skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good point. And actually from another post in this thread it sounds like it is more than a patent/algorithm, it is a painstakingly built system. So yes perhap they have something. We will see.

As for you comment about researchers not being aware of the literature, I agree 100%. I review from time to time and the number of papers that are reinventing the wheel (and doing so in a sloppy way) is staggering. I think the problem is that too many researchers are just concerned with building up as many papers as possible to beat the tenure clock and/or to impress their rivals.

Evaluators somehow need to stop bean counting publications as a measure of merit. The problem they face is they don't know how else to evaluate...
Worst-case is when you get some get-rich-quick guy with dreams of gold. Domains are so cheap there is a lot of speculation in the market by average Joes looking for the next Google to make them a 7-figure offer on their property. An appraisal service can help. I don't have a lot of faith in the third-party brokers, but I've never tried them.
'Lobbyconners' crash tech conferences to schmooze, cut deals
1) Send email to ask them if the domain is available for sale.

2) Receive email back saying that it is for sale, for $40,000, despite the domain not being a dictionary word or a combination of dictionary words or anything anyone but you would ever likely be interested in.

3) Send email back with a reasonable offer (say, $500).

4) Receive email back saying that the price is $40,000. Firm.

5) Look for a new domain name. Repeat.

(Actually happened to me. After that, I usually don't even bother)
My partner and I are planning to do a Chinese version of our product sometime next year.
I'm young, and I've been doing a bit of traveling over the last couple of years (China, Vietnam, Ireland, Califorinia and the Eastern Seaboard), and I've heard of couchsurfing from more than a couple of people that I've met, but I've yet to try it. I like the idea that people you meet online are real and hospitable, but personally, I wouldn't want to do that.
I like hostels because you get to meet many young traveler types that have varying experiences and cultures, and meeting together for a meal or a soccer match with that many people from that many backgrounds is probably one of the greatest things ever. I think that maybe it would be hard to meet as many people (save pubs I suppose) if you were couchsurfing.
Seth Godin's posts and startups
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/10/radiohead-an...

In the middle of that post Seth talks about industries, specifically:

---------------------------------------------------

Most industries innovate from both ends:

* The outsiders go first because they have nothing to lose.
* The winners go next because they can afford to and they want to stay winners.
* It's the mediocre middle that sits and waits and watches.

---------------------------------------------------

I guess to some extent you can draw the same co-relations with startups:

1. People who believe that they have nothing to lose go first -- recent college grads, etc.

2. These would be the serial entrepreneur's

3. Everyone else
godaddy has a service where they negotiate on your behalf with the domain owner - they're usually in a stronger position than you are because they're regarded as an expert authority on the subject. They also have an appraisal system.

I've used them.

Do I think they're good at providing this service? Yes.

Would I use them again? No.

Godaddy are fine, but the chances of getting an owner who wants to sell at market value are slim. Better to invent a babyword (bebo.com) a letter agging (digg.com) or a domain hack (deli.cio.us).

Or just get a good domain (not a great one) and be at the top of the search results, like 37signals.com is when you google for 'basecamp' style.
Offer the owner what you think it's worth, and if you don't have a deal immediately, give up on that one. Otherwise attempts to buy domains drag on interminably, which a startup can't afford.

Trying to buy domains is such a time-suck that it's usually less work to think of an untaken one.
It does look pretty neat. Too bad it only works over Mysql currently. I wonder how their approach to the problems compares with CouchDb
if anyone here is interested in C2C, B2C, C2B or B2B secure online payment solutions - we actually power AliPay (http://www.asiapay.com/press_e.html) via our PayDollar system.
Ah, then ignore what I said before.
No, people can broadcast just as often as they want.
Until hydrogen is stored in a solid material, using what some would call nanotech but what I call physics, it isn't going to be common. This isn't to say this is far off, just the way I see it coming -- with knowledge gleaned from physics PhDs working on the problem.

But the simple answer is 'yes'. Hydrogen could make an excellent base for a battery.
According to the article, the problem it is solving is generating small amounts of power inexpensively and reliably. It would power those LED lights which are used to allow people in developing countries to read at night.

You seem to think that this is a small-scale proof of concept even though there is no reason to think that this is anything but the full sized device.

He doesn't claim nor does it seem credible that there is a particular advantage to this technology on larger scales. Bearing friction, which he cites as a problem at the small scale, is not such a big issue for larger generators.
LED? I've been charging my electric car from my phone line for years.
Most college folks would celebrate if all the Winers of the world abandoned facebook.
The article implies there was some conscious intent on the part of the government to deny Bill Gates his visa. Much more likely is that Gates' staff sent in a standard application through the Nigerian immigration department, the clerk looked at the forms - he doesn't know who this Bill Gates guy is - decided "hmmm... looks like this application is incomplete" and then sent it back with a big red rejection stamp on it.

No implied message on the part of the Nigerian government, just standard bureaucratic silliness.

You all know the old Napoleon quote.
Why Did Google Buy Jaiku?
Fearful looks get brain's attention fast
TED talk Richard Branson: Life at 30,000 feet
Interesting tidbit here..The Nigerian president's son works for Microsoft.
He's also a pretty prominent blogger..Check him out here.

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/
Why bother?

Surely you can find an appropiate domain name that isn't taken.

Make an app people will want and find a way to reach them. Your domain name should be the least of your worries.
Why VCs Want To See An Executive Summary
Your first submission to a VC should be an executive summary, not a complete business plan. A complete business plan attempts to tell a VC everything there is to know about your company. At this stage in the process there are too many other plans being submitted; VCs do not have time to learn everything about every company...
Only if it generates enough current to run the fan ;)
But people only care when 3rd-party tools exist that they can't use. Right now, the ivory tower is okay, because the rest of the landscape is flat and barren.
I could look for another name but I've thought of one that is particularly appropriate and its being squatted on. However I think you're right; investing time thinking of others names is more effective.
Sounds like good advice. Any tips on evaluating what they're worth?
Not clear. What do you mean?
Customers will care about controlling their data as soon as someone offers a useful product that requires it. Many are already reluctant to get involved with Facebook because of this.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html

As it is, MySpace users who want to switch to Facebook do it anyway, leaving behind a GhostSpace where they log into to check messages maybe once every 2-3 months. People are going to get sick of that crap, and will switch to a service that promises they'll never have to worry about it again.
Absolutely. China is a fantastic place to learn about how value is created, copied, and consumed. Especially in the internet space: look at TaoBao, China's response to Ebay, where buyers haggle down rather than bid up.

I met with an engineer from a Tsinghua spin-off company about creating a social network based around QR codes, technology big in Japan which has not taken off in the US. Webapps, or any product for that matter, will evolve to meet the cultural nuances specific to China. That's an interesting problem to solve.

h34t: In Guangzhou, be sure to visit the African trading community near Yuexiu park at Xiaobei lu and Huanshi lu. That will teach you a ton about commerce in China.
Hi, we are also building international manufacturing tools. How long will you be in china? I would like to discuss. best, matt thenewbrooklyn@yahoo.com
Open Forum for SQL and Dot Net Programers
Open Forum for SQL and Dot Net Programers
No biggie. I lose my Google WiFi here in Mountain View a couple of times a day for a few minutes, sometimes more--it's my enforced break time. I take the dog for a walk or go have a bubble tea at Verde. When I get back, WiFi is back, and I'm refreshed and thinking more clearly. Of course, on the occasions when it's gone down for more than a few hours, I get twitchy and nothing gets done. So, I guess a long-term power outage would be dramatic.
The author admits the title is not precise:

PS: When I write about it, I do it crudely, saying they suck or don't. When Doc Searls writes about it he calls it Vendor Relationship Management. Doc writes so elegantly because he is a research fellow at Harvard University.
I think people do care a lot about moving data between applications. There is nothing that comes up more often when end users need help. Today I was asked to move emails out of Mac Mail. Last month it was watch lists from a trading site to an Access database. Data silos are a huge problem and a productivity killer.
It puzzles me that some people deem it necessary to down-mod what is basically a question.
That's an interesting perspective. I'd be curious to know if anyone has a problem with moving to the US, and "supporting the war" through taxes.

Personally, I'm pretty ambivalent about it, but in the end, I would probably do whatever I think is best for the startup.
Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs. - washingtonpost.com
Startups and Kids
Back in the 90s when we were deep in the first Web1.0 boom we worked long hours, played around on our scooters, bought cool aeron chairs, spent millions of dollars, and generally had a great time. In 2005 we are a little wiser, a little more established, a little more responsible (I am embarrassed to take the scooter down to the bathroom), I sit in an inexpensive chair and I am spending my own money
The Sustainability of Web 2.0
Since the inception of the term "Web 2.0", something about it has made me cringe. Even after reading numerous definitions and opinions over the past 2 years, I never seemed to be able to describe exactly what bothered me about it so much (beyond its ambiguity), until now.
Just shows the conferences are too expensive.
My point is that there are other many-worlds interpretations apart from Deutsch's, which differ somewhat on philosophical issues like whether words really "split", as described above.

The main problem with them is that they're all a bit vague and handwavey -- the world is still waiting for somebody to come up with a truly rigorous treatment of many-worlds and its consequences, and how it works in non-toy systems (i.e. systems which don't just consist of a single observer observing a single observable).

The other problem is that most people writing on MWIs don't really acknowledge the existence of other MWIs, with the effect that everybody winds up talking past each other. Finally, it doesn't help that Everett's writings are so vague that we can't even figure out what he himself was saying.

Personally, I suspect that MWI is likely to be true, and that other interpretations have insurmountable flaws, but I'd be very careful about going around saying everything else is "ridiculous".
The idea of letting everyone broadcast is colorful, even if the median broadcast is not.
I'm sure that many interesting software gems were abandoned because the hardware was not powerful enough at the time.

Plus, when computer science was new, a lot of crazy stuff was being researched; nowadays the academic research seems pretty close-minded.
The purpose of conferences like these is to extract money from big companies. They're the social analogue of buying MS Exchange, or hiring people through headhunters.
Early stage startups should never pay thousands of dollars to go to conferences.
Oh, and by the way, the MWI FAQ you posted actually contradicts you on this point, it seems:

"Q19 Do worlds differentiate or split?... Worlds do not exist in a quantum superposition independently of each other before they decohere or split. The splitting is a physical process, grounded in the dynamical evolution of the wave vector, not a matter of philosophical, linguistic or mental convenience"

Which proves my point about how there are a several different MWIs.
Who Cares About Academic Diversity?
we are based in hongkong and recently launched an online marketplace to buy and sell(http://www.ushops.com). right now we have opened it up for any type of products to see what would work here. payment systems to facilitate P2P payments and raising funding are two of our initial challenges. any pointers in these areas appreciated. contact: altafr@ushops.com
Why I'm Not Married Yet - a look into Web 2.0
It's also worth noting that you can't get e-mail or any other contact info from the API.

What's interesting about this argument, is that facebook used to have a feature to export all your friends to vCards. I asked their VP of Product Marketing recently why they got rid of the feature, and he claimed it was to protect users from spam. "Facebook is all about edge cases, and we haven't had the time to focus on the problems that would cause", or something to that effect.
When my company started, our company's name was already registered (and parked). After following a bunch of links to find the owner though, we came across a small paragraph stating that if we had some claim to the name, they would forfit the domain. After we incorporated, we sent out an e-mail, and then when they asked for proof, we faxed a copy of our incorporation papers. Only had to pay a $20 transfer fee.
50+ CSS Best Practices and Coding Guidelines
Lap dancers earn more when they are most fertile
How do you make an internationalized interface?
My family is originally fron Guangzhou, my uncle is a VC in Hong Kong/China (middle-growth, not early stage, sorry guys), while my father is a struggling entrepreneur in Beijing (we follow in each other's footsteps...)

For those interested in China, I think the holy grail will probably be getting the internet to be a more accurate reflection of the robust Chinese economy. Moreover, how the Chinese tap into mobile in China to the ring of traffic like QQ and Alibaba will be huge (although the strong Korean and Japanese firms will be strong competition).

Another is thinking about maybe setting up a Chinese presence for your company (on the web and an actual office). One of our friends just sold their company (mezzimedia- specializing in Chinese comparison shopping) and they have an office in Pasadena and in China (the one in China is 3x larger). Their model is working really well.
I concur.

There are two possible future outcomes I can think of.

1. We have an oil crisis, and cities return to the way they used to be, over the course of time.

2. Alternative energies gracefully take the place of oil, there is no crisis, and things continue as they have been.

Oddly, the crisis outcome is more appealing.
I would add that the (2) is probably the companies like Google, Yahoo and others who want to stay on top of their market share.
We have a static IP from Comcast at the office and two weeks ago they changed it. "Why are we paying for static IP?" I asked. "Oh, it's still static, just a different static one..." [argh]
Thanks for the link. Always good to have encouragement in the face of the "unnamed" number of applications this year.
If only you were Bill Gates at 19 (Sam Altman and Loopt), then you may not have this problem. Don't know if Sam has time to weight in on this, but maybe some folks from HeySan, TextPayMe, and others could weigh in on their thoughts of the future of mobile and give you a one-sentence (Good, do it. or No, do this.)
I'm the non-hacker (although HTML, CSS, UI, content, and the stuff outside of product is my focus) with two cofounders who are great hackers. So, I let the guys work their magic and then we all test together while I handle a lot of the user support and make critiques on the flow. I'm the guy who updates us on Battlestar Galactica and other developments in nerd lore.
actually you know those people who stay in hostels and such? they host couchsurfers when they aren't travelling. a friend of mine couchsurfed through europe, and he met more people and had more fun than he ever would have otherwise. they'll bring you around town, introduce you to their friends, etc.

you should really give it a chance, especially if you are a hosteler, there's a reason everyone says to use it :)
Three comments.

(1) Reads like "case-in-point" for Norvig's argument that the GoF patterns are artifacts of less expressive languages. Most of these examples battle clearer, more effective idiomatic alternatives in Ruby.

(2) Yet another misinterpretation of what Chris Alexander meant by "A Pattern Language". The GoF book isn't a cookbook, it's a starting point.

(3) This document didn't benefit at all from being "typeset" in PDF; any Wordpress blog with syntax highlighting plugins would have presented it better.

Wouldn't it be cool to see the "real" design patterns for Ruby?
it seems pretty straightforward to me. my only hope is that they pay a bit of attention to the physical design of the phone, and think outside the '40 buttons and a small screen' box.
Formal Market Evaluations?
Hello everyone. What is the prevailing opinion about paying for a market evaluation of your product or service. Specifically I mean paying for an objective survey to be undertaken to gauge demand.

The reason I ask is because I have been given a small amount of money to commission just such a study. Does anyone know of an market analysis/survey company that would be good to use for the database interface tools market?
Let the experience be your brand, not the other way around.
A brief look at how Microsoft foolishly chose branding over the user experience when they designed their "start" button and menu.
Yes we are supporting both Linux and Windows. And Linux definitely has been better behaved. Still it hasn't been too bad under windows. It's just when we want to do something like support foreign characters then we run into trouble.
"The closest you'll get to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for Myspace. That's only off by a factor of 10 or so."

Funny quote, given today's world. Maybe PG meant 10 times too small?
Robot Tribute To Steve Irwin
I think spam is the biggest reason, after the inherent difficult of developing client-side apps, that online social networks growing towards email were more successful than email growing towards social networks.
Is it just me, or are all the proposed solutions more complicated than the original one?!! This article actually convinces me that I should continue to use the <br> tag.
German man programs "Hello World" into wheat field
Lisp Machine Manual
Witnessing Side-Effects | Lambda the Ultimate
Simple Ways To Help Your Design Suck Less
Found via e1ven: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66871
I think a facebook-aim comparison is far better than a facebook-aol one

aol instant messenger is still BY FAR the most popular im network in America

Geeks and hackers can sit here and say the world would be better if everyone used Jabber or some other open protocol, but it won't catch on because...

1) people like aim
2) their friends are on aim
I'd rather read a clear problem description and come up with my own solution than infer the problem from the code...
Found via e1ven: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66871
tdnam.com; click on advanced search; click on Expired Name Auction checkbox and .com checkbox; type in a keyword to search on then click search. Give it a chance, do a lot of searches. I found some really good domains the most recent one I bought was "askshare.com" I paid $20.
99.9% of facebook users don't care about how "open" facebook is--until it remains a very useful social tool.
The liberal sprinkling of the word "always" makes me rather wary. It's easy to just take it as "the way to do it", and don't know why, especially as a programmer like myself. When things change later on, it's easy to end up being one of those that just do it because you've been told to do it that way.

The general spirit of the article is spot on though. I liked the suggestion to try using line height or spacing to differentiate headings from body, rather than just to bold everything just because that's the browser default. The idea of alignment points is something I knew implicitly, but never thought about specifically. I think there's a book called Grid Systems that discusses this.

The idea of web design is to communicate what is important vs what isn't (as an easy over-generalization). You can use any number of techniques to achieve that. This is a good start, I think.
MIT Digital Drawing Board
So because a majority doesn't care, we're not allowed to critically assess Facebook's shortcomings or voice our opinions over its policies?

Winer is simply stating his opinion and pointing out the lack of openness when it comes to Facebook's data.
well then I'm curious - why did you complain?
If Winer was stating his opinion, so was I:)

Perhaps I should have been more clear: I think facebook is pretty open, I don't think there is an immediate need for facebook to make it easy for users to move to other networks.
It's very straightforward and intuitive to use. I look forward to the API.
i have no idea, and apparently not that many here do either. you might have luck asking the same question at startupping.com
The point of doing all that is to future-proof your site on the off chance that browsers will render things correctly during our lives. Whether or not it is worth it is for you to decide.
Sounds like the infamous T-shirt experiment.

http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/15/4/579
Adsense Kills Business
Essays from Donald Norman on Design
Essays from Donald Norman for engineers to understand how to do design thinking and therefore know how to work constructively with designers (instead of the mutual unintelligibility that now takes place).
Wile E. Coyote sure could have used this.
Could it be that the women behave differently when they are most fertile? It would make sense that they would try their hardest to get pregnant at that time of the month.
Why I'm married:

Because I moved away from Silicon Valley in 2000, to Padova, Italy, where there are actually women (in proportion to men (asterisk)), young people, old people, not everyone is employed in something to do with software, and ordinary people can afford houses.

(asterisk) http://www.macdirectory.com/newmd/mac/pages/NTRVU/siliconval...
Girlfriend? That doesn't help your argument joe.
Does anyone else think the Econ has gone downhill in the last couple of years? It's not just the overly-cheeky photo captions, the bad puns, the annoyingly small vocabulary of the new editor (how many times can you use the word "Schadenfreude [1]"?), the "amazing new energy technology!" ads in the back -- but the actual substance, the subjects it reports on, are devolving into factoids and titillation with a side dish of political snark.

[1] http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aeconomist.com+Schadenf...