skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my honest opinion Yahoo! acquired Summly for their launch video: https://vimeo.com/52014691 It's simply so cool. Yahoo! is nowhere near that cool. The experiment now is if buying cool makes you cool.
I wonder how similar his algorithm is to that of Mac OS X: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/19/mac-101-shorten-text-using-th...

EDIT: I just watched the launch video, and apparently Summly uses a genetic algorithm. I doubt that Mac OS X does.
Only if 80% of the use cases are extremely simple use cases, with no need for multiple indexes per table, complex queries, common table expressions, user defined datatypes, window functions, asynchronous queries, or a strict stance on undefined behaviors, etc.

The problem I see is that simple use cases gradually become slightly-less-simple use cases. And the pain of switching is 1000x the pain of taking a few extra steps up front and using a better database.
I don't mind that as much as the ipod app on the iphone. Landscape mode is coverflow, even though half my music doesn't have album covers, and there's no way of disabling the 'feature'.

I agree, though, coverflow is pretty good for pictures in the finder—not for most documents, where the content can't be easily rendered distinctively to a rectangular image.
Don't let the goofy public trash cans discourage you--there are lots of good reasons to visit Philadelphia. In no particular order, Philadelphia has great bars and restaurants, especially great beer options, the Art Museum, the Rodin, the Barnes, the Kimmel Center, a vibrant Chinatown, the Italian Market (which morphs into a bit of Southeast Asian Market), and many quaint and historical places to walk.
Korean Pop and Big Data - Strata Ignite 2013
they said they didn't get rid of personnel just now use them for the recycling program
The queen is dead. Long live the queen.
So a kid that came from money, got lucky and sold his app for more than it's worth. I hate these types of garbage articles the media propagates.

The media always has the same story they want to tell:

- Brush over the amount of time/work real achievement takes

- Downplay the amount of investment taken or starting capital

- Over-hype the selling price to give a rags-to-riches over-night success story
And this is the stuff that dreams are made of, other people's dreams. The dark side of this move will be dealing with his new colleagues at Yahoo, there are dragons there and I hope he has enough introspection to understand the less nice reactions he will get. That said, let's hope that he finds his passion and doesn't leave us early like Aaron did. If nothing else it is difficult to fathom the impact that will have on his psyche going forward.
I feel like bitcoin is the leading edge of a wave of peer to peer encrypted technologies. Namecoin is also interesting.

http://www.reddit.com/r/bitmessage

http://www.reddit.com/r/namecoin
That's the problem with durable equipment. It doesn't need to be replaced as often so the companies that make it go out of business.
Color-coded surgery
They don't hold Amazon/Target/Walmart sacred. They probably have contracts where these vendors get commitments from google that they will not be treated this way.

Pissing off some little knife company means exactly nothing to google.
Are you saying there's not that many and especially since they are not US citizens? ... That means it's a seller's market.
From the article:

... he will make arrangements to test out of his classes and work from the Yahoo office in London.
Weekend Project: Taking offline donations for Watsi using Leaf
I only browse hn using ihackernews now. I feel like im cheating every time I do, but I have accepted this well executed solution to the problem of hn on mobile rather than waste my energy trying to convince strangers to alter their site.
haha, your roadblock is awesome
It seems that he came from money and privilege? He attracted a very peculiar crowd of investors to say the least, and I wonder what role (if any) his background played. Good on him though, and congratulations. He certainly seems brilliant.
I started typing a longer response, but honestly I think the clearest answer here is just sarcasm:

Some of us have a higher standard for "readable" code than "can be refactored so that it doesn't suck". :)
Folding knives aren't new, and aren't primarily intended as an alternative to switchblades. Folding the blade into the handle just makes an easy to carry package, with your are a contractor, or a sportsman. Knife regulation is mostly around the length, not whether it folds or not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Knives
Easily setup Heroku for Resque jobs
I agree with all of that :) I actually think DDG's open approach will win out in the end over Google's monolithic big-data strategy, but they certainly have a good head start.
Idea is worth adding to http://hnwishlist.com, although it does already have an entry titled "Include a mobile/responsive version".
Listen to mostly NPR podcasts on my razor headset, in specific I will listen to Freakanomics, This American Life, Radio Lab, Illusioniod, Tell Me More, Brian Leher Show, Planet Money, Stuff You Missed In History Class, NPR Science, TED Talks, and when I go through all of that I will listen to some music (Local Natives, Mumford and Sons, Parlor Mob, The Killers, Edward Sharpe..., She and Him, Of Monsters and Men, Catch 22) There are more things I listen to but I cant think of right now. I am relatively productive with most things I listen to except for Illusioniod.
Any ETA for allowing to block Referer header from being included in cross-origin requests?

This feature has been supported in Firefox for a long time, but you have to set it in about:config via the "network.http.sendRefererHeader" integer.

2 = always send
1 = send only to same FQDN (what you seem to want)
0 = never send

IMO this is one of the best bang-for-your-buck privacy configurations. I would love it if Mozilla changed the default from 2 to 1, and at the least, it SHOULD be an option under the Preferences -> Privacy tab.
While stories like his are interesting novelties, I feel like they are distracting and counterproductive to the startup scene at large.

Instead of focusing on what Nick D’Aloisio has actually created, perhaps looking at this "algorithmic invention, which takes long-form stories and shortens them for readers using smartphones" and digging into what makes it special, the story is all about the jackpot of millions he's lucked into.

I'd love to know more about the technical details behind Summly, or what Nick went through to create it.

This kind of lottery mentality just gives the general public the impression that there's a gold rush going on, and causes the kind of magical thinking that's similar to teenagers all hoping to become the next rock star or sports legend, or in this case, startup founder, that will make millions, focusing on the money instead of asking themselves what they want to do with their lives.

For every teenage millionaire that hits the startup jackpot, there are thousands of hard-working entrepreneurs that build for the love of building. I'm not saying Nick D'Aloisio isn't doing what he does out of genuine passion - I don't know anything about him, I expect he's very driven and geniune - but I would rather focus on the work than the jackpot.
Como Conquistar A Mi Ex – Los Mejores Consejos
Awesome progress in under a year.
Let's all cling to the fact that he "comes from money", so that we can cope with our impending feelings of inadequacy.

:)
Show HN: StreamBoard - my Twitter Streaming API client for iOS
"So a kid that came from money, got lucky"

Those aren't disconnected points: To a great extent we can attribute the "luck" here to the video launch. It clearly cost some money to put together the launch video, and that's not necessarily something most people have or are willing to spend.
I hear what you're saying but I think what you're describing is not the most notable part of the story, in fact, possibly the least interesting part of it. I don't know what his algorithm is; I have some doubts as to it's efficacy but apparently Yahoo! did not. I'm more interested in how this person got celebrities and billionaires interested in the product early on. Seems odd.
It's great that you're happy in the Microsoft ecosystem, but other than the "not Google" checkbox, what issues with being in the Google ecosystem does being in the Microsoft ecosystem solve?
Generally some version of "The hack-pad"
I don't want to argue freedom of owning a gun, and you may very wel be trained to deal in such situations, but a gun most likely wont help you if you get in trouble. You can take away guns, but it would take many years, perhaps decades. Lots of other countries have done it.
Maybe another outlet can take that route, but this is the new york times
"After some deep thinking, we decided that serving our customer base, who legally buy large amounts of assisted-opening knives, was more important than continuing to advertise with Google. For this reason, we decided to not remove the knives and forgo our Google Adwords account"

I'm not clear. Did Knife Depot remove their ads or did Google?
I'm not worried about him; I think he will fine. :) I'm not sure what brilliant management (sarcasm) over at Yahoo! are thinking though.
I can't read this article. I have to pay 99 cents for the first four weeks first.
"I was struck by the idea of a function taking a function as input and transforming it to another function as output."

That's a higher-order function (HoF). I'd say it's not the fundamental thing to understand about FP: you can even program in a functional way without using them.

And also you can have languages which aren't putting the emphasis on FP at all and yet who have higher-order functions: elisp, for example (anyone calling elisp functional is automatically setq'ed to crazy ; )

IMHO Lisp dialects aren't inherently functionals. Some are, some aren't. Even Clojure, which definitely puts the emphasis on FP, isn't purely functional, far from it. But you can use it in a functional way (and Java too, in a way -- I used to do "OO over immutable objects" and use "functional Java").

However you'll probably find that when using Lisps in a functional way, you can use higher-order function often. For example if you have, say, a referentially transparent function and want to add memoization for free then it's very convenient to simply (memoize myfunc).

Or if you want to "carry the state" of your program through monads (or to use other kind of monads): then you'll need higher-order functions.

To me if there is one thing about FP it is simply idempotent / referentially transparent functions which make it easier to reason about the program.

I'm simply beginning to "grok" FP, HoFs and Clojure so take this with a grain of salt : )
The distinction is not whether or not pressure is applied, as the video seems to state. Pressure is obviously applied to the mechanism in either case. Each mechanism also uses springs to propel the blade outwards. The distinction is between whether you are operating a lever or (what amounts to) a wedge.

In the switchblade, the button is releasing a wedge of some sort that is preventing the blade from then swinging out entirely due to the force of the spring. In the spring-assisted model, a spring is also present to propel the blade, but there is not enough tension for the blade to release on its own. Instead, the user must torque a lever a certain radial distance before the spring's force is sufficient to finish propelling the blade, hence the term "assisted."

In terms of time-to-readiness, this might not be a big difference. But I was always under the impression that switchblades was supposed to refer to spring-operated "plunging" type knives, where the blade is concealed in a chamber before being propelled outward by the spring, requiring only a click of a button rather than a slashing movement on the part of the operator to cause harm.
You're referring to (1) procedural memory/learning and (2) declarative memory/learning.
I have worked with Daniel and Erica (the Bitnami execs) for the last five years. They are smart and they have been steadily growing Bitnami for a while now. Their appliances make deploying and updating a snap.
> This is a really narrow-minded perspective, and quite incorrect.

I agree that it's sort of narrow-minded, in that there are reasons to use Oracle and IBM outside of the industries and use cases I singled out. I'm not sure why it's incorrect, though (feel free to enlighten me).

where the license cost makes sense. I see a lot of big Oracle HA configurations where downtime or data-loss is unacceptable (and very pricey), where management wouldn't risk their careers choosing something that a start-up would consider.

Is it really true that Oracle's products are superior if you're going for "no downtime, no data loss, cost not so important"? I don't have any experience in that arena. But I would expect an open source options to be competitive.

If the Oracle products are really worth it, what explains that?

Is it that you can get Oracle people on the phone at any hour whose sole job is to fix it, and there isn't similar open source support? (If so, why isn't there? Red Hat plays this role for Linux.)

Is it that Oracle software is just too complicated and well-done and smart to be replicated in the open source world? "In theory," that should not be the case, but maybe the database equivalents of Linus Torvalds always end up just working for Oracle, or something.
It seems like we're seeing evidence that the class system is alive and well in the UK. Listen to his posh accent, and look at the easy way he casually hangs out with Stephen Fry: http://vimeo.com/52014691

I suspect the story behind this is simply "upper-class child with family connections finds success."
That would have the unintended and probably undesirable effect of decreasing purposeful down votes.
Waahaa!!!

The beauty of Hacker News!

It started at Google Adwords and is now going to Communist China and Stalinist Russia!! Just have a look at the comment threads.

Not bad!
Touche, but is this hyper growth in startups necessarily a bad thing, or just a bump in the road and a bottleneck to be overcome?

Despite how mainstream tech entrepreneurship has become, and despite how many founders are not in it for the right reasons, I still believe (or hope) it's mostly noise and the best products and founders will always rise to the top. The US (and the world) still needs more entrepreneurship to stay competitive, though perhaps not in its current model/form, and we haven't yet reached the point of diminishing returns in my opinion.

This is a tangent to your main point, but TechCrunch had a pretty good piece on how YC tries to tackle this problem: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/02/yc-y-combinator-scaling/
No, it went horribly because Dave listened and they were invited for a follow-up. Sounds like it went pretty well.

The starstruck tone of the article is a little embarrassing, but hey, Dave's pretty awesome.

It's not so much that Dave can't be pitched. He is trying to intelligently route pitching traffic through his expertise network, and you are probably wasting his time and not being diligent and respectful if you don't follow that advice.
Analysis: The end of Indian IT staffing as we know it
The most nonsensical part of all of this seems to be that Yahoo's going to kill the app and just integrate the technology into it's own products.

As far as I can tell, the reason the app was so valuable was due to the story that came with it, not the technology. Two years ago it got it got national coverage due to the surprisingly young age of the founder managing to create a popular app and raise funding. At the time the summarisation technology was highly unsophisticated. It appears that's now improved by using a combination of machine learning and natural language processing but I'm yet to hear a strong case that this tech is particularly innovative or protected from being reproduced elsewhere.

By killing the app, they're losing all the users up to this point and all the potential customers that would check it out after hearing this story. These people don't particular care for the summarisation algorithm, they're not going to be searching for yahoo's own version of the app in a months time.

Yahoo's either being stupid or know something we don't.
Facebook Expands Targeted Advertising Through Outside Data Sources
"I'm more interested in how this person got celebrities and billionaires interested in the product early on. Seems odd."

Ding ding ding! That's my real issue with stories like this. They don't explain how these young geniuses got capitol to build their ideas or how they were able to market them to people with influence or how they are able to convince influencers like Marissa Meyer to fork over $30 million.

Not hating on the kid, but without proper explanation of those three aforementioned things, there's no real story here.
That's the impression I got from day one. Him or his parents had connections to get someone interested from day one.

I am also very curious about this so called "algorithm".
For all I know, it could be a very well made genuine admin interface plugged into multiple turks. That is what I would have done.
On the DIY note, it would be pretty trivial to create a personalized version of Hacker News using Moovweb. Move a little HTML around, add your own CSS, bam -> mobilized hacker news to your customization.

http://www.moovweb.com/developers/moovwebsdk
Well written article and as a non-tech founder with experience starting a business, you nailed it. I started a company that I didn't know anything about prior to starting and if it wasn't for a lot a lot a lot of hustle I'd be in a much different place then I am today. It's great to have my own office, employees, and take care of personal finances from the revenues my business generates. The reward is great. But the hustle never stops. Actually that's the most exciting part of the business. Is waking everyday with a mission and being solely responsible for the success.
Can’t Change Amount of Stress You’re Under? Change Mindset Instead
A Framework for Email Communication | TradeBriefs
Nokia CEO evades questions about Lumia 928, tosses an iPhone on the floor
I think "years of experience" dates back to the era of widget factories where it actually made sense.
The rambling thoughts of a software engineer.
Weekend Project: A Call Screener for Recruiters
Ask HN: How can I raise $250, fast?
I am the lead welder, engineer, and machinist for my high school's Kinetic Sculpture Team. We participate in the Kinetic Grand Championship (http://www.kineticgrandchampionship.com) and the race is coming up in about 60 days. We have been working really hard and just got all 4 wheels attached to our sculpture yesterday. What we need now are two steel framed mountain bikes in good condition. We haven't been able to find anything within our budget on Craigslist (really rural area) and I have decided that we should just buy them. There is a local store that has exactly what we need for $100 apiece, but our team just doesn't have the money. We are a sort of under-the-radar club at our school, organized as a community service project. During the race, we raise money for a local homeless charity. Unfortunately, during the offseason, money really dries up. I have taken it upon myself to raise the money and I figure we will need around $250 in total for the two bikes and tax.

I am coming here because I know how good y'all are at fundraising and finding what South Park would call "internet money". If anyone out there could point me to a site that is designed for this type of quick, small fundraising, that would be great. I am also down for any other ideas that might help us.

Here is a picture of us yesterday (I am in the middle) http://imgur.com/9ETOpci

Here is a picture of our team in last year's race as Betty Chinn's Peace Crane http://imgur.com/JfVxieR

Thank you!
Mr. Meker
These aren't extensions, but mobile optimized versions of the site.

http://ihackernews.com

http://hn.gethifi.com/

http://hackerwebapp.com
Distance.js - Calculate the distance between points
If you can't afford $300 for your kids, you have big problems. You are certainly not the family shown in the advertizement. Also you need a keyboard and monitor which could easily set you back another $100. It is my humble opinion that the price differences between this and a real computer are unjustified, just buy your kids a real pc!
How about GNU unifont or terminus? they both have fairly large sizes.
Crowd Surfing The Zombie Apocalypse
I sent you a pull request. I think the Clojure version becomes more performant still if you slurp the nouns into a set so you don't have to do a linear traversal.

Also, I think the regex usage makes the code a little harder to digest and comes at the cost of further unnecessary cycles.

I think this code gets even easier if you don't have to preserve the whitespace and filter non-alpha characters. (see danneu's suggestions)

Finally, what are your thoughts on passing along the wordlist (nouns) as an arg to nurble? This would offer referential transparency and also make the test easier.

Btw, I think your update broke your gist (where you changed (some (partial = w) nouns) to (not (some (partial = w) nouns)). Check that out again.

Cool post, thanks for sharing.
How to Convince People to Join Your Start-up
I read another article about this acquisition that linked to this Gizmodo article from 2010 that was openly mocking him after naming his app "worst app of the week": http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-deve...

Nice to see he got the last laugh. It's inspiring to think that his company went from a joke to some people to a $30MM acquisition in a little over 2 years.
A new python-js compiler called PythonScript
A trollish resume of the story can be found here: http://imgur.com/zwyRWCa
Mysql cannot do parallel query. That's a single query won't spin off multiple threads and work in parallel. This makes it a bad solution for say aggregating over large data.
Mysql can handle lots of threads(queries) in parallel making it an ideal solution for web.

Postgres can do parallel query.
Lisp 1.6 from the IBM 1130
It sounds like he came from a very wealthy family which was willing to invest a lot of its own money in extraordinary marketing for what is otherwise a fairly ordinary app (or so it appears).

I'd say the Yahoo! acquisition was more about the buzz and marketing this would create and less about the technology. I imagine they could have just had their own engineers make a similar app quite quickly and for considerably less money.
You think all his users are using his app because he's young? I think that is unrealistic; they use it because it provides value. Yahoo! just wants to incorporate that value into their own offerings. How is this surprising? To make something great, you have to bring lots of good things together.
Back to hardware: Why electronic music producers are moving away from computers
I'd add, the possibility to be part of a community greater than any one company, if you're in a tech hub and recruiting someone from corporate
So what we're saying here is that upper-class connections of some sort or another suffice to get companies acquired by Yahoo?
"This despite the fact that I already paid my 2012 taxes back in September."
fiscal year does not necessarily equals calendar year, how do you know for a fact that's not what happened?
Sci Fi Coder
Type like all the cool kids in sci-fi movies.