skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interview: Dave Grannan, President & CEO of Vlingo a speech recognition application for cell phones
vlingo provides wireless carriers and wireless application providers a voice interface to their applications. With vlingo, instead of triple-tapping on a small keyboard, users can now simply speak to their mobile phones to enter search terms, addresses or any other text.

Using innovative speech recognition technology, vlingo delivers a single voice interface that can work with any mobile application without training or other constraints. With vlingo access to your mobile internet applications is no longer held hostage by twelve tiny keys.

Watch Dave Grannan, CEO and President of vlingo talk in details about the business model and view a live demo.
Having your wife as a co-founder is going to severely test the limits of your relationship. Be prepared.
Not necesarily boring. What if your dream is to become the best body-builder? "Fun" and "boring" are relative. Some consider fun to go out every Saturday to hit a disco, but I don't really like them (way too noisy). On the other hand, I consider programming fun, but there's a lot of guys that think that me coding in my free time is weird.
OK, but the disadvantage (that everyone gets all content) is a pretty big one. That means that Joe User gets the admin page sent to them hidden using CSS.

If you want to cache individual pages for users then you can do that with a standard cache mechanism (e.g. memcached) and just expire the cache when you decide an update is necessary.

John.
I really meant that, no need to down-vote me. I was thinking about color combinations for the front page and stuff like that.
I guess my problem is that he's implying that simple systems are bad because they can be easily implemented by anyone.

It is very easy to write a Scheme interpreter, and a lot of people write very bad interpreters, but that doesn't imply Scheme is a bad language. Java is a lot harder to implement, so the few implementations out there tend to be very good.

As for language, I agree that the C programmers left are on average better than the average Python programmer (I'm not using Java for this example because I don't actually know much about Java), but that doesn't imply that it's better to use C than Python because the average C programmer is better than the average Python programmer. Personally, I'll use Python wherever I can even though I'm a better C programmer than Python programmer, simply because getting things done in Python is on the whole easier.
At large companies, much of the busy-work that you remember from school goes on. It's important for everyone to have something to talk about at their weekly status meetings. At large companies, there are lots of useless people, useless management, etc.
Bring out the Renaissance Man (or Woman): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_man
It would be cool if he system looked at what links I clicked on and then didn't vote up. That could be used to get an idea of what I didn't get excited about; perhaps that would could as a fractional vote down.

John.
You suspect it - why? Just assuming a conspiracy would violate Occam's Razor. Enthusiasm is simpler.
Fact or fiction: Is there a shortage of IT workers and programmers in the U.S.?
A lot of clicks (at least most of mine) come from the RSS feed. I only come to the site when I really want to vote something up, or if I want to comment (or read comments). I'm a fairly passive user of YC, so a lot of my votes I didn't even 'click' from the site, so you'd also have to check those from the RSS feed for this to even remotely be effective.
Yet wine ratings in places like Wine Spectator are always done in a blind manner.

http://www.winespectatorschool.com/wineschool/Tasting_Guide

Wonder how both things can be true at the same time? Perhaps the tasting methodologies are just a fancy random-number generator? Something smells fishy.
From the variation between Ron Paul's prominence in hacker opinion and on reddit. Till now (and I have literally been observing reddit since day 1), the topics on reddit have been an exaggerated version of typical hacker opinion. E.g. though there were a lot of anti-Bush links, most people in the hacker world do dislike Bush. But I have literally never heard anyone mention Ron Paul in conversation except when talking about how his supporters spam the aggregators. He's like Levitra. I only even know his name as a spam token.
Warning: Software Startups are Not as Easy as Everyone Says
I agree - someone could prove me wrong but this article just kills the whole point of using rails with a bunch of bad practices.

If someone wants to improve their rails app performance, it's better to use cache_fu and memcached:

http://errtheblog.com/post/4872

to me it makes a lot more sense to cache your db calls instead of the view layer
You are making the classic internet mistake. Your social circle is much, much more insular than you think it is. This is not a criticism, it's a result of the fact that you pick where you hang out, and so do the other people who hang out there. The internet is very effective at matching like with like - and the result is you think "everybody knows..." or "nobody has heard of...". Not so.
Skintile: Electronic Sensing Jewelry
Cool.

But finding the distance between two N-D points isn't really hard at all.

What is hard is finding the distance between a point and a set of points. Or a set and a set.

Doing exhaustive search is wasteful.

If you're interested, look in to K-D trees as a real solution. Best-bin-first modified K-D trees are the basis of the SIFT object instance recognition feature matching algorithm. Break an image into a set of ND features. Matching a geometrically consistent subset of those features to a previously seen object works extremely well.

The algorithm is general. Change and add features to make it more powerful or faster. But the idea of using a set of ND linear features to describe an object should last for years.
Ok, If I'm correct, this has been hashed a hundred thousand ways. People in the industry get excited about some new technologies, and a couple of new ideas, (portals, social networks, semantic web...there will be more) and a few somebodies make it big. Lots of other people say "x and y market could also use that idea" and soon it's a paradigm with buzzwords.

Now there is a group of developers and entrepreneurs equipped with some good ideas, some buzz words, and some drive, they all take these things to the VCs of the world. VCs are smart people, and I'm sure that they get tired of seeing 20 different angles of the same box.

Business principles haven't changed since the 1890s. You have to either do something new, or do it much much better than everyone else to make it big.

I think that the message that he's trying to give is "Give me something new, and show me that you don't need to bank on the success of somebody else to do it"
From personal experience, it's not.
Exactly! It is a big mistake to assume that you can express relations between the entities you study with a single number. I've never heard however of non-metric topological spaces used in applications.
In other news, experts can't tell the difference between a long line and a short line:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

This study doesn't show that there is no difference between a great wine and a mediocre wine. All it shows is that people can be tricked into disbelieving their senses.

EDIT: As for the study about experts disagreeing, you could just as easily claim that because some ice cream experts prefer vanilla and others prefer chocolate, the ice cream industry is teh fraud.
<expert>

I don't know why anyone even bothers serving Coke. Pepsi is so much better. Obviously.

And Rails is so much better than PHP.

And Apple is so much better than Microsoft.

And Chevy is so much better than Ford.

See how easy that was?

</expert>
Did anyone you know vote for Nixon?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Kael#Nixon_.22quote.22
I like the Ron Paul stories on Reddit. I agree with others, this is grass roots democracy.
expert {
background: #000;
color: #FFF;
font-size: 40px;
text-align: center;
}

All expert tags need some CSS ;)
Well, in a blind tasting it's much more likely that the judges will describe the quality of the wine itself. Otherwise the appearance of the wine and the bottles make a difference. This holds true for any product and companies spend tons of money finding ways to optimize their packaging to "enhance" the perceived quality of their product.
Django you can do something similar.

http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/cache/#template-f...

Cache based on the page name and the user id as your keys, and magic presto! Cached! Works well with facebook profile templates, etc.

Not vulnerable to any CSS injections or anything like that.
Do you worry about that being the case with, say, you or Joel Spolsky or, uh, Lisp? To an outsider, these phenomena all look the same: a pretty obscure person or technology getting lots of attention from a certain kind of website.

When you're outside of a popularity bubble, you have pretty good odds of identifying it as such -- but that doesn't mean you can't be inside another popularity bubble, too.

(I don't actually think this is true. As far as I know, support for Spolsky, Paul, and Lisp is genuine, and its concentration at reddit is just a typical network effect. I don't see why this has to be any more complicated than "People who like Ron Paul news will read it at reddit and vote it up at reddit, attracting more people who like Ron Paul news")
Why stop there? This guy's an expert, right?

.expert { font-style:oblique; text-decoration:blink; font-weight: 900; }
I don't know. "specializing" in a couple of OO languages and a couple of functional languages sounds like way more work then necessary. You might be familiar with a couple of languages and a master at 1, but to master 4 or more programming languages at the same time is going to be very time consuming.
I thought that was Scott Adams.

The advice is sound because it circumvents a hazard of trying to become a 'generalist' - Most make the mistake of thinking the formula for Renaissance Man is 'learn everything'. I think it's more accurately to spend 60-80% of your time going deep on 2-4 specializations (the more diverse the fewer) while spending 40-20% of the time getting a broad overview of anything else that interests you. Do for x years, choose new specializations, rinse & repeat.
F-Secure on potential Android security problems
I'll post the same thing here that I did at reddit: there's no use for this script since the Reddit Content Filter, another GM script, is already out there (and way superior - no offense meant). the RDF includes filtering by title, user, and/or site as well as RegEx...

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8751
How will OpenID change your site?
Shares of Alibaba.com Climb on First Day of Trading
How to Spend Less Time Chasing Investors
Yeah this isn't something where a brute force attack is going to work. One of these a year, or one every six months, should be doable for most people. But definitely don't try the whole shebang at once.

And I wouldn't look at it as work. More like nerd-traveling: you get to see a lot of neat and unusual things, and when you're done, you appreciate home a lot better and have a better perspective on things. Having said that, I'd be sure you solve a few non-trivial problems. Traveling is no fun if you just take pictures and don't get out and participate.

In general, if you haven't tried a new way of making solutions in the last five years or more, you're sucking wind in this biz. That's advice just about _keeping up_, getting ahead is an even tougher game.
Greatest Copy Shot Ever Written: what makes good copy good?
I'm talking about the change in the correlation between reddit stories and the conversations I hear, not its absolute value.
I don't mind Java so much. It's the incompatibilities between phones that's the killer. IMHO it's far worse than the browsers used to be.
Need Publicity for you Startup? Try the Crunchies.
Warning: the stove is HOT!
Yeah the quote is by Adams, but I found it through pmarca so I linked to that article instead.
You are right, but we missed something:

position: absolute;
top: 0;
left:0;
Programming the World in a Browser: Real men don't do Javascript, do they?
Nokia perfects the clicky tactile touchscreen - iPhone gnashes teeth, swears revenge
Did everyone only read the last 3 sentences of that comment? Obviously in itself the fact that I don't hear anyone talking about Ron Paul means nothing.
Hey Don,

One out of 300 ain't something to be proud of!
I would disagree. Look at your karma levels in this thread. I never saw it so low compared to the responses to your posts by others. This would suggest that people in this forum(presumably hackers), like Ron Paul and are the same type of people upvoting on reddit/digg.
Like the article suggests, this award appears to have been invented to give the media something to write about, and to give Sun a plug.

A startup is supposed to be about building a successful business, no? Success for a startup could be defined in lots of ways, but I doubt that winning a media award would be one of them. Will the judges give preference to startups using Java or Sun kit? Can any startups afford to use Sun kit? What happens if one of the winners subsequently falls flat on its arse? I would bet that most YCers wouldn't give this award a second thought.
Your Privacy Is An Illusion: Facebook to stalk you while you shop
In the news:
- Google has launched two major platforms within the past week
- Last week Google introduced OpenSocial for the web and yesterday their mobile platform Android

- Both platforms have the same approach: both open, easier for developers to make applications, developers will be able to reach a lot more potential users much easier and faster, Google is constantly looking to add new partners (major ones) that would also support these platforms.

From Before:
- In the 90's everything seemed to be closed and platforms were mostly used to set standards and create lock-in situations and exclude the competition (Microsoft was the pro here). --> the exact opposite of what Google is doing now!

- The web has changed many things and creating such lock-ins are not possible anymore, at least not the same way as before

We Know:
- Google's mission and business model requires them to have access to all the information on the web

- Facebook and other sites have proved that they can accumulate vital information and have them within their walled gardens, and exclude Google from accessing them

- Google knows they can't own all the information themselves or have exclusive access to them

- But they also know their strengths, if information is available to everyone they believe they are better in getting that information, so other companies will not be scaring Google by also having access to those info

Question:
- with the new platforms and the new approach, is Google simply making sure they'll continue to have access to all the information out there, OR are they in fact doing more behind the scenes that would allow them to take advantage of their platforms and set standards the way companies did in the 90's, will they be able to create lock-in situations again?
look at my comment underneath I made it point form for you...hope that helps
Is the list of languages in the graph the complete list of languages searched for? If so, its not very thorough. For example, Objective-C, which by these same metrics looks at least as popular as Lisp (Freshmeat has 4 times as many Obj-C projects as Lisp projects), is not included.
I agree but is Google doing this because they are scared they will lose their position by losing access to all the data out there?

And will they have advantages in terms of advertising on these platforms?
Might not be a big deal.

http://theharmonyguy.com/2007/11/06/ning-opensocial-implemen...
Have you tried J2ME polish? It makes things a tiny bit easier.
Google speaking about Android/gPhone at Future of Mobile
That would be a great replacement for the classic MacBooks, however I'm assuming the price tag will go around two to three grand...
Programmable Water
Netvibes Wants To Tap Into Other Social Networks
Apple Working on Tablet?
It's a matter of trust. Each of these people has had thousands of red wines served to them, with none of them being an impostor white with food coloring. Therefore if a white is served to them in disguise, they simply assume it's a red, because why would anyone ever do that?

Also, whites are typically served chilled, reds aren't. If someone gave me a warm white wine with red food coloring in it I might not care for it but I'd definitely be fooled. That doesn't mean there isn't a difference.

A much better test would be to blindfold them and ask which are whites and which are red. I bet they'd do considerably better.
Thats pretty cool. I like it when technology surprises me with what it can accomplish
It definitely is a bigger project than we realized going in.
Hacking OpenSocial - one app at a time
Five New iGoogle Themes
I think the elephant in the living room ignored in this debate is:

Median wages in the U.S. are falling. Full stop.

Mr. Aron keeps saying "so get out of IT and do something else". But except for a small and shrinking number of people, wages have been stagnant for the last 7 years. There are a handful of people soaking up all of the growth in our economy.

So there's a good chance that even if you do pick something besides IT, you don't have a very good future ahead of you in the United States. Unless you are already rich, in which case the future prospects of getting even richer look very bright.

I think startups are a good solution to this problem (not just software, but taking advantage of the ease of incorporating, marketing, communicating, outsourcing etc. enabled by technology). But I am concerned about how well it scales. In startups, the best competitor in a market can take almost all of the growth and profits for itself and leave little for everyone else. Are there enough startup niches out there to provide a living for everyone in a country with 300 million people?

Otherwise, look for more peasants with torches and pitchforks demanding a more socialist/communist economic model.

(ps Yes, this is all my observations from my perspective living in the U.S. but I am curious if people in other developed countries face similar issues and how they are dealing with it.)
In other news, Asus stock rises inexplicably. Asus CEO now being questioned for stock manipulation.
Dave Winer: I'm not happy with Leopard
Google's OpenSocial looks more like hype than substance
It's indeed an industry loaded with pretentiousness.

Here's a clip from a related and interesting article about the wine industry:

Source: http://money.cnn.com/2007/09/05/news/companies/Two_Buck_Chuc...

>>>In 2002, Franzia persuaded Trader Joe's to sell a low-end label called Charles Shaw (after the winemaker who sold the tony label to Franzia, and dubbed Two Buck Chuck by consumers) that waged war on domestic wines in the $4 to $10 range - and was named best chardonnay in a blind taste test at July's California State Fair over far pricier competition. The label is one of America's fastest-growing, selling 5 million cases per year, all through one chain of stores.
Apple Tablet Concept: the iPad Touch
The other part of the comment wasn't as interesting. Taken as a whole, what you said sounds indistinguishable from "Reddit used to be like what my friends talked about, only more so. Now it's like that, with another subject they didn't talk about. This is probably because it's being manipulated."

What's interesting is that I've heard this from all sorts of people on reddit! Some of them were talking about Google, some of them were talking about XKCD, some of them were talking about Steve Yegge, and lots of them were talking about you. So a) you're the first person to be right about this phenomenon, b) you just missed it before, or c) this is just how people react when they find out that they're suddenly in a minority within their peer group.
My rule number one: if you don't know your competition right off the bat, don't simply assume they don't exist, look hard to find them ... (and if you end up finding them, ask yourself why they couldn't make it to a point that you would know about them without doing so much search, and how your product would be any different than theirs and same thing wont happen to you)

If you have direct competitors then it won't be too hard to tell who they are, you do some basic searches and you will find them.

But I think you should look at indirect competition as well... look at all those companies that if they intend to come in they can crush you over night (and I don't mean Google, Yahoo and the other big guys necessarily, I mean all those other companies that their business models allows them to do the same thing as you do, if they like to do so, but they never thought about it or had the intention to do it... sometimes they might have some strengths that would make them more successful than you.)

Also, I would keep in mind that if your product differentiates from the competition by just a few features you don't have a huge advantage

And if you ever intend to compete with any business that has any social aspects to it (i.e. web 2.0 businesses) never forget the network effects they could have just for being out there before you
Why do you people up vote this stuff? This place is turning into planet of the obvious... do you really need to read a page of it's not easy?

pfff junk
we only get to see the titles here if the system was designed to give a teaser of the article or maybe a separate voting of the quality of the article then we would know more clearly how good the contents are .. I guess voting up and down will help to some extend to solve the problem .. i would agree its not the most useful feature
this is an interesting article
It's not as obvious as you might think. Otherwise, there won't be tens of thousands of anandoned startups.
Google demands non-fragmentation pledge for Android
Symbian CEO: Android just another Linux platform
HTC already working on Google phone **
Ask YC: Who's launching something soon?
I'd like to get to know some more of the startups you people are launching. When's your launch date?

What are you launching?
Yeah I have, I remember the release candidates for version 2 were having some problems, so I just went to check and it's still on RC4 since March this year.

I actually remember reading that Gmail's mobile client is written with J2ME Polish, maybe Enough Software is working with Google?
Well, let me give you an example. I know RP from lewrockwell.com (LRC). He's been a columnist there for literally years, long before he entertained any thought of a 2008 presidential run. LRC is a hub for hard core principled libertarians (and is friendly to libertarian anarchists). It's also pretty right-wing Christian, and can be a bit nutty. I don't care for that, but I come back for their libertarian articles. Ron Paul fits right in there. However, I wouldn't link an LRC article onto Reddit. What would be the point? Libertarian minutiae would never get voted up. So I'm a silent bridge between the two cultures. I expect a lot of the other more hardcore libertarians heard of him there. In another case, a hard leftist might have heard of him on DKos when he made the news for arguing with Giuliani over Iraq in the Fox debate. Each of these people bridges him onto Reddit. And if they decide not to be a silent bridge, but to open up the conduit and start linking articles, then suddenly people who never mentioned Ron Paul are crowing about him, and others are voting. But you don't see that, because you don't overlap DKos or LRC, so it comes like a bolt out of the blue for you. Who is this guy and where is his support coming from? It was already there, you just never got told.