skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Myself and a colleague entered this competition. We came 9th.
We were doing this for fun, and aren't experts in the domain, but I think our score was within 'diminishing returns' of the better teams.

There are a couple of things to realize about this challenge:

I wouldn't conceptualise the challenge as trying to find features of good essays. It is more about trying to find features that are predictive of the essay being good.

This is a subtle but important distinction. One example is that the length of essay was hugely predictive of the score the essay would get - longer meant better.

Is a longer essay really a better one? No. But, at the level the students were at, it just so happened that the students who were able to write better, also were able to write longer essays.

While you get good accuracy using techniques like this, its debatable how useful or robust this general approach is - because you aren't really measuring the quality of the essay, so much as you are trying to find features that just happen to be predictive of the quality.
Certainly, it would seem fairly easy for future students to game, if such a system was deployed.

This isn't a general attack on machine learning competitions - but I wonder, if for situations that are in some sense adversarial like this (in that future students would have an incentive to game the system), whether some sort of iterated challenge would be better? After a couple of rounds of grading and attempting to game the grading, we'd probably have a more accurate assessment of how a system would work in practice.

There is another important feature of this essay grading challenge, that should be taken into consideration. There were 8 sets of essays, each on a different topic. So, for example, essay set 4 might have had the topic 'Write an essay on what you feel about technology in schools'. To improve accuracy, competitors could (and I would guess most of the better teams did) build separate models for each individual essay-set/topic. This then increased the accuracy of, say, a bag of words approach - if an essay-set 1 essay mentioned the word 'Internet' then maybe that was predictive of a good essay-set-1 essay, even though the inclusion of 'Internet' would not be predictive of essay quality, across all student essays.

Its important to remember this when thinking about the success of the algorithms. The essay grading algorithms were not necessarily general purpose, and could be fitted to each individual essay topic.

Which is fine, as long as we realize it. The fact that it was so easy to surpass inter annotator agreement (how predictive one of the human graders scoring was of the other human graders scoring) was interesting. Its just important to realize the limits of the machine learning contest setup.

I would guess that accuracy would down on essays of older, more advanced students, or in an adversarial situation where there was an incentive to game the system.
BSON is really only used by MongoDB.
The OP asked why Java isn't used for the web. One of the more popular Java web frameworks heavily relies on XML. It has nothing to do with Java, but it has everything to do with what the OP asked about.
"11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you'll never share it with anyone."

This is the theme of my project. Especially the past 2 years. Except I do put it on paper, but actually building the thing always takes a second hand because I keep waiting for the "perfect" solution. I've finally gave up on that idea, because

1) i don't have the resources to build the perfect idea
2) it takes too long to wait for something to happen in your head

I've recently adopt a motto "hackFast". This means to know what you want to get done and just do it. And not just lazily open up your IDE and selective fix or create things. I mean, to open the IDE and just dominate the code.

There's a balance that I haven't achieved yet. There are times when you do need to think of the perfect solution, but until then get the prototype done. You're mind will wrap around the logic and it will eventually fix itself.

#11 and #17 goes hand and hand. It all go down to doing it.

..I've also been recently reading "Getting Things Done".
> this is out of my 20,000 leagues.

20 000 leagues is not a reference to depth ;)
Are there any add-ons out there which allow you to remove specific parameters from the URL before requesting it? This would be very useful for me, as I have a slight (probably OCD-related) problem with the parameters added while browsing YouTube. Before I start viewing a video, I always remove "&feature=related" and similar ones appearing, causing a reload. I would prefer not requesting with those parameters in the first place.
I always thought the advice against "writing your own" spoke of the algorithm itself, not a library around the algorithm.
Project Magenta : Linux running iOS
I built http://artistsnclients.com - It was an idea I had back in 2011 but couldn't find time to do. Now I built it, but it doesn't seem to be viable. I had a few people test it and the profit is at about $4 right now.

At least I improved my skills a lot thanks to it, especially in regards to financial processing.
We've silently launched Photofable. It's a social site aimed at promoting global culture exchange through photography and descriptions. Can be used as a travel tool as well. The focus is for each photos description to be informative or educational about the place it was taken.

http://www.photofable.com/destinations.php
yes, but if you noticed I'm comparing Java to C in terms of program language speed. I'm comparing Java to Ruby in development speed NOT language speed, I thought this was obvious... sorry, If I wasn't clear enough above.
Frankly I'm surprised you need examples. A few companies I've worked with didn't create products, they literally created CMS based websites, and when home-time came they clocked off. I'd rather not link to them (unwanted attention). But you and I are both from London, if your view finishes with the people you meet at meetups, read about on blogs - then your seeing 2% of the actual space.

For these people its business as usual, they would I guess as you and I might say, be running on business 1.0. They haven't heard of Github, probably haven't heard of Ycombinator/HN either, or Techcrunch. And thats how they like it.
If You Fusteriated with The GOP | Socyberty
Actually, it needs pure functions. Lambdas are one way to add them with the benefit of being buzzword-compliant.
"Also there are three definitions on that page... Under the last definition bitcoin would be easily considered fiat."

Then I regret citing it, it is wrong. That third definition actually misrepresents its source (Mankiw's Principles of Economics) -- what Mankiw actually says is:

"fiat money: money without intrinsic value that is used as money because of government decree" (emphasis mine)

"Money without intrinsic value is called fiat money. A fiat is simply an order or decree, and fiat money is established as money by government degree..."

http://books.google.com/books?id=3ojsWuqmorEC&pg=PA644&#...

"It isn't mandated by law the value of any other law what the value of any fiat currency is."

I meant that fiat money only has value (as opposed to... no value) because it is mandated by law -- you are required to accept it as payment of debt, to pay taxes using it, etc. Sure, what the value is in real terms is a market decision.
This has actually been covered before last year:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2571729

One interesting comment:

Yup. We tested messagepack a while back in our environment. Speed difference was 2% versus gzipped JSON. Not enough to invest time in changing a working system and losing human readability.

Also looks like MsgPack has very poor serialize/deserialize speeds on the JS end:

https://gist.github.com/1101623
Also the possibility to bookmark and to send a link to somebody else.

Also after all, you want to GET the search result, not POST anything.
I started Rankique - http://www.rankique.com/ - basically a price tracking app.

Made about ~20$ so far, so it's "profitable", but you get the point..
Actually, I was talking about rent control and, yes, I know the difference between rent control and rent stabilization. I don't have a huge problem with the latter; it's a much better system. If RS were made uniform across the city, I wouldn't consider that such a bad thing.

Only about 2% of apartments are rent controlled, but when the vacancy rate in Manhattan is regularly below 1%, that makes a huge difference.

There's a fallacious argument people make that, if only 2% of people have RC apartments, they're only responsible for a +2% markup on New York rents. That implicitly assumes the demand elasticity for housing is exactly 1. Not so. This is a bad assumption. Consider the oil crisis of 1973, which established that a 5% drop in oil supply can cause prices to go up 5x or worse. The same happens with housing in urban areas: small discrepancies in availability can have huge effects on price.

Rent stabilization is a lot better and fairer because normal people actually have a chance of getting it, and because it's a more reasonable system. It would be even better if whatever schema were applied to New York were applied uniformly, but RS is a much better and fairer system than RC.

I maintain the position that RC does an extreme amount of damage. If the demand-elasticity for New York housing were 1, it wouldn't, but it's much higher.

Also, I have no problem calling rich people who exploit a system that was designed to help working-class people, at the expense of everyone else who has to pay these insanely high rents, "cockroaches", especially given that they usually break the law in doing so. My problem isn't with legitimate RC beneficiaries who couldn't afford to live in New York otherwise, and who probably comprise a small fraction of 2012 RC-holders, but with well-connected marketing directors making $200,000 per year and alimony socialites who pay $350/month for prime apartments while the rest of the city gets shafted.

(For the record, New York landlords, as a class, would probably lose if RC were abolished, because it's quite likely that the free-market demand elasticity of housing is much greater than 1. Individual landlords who had RC tenants would gain, but landlords with no RC tenants would be getting less rental income, and the overall effect on landlords as a class would be reduced income because the artificially high rents paid by non-RC tenants would plummet.)
GNU Emacs 24.1 released
Easier to stock 3 blade types and 3 handles than 500 diff ink types. That only obstacle I see. Also people don't buy ink so regularly I have no idea what intervals I buy ink at
I built an AWS image for launching a bunch of machines and using them as a Blender Render farm. It'd need work to make it secure enough for public use, and I have too many other things on to get around to that. It does what I need though, and I like the feeling of power of clicking a button and knowing so many large computers start calculating for me :)
I've built http://AppCod.es - a tool for App Store SEO. It was launched around february 2012, in march we got covered by Techcrunch (instant break even) and our sales were increasing month by month since then.
Eh no it's not false. You are missing the point.

He built it himself with help. He didn't just pay someone to do it. Just like he is now building (and have launched) his own rockets.

How do i know? Because he build it where I used to live and I know them.
I wrote a proposal for Tiger Scheme[1] to radically alter the structure of the scheme and change the general direction, in effect a reboot of the scheme. If it's accepted, it'll be a shedload of work with no financial reward and a massive time sink, but it has the potential to really change information security in the UK and help with the skills shortage in industry so it's worthwhile.

[1] - http://www.tigerscheme.org/
Mobile Wallet Products And Services Heating Up The Mobile Communication Market
We have now come full circle in terms of how data is marshaled between client and server.

I've now seen it go from XDR (the marshaling used by ONC-RPC) to XML to JSON and now to a binary form of JSON, which is basically like XDR.
nice! thats something I might have to check out
The Complex, the Complicated and what it means for NASA | fragile
My first game for iphone at 0.99$
Reading through the specs, it seems that it's designed with that in mind - the center of mass is much lower than the center of buoyancy.
I seriously recommend that you re-look your stack. Java is simply the most performant (RAM and CPU) stack vs Rails in a pure apples-to-apples comparison.

The two stacks you have compared are apples to watermelons - here are a couple of questions:

1. Why both Tomcat and Jboss ? Choose one or the other. In fact for the best performance you can run your application on Jetty.

2. Mysql vs Oracle ? you need to compare equally. I hope you do realize that JDBC/JNDI are perfectly compatible with Mysql - more so, since they are the same business entity.

3. Lighttpd vs Apache is again an unfair comparison. You can perfectly run Lighttpd in front of Tomcat.

I seriously suggest you re-evaluate Java if you are purely looking for performance. Developer productivity is a whole different story altogether.
Started writing a blog to document our startup experiences but no one visits it. Those that visit don't stay. Tried promotion through social media without success. Everyone said it will be easy to interact with those with similar interests. While not the aim to make a profit, currently no chance of making any traction, let alone profit from the blog.

http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/
Try Haxe
The first people using your product are an amazing breed
Does anyone knows if and how I can install zsh on windows with git bash?
I grew up reading assembly code listings. Being able to read code is a really really important skill IMHO. Something like Java is very very easy to read. It's mainly keyword based, rather than special character based. I'd much rather read a 1,000 line Java program, than a 100 line <concise language> program.

The other point I'd make is that Java is probably about as verbose as english is. But we all manage, using English. We don't moan on and on that talking, writing, reading is so inefficient and we should all switch to something better. English also has odd grammar and spelling rules which are inconsistent and plain stupid sometimes. Yet, English works pretty well for what we use it for. Communicating.
The idea that stabilization is "having some effect on keeping rents low(er)" seems questionable. There are effects that push in the other direction too. For instance, the fact that "stabilization" exists at all makes being a landlord less attractive. If people could bargain freely to any mutually-agreeable rent terms, developing new housing would be less risky so more apartments would tend to get developed, which would drive down the average rent. Stabilization can hold down prices in a few apartments, but tends to do so at the expense of higher prices (and lower-quality apartments) everywhere else.
How about the same test with a '-client' switch...
Note that Google counts activations, not devices, so if those friends really don't have a Google account (more plausible than I'd thought - I was recently surprised how easy it is to skip that step of the setup wizard these days, even on stock Android. That's a change from the G1 days, IIRC), they wouldn't be counted.

On the other side, I suppose you could ask how many people use iPod Touches as pure music/video players, though the music player market is getting less important with time, unlike feature phone conversions.
I started building http://www.splatsearch.com
A comparison engine with big plans to compare everything in the world.
One online marketer and 2 developers building it.
Currently the live version is a very different snapshop from the dev version which we roll out soon and just has 14 million sample products.
We bootstrapped it and it probably just about profitable even though its barely live.
Great website, would be even better if it noticed I was from the UK, and then showed UK Amazon results :)
> That Java makes you repeat yourself is not controversial. That being averse to this means you dislike thought is a somewhat bizarre position to hold.

The English language makes you repeat yourself. I don't see it as a bottleneck. I've never considered <speed of typing> a bottleneck to programming. possibly when programming some assembly routines. But if you're typing too much, you're probably repeating yourself too much, which means you're doing something wrong.
What are examples of what you consider blogspam on forbes.com?
Write your own framework. It's actually not rocket science.
You can have a pretty good Java web server going in about 200 lines of code.

Just write a simple HTTP server in Java, and have it work as you want it to. Without XML...
demos :

Flash API to SWF or JS (nme/jeash):

http://try.haxe.org/#655c1

http://try.haxe.org/#E4001

Flash with custom shaders (hxsl):

http://try.haxe.org/#93bE1

Flash + away3d:

http://try.haxe.org/#9F075
I think that in less than one year we will have a Google+ bar...
They bought the bar and the team to integrate Google+ on every website.
Google Friendconnect bar + Meebo bar = Google+ bar.
Help me transform your hair care experience
Hey HN,

With motivation from keeping up with you all and graduating from MIT this year, I just recently started to pursue this idea I have had for a long time that came out of constant frustrations with my hair care experience from A to Z. Think Opentable for minority hair care services.

As an AA, it is hard to locate a barber that focuses on certain hair types and once you do find one, the headaches continue. You often have to wait multiple hours for a hair cut to realize you forgot cash and have to run to an ATM. So inefficient on both sides.

In a nutshell, I am in the process of building a web/mobile app that brings together barbers and their clients in an open platform that is a WIN-WIN for both sides.

On the barber side, the app allows:
1. schedule and client management
2. mobile payment (e.g., square card service)
3. promote services through instant pic uploads to myBarber website.

On the customer side:
1. Find and locate barbers, especially those often hard to find such as freelance, minority-serving, etc.
2. Book and pay via cc/debit card
3. Ability to rate and see what barbers/beauticians your friends use (social media connect).

Specifically, I would like to get your feedback on:

1. What do you think of the idea?
2. Is focusing on a niche market limiting myself? (i.e., barbers, AA community, beauticians)
3. Any recommendations on scaling? monetizing? I was thinking charging barbers to use the app.

The mock-up of the site is shown here:

https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/#xrb258i

Check out and pre-test my survey here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CQPZMZJ
... and the editor has autocompletion on dot :)
Nah, there are always favourites and 90% of the industry is following them. If you google 100 MVC web frameworks for Java, that doesn't mean anything but that the language is popular.

There are only a couple of frameworks that are in real use. Some large and 'lucky' companies are glued to IBM/Oracle so are forced to use proprietary solutions without this luxury of googling for something new.
The main differences are:

1. MessagePack includes less data types. Several of the BSON-only data types are specific to MongoDB, but others - such as separate types for binary data and UTF-8 text - are IMO quite useful.

2. MessagePack includes several optimizations in the "type byte" to efficiently represent small values.

A while back I designed my own serialization format that combined features from both, but I never finished an implementation.
I'm from Romania and I have not experienced what you describe. The Eastern Orthodox priests I have interacted with didn't care about evolution from a theological standpoint and didn't consider the relationship between science and religion relevant in any theological manner.
Thanks. I'll try to remove the upfront signup process. I will also try to integrate Twitter/FB connect.

There is a LinkedIn import, but it is one of the PRO features. More about that here - http://www.resumonk.com/pro
It is obvious what the author means by "unimportant" and they're very important things. Pure clickbait. It's like me writing an article, "work on the worst ideas you have". Care to click to find out what I mean by "worst"? Of course you do.
مشاهدة مباراة اسبانيا وايطاليا
مشاهدة مباراة اسبانيا وايطاليا بث مباشر اليوم 10-6-2012 في كاسس الامم الاوروبية -Watch Spain and Italy live today 06/10/2012 as grounds in the Euro http://mushahda.com/113.html
That's cool! Very fast, interactive and simple! Space Invader is a great classic of video games, and it's a good app to start to developing ios apps!

Good luck
10 Timeframes: Time and how we experience it
With the same argument you would easily arrive to the conclusion that the best way to learn grammar is a spell checker.

Actually it depends, if those beginners are supposed to become programmers then you're wrong, if they just want to write one piece of software once in their life and never do it again then maybe you're right.
Quality isn't just about search results. I recently wanted to try Bing for a week or so because people keep claiming it has gotten better, but I ran into a dealbreaker: no working search add-on for Firefox Mobile (even though Microsoft was trying to get the Firefox default last year). Plus the Bing search app/widget was disappointing: it kept trying to keep me in the app instead of integrating with the rest of my phone

In the bigger picture, Bing still has a long way to go.
What is work?
Cool; I’d have put a dash in there thought-threads.org, kind of hard to read like this
If I stopped working tomorrow, it would be months before anyone even noticed. Probably much longer before they got around to stopping my pay. This doesn't help with motivation at all.

This doesn't help with motivation. You folks who are living on the edge of starvation have it easy!
very nice. laughed my ass off.
Twitter hash tags and UTF8
Interesting.
As far as Twitter is concerned, hashtag #ą is the same as #a
And #ö is the same as #oe
But #ć is not #c
And #ź is not #z
Word of warning, the node.js implementation has many bugs and pull requests are ignored. Find someone's fixed fork to point to.
Saying that reducing 50% of a 30 bytes message reduces 50% of the client-server exchange traffic is misleading (and wrong).

The average HTTP header is around 700 bytes plus 40 bytes of TCP/IP header. Since its gains diminishes with more data (MsgPack seems to focus on the structure of the message), I imagine the real gain will be between 1-2% of traffic.

The extra complexity is simply not worthy.
I built http://ziposit.com, for super-simple website hosting. I was going to add ads when I started getting users, but users never came. Still fun.
We've launched http://heattest.com/ two months ago. It's an app for heatmap analytics, which was a pretty hardcore to develop. We've spent a lot of time to make the algorithm really good and reliable, but so far we have like 3 sign ups in total, all of them for free trials. The market looked really promising at first.
Here's one (but by no means the only) example: http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times-art...

From what I've seen, articles on forbes.com are mostly low-quality - often blogspam or tabloid-style journalism. They seem to have a good reputation in society which isn't represented by their articles.

I would be a happier living in a filter bubble with "forbes.com" removed from my life.
You'll get far better gains by removing HTTP headers and other fun things.
How did the Terminal Services Licensing PKI effect you?