skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here here. There's nothing quite like:

for i in $(exceptionally long pipeline that doesn't work right now)

Because someone didn't tell you what I was supposed to be.

Or being a few lines down the bottom of a very long loop, and trying to remember what 'i' represents this time round.
Outlook not good for email (so, what do you use for messaging)
Baltimore startup (featured in Engadget & G4TV) looking for web developer
Hi

Were looking for a solid php, ajax, mysql & javascript coder to work alongside our web/graphic designer.

We have been in private beta since mid September and since then we have achieved the following -

Chosen as a semi-finalist for TechCrunch40 conference
Chosen to present to a NYC crowd of 400 alongside Facebook, Microsoft and Google!
Noted in publications as creating a new industry; quoted "A promising site," & "A fantastic idea!"

If you live in around Baltimore, MD (Northern VA. , DC. , Philly, Delaware) and are interested in being apart of something revolutionary please contact paul9290@yahoo.com.

Pay is negotiable!

Cheers,
Paul
I find your online Internet webpage fascinating and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I wasn't recommending looking everywhere, I was recommending being open to looking anywhere that catches your fancy.

The thing that is independent/unique about somebody isn't a static criterion that remains unchanging over time, it's more the trajectory you end up taking that's constantly evolving over time. All I'm saying is: don't exclude reading about past failures when you make your choices on what to do next. It's fine to say ok, let's stop reading for a while and try building this one thing my mind has settled on. That's a great habit to acquire.

The unpronounceable author of Flow:
http://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Mihaly-Csik...
says the most successful people alternate periods in closed states when they focus on a specific concrete project with periods in open states where they demonstrate huge appetite for new ideas.

I'm starting to think we're saying the same thing in different words and with slightly different emphasis. It is thus with most interesting conversations.
I'd agree with machine learning falls within the purview of AI -- I'm just saying if all you want to learn is machine learning, then a book on just that subject would probably be more relevant than AIMA. I just got "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" by Bishop, and it's a great book.
"When someone says "AI", I think they mean AI, not e.g. path-finding for writing a Quake bot."

Then you're hopelessly out of touch with what most people mean when they say "AI", and what the person who asked the question wants to learn about ("Learning Algorythms and Decision Making programs").
> You don't really understand something until you implement it.

Yup. We've already established that one has to prioritize what to implement. The priority clearly shouldn't always go towards doing something rather than reading what somebody else did. (Children would never learn to write that way.) Instead we prioritize differently at different times, and we try to have lots of feedback between reading and doing, by things like active reading.
> I'm starting to think we're saying the same thing in different words and with slightly different emphasis. It is thus with most interesting conversations.

I LIKE TURTLES
Hands on with the new online version of OpenOffice.org
Founders Fund Closes $220 Million Second Fund
Ask YC: Good/small open source projects to work on?
I am a university student majoring in CS and minoring in EE and have noticed that while I do learn some programming in my classes, it's not enough. I've been working a job on campus doing web application development (LAMP, PHP, JavaScript, XHTML, CSS, JSON, AJAX, insert cool web technology here), but I've also noticed that this is not enough; hopefully PHP is enough of a reason to support my last statement.

Anyways I would like to start hacking on some open source projects. But I can't seem to find one that 'fits' me. Most of them are huge. I would like to find a relatively small community, with a small project. I would also like to get involved with a couple -- in different languages. So I can branch out of C, C++, PHP, Java, insert corp lang here.

I've been recently really into memcached for a while. Been working on client APIs here and there, but they're pretty well supported already. Idk but something about caching really intrigues me.

Do you guys have any recommendations? I would like to hack on Python, Ruby, OCaml, whatever really.. Thanks!
The idea is to improve recommendations. How well recommendations tie specifically to revenue is, I'm sure, a fairly guarded secret.
Reddit got 18 million.
> Then you're hopelessly out of touch with what most people mean when they say "AI"

Hopeless? Doc, are you telling me there's no cure?!?

In fact, when most people talk about AI, they mean it in the sense of, "do you think computers will one day be as intelligent as humans?". Cf. the moviefilm "AI". If that kind of AI is what you wish to pursue, then the so-called field of AI isn't going to get you there.

I'm reclaiming the term AI for actual AI from the minority that's misusing it and we're having a Pride march on the 23rd. Wheel out your servers and "represent".
T-Mobile + Twitter (it's technical, not net neutrality)
Bill and Ted can't do math.

-

I thought the terms were confidential. They really got 18?!? Now I am trying to decide if that really pisses me off to no end or not!
"... A Trusted Source Tells Me That The Ads On Pownce Are Free. Because Leah can't get anybody to pay for them. That, however, is inconsequential. We are talking about serious engineering here. So beyond the butthurt about Winer & Scoble, there is some real deconstruction to be done. One of the stupid parts about SimpleDB is XML ..."

Blah, blah, blah.

This is the kind of dribble you'd expect from tech-talk, trash-talking fan-boys. Dave Winer some times is rude, abrupt and often wrong. The difference is Dave doesn't hide. You know his name, what he does and what he looks like and what he is thinking. But not so with the author who is less interested in informing, interacting or asking questions.

So who is the author?

Well it's Ted Dziuba of course. A 23y/o ex-googler doing a startup called 'persai' [0] Persai is working on a personalised information gathering tool. One reason I don't waste too much time on the opinions from the likes of "Ted" is because he (they) hides behind what is essentially a gossip site. [1]

Is this a new form of marketing plan?

Get above the rest of the tech-industry by creating a trash news site in the hope of raising their profile for the beta release? A better idea would be showing your chops through a demonstration or intelligently explaining why the particular problem being solved is good for users. Interesting stuff can be found on persai where they are taking lessons from google and applying it to news [2] Hardly ground breaking without a demo. The technology looks interesting. But it's not just about technology. It's about users.

Lets wait and see how useful users view persai.

[0] "... Persai is a news aggregator that is specific to your interests. You specify a topic that you're interested in with a few words, and Persai will find new content relevant to that interest and recommend it to you. ..." ~ http://techfold.com/2007/12/17/you-say-per-say-i-say-persai-...

[1] Is this typical of the mindset of 'googler' engineers? I certainly don't see this subservient (scared) attitude with say Chris Sacca or Paul Buckheit?

[2] http://blog.persai.com/
IIJ to Use DoCoMo 3G Network to Provide Corporate Data Communications Services as MVNO
Ask YC:  How do you transfer input to and output from a widget in an iframe?
IFrame (Wikipedia): an HTML element which makes it possible to embed another HTML document inside the main document.

Widget (Wikipedia): a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation.

What exactly are you trying to ask? You can certainly exchange data via a database and 'make it feel interactive' between the frames using JavaScript/AJAX.
Unfortunately, too often, that perspective is lost. I know of no general solution to what defines intelligence. So I'm very dubious as to whether an encompassing artificial version is possible.

I see lots of specific solutions to specific problems. That, to me, is the best approximation of intelligence. To the extent that many specific solutions can be approximated and optimized, we'll be very well off. It's easy to denigrate a calculator and spell-checker, but I seem much more intelligent than I would be without them.
I thought I read it somewhere, I'm not sure though.
I have a Facebook page with an iframe containing a gwt widget. How do I transfer data to the gwt widget? I know what this data is when I am generating the Facebook page, so I was hoping there's an easy way to do this without having the gwt widget contact the server to get its input.

I also need to get data back from the gwt widget. How should it send this data back to the server?
I was under the impression it was closer to 10-12mm.

Now I love Reddit, but I do think the Reddit guys made out like bandits. It will be a while before Conde Nast recoups their investment, especially if the site continues to stagnate.
What I find interesting it that it's much better to leverage quality data than a larger quantity of crappy data. To me, it's the difference between running a well-designed study on a small group versus a large study that's poorly controlled. Computation gymnastics can only do so much to clean up a multivariate mess. To improve data quality, you need to understand user psychology (i.e., better design). But any engineer can build a massive database. Problem is, how do you decide what's most important for the problem at-hand? Collecting more data, to figure it out later, only introduces more noise into the analysis.
How can I learn to scale my project?
I really want to start testing and developing methods for scaling and speeding a project of mine, and also just for general knowledge. I can't think of a way to do this without creating a bunch of amazon ec2 instances, or buying more computers and doing this from house.

Can anyone think of think of way to do this for free or very little money? is their something I am not thinking of.

Background

I am creating a website http://www.tastestalkr.com. Right now I run it on http://www.dreamhost.com. They are great when it comes to serving webpages, but not if you want to run a crawler. I run the crawler from a computer in my house. This works great for now and I understand that I don't need scale for a long time, but I am doing this all by myself. I am using django and pythong. I am thinking that mayby something like hadoop is going to be my best bet.
The church speaks in latin because it makes common people look foolish and inadequate.

The computer "programmer" speaks the most needlessly complicated language because it makes him the focal point.
XMLHttpRequest?
Is there a way to avoid the request for input since you can include it in the web page so that the widget can pick it up?
1) Profile. You really shouldn't start blindly optimizing code without profiling. Profile it, find your bottlenecks, optimize, rinse, and repeat. You should also benchmark your hardware; run scripts that make requests to your www server. Check out Apache's ab benchmark. Etc...

2) Cache. Google "Memcached". Django has support for this. This will alleviate huge database bottlenecks (if your app is read heavy). Also possibly consider some sort of FS (file-system) structure specific for your app. It looks like you deal with a bunch of media files, that could get hard to manage without a proper FS plan.

3) Write clean code. There is no sense in profiling, optimizing, caching, etc if your code is horrible. Those things will lead to even worse, unreadable, unmanageable, possibly slower code.

From your description you asked slightly more specified questions, but you really need to understand the basics of above before specializing for your app. At least that's what I believe.
"Duh, they want to train a speech-to-text parser, and that's the best way to do it."

I'm not sure I agree. But what do I know? The problem to me seems to be individual speakers who can vary so greatly as to make any one prediction, based on a population-phoneme histogram, very noisy. Speech recognition works decently now when individuals train their own classifiers. I'm not sure why products don't coalesce around those specific voice profiles. Here's an example where, I think, one massive effort to collect many examples is actually more problematic than helpful. It may work for easily discriminated phonemes (e.g., one, two, three, four) but the pronounced lexicon is a minefield of starlust knights. Context helps greatly, but that's much more data than would be acquired in a 411 call.

We shall see...
LOL .. Jakob's been around for a while. He actually was a consultant for Google in the early days.
Laws of Nature, Source Unknown
Startup Lawyers: When Can You Do It Yourself?
Well, that "minority" is essentially the same community that invented the term in the first place. It's not like what you're observing is some ghastly secret: the AI community hasn't been seriously trying to construct strong AI for 25+ years. "AI" is a bad term, and doesn't accurately describe much of the work that is done in the field -- fair enough. Considering that trying to build strong AI is a pipedream anyway (IMHO), I don't think that's such a disaster. The person asking the question was plainly talking about weak AI techniques anyway.
"I'm reclaiming the term AI for actual AI ..."

Those people have mostly switched to using the term "Artificial General Intelligence" when describing "actual AI".
"I know of no general solution to what defines intelligence. So I'm very dubious as to whether an encompassing artificial version is possible."

Logical Fallacy Alert! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

I don't know how to build a rocket ship nor to do a heart transplant, but I'm fairly confident that these are both feasible.
Exactly - given that any day some other site could become the top social news site, it seems weird they would be trying to get such a large/unlikely amount.
The Depth of eBay's Problems, Part 2: Angry Sellers
Part 1 is also interesting: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/the-depth-of-ebays-...
Ask YC: is networking class worth it?
Hey, expert web app writers. Problem: I have a choice between taking networking or mathematical logic in my final semester. I prefer logic, but in June I'm joining a startup and there's pressure to learn "the practical stuff." So the question is: would taking a networking class give me a big edge, vis a vis writing web apps? Or is this stuff pretty easy to pick up?
Overview of the networking material is here: http://remus.rutgers.edu/cs352/F07/#Lecture_Notes
The course project is writing a bittorrent client in Java.
Digg has so much room to expand, I'm not sure why they haven't done so. For instance, users should be able to create 'sub-digg' pages for specific subjects that they can then build a community around, or even embed into their own sites, instead of using pligg, etc. By allowing niche communities to develop, quality of news will increase, and digg can become a pretty reputable and valuable source of news. Also, by catering to niches, users will see a greater value in using and contributing to digg. I still see digg as a novelty site which serves as a mere gateway for internet jokes and the typical anti-cop/george bush/microsoft/etc. shit.
# no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no

# no. fuck no. I am a fucking

# moron.

I love this comment. It reminds me of the times where I had been banging my head against a problem for a while, trying out different solutions, but none of the ones I came up with were any good. So I left it in a crummy state.

Then a few days/weeks latter I came back to it, and knew straight away how to solve it, and how bad all my previous attempts had been.
Read Cal Henderson's book "Building Scalable Web Sites".
Interesting ideas, but once you start adding tons and tons of features that look good on paper, the site starts to lose its community focus and you alienate some people.

By nichifying digg, you'd convert one huge community in a ton of little ones.

Anyway, you can already kind of do this, by selecting specific categories and viewing only stories sorted there.
I really wouldn't worry about which class to take. Both are important. Too bad you don't have time to take both (assumption). Networks might be more "practical" if you're applying for a job at Cisco. Logic might be more practical if you're applying for a job at Xilinx. Both would be practical if you're applying at Google. I would suggest that you take the one you're more interested in. Personally I would choose the networking class, and it might be more applicable when you start hacking at your startup... but take logic if you like it that much. Don't waste $$$ on a class that you're not as interested in -- especially when you have the luxury of choosing between two CS courses.

Also - don't stress over it. It's your last semester, you'll have the rest of your life to learn whatever you didn't learn at Uni.
Good book, but it's somewhat bias. Not gonna go into details, but definitely worth a read.
The Great Switch: Vista to Ubuntu (100%)
Well, I'd rather be part of a bunch of smaller communities who share the same interests as I do, tend to have more in depth knowledge than the whole community about said subjects, and who care about the quality of submissions, like here on news.yc. I find much more value in that. And I think news.yc is evidence enough that social news sites run by niche communities can thrive and prosper.
Or like the time I wrote a Makefile with the following rule:

clean:
rm -rf *.o myapp*

which was supposed to delete "myapp" and "myapp-old" or something. Unfortunately the source was also called "myapp.c"...
nobody knows, it was never reported. if somebody told you they know, they don't.
ditto. from my tmobile dash.
Android Hardware In The Wild: Google Android Prototype In the Wild
Lane Hartwell (woman that took down web2.0 bubble vid): Still wrong on fair use
Stagnate? :-(

Have you seen this chart?
http://reddit.blogspot.com/2007/11/website-needs-traffic-emp...
I heard they got around 200m...
xkcd & reddit unite for non-profit fundraising: submit & vote for the recipient
I heard they gave it away for a couple parties with free beer.
It's not like people haven't been trying. Indeed, the great aspiration to understand humans is the effort to define our understanding (how's that for a circular argument?).

Moreover, you prove your own point - the one I was agreeing with initially out of everything said in this thread. A rocket ship or heart transplant are specific solutions to specific problems. The analogy to intelligence would be one universal solution to flight or one universal solution to getting oxygen and glucose into cells. It's not that a solution isn't possible. It's just that the hope for THE solution is misguided (see also THE cure for cancer).

I really like the flight analogy because of the length of time people put into finding THE solution.
But what we end up with instead are rockets, and prop planes, and jet engines, and airfoils, and gliders, and helicopters, and hoverboards...
Mashable Reviews -- Top 7 Coolest Web Apps of 2007
Google's new iPhone app: "Nothing speaks louder than code" - (37signals)
Climate Change Performance Index 2008 Released
9 Essential Principles for Good Web Design
You can plug into someone else's crawler. For example http://spinn3r.com/.

In general take a look at http://highscalability.com/.
Conde Nast purchased Reddit to take their engine mainsteam, as there are more people interested in fashion and gossip then electronics and programming.

CNs mainstrean reddit, lipstick.com, is stagnating, and has hardly any activity.

Check out sugarloving.com for a decent, mainsteam-content social news site (that does a lot better than lipstick.com)

Both sites, however, miss how visual such interests are.

If Tara Reid falls over drunk again, then you better have a picture of her falling over drunk. Galliano's new collection is better described by images than a paragraph of text.
While Kevin Rose (via Diggnation) and the digg audience generally advocate piracy, that doesn't necessary correlate to the audience using ad blocking software.

Wanting something for free, and wanting something that is already free to be without ads are different things.

You could also serve the ads from the same domain as the thumbnails and images, making it more difficult for blocking software.
You could find some project that you think is painfully close to being perfect except for X, and implement X for them. (For lots of projects, X is documentation, but you can probably find lots of X's if you keep your eyes open).

Or, you could write something on your own: a program that is intrinsically fun and/or useful for you. Find your own "itch" and scratch it.
omg kn0thing how did you find that out! ;)
Alzheimers is heartbreaking and I don't want to post anything that would give you false hope. These folks are running some clinical trials with curcumin / Turmeric & DHA
http://alzheimer.neurology.ucla.edu/trials.html

these are also available over the counter, so in consultation with her doctor you might have her try one or both of these.

Another source for alternative medicine info is Life Extension Foundation, here is their page for Alzheimers

http://www.lef.org/protocols/neurological/alzheimers_disease...
With disappointments like these, who needs successes?
Cass Sunstein argues here, as he has since he first published his book Republic.com, that technology will allow us to filter information to bolster our own beliefs, causing people to form less informed, more polarized opinions. My issue with his argument has been that information technology actually has the exact opposite effect. With so many ideas circulating about the Internet, it is much harder to avoid hearing diverse opinions on any matter. No matter how hard I try to add only tech blogs to my RSS reader, I still end up getting some real-world news. ;)

Indeed, in the second edition of Republic.com, Sunstein acknowledges this and more or less retracted the "Daily Me" prophecy that he apparently is reissuing in this article (and, I suppose, the most recent version of his book). In response to a flurry of criticism from his legal peers, he added a postscript acknowledging the above argument and rephrasing his prediction as a hypothetical possibility that wasn't actually occurring. I have to wonder if that cycle is about to repeat itself.
No way, dude...

If they got THAT much, they'd probably just sit around all day and spend all their time on reddit... ;-)

(or news.yc...)
Take the boring one. You'll find it easier to learn the interesting one by yourself (provided you have time while working on your startup).