skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They apparently use Ruby for their front end and Rails for their internal tools. I am a little curious as to how that turned out. I haven't seen any blog posts recently.

With all due respect, I doubt if they have the brain power to create something to dethrone Google. Google has some incredible people working on search.

A couple of years ago, when the Yahoo vs Google war for search dominance was at its peak, I asked a friend of mine who worked at Yahoo, "Who is your equivalent of Peter Norvig? " (who was then Google's Director of Search Quality - today he is Director of Research) and after some hemming and hawing he told me " well, we don't have anyone like that but then we are a media company, not a search company.("We are a media company" was the mantra Terry Semel was repeating at Yahoo then) and I knew then that Yahoo would never beat Google (in search).

I wonder what the Powerset guys tell themselves? I find the internal mythologies of companies fascinating.
I would strongly advise against this. The INS likes to look at things you've done in the past (entering the country for pleasure) and argue that you had certain intentions at the time (starting a business, which they could deduce from the fact that you're still in the country and now applying for a visa). Given that the worst case, deportation, bars you from entering the US for ten years, it's not worth it imho.
1. This method wouldn't work in heavy traffic.
2. That "nearly constant 10mph breeze" is improving fuel efficiency for the cars behind you through reduced wind resistance.
3. A similar idea for generating power from traffic is through the use of speed bumps as power generators. But that doesn't work either. Here's an interesting article from wired: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2001/06/44518
Absolutely! I just looked at your website and I think there is an area of possible collaboration. Let me study it a bit more. But a quick question, to what extent are you using relational databases to represent base level facts in your system?
He means the IP of the startup itself, not of the content flowing through it. Google would have been a lot more worried about buying YouTube if some of the code had been written for one of the founders' previous employers.
Your latter comment would be one use. There are a lot of ways to recapture wasted energy (such as all the wind that cars generate when they go by). If this wind turbine can generate electricity from just a little wind, then highways are a great candidate!
We're not using their web servlet code. All we use from Mzscheme is the core language.
Thanks for the encouragement. Yes, let's keep our fingers crossed and hope to meet in November.
No. In fact it still runs on CLisp now, I believe.
This is quite a brilliant little idea. A couple of years ago I was involved in a newspaper project (Boston.com) that used Squid with ESI to build the page from disparate Zope backend servers, and it resolved quite a lot of problems--like being able to have a fast and database-less server in the front that could make decisions about which backend servers to draw from based on the required content. The backend servers then didn't need full copies of the database, because they would only ever be asked for content they were authoritative for.

DBSlayer takes the web server and the proxy server out of the picture, and puts the site building burden (to some degree) on the client. It could, theoretically, also make decisions about which database to query, such that the memory caches on the database servers will always be primed with the content that the database is authoritative for.

The comments so far seem concerned about security...but DBSlayer wouldn't need write access, or access to all tables. It could simply be a read-only window into some tables. I guess that's a foreign notion to folks who do everything in one process, which has to have write access...but it's one of the aspects of proper databases that makes them useful in large scale deployments.
Surely this technology is fairly well-known and widely deployed these days (for example, to enforce the London congestion-charging zone). What did your software do over and above what's currently being used?
What's wrong with the landlords? I know nothing about this place but since I might move to SV I'd like to know why to keep away from it.
From what I understand from the presentation given at the Singularity Summit by Barney Pell, Powerset's NLP technology was developed over 30 years by Xerox. (You can listen to the audio at http://www.singinst.org/media/singularitysummit2007 ). That could conceivably give them an edge, or at least a short term lead. :o)
Great! We're using Mysql for our database, so I think it would be the perfect platform for seeing what you can do with real world company data and hopefully adding excellent value to our service - a win win. (I've just emailed you to get on the beta)

Business model idea: We could let people use your search free for the first month, and then let them decide if they want to keep using it for an additional amount of money on top of our base subscription per month.
They split them up for an initial run through, and then all of them read the good ones, I think. pg is definitely not the only one reading the application.
Well, there is a big difference between poking around in CSS and creating a design for the actual site. On the other hand basic programming is not really complicated especially if you are technically inclined and are willing to learn. You'll probably have to leave the heavy lifting sooner or later to experienced developers but I would recommend learning to do some code yourselves. Getting developers this early on will usually cost you either money (which you might not have) or a ton of equity.

I would personally recommend picking up some Python and maybe Pylons and start hacking some webapps (others might recommend Ruby and Rails, etc). How else are you going to build a demo from the 15k that YC provides?
"You copied and pasted into MS Word so that you can do a word count on your answers."

You're doin' it wrong!
Anaphoric: Our consumer web search product is still some time away, but we have launched Powerlabs to a small group of users and we are inviting more every week. I'll see if I can get you in to the next batch.
Not to start an argument (you(==bsg) make a good point), but one should be very careful in judging a technology as an "edge providing" one just because it comes from PARC.

PARC has certainly done brilliant,pioneering work in many areas. What most people miss is that PARC had many deadwood/unsuccessful projects (and people and worthless papers ) in its time.

I know nothing about what exactly PARC licensed to Powerset, but without more data, I wouldn't automatically assume that it provides an edge.
The article isn't saying that all standing presentations are bad, just ones with VC. With that said, I think that people should present however they're most comfortable.
For new comers: Before the admins changed the title, the title started with prefix: Holy @#$%&!!. I thought in this case it was worth defending.
Honestly it may be somewhat heretical to say it, but I doubt very seriously that an old Xerox patent really has so much relevance.

The academic community has been working with semantic indexes for quite some time. I know many of those involved. The real question is whether they have developed something fundamental recently.

As for performance, yes perhaps they have some innovations. But with NLIs its usability that matters the most in the end.

At a more technical level I think the question is how expressive/consistent is the logical form they are mapping too. If they have developed a parser that maps to an LF that can lead to actual inferece then that would mean something.
But then they need an open domain strategy to actually reason over such expressions in a meaningful/useful way. We will see.
I do UI, design, HTML, and CSS. I can code and I've done a lot of work with LAMP setups, but I don't really consider myself much of a hacker (mostly because I don't really love hacking as much as I do design, and I'm definitely not as good at it).

Understanding PHP/MySQL is nice because it allows me to communicate with hackers, but I wouldn't know where to start with anything serious like writing an API.
wc -w [file ...]
Supply Side Economics Fail Music Industry Again
Actually, Jobs makes decisions and presents them. As Kottke explained to those who complained, the prize is for the movie. No movie, no prize. The movie was a slide show dramatization of results Gore didn't find.
heh well i mean YC is only one avenue for success, and it certainly doesn't make sense to tailor our plans and/or our idea for YC. if we're the right fit for each other then it will work out,and if not there is no sense in forcing the issue. we don't have a demo yet simply because we haven't felt as if we'd done enough research and thought enough about what we're doing and for whom until this point.

it's pretty serendipitous that we stumbled upon YC about 4 days before the application deadline :)

we're working with a family friend who has had quite a bit of success in the SV startup world, and he seems fairly convinced he can introduce us to a friend who can do some work for us as a favor, and a perhaps a bit of money or equity (certainly not founder status).

furthermore, our concept doesn't really require any intense programming in the first iterations. it won't be until we actually prove the concept (via a barebones site) that we will need 'heavy hitters' to take things further, and by that time we feel like we will have acquired at least some funding based upon how well things have been progressing thus far.
I still don't understand what was offensive considering no actual expletives were used... I guess nowadays even special ascii characters aren't safe
Thanks and sorry about the public grousing to get myself invited :-).

I understand that you guys are taking on a profound and very important challenge. And I am very much wishing the venture success. I think that NLIs eventually will become a dominant interface solution for many tasks, search included. I look forward to looking into what you guys have.

BTW are you doing anything in domain specific search? Feel free to reply at mjm@anaphoric.com or mjm@cs.umu.se.

Regards,
MM
http://valleywag.com/tech/justin'tv/landlord-evicts-startupp...
Let's see. You somehow generalized your personal experience to the entire population of technically able people. This, in addition to being incorrect, is strangely presumptuous. Who can speak for the demographics of an entire industry?

Secondly, you're calling those disagreeing with you untruthful. You're challenging not merely the validity of their view, but their experience. "Face it", you say.

Finally, you call all the girls in the industry 'not very good looking at all'. That includes me, and many of my friends, whom you've never seen. It also includes Jessica Livingston, who, if you deign to recall, is the only person working on YCombinator fulltime.

So, yeah. It's insulting. And worse, untrue. So wise up.
I don't really think that batteries are so necessary, and this development is phenomenal.

This is huge. It means wind is cheaper than nuclear, even with most subsidies.

We don't need batteries -- Arthur Rosenfeld has done work going way back that shows how distribution isn't a problem for windpower. That's a widespread myth, perpetuated by media echo chambers, funded by big business.
http://www.lexxe.com/
Justin.TV: A Site Warhol Would Relish
I assume its the linux build because we are having a devil of a time getting full ISO-8859-1 encodings to work under windows.

But perhaps that's because I want to support Swedish characters. Maybe I should kill that requirement.

In any case this is great news because I was a bit concerned about going all the way to market on CLISP. Some manager at Boeing was suggesting to me that I might need to go with Allegro or something else. It sounded expensive. And my belief now is that I need to keep costs/prices low/reasonable to enter my market. But in the end I think the manager was just expressing his FUD about open source.
This really is just totally and utterly wrong and bad advice in just about every way possible:

"while you are here for "fun", make the connections and taste the waters. If everything is running smoothly then you can contact the Immmigration in place and make the necessary changes"

- If things are running smoothly after 6 months you're going to be kicking yourself and wishing you had sorted out these visa issues earlier when you had more time to deal with them and they were a considerably smaller threat to your startup.

"YOu will be surprised how much can be done if you sit down with them live and tell them you are building a 100 million dollar company"

- You'll only be surprised if you actually thought having a sit down chat with someone from Immigration and telling them how great your startup is was going to have any effect at all. If you've ever actually met someone from Immigration you'll know they really couldn't care less and will expect you to file the right forms just like everyone else.
Eh, you're right, although I do think the fact remains that buying YouTube is buying a lawsuit.
foxnews.com? really?
You have a good point. I was trying to offer advice regarding applying to YC, but certainly there are other avenues and if you can find someone to do a prototype without too much cash or equity then you're set. I imagine it might be hard to recognize great developers when you get around to hiring, but if you can get someone you trust to help out it might work out. Good luck!
I wish they had given examples of how they use it internally. From the lack of authentication I would guess that they don't call it directly from the client, but it could be made safe for certain readonly data.

While their reasons for using http and its benefits are clear, I'm still trying to figure out why they used json though. Why not XML or a compact binary protocol?
You know you're obsessed with getting into YC when... you write a post about it on Hacker News :)
And yet he didn't register windbelt.com or .org, which is too bad, because it's such a great name and a good place for people to learn more about it. I guess it's quite clear he's not in it for the money, though.
We are demoing some domain specific use cases in Labs, but the goal is ultimately an open box search engine at web scale.
I was thinking principally of the sheer number of man years that have been put into the system. I know that's not a very accurate yardstick, hence the smiley. :o)

My understanding is that the technology Powerset got from Xerox is a production quality, multiple language parsing system with a language-independent core, with the long development time being due to the engineers being allowed to work on the problem until they had solved it to their satisfaction.

Of course, all of my information comes from the above-mentioned presentation, so a large pinch of salt is almost certainly required. :o)
you can take what you said and apply it to google and their published pagerank. or the establishment of the previous players.

as long as there is a lot money in search, there will be a lot of people competing for it, and people funding them. And the very least it will do is keep google on its toes, which is good.
PCs to Be Seen, Not Heard
i mean, yea, we definitely have out work cut out for us.

best of luck to you as well :)
true point. the thing is, are the people that own the sailboats going to use it? and all the other people who might have useful stuff? the thing is to reach a critical mass, I haven't done that before, but is possible for sure, just takes some time. best of luck with you project, sign me up for beta invites if you are going to work on it.
Will be in San Francisco this Sunday/Monday... what to do/anyone want to meet up?
Hi everyone. My cofounder and I will be spending all day Sunday and Monday in San Francisco (just missing the reddit party, unfortunately) and are looking for things to do. We're up for anything, restaurants, bars, tourist attractions and beyond. Thanks for your suggestions.

I would love to meet up with anyone that will be around Sunday afternoon/evening/night or Monday evening. Post here or email me.
i dont think the problems with innovation in large companies are caused by the number of employees. I think often the management style at large companies tends to stiffle innovation. If Google can maintain it's atypical managent structure and encourage bottom up innovation and remain willing to take risks on ideas that are not profitable at firet (and unrelated to its corr business) it can remain a leader in innovation.
Me. but my co-founder is a coder.
Wow, congratulations to justin.tv -- great article! Fantastic work to get in the New York Times well after launch.

It also shows that when it comes to getting PR, you can't beat offbeat. Reporters love ventures like j.tv that are doing something way out of the mainstream.

The comparison to the Al Franken SNL skit was very amusing and appropriate. I'm surprised I hadn't heard that before.
Yes it was my impression that it aimed at the open domain.
BTW are you doing any dialogue modeling?

The reason why I asked about closed domain work is because that's what I am working on. See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWio8bHq4wQ
Musings from Alexa
How do they come about their traffic rank numbers?
my first computer had a problem with the fan so that every few hours it would start to rattle so loud it would wake me up in the middle of night. the only way to make it stop was to hit/punch the damn thing.

eventually there was this fist sized dent in the side of the case.

besides losing sleep, i never really understood people who fawn over super-quiet pcs, unless they are going for a media center. our way around that was using a pa system for sound. not only did it drown out the cpu fan, but it rattled the walls.

nowadays though, d-link's dsm series seems to be killing the media center pc concept. we found one on CL's free stuff, and it's pretty amazing. haha don't ask me why he was giving it away.
I say don't waste time doing all this stuff.
Riiight Dani.

I am not generalising, I am averaging up. There is an implicity on knowing that for every group, there are people that are outside that average, but they are usually the exception, and not the norm.

As in every pool, there are people that wre good looking, and there are less good looking, but the AVERAGE tech person (girl or guy) is not that good looking. Add: lack of going to gym regulary, not dressing good at all (usually we look like just rolled out of bed), we are a fugly bunch. (every tech party I have been too, this has been the norm). I am including myself there. Even I can try to dress better, go to the gym, and look good, I seldom do, as that takes effort and my priorities are somewhere else.

You want good looking? Go work for Gap in SF, or any of the advertisment/fashion companies in NYC, and you will see that there you are implicitly REQUIRED to look good, so even if you are not that good looking, you will make it up with some good fashion sense.

As I said, my statement stays both for guys and girls. Now, add that there are so few females in our industry, (the ratio is something like 1 to 8 ) the average tech/startup guy has much much less contact with the oposite sex.

Hence all the jokes we get "Your website looks good, but when was the last time you had a date?"

And I feel my comment was totally approperiate for this thread, as we are talking about ties and fashion.
Ask News.YC: Who is working on a Mobile Startup? (Me:Mobile+VOIP)
I tried, downloads, SMS, WAP and all the other crap. Now I am giving VOIP its fair shot. At least this time I have a revenue model from the beginning. .
Seconded. Furthermore, their immigration policy changes year to year; so one person's experience a few years ago may not be applied to this year's applicant.
you should definitely make an account on couchsurfing and surf around. i'm registered as loltron, so if you need a couch down here in santa cruz just drop me a line ;)
Agreed. Think about it. If they can answer any naturally posed question, are they not Turing test material? This rant,
which I linked to awhile ago in another post, sums up the situation: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061005-095006
I've been entertaining the idea of proposing an SF meet-up. I had a blast at the Boston events this summer and have been hoping for some similar gatherings here (now that I am in the SF area). I'd really like to organize a night where News.YC'ers can just hang out, maybe grab a drink or two, and talk shop.

With the passing of the application deadline I think it might be an opportune time for something like this.

How does that sound? A Monday night meet-up would give pretty short notice for the rest of news.yc but I'm still up for it.
I was full of hope when I saw the Trulia link, because our real estate startup often thinks about dataviz possibilities that provide people insight about the places they're interested in.

But, whoops, it's more like an online gallery, basically a PR thing. They are pretty, but come on, guys. People desperately need accessible analysis about stuff relevant to them, not works of art.
How to build a natural language search engine. YahooAnswersAPI + AnswerBag API + index all FAQ webpages + index YELP and similar Q&A sites. That is it. Then when you get bought for that secret underlying technology send me a check. Matter fact don't. Send it to a educational charity in Africa or the 100 laptop project.
Edit: I know this because I got one of my co-workers to do it for me in the past using only the Yahooanswers api and believe it anyone who tried it loved it although it was more fun than helpful.
Scale in what sense? The stated motivation for the invention was to provide small amounts of power.
This is cool stuff, guys. Using JSON means you can put the authentication in the HTTP request, split up the services between various platforms, proxy out the web apps to any kind of tech, and scale the page load performance in a hardware-agnostic fashion.

I wrote someting a few years ago with JSON. IMO, it's way better than that old XMLHTTPRequest stuff. Done correctly, it really makes this web-as-a-platform thing sing.

Very cool stuff.
To me it seems like you got a lot of hits but most users didn't stick around. It seems like your site only got picked up by Alexa recently.
What real deal? It doesn't seem far-fetched that it can generate enough power to run a few LEDs. Probably a pinwheel can do that too.
Fred Wilson: Why Do You Want To Invest?
What if C.E.O. Pay Is Fair?
Stop wasting our pixels, you two.
They have no clue what they are talking about. For example this:

This is the same case with quantum suicide. When the man pulls the trigger, there are two possible outcomes: the gun either fires or it doesn't. In this case, the man either lives or he dies. Each time the trigger is pulled, the universe splits to accommodate each possible outcome

Universes do not split like that. That would mean many universes were being created from nothing every instant. What actually happens is there are already infinitely many "universes" and they become different. And not one per outcome, but in proportion to the probability of outcomes.
That, sir, is the $20 Billion-dollar question.

If they do, for any serious length of time (I'm talking 20+ years), then they will have been the first to do it.
MySpace To Open Office In San Francisco
up to 10x10" metal parts from files downloaded from myGun.com...

I guess the 1st amendment will only apply to states too, soon.
A pretty good article. Congratulations on the nice hit to the Justin.tv guys. It definitely touches on the interesting question of whether there will ever be a "YouTube of Live Streaming". My opinion is that the best any of the current sites could hope for in the near future is to be around 1,000th the size of YouTube. That's still a really big deal and I think there's definitely huge potential for more than that in the future.
3D printer demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps0WEZbDjHE