skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great article. One thing to point out is that iChat allows you to integrate with your Address Book, so that if you want you're able to set things up to use real names when you're talking. It makes vcards that much more useful.
There is no more news feed, they've eliminated it! What you now see on the homepage is basically a "status update feed". While they've enhanced status updates so that they now combine the former share/post functionality, every other kind of action that used to go in the news feed is no longer there.

That's not true at all. Apps still publish to the feed. That's how I found out about this Facebook poll: it published an update to my feed.

Furthermore, the Highlights on the side is the exact same as the old feed. You get app updates there as well.

... the same is true for other things: For example, when someone tags a photo of one of your friends, you'll no longer see that on your homepage. You'll only be notified of the new photos if the person who posted the photos is your friend.

Again not true. I get tagged photo updates on my main feed.

I understand the Facebook change dislike, because people hate big changes, but people are just blindly making things up now.
Sweet! Looks like you put a lot of work into this. More content probably needs to be added before you can see exactly how it will be useful to your audience.

I would get rid of the ads for now and spend a bit more time reconsidering the user experience. For example, the color scheme, bold headlines, brief blurb of what the page you are about to click on is. It would also be nice to know what pages are external and which are not.
Using Tokyo Cabinet from Clojure
Any hackers in San Francisco willing to meet up? Check out our HW demo?
I will be in San Francisco Monday afternoon, and am looking to meet up with some local hackers interested in having a look into the future of light. Arkalumen is a bootstrapped startup founded by an exceptional electrical engineer and hardware hacker. I am in town for a cleantech conference and would love to meet up with some interesting folks. Anyone interested?

FYI, there isn't much info on our very basic website as we have been in stealth mode. For more information, here is a link to a brief describing our technology and it's applications:
<a href="http://www.scribd.com/full/13501981?access_key=key-tdquqebl0asgxu7fzcr"/a>

For those who can't make it but might be interested in seeing a demo, there is one available here:
I will be in San Francisco this Monday afternoon, and am looking to meet up with some local hackers interested in having a look into the future of light. Arkalumen is a bootstrapped startup founded by an exceptional electrical engineer and hardware hacker (no, not me). I am in town for a cleantech conference and would love to meet up with some interesting folks. Anyone interested?

FYI, there isn't much info on our very basic website as we have been in stealth mode. For more information, here is a link to a brief describing our technology and it's applications:
http://www.scribd.com/full/13501981?access_key=key-tdquqebl0...

There is also a video demo of our lamp in action available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4GnC_1LbsE&feature=playe...
(Our light is featured at 5/7min into the video)
Beer is an appropriate topic in many contexts. Relax.

Microbreweries hack the beer industry.
Wow, I made a major typing mistake. "Because" ought to have been "becomes".

Also, does HN autocapitalize the first letter of a news submission?
Ask HN: How to cache for logged in users?
How would you go about caching for logged in users?

I have thought about caching "blocks" of the page and then assemble the entire page before sending it to the user, but are there any better, more elegant solutions to the problem?
I use Apache Web Server on a four year old server. It hasn't gone down outside of two server moves. Coming from the Java application server and IIS worlds, it's seems pretty simple to me. It seemed to be a more widely supported choice amongst my customers, and thus worth my time to invest in learning it.
Is this a paying gig?
That is true. Most users (at least me) install ad-blocking software because of moving advertisements (flash/gif). Why do every site want to give you an epilepsy attack?
Well, you have got to realize that this is part of Scoble's job—he is a technology evangelist (among other things) by trade. A large number of his statements are inherently biased, and that's OK; it's not like you have to pay him any heed. I certainly don't.
When I checked, it said it was just down for me.
This comment explains why I decided that Redcar would be my next project. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6f2nh/what_do_y...

This project just lasted longer than most. Other than that, every justification I could offer has already been written in this comment thread.

(author of Redcar)
Aren't there already a ton of books on the GNU/Linux command line?
So Bruce, are you just getting into the SEO business and trying to link "Fennec" to "mobile browsers", or are there more than one browser shown at this link? :(
Ask HN: Is AI a growing field?
I have become interested in artificial intelligence lately and I'm trying to gauge the field, but I haven't found many publications about the current state of it.

Are more people becoming interested in AI? Is there greater demand for it in businesses then say 10 years ago?
Facebook Privacy Bugs w/ New Design
For the same reason why people don't use scheme: they don't understand it, so they don't bother with it. I know scheme myself, and I don't bother with it, as I've not had the time to really learn the libraries that come with plt.
I'd bet that Microsoft would pay a lot more than that, but Mozilla wouldn't accept it (at least not for the moment) since Google's is perceived to be the best search engine. So they do the right thing and have Google search being the default.
It's kind of like walking in a store, the sales person asking "what are you looking for", and then the sales person trying to sell you that thing you're looking for. This may be "insidious", but it's generally helpful for both parties. Google ads are usually the same way. Google knows what sort of things I want, and it reminds me from time to time. They make money, some random advertiser makes money, and I get the thing I want.
I keep track of logged in users via sessions that are stored in a DB.

Every time the user goes to a new page it is updated. This happens so frequently that caching doesn't really make sense. Accuracy is also important.
There's an interesting assumption in this evaluation process wherein people from poor home situations are presumed to have more drive than students who are not.
Are you sure the problem is job title? Forget about the huge differences between "web dev", "CTO" and "technical co-founder" and think about what info is available to an outsider:

You are three non-technical people.

Your say your idea is really really great but unfortunately secret.

You have been unable to hire a "web dev" (really?), so you decided to replace "web dev" with "CTO" and post again.

From your home page: "New layout & about us coming soon! 37 days ago"

Offers on the blog to send your PR person to talk on podcasts about this great new thing that doesn't exist and you can't talk about.

From the evidence, Ampley is run by people who aren't capable of making an about page, much less "revolutionize the internet". Maybe I'm wrong but from where I'm standing it's not a mystery why "web devs" are not breaking down your door.
Why are they storing whose info I have access to see inside MY profile data and not within the profile data of the other user?
I suppose I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with this. I looked at my area (orange county, california) and there were a few icons. clicking on them didn't give me any description - I suppose it's because you don't have any for those places (I do see the link to add info there).

But you show me some info that I don't really understand. It doesn't change based on my interaction with different icons. Maybe give me a one liner telling me "Hey, these are interesting reviews of places near where you're looking." Just a thought to make it more immediately engaging - I wouldn't personally take the time to figure out this interface as it is right now, even though I enjoy hiking quite a bit.

That said, you guys have ben iterating quite rapidly it seems, and making great progress, so I'm sure all of this will be taken care of shortly.
I'm talking about the users who deem it a major event in their lives that their social portal changed layouts, not the entrepreneurial hackers discussing how this has implications for future profits for their own projects.

Think more meta, man.
Another problem with advertising is that usually I don't want the things that are advertised. (At least in the case of non-contextual display advertising.)

For example, when I read the NYT I see ads for Target. This is a bad deal for Target, because I already know they exist, and I buy toilet paper there every week anyway. I don't shop there more often because they don't sell anything I want, not because I don't know about them. (Other display advertising is similar. I know Pepsi exists, but I think it tastes like shit. So wasting money advertising isn't helping them; but improving their product would.)
I've read your blog, the page on your website, your twitter feed, and I still have no idea what you want to do, what source of revenue you want to have, even what domain this company operates in.

Dropping the complete secrecy and telling people what the job is about might bring you a little more "luck" in finding a developer or CTO.

PS. Lots of startups want to revolutionize some web-related concept. How are you any different?
Not only this, but that ultimately the decision comes down to if ads and a free verson are even appropriate in the first place for your users, and if bad reviews for a free version will hurt your paid sales.

From my point of view as part of the Colloquy (irc client) team, we're trying to decide if a free version with no ads limited to one channel on one server would help sales. The problem is there's only one free/ad supported irc client out there on the app store, and it's a complete piece of crap and the reviews reflect that. However, the reviews for that app also reflect that most people downloading and reviewing are people who do not understand how irc works, and to an extent the reviews for our $1.99 USD app also reflect that - our reviews are pretty much a reverse bell curve where all the 4-5 star reviews are typically from people who know what irc is, and all the 1 star reviews come from the people who thought we were a sex chat app (seriously...it's getting tiring recommending these channels) but weren't satisfied with the learning curve and this whole thing evens out to 3-4 stars. If the percentage of people with no irc experience grows with the free app (as there is no longer that $2 barrier), the growing bad reviews from people who don't read app descriptions might hurt paid app sales if someone with irc experience does a search for 'irc client' and spots this horribly rated free version and a mediocre rated paid version.
I loved the library analogy!

I agree with this article, however I want to make it very clear that I agree on the basis of the soundness and truthfulness of the matter, not because of who the author is.
Sounds like good advice.

As it stands now, if we have a report for a place, then we give it an orange notebook icon. Typically, a place will have the icons as you see - streams, summits, etc.

We have 6000 or so reports indexed to the map now, and we plan to increase that by an order of magnitude or two, so we'll have reports all over the map.
as peter norvig said at a recent conference, it depends on how you define AI.

to gauge the field, why not start with his textbook (http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/). right next to this link, i just saw this one here for more resources on the web (http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ai.html).

btw, i wouldn't really think too much about what other people are interested in or not if you are at your stage. if you are drawn to the field, do it. tech is too unpredictable to make this kind of career calculus.
I don't trust the data at all. This says that 10% of _Windows 95_ users have Silverlight installed.
All the time? Sometimes I am working on Bar, and want to update Foo. Unfortuantely, someone changed Bar, and now I have to deal with that change right now no matter what. And, I don't get the opprotunity to decide if I want the change to Bar; svn just auto-merges the changes in. There is nothing I can do to stop that, and no way to revert the change once it's happened. (In git, you can roll-back to any committed state. In svn, you can't even commit if there is a conflict.)

Anyway, I am glad you like svn. But it is probably due to some reason other than svn's technical merits like, "at least it doesn't have all these Ruby fanbois." That is totally understandable, ignornat fanboi-ing is VERY off-putting. (To be fair, I started using Git loooong before it was popular. So I don't consider myself a fanboi.)

Also, you don't learn anything new by sticking with what you already know. Perhaps it is worth expanding your horizions. Maybe try creating a branch in svn and go from there -- you might like it.
The Joel Reddit Effect
There are a LOT of publications on AI if you look at all the conference papers and journal papers floating around on the net. The field of AI itself is divided up into lots of sub fields such as logic theory, machine learning, language processing, search/optimization.

Examples of "AI research at work" are the face detection in google picasa/iphoto ( machine learning + vision ). You email spam filter ( text classification ).

As AI research matures and as computers get faster, its safe to say that there is definitely a greater demand for AI but its hard to come up with "obvious" applications of AI algorithms like the ones I listed above.
Does your project have a website?
The lack of attention to detail is a bit alarming, too. For example, the first sentence on the page begins, "Please bare with us as we develop this..." but I don't think you're trying to organize a clothing-optional coding party ("bear" not "bare").
For me, it's closer to walking in to a library, the librarian asking "what are you looking for", and then the librarian trying to sell me that thing I'm looking for (which she gets a commission for).
This is just the tip of the iceberg. I've been picking at the new design for nearly a week and there is a host of security flaws and loopholes left there.

(up your privacy settings if you want to remain private!)
First glance at it also said to me, "Not quite with it." -- in addition to not saying what it is they're doing, even vaguely, the first text on the page is incorrect (it's "bear with us", not "bare with us", unless you're getting nekkid.) and the text "test" appears at the bottom of the page.
SpiralFrog owed $34 million. Investors get nothing?
Why can't advertising work on the internet if such intrusive advertising can work through television ( atleast the companies think it works )
Try searching AGI or "strong AI", which is a new movement trying to achieve general AI rather than application specific. I have got a good article on that: http://www.cybertechnews.org/?p=689
> There are plenty of examples of successful companies that have used this model

Do you mean they used their blog as the main marketing effort? I'd like to hear more about those.

It seems if the users are looking at your blog, they've found you already. Or perhaps those companies created thousands of other blogs that were only used for search engine optimization (linking back to their money blog)? That I can understand.
I bet TV ads stopped working as well when TV remotes became popular.
Cache? Opera instantly gets page from cache when I press "Back", even if I don't have internet connection.
Here's why I avoid talking about certain topics: it's embarrassing, and mostly not useful to the audience.

The article focusses on people determined to agree or disagree with PG. Interestingness is a far better barometer of value than agreement. My tests for what I say/write: Is it interesting to the audience? The subsidiary test for what I write here: Will it make PG uncomfortable to hear? And my test for that: would it make me squirm in his position?

---

There's endless ways to talk about how much I admire PG and Eliezer Yudkowsky. I could describe running into Eliezer's ai_design.temp.html document back in '98 after searching a new search engine called 'Google' for 'copycat eurisko sources' after reading Douglas Hofstadter's book about his cool AI projects, and my obsession with AI for the next 3 years. I could talk about the sense of epiphany of reading 'Why nerds are unpopular' and 'the age of the essay', and then PG's essays on startups that gradually opened up to a struggling, mediocre grad student the third career option besides academia and bigco research lab, with the grand culmination of 'How to do what you love'. When I met PG I felt like how I imagine teenagers felt in front of the Beatles ("OMG, I can't believe it.. it's really PG.. quick say something.. wait don't say something stupid..")

How I feel about these guys is more than admiration. It's a sense of identification intertwined with the time in my life I ran into them, and the influence they had (http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-03-22-20-03-26-soc). It's not about how good they are, or whether there are better writers out there, or whether they can kick Chuck Norris's butt; it's about the vivid memories of reading specific essays.

I could say all these things, and even rationalize to myself at the time that they were interesting, or said in interesting ways. They may even be interesting to say once. But this is a community, and there's a daily routine, and the emphasis is on the trajectory rather than on individual comments. It would be super boring to find endless ways to talk about how much I admire PG and Eliezer. Or to read everybody else's, I fear, far too similar stories.

---

I like to praise the people I admire in useful ways. Like if I can focus on something they said and add more evidence. Or contrast a point with what somebody else said. Or respond to a commenter who seemed to miss the point. I admire the content of their writings, and the form. A great form of praise is by showing I understood, at a deep level, what they were trying to say. An even better one is to try to write like they do.

(OMG, I really hope I didn't make them squirm. I hope PG didn't think this was lame. But I can say this once. But I hope I'm not embarrassed next time I meet PG. Will I meet PG soon?..)
It's up 34%, but that's not particularly surprising since they expanded to Boston, it's now for two cities.

It could just be that 34% is willing to participate in Boston but not Boulder.
Depends on what you mean by AI. It's not a single area of study.
What assumptions are you making?
Dude. You're in the library. Just get your stupid book and go read it? Why the deal with analyzing everything people might say to you? (grin)

I'm at a similar loss here -- your post is about anti-admiration. The community here is hackers -- people who break the rules in order to advance society by building something of value. If we were interested in conforming we'd be "IBM News" or "News for People Who Don't Disagree Much" -- both of which would be soundly boring. We'd also be some place like reddit, where herd mentality rules a great bit more than here (but it's still quite prevalent here as well).

I've seen quite a bit of mindless adoration on here, not especially for pg, but for a lot of prominent internet writers. We all know them. Famous Joe the writer could post his grocery list and it'd have 15 points and a dozen comments by tomorrow morning. I guess it's just something about being a public figure. Steven King did a nice essay about this a while back but the link escapes me. Plus, as I've pointed out before, having a hero is a completely normal thing to do. When you're 16 or 17 its critical to have somebody to idolize that is worth a damn. Once you get older that need doesn't go away, but you're able to synthesize the best of multiple people, something that isn't so easy to do with limited experience.

I think you hit the problem dead on: if you're thinking "gosh! It's PG! Why would I disagree with him?" (or agree, for that matter) then you've already lost it. Praise is great, but just react normally and don't worry about who the person is. It's the value of the idea, not the value of the person.

There was an article on here a while back about the difference between people who really succeed and those who get stuck. The gist of it was that if you can't treat everybody, including people who can help you a great deal, as equals, then they'll never think of you as an equal either.

Good essay! Made me think. And you're spot on about GED. Great book. :)
Undersea Eruptions near Tonga (lots of pictures)
When hacker news is down, it creates the "I must not waste my time pressing F5" effect.
I've clicked Google ads before despite the fact that they're very obviously ads (different-colored backgrounds, text saying ads are ads). I've clicked Facebook ads, which are put in a special Ad Zone of the page.

What percentage of Google's revenue comes from people clicking ads that they don't know are ads?
For some reason while I tried it for several months it never felt... sticky? I just never felt like it quite fit for me.

Of course Clojure showing up may be part of the reason for that.
"I don't know Paul Graham, but I know he doesn't talk the way he writes. For one thing, one can point to examples (like the interview in Founders At Work). For another, nobody talks like that."

heh lol
Ask HN: What are good user interfaces to decision support systems?
I searched around but came up only with either industrial, proprietary desktop apps with no screenshots or academic papers. But I'd like to know, in a very mundane way, how users (possibly unsophisticated or without much training) would interact with a DSS. Text? Q&A? Buttons? Point and click? Speech? In particular, web browser based interactions. The system would need to gauge the level of expertise of the user and adjust its services accordingly. Is there a good example of such systems that is publicly viewable? Ideas or pointers, anyone?