skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=73079
I gather that the recovery rate of microfinance institutions is quite high. Grameen bank says they recover 98 %. So that means I'm going to lose 2 % on defaults + 2 % inflation + 4 % opportunity cost (what I get for short term funds). So I would do it for 8 % interest or consider it a donation.
A site would have to come up pretty often for me to want to block it. I don't remember ever seeing the British tabloids on here before.
If I were him, my main selling point would be trust. That is, I would trust him much more with my data than any random guy who copied his code (because he really knows computer security and cryptography and because he has some credentials, too: he's FreeBSD security officer).

If you wanted to compete with him on this ground (trust and security), you'd need to be a good security hacker too and obviously you wouldn't need to copy his code because you could write it yourself.
Didn't watch till the end, but in the first few minutes it did not show any learning, or did it? That would have been interesting, like SILVIA doesn't know an answer to something, guy explains, SILVIA understands and reiterates in her own words.

I am not holding my breath on this one. Especially, why did they bother to create the face and voice recognition? Seems to me creating good conversations is hard enough, I don't see anybody making a breakthrough in that having spare time to create a pretty talking face thingy.
Greenpeace Loves to Pick On Apple
Aren't ask YC questions depressing when pg doesn't answer?
That all seemed terribly important, but I'm not sure what the message was.
I know neither desktop programming nor web programming (I do embedded stuff) but as I see it, web apps require an awful mess of ad-hoc technologies (XHTML, CSS, Javascript, some server-side language and framework, SQL, a webserver, etc.) whereas there are powerful, well-designed tools to easily develop desktop software (Visual Studio, Delphi, Python + Qt or wxWidgets, etc.)

When you develop embedded software you can choose between a grab-bag of tools (using open source tools like the GNU toolchain; very configurable but rather complicated) or an IDE.

It's interesting to have both because, usually the learning cycle is the following: you generally start by using IDEs (when you're at school), then when you start working you like to configure the complete toolchain to learn how everything works and finally, after some time, you're getting really tired of having to do all this stuff manually so you start using IDEs, libraries and the like.

That's why I don't understand the idea behind toolkits that let you write desktop apps using web technologies; it seems like you get the worst of both worlds!
I think the point was that the educational system is extremely expensive and overpriced and was designed in the 19th century for primitive and scarce information flow even though we're now in the 21st century and the system is woefully inadequate to the actual needs of modern students.

That was a very slick way to communicate the idea.
I said that the code was going to be free, not that it was going to be freely licensed. Users will be able to see the source code, but it will be "look, but don't touch" license.

Open Source is great, but after spending a year working on this I don't want end up competing with someone else who is using my code.
Trust my ability, not my morality. I'm just as vulnerable to court orders, extortion, and corrupt datacentre technicians as the next guy, so you shouldn't be trusting that I'll never try to steal your data. If someone puts a gun to my head, OF COURSE I'll try to steal your data.

However, if I've done my job properly, I'll fail -- because the first design principle behind tarsnap is that nobody will be able to steal your data, even if they force me to cooperate with them.
That was altogether pretty lame. Having done some NLP and chatterbot development in the past, I don't see anything here out of the ordinary. In fact, it seems as though they're just trying to impress folks who don't know any better.

People like them (Cognitive Code) give AI research a bad name. As always, put up or shutup.
Django Users: i18n Security Fix Released
Affects Django users with 'USE_I18N' set to True and the LocaleMiddleware activated. Fix prevents a potential DoS attack from a malformed HTTP request.
Affects Django users with 'USE_I18N' set to True and the LocaleMiddleware activated. Fix prevents a potential DoS attack from a malformed HTTP request.
This shows nothing about A.I. Only some good speech recognition software.
Very interesting. You really should contact sponsors.
Consider Nike or Addidas so you can give more credible shoes ;-) Sportswear sponsoring should also be considered. At least for socks.
Yeah but I don't get why you are pointing that out? Am I missing something?
"... Are you saying that tumbleblogs takes copyright over the content that people publish there? ..."

Hey rms, no. Not copyright but control of content and through that the ability to infer. As you know I have this thing with letting third party sites have control of your data. For example by control I mean release this bit of information with "all rights reserved", another "creative commons, Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs".

I know these sites are easy to use, cheap and share. There is a cost. Maybe I'm arguing a point others don't care about. There is a better way to share.

"... I thought that all the hosted blogging platforms let people own their own data. ..."

What about meta-data? What about the logs. Depends what you mean by "their own data". I may seem to be arguing the extreme case but there are other ways you can share your data without third party social sites. It's just they haven't been invented yet. To put the third party out of business and take control of your own data is an interesting idea ... at least to me.
I want to believe, but an prepared for disappointment.
Microsoft's Facebook deal makes no sense
What was it Guy Steele said in a video "my stone tools don't run out of batteries". So true.
Teams Get Ready for Pentagon Robot Car Race
How are you planning to scale better than amazon s3 in terms of cost? If someone were to build an open source thin layer storage/backup client on top of s3 you would effectively be dead.
I'm going to answer this too because we are in the situation you are describing. We are writing a platform that we intend to release under a liberal no-strings-attached free software license (ie: not GPL).

We're not worried at all about people taking our code and using it to build proprietary products. In fact, we are going to encourage people to do exactly that because, as far as we can see, other companies having a vested interest in our platform is pretty much a win-win situation for everybody.

Of course as a business, we have revenue generating activities with the platform planned for ourselves, but it really seems unlikely that another company would choose to compete head on with us about that. We wrote the platform after all, so there are many different ways we could rain on their parade if they decide to use our software in an antagonistic way.
Fred Wilson's tumbleblog
I don't have any brushes in my house, I guess that makes it fairly immune against brush fires.
"New OS X backup software ironically destroys all your data" would be an even more hilarious PR disaster for Apple than all those 'bricked' telephones.
Well, 'risky' knowledge seems generally easier to research than the knowledge to contain it. See the atomic bomb vs. the missile shield, over 60 years later. It's easier to destroy than to create.

Also, humanity isn't exactly united in aiming our progress in the right direction. However, I don't think we'll go extinct any time soon (that would take nothing less than a very big asteroid).
agree, pretty lame that they dont show a believable, casual conversation with someone not related to the project

still, this bot seems many times more articulated than me :P
David Karp: Tumblr's "almost one-man band"
I guess thats why I prefer web development, powerful well-designed solve every problem tools just aren't and don't. Qt's the best of that lot and its not that great. I'd much rather different tools doing different things.
You can't do good 3d in a web browser at the moment thats a definite.

Re: But 6) and 8): at the current stage there hasn't been a lot of interaction between web apps. There isn't a reason why this can't happen. I'm not sure about images in gmail (why not send a link?) but applications like fauxto can get your images from links. All these i-products are made by one company, a web company can make its programs just as intertwined. As a parallel to your example I think a fair number of web applications work with google calendar.

Re: But 1-4: If your company wants to work at the stage people get data off their devices then a web startup makes no sense. Once they've done that though - the first things they want to do is share it. Thats why the internet is huge, there are other people on it.
Im making music apps, to make my own music ... im still not really good though.

[edit]

I'm pursuing the idea that a programer can do art with his programming (and his programs), and actually be good art, not just "look what i did with some code because I'm cool and can write some lines of code just like that" kind of crappy art, but something that a regular person listens, and say, "wow, thats sounds great", without explaining them first how the piece was made and trying to win some points with that explanation.

I know that if the music doesn't sound good then i have to get better at it, else I'm just fooling myself ... pretty much in the same way you just can't make a web app and say "i code it myself!", and then expect it to be a success.

[/edit]

I think the hardest thing is to actually get a good sounding thing (synth, efx, etc).

Is very exciting, to be a programmer and a "music maker", to be able to come up with crazy ideas for music instruments and then actually build them. Just wanting to know how will they sound is a very strong motivation.

You can listen to some of what i've been doing (music tracks) if you are that curious:

http://myspace.com/rugoso

Most of it its done with my software, i just use audiohijack and logic to masterize - add "punch" - and to do some edits - cut the bad parts, put together the good parts.

The track called "Setup Seeker" is an exception, there i only used a sequencer and a midi controller I made, but the sound actually comes from commercial software.

I realize its not really good, I'm working on getting better at it ;)

Some one else doing music apps here?
IMAP, YouMAP, WeMAP: Mail Protocol's Proponents Argue for Better Support
Hotel Biz Zillionaire's Next Venture? Inflatable Space Pods.
but we didn't and still don't necessarily need a missile shield to prevent the atomic bomb from destroying us. we had, and used, diplomacy, locked weapons silos, etc
In which ways could you 'rain on their parade'? stop supporting your software? change the license? They could just hire talented coders to use and update your base from the last point that you did update, or the last point that you had that license. Right? I'm not trying to antagonize you, just trying to understand the legalities of the open-source side of capitalism.
People who work on email systems say IMAP is one messy protocol to deal with. Still, arguably, gives you better features than anything else. Email needs improvement, but it's not an easy task. I am also surprised to see Google implement it after all. I expected that the world would move on to something better eventually. I don't expect this to happen fast though. Migrating email systems is a slow process that regular people and system administrators find painful.
You posted an evidence-based conclusion.
Looks really cool, easy to use. Here is one I just did about Flickr's Juicy Carolina http://www.zoomomail.com/6b8a256a797f78823603ca987cd9f485
Fun
Is F Sharp Enough?
BusinessWeek: Slideshow of Tech Buyouts
- Really, how much should I expect this to cost? >> A few thousands.

- How can I do it for less? >> Agents are a cheaper alternative to lawyers.

- How long does it take until patent is awarded? >> At least 2 years, as far as I know.

- Can I license the method to someone before the patent is awarded? >> Yes.

- How do you choose a patent agent/attorney or do you even need to? (I know you don't HAVE to, but is it a good idea?) >> They should supply you with links to patents they have written (or at least applications). Try to figure out if they are any good. It's a crap shoot..

Do you need one in the first place? I read all the books, then wrote the patent myself including claims. I thought the claims looked fine but when I took it to a lawyer he had to rewrite them. We had a lot of back and forth and now they look dramatically different. The point is if you decide to do it, do it right.

- What am I not aware of that I'll later wish I had known about? >> You don't know the future, so you may never use the patent...
Startup Idea: White Label RSS Readers
Does anyone know of a product like this out there? Seems like there might be a large set of media companies out there who would be interested in this sort of thing. (The reddit / Conde Nast relationship comes to mind)
We could relicense components that they need under a less business friendly license so that they could not take advantage of future improvements to the platform.

But yes, they could then pick up that development on their own by forking the platform from an older version.

The most important way that we could 'rain on their parade' though is just by being way better than them at creating applications based on the platform since we will always understand the internals better than anybody else.

We only want to reserve a small number of commercial opportunities for ourselves out of a large number of possibilities. Cooperating with us to develop one of those other possible product ideas is going to seem a lot more attractive than competing directly with us.

Please don't worry at all about challenging our ideas about this stuff. We are trying to understand the same things you are and our open source business strategy is largely theoretical at this point.
22 amazing sites to listen to any kind of music for free
I am a former patent lawyer (EE), and more recently an entrepreneur who has founded and sold s/w businesses for large sums. If I were you I would forget about patenting your idea and focus on building something people want. Getting a s/w patent will take you about 4 years and probably cost you $20K-$60k to prepare, file, and argue to issuance. I'd forget about it, and focus on solving big problems that real people have.
Objective-C 2.0 Overview (brush up before iPhone SDK comes out)
How Not To Submit An Executive Summary To VCs
A friend of mine told me that an entrepreneur recently mass emailed nearly two hundred VCs his executive summary. To make matters worse, the person carbon copied all of the venture capitalists, enabling all of them to see what the person had done...
His questions covered only very narrow territory. But she was able to connect different parts of the conversation quite well. If you call that lame you're going to run out of words to describe 90 % of the software that's being created (including much of what I've done myself to be honest)
Reverse engineering the storm worm
I have in the past.

Nothing wrong with 'em. Depends on what you want to do, where the market is, and how your business model is going to work.

People are infatuated with the web: it's easy, it's universal, it's cheap. But everything has good things and bad things, and I could see the case for certain types of software being on the desktop. The way to make money is to make the user happy, not follow the herd. :)
On lag: I would imagine that the first teleoperation centers would come from places where sufficient internet connectivity was already in place, and then as the market grew, it would become profitable for service companies to create internet infrastructure in places where wages are lower.

Yes, we envision the first applications being dangerous services. The idea is, at any given time, for any given task, there is a ratio of how long it takes a teleoperated robot to do the task to how long it would take a human. Currently this ratio is maybe 10:1, and a good part of the work in the next couple of years will be reducing that ratio. It's likely to be cost-effective, though, to send robots to dangerous places even when the ratio is high; then, as the ratio nears 1:1, it becomes reasonable to use such robots for household tasks. Then, as we develop autonomy for individual tasks, the ratio will start to go below 1, because an operator can set a robot on one task, switch robots, set a second robot on a task, etc.

We haven't really looked into ruggedizing the thing, partly because Anybots eventually wants to mostly be in the software end of the industry, rather than manufacturing hardware. The point of the prototypes is to provide a platform to prove the quality of the software, and then find manufacturing partners to help make the robots bulletproof and production-ready.

Number of pixels is similarly up in the air, depending on how many we think are necessary to accomplish a given task. Monty's current setup has an array of fixed, cheap cameras, because it's easier to just have a whole bunch of cameras than to have a complicated expensive pan-tilt operation with one camera. One way of reducing the required bandwidth would be to create an option just to ship a user-selected region of the panorama, the one relevant to the current task. For navigation, maybe we could downsample the panorama to provide a wide-angle view of the scene. (The above is all speculation, by the way.)

I'm not totally sure I agree that latency is so terrible. Currently, our operators mostly move the arms pretty slowly, to avoid nonintuitive dynamic effects of pneumatic actuators. I would imagine that if you had to move your arm and wait a fraction of the second for the visual feedback, it wouldn't be so terrible. It would slow things down, but I don't think it would kill you.
Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap.

This applies especially to attempts at NLP.
That it does, on the whole.

For the business units that directly compete with Google, how does it perform?

Much of that profitability are the cashcows that are Windows and Office.
Microsoft hard at work getting Windows to run on OLPC computers
Don't Keep Your Startup Idea a Secret
ie the things that are dying out...

In time the O/S will be pretty irrelevant - like desktop software.
Thanks. I had looked into using an agent; a friend who has a few medical device patents suggested his agent but I've left several messages over the last week and the agent hasn't called back yet. I'm thinking I should interview two or three attorneys/agents before settling on one?

What sort of rates/amount should I be prepared to pay the agent/attorney?
I'm not planning to compete with S3 on cost. I'm planning to compete with S3 on features -- an encrypted snapshotted backup system is vastly better than one which just copies files onto S3.
fyi, the interest rates on microfinance is about 20 % / year or greater, at least for many microfinance operations here in India.

Microfinance only works because the folks doing the lending do so without collateral. The people who take these loans can't go to a bank and take a normal loan because the banks insist on collateral, which being poor, they don't have. The interest on a microfinance loan is not low in practice.

As a matter of fact, many banks (here in India) are beginning to set up separate divisions/ organizations to work in microfinance because of the increased rate of return on money loaned. Again, this is about what is happening here in India, not necessarily about grameen etc. I have friends who work for such banks and there are many shenanigans that happen there. Nothing strictly illegal but lots of very unethical stuff.
"live by the sword, die by the sword." although they also say "don't hate the player, hate the game".

So I don't know. I'd be very uncomfortable even patenting an actual mechanical device let alone an algorithm.
1) no iPod.
-hardware and drivers are a tough science, have you done them, have you certified them? last.fm has a small app that scrobbles, which is a far cry from a desktop app.

what are you describing as a desktop app?

-you can always create a plugin.

2) no graphics card.
-there are a number of 3d accelerated plugins out there
-http://www.papervision3d.org/

3) no digital camera.
-i think flash connects to your digital camera

4) no phone.
- flash and voip are being used together

5) no clipboard for anything but text.
- link to a web copy of it

6) if I want to email my image from fauxto or flickr to someone via gmail I have to download them it upload it. (Nobody ever mentions this elephant in the web 2.0 living room. How do you get data from one web app to another? An un-started startup perhaps?)
- we are using a combination of flash, javascript, and web proxies

7) Half ass interfaces. I really give props to the fauxto guys for pushing the limits but only half ass users like me will ever see it as a worthy replacement for photoshop.
-its hard but the pay off is huge because of the reasons you listed above for a web app.

8) No OS integration. I like how Address Book, iPhoto and iCal can talk to Mail.app.
that can all work together between web apps.
Re: iPhone and GMail - There's no fundamental reason your iPhone couldn't sync with GMail. GMail imports and exports contact using CSV. Download / upload the CSV via Safari, and if your iPhone could parse the CSV, you're good. In fact, someone should write an iPhone app to do just that.
Good 3D in the browser should be coming soon. Look up Quake Zero -- a browser version of Quake 3 -- still years behind what we can do on the desktop now, but not that far.
The cynic in me says that there are two:

1) A certain professor at Kansas State saw YouTube and Google Docs, and thought "tenure".

2) Wireless internet access should be disabled by default in lecture halls.
http://salavon.com/work.php
But what prevents you from building an encrypted snapshot and storing it on S3?
What if the idea is still just an idea, and you plan to implement it but haven't started? There is no headstart in this case.
Leopard Easter Egg
You know, eventually the line between the desktop and the web is simply going to disappear. Web apps will cache more data on the user's hard-drive and run more code on the user's CPU. Meanwhile, desktop apps will store/backup more data online and offload more computation to servers (or maybe other desktops). There's huge potential for libraries or tools that make developing half-desktop / half-web apps easier.

Question is what form will those tools take. I wouldn't be too surprised if the OS just became a ginormous browser that could talk directly to hardware like the graphics card and a huge cache for storing "installed" web apps.
> unless we can interact with it (Silvia) ourselves... it's really hard to believe

Agree.

> This makes it a little more believable: http://cognitivecode.com/products.html#studio

Not really. You can't really download or get it until some future release date, so who knows how good this thing is.
Talking to people will help you evaluate and refine the idea. Making changes and finding a market is really the beginning of "working" on an idea.
What they have is impressive at least as an implementation of AI window dressing. It did a decent job with context assuming this was not overtly scripted as they claim.

Most notably, though, if sylvia was an astounding breakthrough in the sense they claim (strong AI) they would have a sylvia chat-window on the website. The absence of a chat window means they realize if you were to poke at it you would be let-down. If anyone finds a sylvia instance to chat with, please post it.

http://cognitivecode.com/