skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What Android's really about (hint: not the iPhone)
I realized this morning what Google's Android initiative reminded me of. Not the iPhone, DOS.

If you look at the handheld development market today, it looks disturbingly like the 8-bit computer market from the early 1980s:

- multiple incompatible APIs

- multiple chipsets

- multiple peripheral mechanism

- multiple UIs

What IBM did was to create a piece of hardware which everyone bought into. And built it out of generic enough parts that it could be cloned. I'm not sure who the equivalent player this time around.

More importantly, however, Microsoft made DOS the standard API set for all of those clone manufacturers. Software developers could now code for IBM machines and have it works on a thriving infrastructure for all flavours of clones.

Google is attempting to follow the same model by creating a compelling, large, consistent set of phone with a standard API. They're giving it away, in the same manner that Microsoft (inadvertently) did in the 1980's.

This is the game that is afoot. From this standpoint, the iPhone is the Amiga: beautiful, functional, better than everything else, and doomed because it doesn't have the API.

It is also important to note that while it isn't clear that Google will succeed at this, Microsoft is certain to fail. Handheld application development on Windows Mobile is a freakin' mess. And each successive generation of the product gets worse, both from a UI and an API standpoint.

This also explains Java as a development environment: it is the VisualBasic of today. The goal is not to enable the l33t haxxors using Ruby and OCaml and Erlang. It is to unleash the masses of coders that need to write a quick little application to make your barber's appt book link up to his chair scheduler.

Android = DOS
IBM's Roadrunner set to smash supercomputing marks
I am a tech commercialization consultant for some of the crazy stuff that comes out of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Scientists and engineers make all this cool stuff, but they don't really know what to do with it, and how to package and sell it. That's where I come in.

E-mail me and maybe we can figure out what it would be good for. I'm thinking you should patent the technology, show proof of concept comparison tests, and shop application specific licenses around.
Answer for this question is different based on location. If you are in US then degree is not that important as there are many people in US at higher post - based on knowledge rather than degree but if you are in country like India then degree matters because you won't even get chance for interview without good degree..
Oxford's Word of the Year (2007)
A hacker who lives in the north (in the countryside between leeds and york), and commutes weekly to London on contracts. There is talent in the north, you just have to be quick to snap it up, coz the first place we all look for work is in the biggest and best paying market, which of course is London.
Quitting the Day Job: Finding the Guts to Pursue Your Dreams (for now making $5,000 in monthly revenue)
That's why Europe, hmm, even Canada is better than U.S.
Your Google Credit Rating
Come and check out London OpenCoffee

http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1056/
Netflix challenge? No recurring revenue, but, hey, a million dollars. You'll have to disclose the algorithm to accept the prize.
This is a classic example of the saying "When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail"
To a guy with a spam filter, everything looks like mail to be filtered. (it was a cool & very interesting experiment non the less )

Symbolic addition is exactly the wrong kind of problem for this algorithm as the symbols don't have any relationships with each other which is exactly the insight this algorithm adds, and which almost every other dataset has.

I've proven that the algorithm works to my complete satisfaction. I've tested it almost every dataset in UCI machine learning repository and it outperforms the best published results on almost all of them. I've tested it on the data from the KDD 2006 cup a contest in the KDD conference whose goal was to identify Pulmonary Embolism based on data generated from CT scans and it out scored the cup winners by a 50% margin.

I know the algorithm works, I am just not sure how to monetize it...
Here's a start: http://www.netflixprize.com

If you've got awesome prediction technology, that's an easy $50k, and maybe an easy $1 million.
How early is it worth going geographically redundant?
There's no fundamental reason why the iPhone couldn't have Android as well, or at least some level of compatibility. Also, if Android = DOS, I note that DOS did not end up a big win for IBM, who made the hardware. In fact, DOS was one of the standards that helped to turn hardware into a commodity.
If it doesn't make money trading, then it isn't better than existing algorithms, because that's what you're competing against.
Thought about patenting it, but the entire idea of a patent is the ability to enforce a monopoly.
I will never be able to inspect the insides of any commercial AI in the field, so as to allege an infringement on my patent.
You could try to find a good pilot customer who has valuable data and is willing to work with you to adapt the algorithm to their particular problem. What you want as an outcome is a story like this: "Math Whizzes Turbocharge An Online Retailer's Sales" (http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=2...)
Software for rent
I'd love to have a virtual clone of myself, i.e. something that has learned to think like me. I would treat it as a virtual assistant. I'd like it to prioritize and schedule my work. Tell me when it's time to call it quits or when I need to be doing something else.

Essentially, it'd be the virtual embodiment of my conscience.

Going along those lines, let's say you're a brilliant CEO or hacker. You could license copies of your wisdom to others who need guidance.
There are probably some AIs making money out there but they try to beat the market by examining a variety of commodities at once and discovering their interdependencies faster and better than humans can.
I have far more hubris, I'm trying to make it work with pure technical analysis on a single commodity. Which is a bit harder.
I like his blog, he doesn't cover everything that is hot there is other sources for that ... he tries to find more unique stuff, and has some interesting videos ... I agree about his writing style to some extend, but at the same time it feels more like a real blog, like what a blog is supposed to feel like, its more personal ...
Build a public web API to use your technology for a fee. Make it dead simple to incorporate AI into any application.
Brilliant.

I'd throw in another 2bil if you can knock off Maroon 5 and Nickelback at the same time?

Get your people to fax my people.
Wide Finder bugs me... more than one thread doing disk reads is probably a Really Bad Idea
you'd

Where do I say "me"? To repeat myself:

ma, pa, uncle sam, and MegaCorp
Yeah, seemed this way to me too. Except I don't agree about VB:

(a) In the heyday of DOS, people used all sorts of languages. Some of the first DOS programs I wrote were in Prolog.

(b) If the best hackers don't want to build stuff on your platform, you're in big trouble. Hard as it seems to imagine now, DOS was impressive in the mid 80s, and smart people wrote apps for it.

I don't think Google is deliberately courting mediocre hackers by using Java. It was probably just the expedient choice for some reason.
Thats the problem disclosing the algorithm is something I'd rather avoid.
I don't mind sharing it with a company for a licensing fee as long as I don't have to public domain it.
Scoble slams Google Android: we want developers but...
Thats an awesome idea. Integration is pretty simple, as you can use it almost as a drop in replacement for a backprop neural network.
>Symbolic addition is exactly the wrong kind of problem for this algorithm as the symbols don't have any relationships with each other...

That was my thinkng exactly. I am glad it is confirmed by an expert...
What's $R and $H doing? I know Javascript, but I don't know all the cool frameworks very well.

Otherwise, this is mad cool.
Open source and open standards are not the same
Are you sure? You could walk into a public college library and start reading papers. The world needs mad scientists.
I just glanced at the rules. I didn't see anything about disclosing outside of Netflix, but you do have to license winning algorithms to them. The license appears to grant them the right to make & sell products based on the algorithm.
Adobe CEO leaves software company
Working with a medical company to improve the results of their CAD software. After it works (hopefully :) ) that can be a great way to drive the next client.
Social Media Opportunity Booming
To be honest. That event just doesn't interest me at all. The speakers are not going to say anything that is not already on the web. ...and if they do, it will be on the web the day after.

I want to meet hackers. The best way to do that is probably over coffee. Not in the context of someone delivering a speech.
When would you say the best hackers stopped building stuff on Microsoft platforms?
$R = Range object. http://www.sergiopereira.com/articles/prototype.js.html#Doll...

$H = Hash. http://www.sergiopereira.com/articles/prototype.js.html#Doll...
I hate to say it, but handheld application development on Windows Mobile (using VS2005) is actually quite good (comparatively speaking). Deploying and testing to a Windows Mobile handset is seamless and tightly integrated. But thats what you get when you have propriety development environment and mobile platform designed specifically to talk together.

Android is platform and dev environment agnostic which is impressive given how feature rich the API is. And it should be possible to become language agnostic too, if a compiler can be created to compile code down to the native Dalvik byte code used by the Android VM.

I think Google needs to get on the ball and create compilers for other languages if they expect to attract developers who really matter - hackers.
Defensio - Anti-Spam Startup
Depends which parts of functional programming you mean. I use $.each (JQuery), closures, let-bindings, and anonymous functions all the time. Not so much on the statelessness, because:

a.) JavaScript makes it a bit of a pain to deep-copy objects; you can rig up something with $.extend and $.map, but it's not in the standard language the way Python's .copy() and [:] are

b.) Most of the time when you're doing JavaScript, the point is to change the state of the UI. Hard to write stateless code where the intended effect is to change state...
VMware Updates Its Free Offering
VMware Updates Its Free Offering to offer new support for more operating systems, including Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Ubuntu 7.10.
Investing. Look to Machine Insight in Cambridge, and the work they've done. They're trying to train an AI system to be Warren Buffet in a box. You don't hear much about this trend, because people are making way too much money to talk about it openly.

I'll put it this way: if you can consistently beat the market by a few percentage points, you can be a billionaire.
Uhm? The latency as a public api will render it useless for most applications.
"Write essays to please an online audience. For new projects that would be better in a different language, learn the new language. Learn everything from first principles, and when something looks wrong, bring it up. Do all the readings, and read the original works. Program in programming contests. Program for fun. Program as reflex. Don't ask permission to do research. Live in Libraries. Play games with smart people. Give talks. Teach. Publish. Learn."

I fully agree that this is exactly what you should be doing to genuinely learn and have a good time. But doesn't the regimentation of school just get in the way of doing the above? School has so much random pointless overhead you have to put up with, and doesn't help at all with doing the above.
This has been around for a while, and its one of the more impressive pieces of JavaScript I've seen. Its by far the best syntax highlighter I have seen on the web. The code is pretty difficult to follow though, and it doesn't work in Safari 2.
Do not do this. Patents are not good protection, and a good enough algorithm is much better kept a secret.
Well, pretty much every product starts out as a proof of concept or a prototype. Both of those things you mention prove that something specific can be done in javascript. And I can say that they were pretty helpful to my partners and I.
Andreessen forgets the PT Barnum effect. Movies are not like a business, they are a carny show. People go shows that grab them, not for something useful that they'll use day to day. H'wood sells vapor, really, literally vapor. That's the principle behind the summer blockbuster, get folks excited, pay $11 and into seats for a wild ride. They are often disappointed in the product, but can't return it and will continue to hope for better from the next preview.

It will change when the Charlie Chaplin of youtube arrives. Chaplin made a lot of movies, he eventually started Universal studios with the thought that the creators of the films should get the beneficiary. Two things matter in H'wood, owning the distribution channels and skill at hype. A youtube 'show' gets a certain amount of word of mouth hype but that 'youtube-house' has not seen a true impresario. One thing the impresario/producers need is the lure of the big payoff, that exists for VC's but not for producers. What will trigger massive change in the studio structure is when an investment in a youtube production can trigger a huge payoff to the frontman. Then he can dangle the costs of producing a single show in front of the gamblers. Right now the only big winner for a youtube 'show' is google and they will not front production costs.

Shows (movies, TV, Broadway, youtube) are structured very different than a business. They are big for a month, a day, or a few years, then on to the next big thing. Few want version 2.0 of say 'Rainman' (with rare exceptions). But even exceptions are really 'new companies' as opposed to an ongoing offering. There seems to be overlap with the spike of new ventures, but when the venture is sold, all the principals don't leave and go to the next show. After the wrap party, everyone is looking for work. There are support companies with continuation (prop rental, render farms) but the core business is show business.
Most AI application aren't realtime (although some of them in the chemical industry for example are ).
A doctor doesn't care if his cancer diagnosis takes another 20 milliseconds so long as its a bit more accurate. And a bank trying to analyze if a credit card transaction is fraud or not doesn't care about the short delays either.
My startup is focussed on this industry. I have a profit model, and the system is compatible with copyright law but does not leverage copyright. I've taken much longer to get it off the ground than it should have because I work far more effectively in a team and haven't located the right partner yet. If anyone wants to talk and has residency in London or Australia then get in touch.
It'd be neat to hook this up to RescueTime and see if our perceived productivity sinks match up with actual productivity sinks. I found that I spend significantly less time on Internet procrastination than I thought I did, and significantly more time with the computer turned off entirely.

Also would be neat to correlate this with company size and stage of development. In my current startup (which is just me doing all the coding), the top productivity sinks are Internet distractions and slow decision-making, because most of the rest don't apply. In my last employer, the top ones were office distractions, bugs & errors, and working on things we don't finish.

And it's interesting how answers might change with hindsight. A couple months ago, I wrote a library that, if you asked me 2 weeks after I finished it, would've gone into the "Working on things that don't matter." Now I just happened to find another use for it, and it's now a critical part of our infrastructure.
Ask YC: Are we all 2.0 here?
Just out of curiosity is everyone here focused on the so called web 2.0 stuff. More precisely the projects you have in mind, whether you are working on them right now or in the near future, are they all somehow related to social networking, getting users connected, getting them to contribute and so on...

And whats YC's attitude towards these companies. Most of them have no business plans and rely on future ad dollars.

And has YC funded any that is not? do they get more excited if it is or if it is not? are they sick of it already?
Within the last couple of years, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! has proven that the internet is a viable marketing environment without involving the radio juggernaut. Within the first two years of their existence, they had sold 90,000 copies of their debut album by dealing with distribution companies directly. However, CYHSY! is still an extreme phenomenon. I think the key to the future of music is making it more efficient for bands to follow this path. Myspace is cool for bands who don't have the time to make their own website and want to stream some free stuff to fans, but it really sucks for finding new music. Last.fm is a step in the right direction, but for whatever reason I don't enjoy using it for anything but the charts.
My reason is that my mom wants me to. I figure she did take care of me all those years, I might have to go back and get a degree once I'm well off.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79205

Pretty much entirely continuations. Uses MochiKit.
"I don't think Google is deliberately courting mediocre hackers by using Java. It was probably just the expedient choice for some reason."

They're choosing the Java Virtual Machine, not Java itself. Java just happens to the be standard example of a language which targets the JVM. Using the JVM is a prudent choice since many tools already exist which target this platform, it's sandboxed, and it's hardware platform-independent. You already have implementations of many languages targeting the JVM including Java, Python, and Ruby.

In fact, the JVM bytecodes are then recompiled to their special VM's object format, called Dalvit. Using the JVM as the common layer allows them to fit into the existing software ecosystem without causing pain for developers and language implementors.
I'm not web 2.0 -- my work (online backups) falls more into the category of web services (although for performance reasons I'm not using SOAP/REST or even HTTP at all).
Well, there's certainly a large installed base of JVMs on mobile devices. I've only done a bit of J2ME programming for cell phones, but my experience was that the platform felt much more constraining than the language. Java, shmava... It may feel clunky, but it's good enough - for now - in the mobile space.
Not too far off of med school plus residency, etc., which lasts roughly twice as long.
Wall Street Journal is tearing down their subscription walls
Clickpass not Sitepass! :P
So what's the technology behind this?

John.
Tips for presenting your work
Google is employing a small army of Java developers -- are they mediocre? :)

I think Google picked Java because J2ME has already won a big midshare among mobile developers and Google wanted to appeal to them by providing a familiar tool.
I should have been more clear:

Android = DOS
GOOG = MSFT

not IBM.
When they all started writing for the web.

Not sure exactly when that was, though, day and date.
I'm designing a new query language and looking for initial comments.
Go to real university
The issue isn't one developer working with a single device.

My concern is for places like this:

http://patientkeeper.com

That have hundreds, if not thousands, of devices per installation, purchased over the course of years.

We found that limiting ourselves to a very small subset of the available devices on the market was the only way to manage. Otherwise the support staff was awash in calls from physicians running into issues with their new, whizzy phone.

I feel that is Windows Mobile's biggest problem: you end up programming to a handset.
Google's Android parts ways with Java industry group
I had lots of high marks in university (and high school), but I now regret the time and effort I put into it. I should have been thinking more independently, pursuing startups.
Hmm, so where does Joel's NewSDK fit into this analogy?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/18.html

It looks like there are (at least) two simultaneous battles going on to establish new APIs. One for cell phone hardware. One for "web applications". Interesting that Google is heavily invested in both.
Android is built on Google's own Java

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79328
I think the best hackers are still writing systems software and algorithmic software. Web development doesn't really appeal to them from what I can see. This at least applies to the awesome hackers I personally know.
mobile phone companies release new phones every 3 months to a bigger audience. The numbers are totally different than the DOS era when you bought a PC and expected to spend 3 years with it...

There is and will be room for more players. Google just wants its piece of the pie...

multiple vendors, different OSs and different UIs over the years is why the Web just worked and will continue to be the biggest common platform no matter if Android or Anti-Android comes along.
If I used that heuristic on email, most of PG's mail would be in my spam folder.
Then don't disclose the algorithm or collect the $1 million. If your algorithm really is good, demonstrate it by 'winning the prize', but rather than claiming the money and turning your algorithm over to Netflix sell it to someone.

You're really wasting your time with the stock market though. Technical analysis is just silly.
Challenge me. Select a dataset send me the training data and I'll send you my results so you can verify it...

I don't mind being tested.
The problem with your argument is that it is based on trust. You trust that the people in your field are doing interesting research and teaching you important things.

Unlike physics say, students have less reason to trust those higher up in this way in a field such as computer science.
Hi, we're two American hackers in London starting a betting exchange to take on Betfair. Would love to meet up with hackers/startups in London...jason@binaryclub.com
any strict web 2.0 definition?
Applying the algorithm to financial markets would be highly latency-sensitive, though.

I'm not sure I buy the web service idea, either: wouldn't typical applications require a lot of input data (training set + test set) in order to be effective? Uploading all that data could be annoying, compared with just running the algorithm locally at the customer's site.
Yep, classic. Joel's also (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html), which has a slightly different focus.

I prefer Tim's, it's clearer.
> And a bank trying to analyze if a credit card transaction is fraud or not doesn't care about the short delays either.

Oh yes, they do. That I do know.
Huh, neat.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=40064

Talks about some similar ideas -- applying ML techniques to make information workers more productive. Cool stuff.
People will pay for convenience, but that isn't really micropayments.
Training always takes a ton of time, even more so with my algorithm which is a bit more complex. But training is usually only done once and afterwards results can be generated very quickly.
DaniFong addresses that here:

"Learn everything from first principles, and when something looks wrong, bring it up."