch and i have a view just like gui mail programs with a list of all my imap folders showing me which have new mail and how many.
OK, I want to mention one more thing.

Take any WS-<star> specification, and you can probably find one or more ad-hoc proposals for adding similar features for RESTful protocols. For example, AtomPub is adding a mechanism that is almost exactly like SOAP-with-attachments, but more limited. The various HTTP message signing mechanisms like those found in Amazon's web services or the one in OAuth (and OpenID? I forget if there is a different one for that) are analogous to the various WS-Security stuff. As another example, I've seen a couple RESTful protocols that tried to define something like a simpler WS-Policy.

I don't think that the WS-<star> stuff is that great either; a lot of it is really complex. But, WS-<star> stuff is all decomposed in ways that make it relatively simple to combine just the parts you need together. SOAP 1.2 isn't complicated at all. WS-Policy and WS-Security and other stuff is more complicated than it needs to be, but it isn't so complicated that it needs to be totally redone anew. And, a lot of it can be (and is) subsetted pretty easily.
Stuff like this belongs on Reddit :-/
Oh man, my girlfriend is going to love this!

I'm going to love it too, because it means less having to help her find this kind of stuff.

That was my first impression anyway. I tried searching for "bedrame" and got 6 results. Then I tried "cb2 bedframe" and got the same number of results, so it actually doesn't seem all that helpful to me, unforunately :(
Wouldn't you want to read feeds in your browser, where you can follow the links without switching windows?
I always worked backwards, knowing it ended in .us I was always able to say "del, dot icio dot us".
Thanks for the well thought out reply. I'll post the link to Sphinn.com (a Digg-like site for PR/Marketing folks) and get their take.

Part of my goal getting involved here is to find potential partners. Has anyone used HN to do that?
Government and ISPs going after pirates
I really don't understand why people consider it a bad thing that Mac users typically become ardent supporters of the platform. Isn't it a good sign for the product if it draws such strong support?
XMPP pierces NAT for one reason. This means you can have XMPP clients behind many more firewalls then you can with amqp.

Also xmpp libraries are available in almost every language and platform and traditional MQ's do not have presence or federation(ie horizontal scalability).

It's not about using XMPP as a message queue per say. It's about using xmpp as a p2p messaging system for machine to machine communication as well as integration with chat.
Angry rants can be hilarious but he's veering into net kook territory with reviews of console based feed readers. I'm anxiously awaiting the next article where he gives us his Ham radio call sign, rips the authors of various Amiga emulators a new asshole, and then reveals his latest project - an album of bird calls he performed on the tenor recorder.
Monster buys job search engine Trovix for $72.5 million
Worker, Interrupted: The Cost of Task Switching
I haven't been "waiting" for the new design, so it not having any major changes doesn't bother me. It's a nice, fresh design and I like it - I'm glad they haven't done anything drastic.
These posts on email are fascinating.

I see 2 major divergences in email usage (or 3, actually).

1) a lot of people see email for personal use - as a TODO list, as a collection of your own information, etc. I think this constituent is made of of mostly males < 30 years of age.

2) a lot of people use email for conversation; ie, leaving messages to people where they know they will see it. Facebook is gaining ground on email because people feel more at ease gossiping through Facebook (which they associate with social activities) than email (dull, boring, practical). This constituent is probably the younger generation (< 22), and females.

3) the rest, which uses email casually or for business reasons. Email is just an open channel to talk or conduct business. The older generation uses it like this.

Email is difficult because people use it in so many ways that one interface for all the different uses of it fails to address specific needs. I think email needs to be sorted into categories that have their own user-interfaces that are optimal for that type of email (ie, email that is back and forth communication should look more like IM, an email that stores information should have the information distilled and be easily searchable, etc)
Severity: Blocker

(Joel would be so proud.)
Convert Blogs to books!

all those baby blogs are crying out for it!
Build Your Own Social Knowledge Network
use rss support in gnus for emacs. tada it can read email too. so he can get rid of mutt. not sure how much more minimal you can get than rss-as-news-articles

and what is with this trend of people buying core2duo boxes to run dvtm? top won't bother reporting idle of greater precision than 99.9 %

anywho, it seems emacs can give him his console orgasm while dropping a dynamic runtime that ties it together. news, email, irc, im (via bitlbee), web, and of course editing text now and then
It seems a bit odd to me that he would go on about the functionality of feed readers but he wasn't willing to try google reader based on a completely different merit?
New Recommendation System = 40 Percent More Diggs
Come on you retards. Fucking mother fuck...

You know, I think these guys have grown up watching people like George Carlin and come to think that throwing around petty insults and profanities randomly is somehow funny in itself. There's an art to it, you guys. Carlin knew what he was doing. You don't.
Oh happy day: the new Delicious is here
The article mentions saving continuations on the client without really mentioning how this would be accomplished. As far as I know it's not possible to import/export continuations as text so you'd basically have to hack something up instead.
YouTube Has Speech-to-Text Functionality
What is served in Indian restaurants (especially in the US) is far removed from and has way too much oil / cream than what is the norm in Indian homes.
A little bit of both depending on how you read it. If you do not pronounce the "i" it definitely says rear end.