skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Remind" might solve the date side of it, but you'll still need to parse it out. I've thought about a similar thing before and the approach I was looking to take was using something like: http://www.nltk.org/ to create grammar trees (read up on how grammars/parsers work at least on Wikipedia) for an acceptable subset of English.

You might notice things like a time is always after "at", a date "on" and a relative date "in". Ideas for rules:

Event -> Title When
Title -> <anything>
When -> TimeSpecifier When
TimeSpecifier -> "at" Time
TimeSpecifier -> "in" RelativeTime
TimeSpecifier -> "on" Date
...

Then you use semantics stuff to get the parser to return some expression that you can use, say a Python call: event(title=<title>, at=<time>, on=<date>).

Just some things to think about and if you don't know grammars, then read up until you understand the example I gave at least. I just wrote it off the top of my head too, so I'm sure someone might find a mistake with it :-)

p.s. If you're as weird as me, you might even consider Prolog for parsing ;-)
Summary here: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/1026580...

Description: In this wide-ranging interview conducted by Edward Feigenbaum, Donald Knuth talks about the progression of his life and career. Topics include his family background and early interest in music, physics and mathematics, his first exposure to programming, finding a mentor, and writing a doctoral thesis. He describes how ?The Art of Computer Programming? became ?the story of my life?, and why it was put on hold for the TeX and METAFONT projects. He also talks about personal work habits, programming style, analysis of algorithms, the influence of religion in his life, and his advice to the next generation of scientists.

One quote:
"I would say that’s my major disappointment with my teaching career, [that] I was not able to get across to any of my students this love for that kind of scholarship -- reading source material. I was a complete failure at passing this on to the people that I worked with the most closely. I don’t know what I should have done."

Man I wish I had time to read this whole thing!
Apple In Ear headphones arrive - not compatible with iPhone. Why?
Very true. But it's not just about government banditry, it's also about cultural acceptance of corruption.

In a conversation with my Iranian ex girlfriend and her mom, it was revealed that her cousin is relatively wealthy due to being a dirty cop. They just talked about it like it was no big deal, completely expected. Several Africans I've known have similarly remarked "I got my drivers license without a bribe!"

In my American family, there are no dirty cops by definition; doing crap like that will get you disowned.

Changing the government won't change the cultural attitudes, unfortunately.
Sounds like a new take on the million dollar homepage to me.
We don't know evolution is true

I think scientists are still waiting on the results of the 100m year experiment where a fish pen turns into a group of intelligent humans.

Honestly, I'm sure I'll get flak for this, but I can't believe people accept Evolution as if it's some inherent and proven physical law as gravity. On the macro-evolutionary level, there's so much bullshitting/extrapolation going on (especially in the arena of speciation) that there's so many questions and holes left unanswered.

Despite the fact that we only ever observe variation within a given type, we're supposed to have faith in the scientists that (given enough time) we'll get whole new kingdoms of life. As far as I'm concerned, those experiments prove one thing: variation exists within a given type. Period.
You're going up the wrong tree entirely. What you're trying to do is one of the oldest ideas in computing, and it does not work. They keep trying it, and it keeps failing. Not technically, but from a user point of view. Typing stuff out the way you want people to is not easy or convenient, and if there is even the hint of uncertainty, most people will prefer not to do it. Considering that you do not have a background in this, you will lots of unmatched items, and 2/10 fails will consitute too much uncertainty for your users.

I have two ideas for alternatives that may or may not work, but at least have not been tried as often:

1. Autocomplete. When the user is typing, autocomplete his message, such that there is always 100% certainty that the command will be executed properly. Also, simplify the syntax, so I write 'remind' : 'December ...' : 'Dentist'. Your syntax has to be consistent, so once learned, there is no relearning. I don't want to have to figure out what the system wants me to type in as a command.

2. Visual. Use blocks and lines to create the actions. Humans have a very good sense of geometry and relationships between physical objects. Leverage that to make your app. Models of physical things are one of the few things we can actually say is inherently intuitive for human beings.
How to Stay Alive in a Terrorized Hotel
The cheap and cheerful way to cheat this problem is to use a restricted grammar that allows synonyms. And one of the many libraries that wrap strptime for date parsing.

In other words; schedule, remind, tell, add; might all represent the same operation.

If you go this route, do write a BNF grammar, do test with a reasonably large corpus of 'live' requests.

here is a link that should get you started.
http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/ANTLR3/Quick+Starter+on+Pa...
the phone seems very good in general, but Android is too much of a draw for me to get this even if it has superior hardware.
The Future of SQL in a SaaS world: Announcing Zoho CloudSQL
Quote from 9to5mac:
"Apple has always recommended anti-virus software - especially to enterprise customers. They do it because they want Apple users to be safe and for Virus makers to know that their user base is protected.
Do a quick search on Apple Docs and you'll find a number of them. Here's one from 2002 (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=50569). Here's one from earlier this year (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1147). There are plenty more. This isn't at all new."

http://9to5mac.com/crazy-displayport-virus
Ballad of the Bubble
37signals to publish a new book
I love using that as an excuse when I get overly pedantic about how ideas or other daily-life things can go wrong. "After all these years of debugging code (or mentally debugging code paths), I'm just debugging life!"
PHP - CodeIgniter
That's what the WaPo assumed as well, but they were wrong:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1147
Privacy is hard
Wow... apparently Seth Godin is my uncle wearing a clever disguise.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/no-one-knows-wh.html
Despite all my obvious love for NLP and grammars, I would actually like to echo markessien's point here.

I agree that NLP might not be the best approach here, especially if you're having to learn all of it from scratch (I'm no expert but I learnt enough basics so that I could look into any aspect in more depth when it comes to it).

My first suggestion would be to take a step back and think about what the system is and what is the easiest, fastest and most intuitive way to input dates. Brainstorm this and you will come up with good ideas like those above.

I like the autocomplete idea and also there's no reason not to use some syntax like "Dentist @ 2pm", i.e. using @ to separate title from date. It's sufficient to indicate to the machine which is text and which is date info, but close enough to natural speech as well (also the @ is a very recognisable character now).

One thing to note is that Google Calendar accepts expressions such as "Dentist at 2pm"; perhaps you can try that and see how you like how that works?
This would be extremely useful. PG, please add it.
Most people I've met that accept evolution (well, the ones that accept evolution and also think about what they accept) accept it as requiring less bullshitting than other proposals and are also willing to reject it if something better comes along. I haven't met any reasoned person in a while that accepts evolution and isn't okay with the fact that it might not be right or at least finished yet.
I agree. I think the review posts are really useful - both for the people who created, and those reviewing.

It would be a shame if any are getting passed by, and would be useful to see the reviews on their own.
i think gravity 'waves' travel at the speed of light
You are absolutely right. I frequently find my self doing a Google search for it.
Apple tells Mac users, ignore OpenSource revolution.

Stay with us, we are closed environment just like M$FT, we just do it with a smile ;-)
Similarly, I had the idea a while ago to make a separate page for submissions that take over 1000 seconds (16.6 min) to appreciate. It sucks when someone submits a documentary and by the time the first few people have finished watching it and are ready to vote it up it's already off the front page. Same goes for the 10+ page articles in the NYT Mag on Sunday, video lectures, short stories, book talks, podcasts, etc.
Yep, main reason I come here. Please give me an RSS feed for this alone.
Startup Reality: Survive or Die Quickly
You are making a very bad assumption here. You are assuming that non-acceptance of dirty cops is something inherent to American culture. Actually, if America were plunged into a huge depression, and most Americans were suddenly thrust into poverty, banks folded and so on, this 'culture' would change in less than a year.

Are you going to disown the guy who is doing dirty work but keeping you alive?

Corruption is not a culture, the potential for corruption is everywhere, it's in all humans. When it appears to be socially wrong, or when there is strict enforcement, then people will not be corrupt, but as soon as this changes, it comes back.

It seems almost as if corruption is the default behavior, and it has to be actively forced away, and not the other way around.
Auto complete would be a good option, however I want people to be able to send the commands in emails (with the option on the web page too).

Having started scanning about NLP, I can tell its a big area, and I don't think I want to invest lots of time into this. Perhaps a cutdown syntax is the way to go. For my small set of commands, all I have now are TODOs, Followups and Reminders. So a few ways of entering each of them and some thinking about dates should get me something usable.

That said, I do have concerns about the ambiguity of what can be entered, and what to do with failed commands etc.

Dates really are the pain point for entering things - date pickers are generally annoying, and a series of drop downs are a pain too and people write dates in so many different ways!
...
"this is the best explanation for the data" is the most you can ever say about anything at any time. ever.
This might be helpful:

http://caldav.calconnect.org/implementations/clients.html
How about just adding tagging to HN and then RSS feeds by tag?
Hi gettalong

That looks really interesting - I do a lot of web site work for clients, in Rails, PHP and simple static HTML sites.

I've found that sometimes you want to mock up simple sites without using a framework or a CMS system like Drupal, but want to keep your code DRY.

Also some small companies often won't want to change their data frequently and would rather pay someone to do it for them and I think this is the best tool for the job.

Thanks for you comment I'll have a play with webgen it looks like an interesting project.

Many thanks
Ben Emson...
yup! that would be useful. This way I can track topics by tags. Thought of this a couple of days back and also that someone would have already made such a feature request.
How to Keep B2B Customers in a Downturn
How to Form an Innovation Strategy
Fair enough, but print newspapers have a much longer publishing cycle (which is only getting longer).
Mostly agree with you. A corrupt government and a deaf attitude of people towards a broken system is kind of a cycle. In many of the countries including India where I live it has gone very far on the negative side that it almost seems impossible to break the loop.

>> Changing the government won't change the cultural attitudes, unfortunately.

But there got to be some way out.

I posted this today after going through a terrible experience. I told many of my friends that I give up, and I don't want to waste my life in this corrupted, broken system.

I can pledge that I am fair, loyal, committed and hard working. So is everyone in my family and most folks I move around with. We have worked ourselves up economically without compromising on values. That is our end of it, but at times there is no survival unless you bribe the system. They CAN make life hell for you.

So the system changes the culture gradually and that in turns reinforces the broken system to be more broken.

I am sitting here today with lost hopes of any change. This needs a revolution of sort, strongly opinionated citizens and a mass mobilization on the issues. I don't even know what I can initiate as an individual. I won't even be heard.
Google cannibalizing their assets? Isn’t it a bit early for that?
I kept thinking they missed one interesting point when discussing why Biya might still be neglecting the roads after 20 years--the point at which it's supposed to become in his interest to rebuild them so he has more to steal. If the World Bank or other agency keeps giving them development money, they can take from that instead of building the roads, so the incentive is gone. But, if you remove the outside donations and the infrastructure is useless, you remove all incentive for them to stay. Thus, you get a chaotic power vacuum. If you were callous, you could think of this as a reboot, but with nasty humanitarian consequences. If you keep donating from the outside, then you are pretty much just funding the dictator.

Is that about right?
It sounds like you want to rewrite Sandy (http://www.iwantsandy.com/), which is good because they're closing down.

They show several examples of commands that Sandy accepts. That might help give you a little direction designing your system.
I bet it'll be a good candidate for Squeezed Books if "Getting Real" was anything to go by.
That's leadership. I hope they are very successful, as I suspect they will be.
The Cult of the Product
How about just using a fixed syntax:

-- email start

* Pick Milk

* Buy Fags

* Drop Children at Mary @ 16:00

---

Then use a python date parse to parse whatever comes after @. You don't need to split reminders or followups, because an @ symbol would automatically imply a reminder, innit?
Make donations conditional on a certain level of good government. More importantly, make the president's Swiss bank account conditional on the same.
This actually helps a lot.

There's a time when people read HN and a time when people use the bookmarklet to post(varies from person-to-person depending on the timezone). So people posting via the bookmarklet wouldn't have taken a look at the interesting threads. So when this happens, all the other people's interesting threads would be gone.

People in different time zones have a problem. Yes time-zones do matter.

I reside in a time-zone totally opposite to that of SF or USA. I've noticed that when I post threads in 'my' morning, it rarely gets response. And when I post threads in 'my' evening/night, then there's response. Threads posted(by everyone) during 'my' morning are often pushed down by others new threads. I've also noticed that these new threads are being responded to during 'my' night. So those which are responded to are those which are posted recently.

So the most interesting part - the review threads are missed sometimes. So its better to have a separate section for it.

P.S: I might sound vague but I couldn't explain better.
Online marketing company finds people spending money online.
I use the MoGo bluetooth mouse because it is easy to carry and works fairly well... I would not recommend it if you plan on spending a lot of time on it however.
Did you read the linked article?

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/12/apple_m...

While Apple may recommend anti-virus programs to enterprise customers, they still use the Mac's relative lack of viruses as a selling point in their ads, and an Apple employee told the column writer that anti-virus was unnecessary. Walt Mossberg says the same thing: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/garfinkel/17586/

There is a bit of a disconnect between the Mac's public image and these quietly posted technical articles.
Also remember that some ways are impossible to tell apart. 12/10/2008, for example, is 12th October for us in the UK, but 10th December for Americans. There's simply no way to guess at which it is without some context or the user saying which.

What that shows is that while NLP can make systems seem quite intelligent, it's really not a replacement for the user putting some thought into it too. Forms work nicely as they can force input into certain formats. I like NLP, so I always think systems could at least meet a human half way on this.

However, even if we were talking face to face, there's some social expectation you'll try to make some sense (i.e. speak in English). You wouldn't just speak Spanish to me if I hadn't indicated I could speak Spanish. AI-like systems are meant to be intelligent, not psychic -- a point often forgotten by some people.

A dialogue system would help uncertainties since it could ask for clarification (which, frankly, is all we humans do if something's not clear when talking to each other), but if you're talking over email, you really want to get it right the first time as it's not the fastest system.

Again, off the top of my head: I'd say you could make it clear that the subject of the email has to be one of "reminder", "followup" or "todo"... then do some aggressive normalisation on the subject lines that come in (grab a Porter Stemmer or even just take the first 3/4 letters maybe) then force to upper or lower and then check against a massive list of synonyms. Then you simply have to bounce with a help notice if someone really still managed to enter something stupid.

Examples:
Subject: Reminder -> REMINDER -> REM -> matches rule for "REM/EVE/HOL" (Reminder, event, holiday)
Subject: event -> EVENT -> EVE -> matches rule for "REM/EVE/HOL"
Subject: follow-up -> FOLLOW-UP -> FOL -> matches rule for "FOL/REV" (follow-up, review)

That sort of idea. It accounts for RaNDom CapITAlisation, uncertain hyphen-usage and plurals. Make those match rules long enough and you might get error rate pretty low indeed.

I know you've probably already gone over this, but does it really need to be email? Is that the best interface? Is it worth taking a step back (going outside the box, as they say) and working out the most efficient method?
Cable giant Ted Rogers dies at 75
The Extraordinary Rise And Fall Of Denmark’s IT Factory
So you are from Cameroon?

And you work with computers? Do you have a post highschool education?
The misery caused by anti-virus software often seems to outweigh any marginal benefit. It's not even like the software is more than 70-80% effective.

Even the Vista built-in AV software rendered it impossible to install Flight Simulator X. This is AV software from a major vendor. If it jacks up the install of their own software, then something is very wrong with the approach.

Personally, I believe in regular backups by imaging my HD every week or so, and being careful about what I run on my computer.
Theory: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. e.g. General relativity has a lot of mathematics backing it up.

Law: a scientific generalization based on empirical observations of physical behavior. e.g F = ma. We don't know why it's true, it just is some sort of an axiom.
Ask HN: Launched my free app, now what?
I just recently launched my free Twitter bookmarklet app called BigTweet http://bigtweet.com and got my first review http://bit.ly/TiPs

I'm interested in pursuing the freemium model and would like to begin working on some "pro" subscription based features for interfacing to Twitter. Should I let BigTweet grow on its own and work on the advanced features, or spend most of my time enhancing the free version and develop some viral components?

How much time do you spend on developing versus promoting?
Here's your view: http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:news.ycombinator+intitl...
Ask HN: Review my webapp
>> It seems almost as if corruption is the default behavior, and it has to be actively forced away, and not the other way around.

Great point. It is also true, as you noted, it is hard to do this in harder times, where people do become more self-centric and would not have time to bother about broader implications or society at large. That is the vicious cycle that has got set up in many poor economies.

edit: A short commercial http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=FAe_bZGqU1g To get this mobilization going is very hard.
Nokia 5210 Mic Microphone Ways
5210, 5210 mic problem, 5210 mic ways, 5210 microphone problem, 5210 microphone ways, mic ways, microphone ways, Nokia, nokia 5210
Since you seem to be an accomplished writer with a lot of ideas, perhaps you should write a parody of Apple done right by your estimation. With the well-connected folks who read this site, I bet it could be produced into a short online video. Who knows, maybe it could be the next Spirit of Christmas.
Your statement is a bit ignorant. You really think that the camerounian government is financed by the world bank? You really think that the world bank are just giving money to someone who is obviously using it all up? You think that the president of the country as well as the entire team of economists at the world bank have missed this great discovery you made?

The world bank is not a development fund, they lend money, they don't give it. And countries like Cameron have a GDP of 40 billion USD a year, external money is totally irrelevant to its survival. Most of these countries don't need external money for the government to stay in power, they just take it because it's free.
The 37 Signals guys are brilliant!

This is great marketing for their products, and they are getting paid to do it.