skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Spam Filters
While going through my gmail inbox today, I marked something as spam and was wondering : When I mark something as spam, and a great deal of other users also mark the mail as spam (because it obviously is), does it disappear from people's mailbox who haven't seen the mail, thus improving the spam filter effectiveness for more people.

Looking around, it seems like spam filters are trained using only certain trusted users. Does this functionality already exist?
DAILY RFID Unveiled A Low-Cost Library Tag For RFID Library System
To improve customer service and speed up the checkout process, more and more libraries are beginning to build a RFID Library System and manage inventory by inserting RFID chips on all of their books. DAILY RFID has developed a new HF smart label for tracking book inventory in RFID Library System, with price at under 0.32 USD. This RFID Library tag can be used for identification in book circulation. With a guaranteed more than 10-year data lifespan, this smart label is a ideal RFID library tag which offers long-term data integrity.
All thick clients should be Mozilla-based
"99.0% of Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets as well as a wide range of devices."

Seems pretty clear to me, they separate 'desktops' (which I can buy is close to 99%) from other devices.
Isn't it the startup model?

By investing in 300 small companies, you get better chances to reinvent the market and create better big ones.
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Approaching cloud standards with end-user focus only is full of fail
> LoseThos will never have full networking support with an Internet browser, etc.

Maybe I don't understand what the author is targetting, but even an embeded system without Internet and browser these days is useless.
You really believe that "Facebook doesn't consider 175 million users"?
Are disagreements honest?
well the main target group of flash is the likes of the target group that uses YouTube.

So defacto their numbers are good enough IMHO
Language comparison: Adobe's postscript and Xerox's interpress [1985]
Are you always that critical of your female compatriots?
I don't know why it's happening. But even though I hear a lot on how JIT can be faster than pre-compiled apps and how hight level languages (Java) can create more efficient code than low level languages (C) ---- I still am seeing C outperforming everything else in alioth http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/. Even in multi core tests C apps runs faster than Erlang. Therefore faster than C still is something we are waiting to see.
Ok, this maybe makes lisp faster than C but at what cost ?
We're currently using ActiveMQ with ActiveMessaging as the Rails bindings. One reason for this was that we wanted something which would be fairly language/platform neutral if in the future we decided that Ruby/Rails wasn't the right choice for certain bits of the app.

RabbitMQ is another option to consider in this area.
I agree..what will be useful is long thoughtful analysis, case studies around such points that expose nuances of decision making and evolution of ideas/business models and not copycat lists which assume there is some sort of formula in the start up success..
Actially, there are EDGE from Nemapli private carrier Mero Mobile in almost all medium-sized cities. There are no problem with internet access because of expansion of mobile carriers.
In some places, like in Darjeeling area you can use GPRS with Indian towers from Nepali hills =)

And what is interesting, almost all GSM towers in rural areas of Nepal and India have a security guard with it, or it built on top of private house, usually owned by some bank.
careful..in getting carried away by this advice though..unless your product targets large enough market you would not get opportunity to experiment/fail and succeed so yes start the inferno by targeting small niche but don't be esoteric unless you are going to get premium for being exclusive..
Rails running on vanilla Ruby does have particular scaling issues due to the limitations of the Ruby garbage collector. You hit a GC cycle after every 8MB of allocation, which typically takes around 150ms to run, so can dominate the runtime of your requests. We've had 80% of the runtime in GC, even when you include database time.

This isn't necessarily a killer, but it means there's sometimes more work than you might like in scaling. There are patches to tune the garbage collector, and JRuby etc. may help, but ultimately you need to be much more aware of memory allocation than you might think.
High switching cost / no competition. Yup, classic.
" it seems that the world is collapsing"

The world has been collapsing the past 2000 years.
More Than One Twitter Account?
> How many kids are taking class notes on their cell phones?

I've started taking lecture notes on my android phone. Its surprising how having an open phone and a decent keyboard makes you rethink the amount of computing power you carry around in your pocket.

I recently went to a seminar on pervasive computing where one of the speakers demonstrated that audience members could learn to type accurately on a chording keyboard without looking at the screen. I was going at 25-30wpm already by the end of the lecture. A cheap bluetooth version would make subtle notetaking really easy.
Microsoft doesn't matter much anymore, but F# will be integrated to Visual Studio 2010, bringing a very powerful functional language to all .net/mono coders. And I'm sure there are quite a lot of them. So the argument of lack of decent library or nice IDE will fall apart (and I heard it quite a lot) : we'll see how well F# fare on the .net scene.

I'm quite enthusiastic about it, since F# is actually a very nice functional language, with strong infered typing. It's basically OCaml running on .net/mono. I've rewritten C# code in F#, and the latter is definitely much more concise than the former... Strong typing is actually quite nice too. For instance a small neat effect : it prevents any kind of null pointer exception, null being a type in itself. Though sometimes strong-typing gets in the way and I wish it had duck-typing...

That said Microsoft doesn't seem to advocate the use of F# for GUI... They still recommend using C#, or the ugly thing that has Basic in its name for doing so.
Backup your Web Sites Database using MySQL Administrator.
Some days back I had posted an article about MySQL WorkBench Usage. So in this post I want to explain how to take backup your database using MySQL Administrator. It's a part of MySQL GUI Tools.
Believe it or not, but java can be written functionally: you have to use an interface (and a few classes) to implement a list and you can use objects as functions... but it's not usually something people get into.
Amazon's Wheel of Growth
Why not write/compile and publish Carnegie-style book about hackers and startups? =) Like 'How to stop reading websites and start doing things.'
The funny thing about this article, is that if you played EQ2 (or any mmo really) for any amount of time you'd know this kind of information instantly.

The researchers found that many players underestimate the amount of time they spend playing the games

Botting tradeskills is rampant in EQ2... the data could be significantly skewed.

And players aren’t just teenagers -- in fact, the average age of a player is substantially higher.

That's because most teenagers are playing WOW or some other similar game. It's no reflection on those players, but a significant portion of EQ2 players came from the original Everquest 10+ years ago...

But what most surprised Contractor was that even though players could play the game with anyone, anywhere, most people played with people in their general geographic area.

Try raiding with someone halfway around the world on a consistent basis. I did it for awhile during my first year of University (waking up 5am for raids) and it's not something I'd recommend for any length of time.

Its more or less about convenience to be able to find people to play/raid with.

All up - nothing new learnt here.
Ask HN: Review my newest site
Although I tend to think of HN of reviewing web apps and more sophisticated sites I have gotten really good feedback in the past.

URL: http://dealwaiter.com (link in comments)

This is a quick site I threw together last week to watch deal sites around the net. Would love to hear any feedback.

If it seems very simple... it is, and thats the goal :D

Thanks!
Clickable: http://dealwaiter.com
The idea behind FP is to minimize or eliminate implicit state change.

This has several advantages. The first is that it eliminates errors caused by unexpected state change. This is a larger class of errors than you might expect.

The second advantage is that FP applications are easier to unit test. When given a certain argument, FP functions always return the same value, so if f(1) is 2 in your tests, you can be guarenteed it'll be 2 in your application, too. FP generally more predictable.

The final advantage I can think of is concurrency. Concurrency in imperative languages is made harder because a data structure referenced by one thread can be mutated by another. In FP, data structures are immutable, so this problem doesn't occur.
Cocoa with Love: An Asteroids-style game in CoreAnimation, Part Two
Zed Shaw: The First Music Post
Pure FP languages eliminate implicit state. You can still have state; it just has to be explicitly passed in as an argument.
Statistically speaking, noone is writing kernels, database systems and VMs. You're a statistical anomaly.
"The article suggests Jobs himself be in charge of these companies."

It does, and I think that's a basic mistake. If Steve Jobs was "a Steve Jobs" right now, he wouldn't be off sick from Apple for six months.
Design Software for Atomically Precise Nanotechnologies
Where do you get your figures?
Life hands Sun steaming sack of...
No, you are putting more money into the pool --- for the people who do the data-finding to investigate and earn a share of.
It's a supplemental operating system -- a new concept. You use Windows or Linux as your primary operating system and LoseThos for screwing around programming. Believe it or not, people used home computers before the Internet.
Your "awkward" may be what others refer to as "cute".
Most of the last and current generation of tech university leavers appear to be trying to be the next Facebook - instead of trying to disrupt the enterprise software market.

It really bothers me that all these talented kids are outside of the companies that produce most of our economic activity - so big corps are still using the same crappy unproductive software they were a decade ago.

Not only is nobody inside these companies causing disruption - but I see few startups targetting core business functions like purchasing or logistics.

VCs could be driving this. Instead, like a herd, they are all trying to back the next greentech, cloudtech, socialtech etc.

The biggest opportunity to create cost savings for new businesses is in reinventing the way the enterprise apps work and communicate with other enterprises - for instance creating auction and bidding systems to improve procurement.

A startup has more chance of saving 1% of costs for a Top 500 company - than it has of being the next Facebook.
A vending machine, a toy robot, a DSP device... they're all embedded and they don't require networking.

Although AFAIK most of these devices don't use x86_64...
Surprise: America is No. 1 in Broadband (according to one measure)
How to turn your head into an antenna, and other useful tips
"suburban-bred office cows"

that is gold :)
You should be able to submit a query without having to enter your email address first. This was a deal breaker for me, because I don't like giving out my email address to websites I know nothing about. At least show me that by giving you my email address and potentially getting spammed I'm going to get something cool out of it.
Video | Guitar Rock Tour - lieliska muzikala spele | iPhone Pasaule
I disagree, but I think I understand why they think that.

The only exit for VCs is selling the company. Acquisitions seem to be based in large part on the number of users. Since ad-supported models don't do well when there is less ad-spend and fewer conversions (like our current economy), donations may provide enough to keep the ship afloat.

The thing is, I don't think anyone is trying to actually make money with a donation model; it is just trying to hang on until the sale. If we get rid of Sarbanes Oxley and VCs had a second exit possibility, I think we would see a companies actually trying to make money and not just make enough to keep the servers powered up.
Facebook Addiction Leads to Arrest
How to deal with stress
45 circuit boards? Maybe what the car industry needs is not a Steve Jobs, but rather a Steve Wozniak.

Woz figured out how to drastically minimize the number of hardware components on the Apple II. He could cut those 45 circuit boards down to 4.
And a pony.

Isn't this like saying poor people need money and hungry people need food? Are we really giving our attention to someone saying, "The solution is to fix it!"?

And maybe this guy didn't notice, but at least one of the American auto companies, Ford, actually has some pretty competent management. They're dealing with their union problems and investing in sustainable technologies (both in the vehicles they produces and the way they produce them), and Fords these days suck quite a bit less than other American brands.
I'll add a couple more points:

- They lack the best people. People at the bleeding edge of software development and interface design tend to work for companies like Apple or Google, or to start their own thing, not go build a risk-reporting system for a bank.

- They go about development the wrong way round. They start with a huge list of features and then try to make it usable. Most start-ups do the reverse - they start with something usable and only then think about adding features. I'll be writing a blog post about that on http://www.woobius.com/scribbles sometime soon...
For some reason this site is very slow to render and a horizontal scroller pops up intermittently here on Opera
9.60 (it's maddening!). I think one of the ads is the problem, I see a never-ending 'loading' spinner floating above the Amazon ad.
Why is it not the case that attractive men postpone their decision too, just as attractive women do?
The feature requests I'm getting now are not esoteric. They aren't exactly "needs" either. I don't know how much the "make few love you" rule applies to satisfying wants rather than needs. But as I prioritize making existing users very happy vs fishing for a larger number of users, pg has certainly given me food for thought.
We've been using dnsmadeeasy for over a year now and have had great service from them. On features vs cost they win hands down. Had a quote from UltraDNS once and it was more than the total cost of our entire hosting infrastructure combined!
A (possibly) related blog post "Enterprise Software is boring" (http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2006/07/but-martin-enterprise-...)
Although at it's current state it is probably useless, it's impressive considering it's a one man project.
Dating Abroad, From A Broad's View 
I feel the need to preface this with dating does not necessarily mean sexual relations. It could, but it's not a guarantee.I don't like to kiss and tell.
The state of wireless HD video
With Javascript (AJAX) it wouldn't be, but with a little Java or Flash it is. (I'm not 100% sure on Flash, but I bet it's possible)

I think Facebook uses Java for this bit (not totally sure, and I don't want to have to log in just to check)
Ask HN: Technical Patents
I have a new startup nearly ready to go, and the core algorithm is patentable. I have yet to find a competent technically minded patent attorney, and really don't want to waste money weeding out of the bunch. In previous patents I ended up writing most of the filing anyway but was still stuck with a huge invoice.

Does anyone have good experience with any technical patent attorneys who can handle machine learning/statistics patents?

Alternatively I am considering writing it myself. I have written a few in the past, have the relevant books and have read a lot of the patent db in my field. Any advice?
Actually, this is generally good advice regardless of what language you're on. The database is almost always at fault. My general rule is that a query should generally take less than 0.001 seconds to execute. If you can get it down to that through proper indexing and whatnot, MySQL will execute the queries fast enough so that they don't get backed up and eventually kill the server. Don't start caching until you can write a proper query. Your site probably doesn't need it if you are writing your queries correctly.
What american car industry needs is european or japanese or korean spirit. Any of the mentioned industries invested much more in development than the american one, which slept for too long (at least the big ones).

This was the conclusion of someone I talked to, working in that exact industry.
Wow, I've just lost a great deal of respect for the programming skills of Facebook and its employees. This is really obvious stuff. I can understand a junior programmer missing something like this (or a non-junior one, everyone makes stupid mistakes sometimes) but surely someone should be checking?

I've just set up a similar system (non-public media served from a faster server without access checking) and the fact that the urls needed to be non-guessable was pretty damn obvious. The timeout thing is also really really obvious if you don't want people to be able to pass around a permanent link.
most of them would be heartbroken

That's a pretty bold statement. Do you know most of them? I know a lot of them, and they are smarter than that. A few failed startups come to mind where the founders immediately started another.

And the average age in YC is 25. These aren't young kids.
Microsoft researchers developing Gazelle -- a new, more secure Web browser
i much prefer sqlyog for mysql. it allows scheduled backups as well as restoring of huge dumps. i think both of these are available in the community edition.
Sphinx isn't hard to set up, but (from what I've heard) Solr is a much better choice if you want very fine tuning. Sphinx is a great out of the box solution and will fit most people's needs quite well.
I would argue that most new vending machines and toy robots need networking. Vending machines use it for credit card auth, and lots of kids toys (certainly a robot) communicate with a PC/website nowdays.

But yeah, I'm sure there exist plenty of devices that don't need networking. Pardon me for picking nits.
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Expert Advice for B2B Marketing
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what area is your startup focussing on?
It's the difference between top-down and bottom up. Entreprise software is designed at the top, and we all know it half of it won't be used, and the half that will won't solve the biggest problems.

The way I write (very small) biz software is get a contract from the top, along with the specs for the first version, and over the next years (pretty much forever) get specific requests almost exclusively from middle management.

It's hard to scale though. I do what they ask because I care about my work, but on a strictly contractual basis I could reject or indefinitely postpone 90% of it.
Rubbish title - and also the author drinks a lot of kool-aid (does that taste like Ribena?)

A Mozilla monoculture would be just as harmful as an MSIE or Webkit monoculture, in my opinion.

Also, Mozilla is pretty expandable, but it seems like it's leading the way to first prize in the cruftiness competition.

For building apps on a web-ish stack, I like the concept of AIR. Webkit + a library seems a lot less evil than the whole Mozilla stack does, and has the right separation of players and responsibilities. Shame its got Adobe and Flash near it, though.
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Excellent.

Enterprise Applications do seem to defy reality.

Could a portion of this issue stem from "the market" being left out of the equation? I guess this would only apply to in-house apps.

That said, EA companies seem to do quite well in the market. I guess any committee can pat themselves on the back for finding an "already built" solution that meets (or can be customized to meet) all of their needs. Of course, internal talent must then configure this software monster and build all of those pesky integration pieces to make all of it work.

Well after the purchase, you might hear something along these lines: "Why does it take so long to simply configure something that should work 'out of the box'?"

This is where marketing meets truth (and runs screaming) and bubbles get busted. :)
Why write to a blog?
The Marc Andreessen Revolution: How Rosie's Biggest Fan Plans to Fix the Economy
> I'm always surprised to see the extreme bitterness that comes out on these threads.

My guess (although I don't know vaksel at all) is that he is reflecting somewhat on his parents marriage.

I only say this because my parent's marriage was often so. While my mom has settled a bit with age, while I was growing up she used the threat of divorce as a weapon to settle arguments with my dad. She also tended to make stupid financial decisions (running up $8k in credit card debt on clothes when she had no job and without my dad knowing she even had a card) from which he would have to bail her out.

I often struggle with this innate fear I have that marriage means signing away all my earnings and being constantly treated as a child by my wife. For this reason I tend to choose extremely independent girlfriends, and ambition is one of my top attractors.
Good slides; He mentions that the "largest, most successful dating service in the world" uses a computer to run the Traditional Marriage Algorithm. But which dating service is the "largest, most successful dating service in the world"?
What's the technical advantage of dropbox over, say, jungledisk?

Differentiators:

- Jungledisk uses S3 which I, in principle like.

- Jungledisk adjusts what they charge me with what I use versus charging me a flat rate when I want > 2GB frame

Non-differentiation

- Both use a snazzy multi-OS drag-and-drop widget
- Storage is storage

It seems like strapping me into a one-size fits all "pro" account is a rather dated modality of charging. Anyone clear on that?

I'm evaluating this critically because I need to have a 'follows me' net-disk solution, but have not, as yet, found one that just bowled me over. This link was timely.
Or handled as a Monad.
It can be done. But it's not pretty. Cumbersome and verbose.
i love this.

I8 how_much;
for(i=0; i < 1000000;i+=2)
how_much += i;

coutln "awesome\r\n";
Improving productivity.