skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, thanks for the comment. We've identified a huge pain point, and have decided to go and build a deep solution, with a minimum first feature set. Expect the obvious differentiation with snaptalent flair to appear over subsequent iterations - homepage doesn't say anything yet
The Mark Cuban Stimulus Plan - Open Source Funding
Spot on. You made some good points. Def email me on sumon [at] snaptalent [dot] com would love to catch up
I think it's usually about being in control - Firefox 3 makes it even better because of the faded visual drag representation.
while signs didn't stand out in particular i do remember distinctly learning about the idea of "rules" and the way they define a social context. and when i first saw a command line, i couldn't help but think it was a pretty strange way to order things around, which led to a prolonged interest in interface design/how our societies are affected by our command of technology (or its command of us). hacking, for me, is the ability manipulate that relationship or at least be curious as to how it manipulates me. what's your story? how'd you first think about hacking?
I know a stupid idiot who bought some equipment, illegally stuck it in some country and is reselling minutes through someone and making money somewhere along the way. Some screw up and he could be in the same boat. But you'd think companies would limit the credit they extend to others...something isn't quite right with that story.
Because if they didn't agree to what ticketmaster wants - ticketmaster will boycott them band/venue. Good luck setting up your own ticker sales site and agreeing deals with every other venue/band.
Is that just your opinion? Or can you link to any evidence to backup that assertion?
There are other types of distributions which fit black swan type data better, such as power-law distributions, Gumbel distribution, etc. I don't know if research in extreme value theory is still a hot topic, but it tries to address these problems. Here is a paper on risk management and extreme value theory: http://tinyurl.com/aa7t6m

Here is a nice paper on risk measures, and points out some of the problems with VaR: http://tinyurl.com/ar3336

My apologies if you're unable to grok the contents of these papers...they're both a little technical but I can't think of anything off the top of my head that's more accessible.
FEWER bugs. Jesus people. If you can count em, use 'fewer'.

Also, it's comparing time to count. Does 90% fewer bugs make up for the lost time? Are serious, systematic defects caught by tests? I suppose I should read the paper.
"we built an API. 2000 pieces of software are capable of sending updates. Summize was the most important one" @ev #ted

http://loiclemeur.com/english/2009/02/evan-williams-of-twitt...
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I had this through nuevasync.com which was pretty awesome. I want to support them as a startup but this is all they did, and so what if they did it 2 months ago, google now does it and I am far less worried about google disappearing than I am a tiny startup.

I hope they come up with something else it was an awesome product.
Checked out the site briefly today but still not sure how I feel about posting my whole resume online - I suppose that's the way technology is heading though. Would be cool if it was like Pandora or something and you could give recommended companies a thumbs up/down and then the site got better at finding companies you're interested in.
Read as much as possible.
If You want to become a writer you must become a reader first.
btw, there are many useful skills from non-IT world. Short stories writing is a good example.
I like this Guy good will to always come up with win-win situations all the time with sincerity and open mind.

Just wonder why would be the reason for rule #2: He will not put his money on any business getting revenue from ads; I do not see Google going bankrupt.
An an employer, I'm stumped. What do I do? Call?
3. It MUST BE CASH FLOW BREAK EVEN within 60 days

4. It must be profitable within 90 days.

5. Funding will be on a monthly basis. If you dont make your numbers, the funding stops

If these are true, unless you're completely poverty-stricken, why whould you need Mark Cuban? Perhaps we're talking large scale investments, but the whole emphasis on "sweat equity" suggests not.
Sure, this rule will filter some false positives -- but on the whole it will surely give him a more interesting (and easy to evaluate) set of ideas.
and even much easier to start it in so-called emerged markets (India/Nepal/Thailand etc.)
I was also really curious about the fly. Although I have to say it seems to work. The floors definitely seemed cleaner.
Apparantly you can learn about anything by studying anything.
good feedback - working on it. Thanks
T-Pain abuses it on every song he has.
Kanye, personality issues aside, used it quite well for a change from his normal style of music. He's not the _worst_ culprit of using Auto-Tune and ruining music.
For one thing it will probably drastically reduce the number of applicants. More importantly perhaps, is it will force people to come up with viable ideas for products that get sold directly to the end-user rather than just expanding the number of advertising channels.
Wait. Are you saying "critique" and "rebuttal" are synonyms? I never thought so, and I've never even been to Europe.
Why Amazon should not be Apple, and Jeff Bezos is not Steve Jobs
When ADA was new, the compatability suite for ADA was also around $20k (at least that's what I remember). Since the name was trademarked, no one could sell a compiler without passing the suite. There was no way that two guys in a garage could sell a compliant compiler without getting it certified. But making a C/C++ compiler and selling it for $25, that happened. So the only compilers in the beginning were from big companies for big money.
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I will check that out. Thanks!
To top it, if it is a type of business that can be built in 90 days, I bet before it even gets reviewed, someone else would get it live and for no equity shelled. So much for open source.
Presumably the same reason many profitable businesses raise outside funding: to grow faster.
This is probably pretty superficial compared to the other feedback so far, but I just wanted to say I don't like the photo of someone doing a star jump on the front page. Maybe I'm more jaded than average but it really screams "generic stock photo" to me. I mean come on, is someone really going to be SO happy using your service that they just spontaeneously start jumping?

I suggest a slideshow of handshake closeups or something instead. Never underestimate how impressed non-HN readers are by slideshows.
"why whould you need Mark Cuban?"

From the hip, I'd say it's a helluva PR opportunity, a chance to be in business with Mark Cuban (which some folks might really value), and would allow you to take a bit more of a risk than you otherwise might be able to.

Like YCombinator, I'd imagine selling him a bit of equity would increase your shot at success.
to go further, why would you need a stimulus, when you could have launched something like this in any type of economy
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Who knows if this concept will work, but it's an intriguing idea. And I like it that in the middle of a supposed depression, the two top links on HN right now are offers of funding for new companies.
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Google is a brand with good karma, like Nokia or Apple. That's not enough to stay alive, but no idea works standalone. Google did many smart steps to attract the geeks, and it is how they probably will win the battle for SMB market.
I don't think Ycombinator is as restrictive. In this case the bit of equity seems to involve a lot of control, including monthly reports on financials, and control over hiring and day to day duties (that's what the bit about "no managers, everybody works" implies).
Here’s the thing. If you’re a person with a "big idea" that idea means more to you than just something that popped into your head. It’s your hope. It’s what may be your big chance one day. So it's a big deal to you.

He’s asking people to basically give up on that dream. Since it would be easy for the idea to be stolen by someone with more resources you basically have to renounce the idea when you reveal it to the world. In return for that sacrifice you might create a company that would, at best, produce a minor positive impact on the economy as a whole.

Which is the kicker as far as I’m concerned. No company created like this is going to save the economy. At best you’ll generate around a hundred jobs in an environment that’s shedding hundreds of thousands a month. Meaning even the most altruistic person will have to get over the fact that they won’t be doing all that much good with this.

Seen like that I don’t see many people taking him up on this offer.
10. I will make no promises that I will be available to offer help. If I want to , I will. If not, I wont.

11. If you do get money, it goes into a bank that I specify, and I have the ability to watch the funds flow and the opportunity to require that I cosign any outflows.

I'm reading this article as "if you can build a successful business in 90 days, I'll give you some cash, and then it's mine....sucker."
How much will it take for Google to actually compete in this area, specifically against twitter and their summize search? Even if they didn't get access to the firehose, this data is already available via RSS feeds, Google would just need to crawl the RSS feeds of twitter users, which are (currently) most likely much fewer in number than the number of web pages that google crawls per hour, and update a temporal index (because as tweets age, they cease to remain "real time"), and show these along side their actual search results. "Your search for 'super bowl' returned this wikipedia article, espn.com and these currently active conversations". I suggest RSS feeds here because they are in the right format for extracting metadata about real time content (datetime, author, text).

In fact, if Google (or another major search engine, but right now only Google could do it) did change their interface to include "real time" results, it would encourage the rise and spread of more twitter-like services (because real time content would be increasingly easier to find). In fact, if Google included temporal RSS content next to the, for lack of a better term, archival content, and indexed comment threads also, the real time web would transcend just being provided by twitter.

Come to think of it, didn't Technorati attempt to do this with blog content, provide a "conversational pulse of the internet"?

Right now, Google classifies all content they receive, no matter when they receive it, as archival, and its freshness is only used to increase the perceived relevancy to float younger entries to the top.
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The Family Car Business That Pays Cash For Family Cars.
AppEngine now allows HTTP requests (urllib2, etc)
Being protected by encryption/DRM sort of makes the fact that it's just HTML moot, doesn't it?
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But the execution is almost always worth more than the idea. Ideas tend to change a lot once you get started.

And of course one thing won't change the economy, but helping to create new businesses is a great thing.
I'd argue that there is nothing crippling about it. You can define functions anywhere, if you need a multi-line lambda just define a function and be done with it. Multi-line lambdas are messy... this constraint keeps your code sane.

You can nitpick all you want, but the fact is I can start reading just about anyone's python code and feel like it's my own because styles are consistent across the board. A lot of this has to do with the tight community, but the fact that it's all reinforced through syntax constraints is a huge plus.
Netbooks are much more powerful than the hardware used in the G1 Android phone, and Android gives a pretty good impression of running every possible app at once (if apps are written to save state) even though the constraints of the device and UI limit it to about 6 apps active at once. If an app is removed from memory because it hasn't been in the foreground in a while, they usually pick up right where they left off when they are restarted, and it doesn't even look like they had to be restarted. Microsoft won't do this with Windows though, because it would break backward compatibility and change the user experience consistency that is the bread and butter of their Windows sales.
Does anyone developing a plug-in for the asterisk or other PBX or something? =)
It's a bit of a stretch, but it was well-written. Very Freakonomics-y.
Seriously, I'd give Mark Cuban equity for free just to be able to say I was funded by him. It gives you a lot of free credibility.
I ended up explaining this to cperciva (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=474457).

Basically we just want to see what people are like. When we do interviews we always feel that we know more about a group after 30 seconds in person than from reading their whole application. We were hoping that video would give us some of that a step earlier.
The plots are symmetric, indeed. Best case scenario though, if we start recovering immediately, full recovery is still 12 months away.
You are completely wrong. Music isn't in a rut. You are. Find someone who is into new music, ask some questions, borrow some albums, and really give it a chance. You'll be shocked at what you are missing just because you believe there's nothing good out there.
Yes, but Mark Cuban has to offer better valuations, no one but the micro seed funds can reasonably invest 20k for 5%. And if Mark Cuban really wants to micromanage my company, I'd humor him.
I agree. And what a fine logical dismantlement.

"I feel pretty silly writing all of this nonsense without even mentioning economics"
On the contrary, the world needs more of this...the obvious utter lack of ability of the average person to perform simple logical thinking is one of the most dangerous things out there right now, and is what makes modern public opinion so easy to manipulate. If more people were walking around with the ability to think, reason, and communicate, we wouldn't be in such a mess.

And then we have people like the original author....outspoken, but uninformed, who are essentially telling people to shut up, and don't even bother thinking, it is futile.

Although, if he was going for the most ironic blog post of the year, he has succeeded splendidly.
Love this title - although the "APIs" are query only.

But a '''programmable government''', run by optimization algorithms? I like this - as long as it's open source. No politicians, just good code and bad code. No lobbyists, just competing, crowd-sourced algorithms.

Sounds too Utopian or too nightmarish?
But that’s sort of my point. Mr Cuban’s rules limit the scope of what you can do. If you have to break even within 60 days than you can’t have that many resources (a 2 person operation at best I would assume). So say you come up with the idea, he funds it, and you get to work with one other person.

Now what’s to stop some company who sees your idea (which is probably worth stealing since Mr. Cuban liked it) and puts 6 people on it for the first 2 months. No matter how well you execute it’s hard to beat a team 3 times your size who are working on the same basic idea.

Because even if you execute better they can self correct fast enough to kill you off.
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The brain is capable of producing four different frequencies of waves. The highest frequency is the beta – that’s what we use when we’re busily caught up in an activity that truly interests us. And that’s the brain wave that doesn’t necessarily appear for those with ADD/ADHD
Who says he has to offer better valuations? The last line seems pretty relevant - "Im sure I will come up with more rules as I see what comes along, if anything."

You can probably get a better deal from the SBA.
I'm assuming you're referring to Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Marc Potters.

Taleb does give credit to them in terms of them understanding the presence of fat tails and focussing on the failure of the gaussian. However, both Bouchaud and Potters, coming from physics backgrounds, believe that the tail-exponent can be calibrated accurately from a finite sample-set. When in fact estimating the tail-exponent (the 'alpha' of a power law process) is fraught with small-sample effects and one cannot reliably make decisions even when you do come up with an estimate of the tail-exponent. This is Taleb's main beef with the breed of physicists with power-law models.

The best paper to understand this is: Weron 2001:
"Levy-stable distributions revisited: Tail index > 2 does not exclude the levy-stable regime"
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/448515.html

More on my website if you're interested: navanitarakeri.com

A Black Swan is not just a rare event - it is defined as a rare event with _high impact_.

Statistical NLP may handle rare occurrences well (are you talking about smoothing?), but, by it's very nature, a rare event in a block of text is not going to wipe out a library now, is it? So the appearance of a rare word in a block of text is hardly in the same class of problems as epidemics, wars, market crashes etc.
I ran the story by a local telco guy tonight who said the guy has the lingo right but its bogus. He told me that two guys couldn't run a NOC with that equipment for that level of calls.

He also mentioned there were some other technical errors in the story like the fact MySQL was not used at all in the industry at that time and he doubted PHP was either.

He said make it $800,000 lost in one night instead of $80,000,000 and it might be a stretch but be believable.
Giving him equity for free is probably a better deal.
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A colleague of mine has been doing some great OSS work combining screw.unit with env.js to allow headless AND in-browser testing of javascript. Track the githubs or mailing list to play along.
It's tempting to a degree, but I think most folks are reluctant to themselves out there in such a public way, especially to be scrutinized by others, for no payoff. So as usual, it's a stunt of his. But when you're that rich, I guess you can do that.
Would you recommend this as a funding option for any of the YC funded companies?
Melodyne is pretty crazy. Some of the changes lead to weird results (if you jump to far with vocals), but still pretty cool.
I sort of see what you're saying, but people's ideas are everywhere and are copied all the time.

Also, more people + more money != faster or better execution.
I am having somewhat of a hard time figuring out how this "stimulus plan" helps the economy, as it appears it's intended.

If a startup is able to reach profitability within three months, this startup surely wouldn't need Mark Cuban's money to move forward and create jobs at some point in the future. They would have a rather big chance at succeeding even without this extra cash.

Mark presents this initiative as doing something for the greater good and the economy, however investing in companies that need to be profitable within three months (assuming funding will stop if they don't reach profitability within that time frame) is not exactly a risky investment and looks more like an easy way into something new for Mark.
This is linkbait, pure and simple. The author is trolling. Posting his own blog posts in HN knowing he'll start a flame war... The post was written specifically to do what it did... unfortunately.

Move along folks, nothing to see here...
I wouldn't say it was well-written, given that the entire concluding section was a non sequitur. It's mostly just a linkbait title with an article built around it.
google, youtube, and facebook would never have made it past his litmus tests.

you've got 60 days to grow a tree. start watering.
Sure, if the valuation was good enough and the growth targets were reasonable. There's no rule about how detailed the business plan has to be.
If you program in a bottom up fashion, you can test your code seamlessly while you write it. In Lisp for example, you simply check that the function you just wrote returns what you expect. If not, you fix it right then and there. While I can't present any evidence to back up my claim, I imagine programming in this way reaps the same benefits of test-driven development without adding as much time.
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I am sorry that this turned into a silly pissing match. This has been headed in the wrong direction from the beginning. So, this will be the last I have to say on the matter.

By all accounts, you seem to be a very crafty guy but your writing is imperfect. I read a little about what you do at PitPatt and am impressed that you work on such a challenging problem. Writing well is hard too. I think that is what this drama is really about. A lot of people misunderstand this article, myself included. Maybe we are all idiots; or, maybe your writing needs work.

I did read the article; I read it over and over and each time I became more confused.

As a writer, your first goal should be to communicate your ideas clearly. Once you manage that, then you can worry about tackling bolder rhetorical challenges like satire. (Seriously, satire is hard.)

One of the best ways to improve fundamental writing skills is learning from professionals who use simple language and structures. Carefully read a quality newspaper or some Hemingway. Try to understand how those writers organize their thoughts. They tend to do a damn fine job.

I too need to learn more about writing and economics. Maybe that lesson is worth all of this drama.
Cuban didn't return my emails when we launched :(.
Ok, so let me get this straight...

Spammer on Twitter: "Hey, let me tell you all about these products I want to sell you!"

Me: "No"

Spammer: "..."

What's that? Oh, yeah, I didn't follow the spammer, SO I NEVER HEARD FROM THEM AGAIN! Does that mean that there won't be twitter spam? that spammers won't target twitter? Of course not...

...but personally, I welcome twitter spam! Please, bring it on! Spam is all about finding that sucker born in the last minute who will buy your breast enlarging viagra penis pump. The only way to be spammed on twitter is to be enough of a sucker to follow someone trying to sell you stuff. Sounds like a match made in heaven.
This seems to usually happen when people keep staring at the same place and expecting something interesting to happen there.

Historically, if you want to get a good idea of where music is going, see what black americans are producing. Virtually every new genre of western pop music in the last century has come from black americans. (Blues, jazz, soul, rock, funk, disco, house, techno, hip-hop)

After new genres emerge then there's usually a couple decades that follow of infusing that with other genres and that's where some really creative stuff starts coming out of the woodwork.
The United States government should follow his lead. Giving more grants and low interest loans to startups.

The startups, the entrepreneurs, the risk takers, the pragmatists, the efficient and rational are what we need right now to pull us out of this mess. Instead the govt is giving all the money to the rich, inefficient, wealthy elite, who lied to get us into this mess in the first place.

Give some money to those with vision. How much could we here on this list do with $700 Billion? The banks aren't doing anything with it... We just wasted it...
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He returned my email when I had suggestions for the Mavs a few years back :-)
Is this an ironic punch-line?

Yes.