skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's interesting to watch is the flip by a lot of Google supporters that, one week ago, were saying that unstructure search was just fine - thank you, and this Wolfram stuff had no merit.

Then today they flip and write everywhere that structured is the next big thing.

Ironic, that's all I'm pointing out. I don't know yet which technologie(s) will have an impact (note that it's not an either/or choice, both WA and Squarred can succeed).
Getting other people to pay is the brilliant part.
Really? That's your contribution to the discussion?

I have a lot of negative things to say about a lot of different languages, but I think what Kris has done with annotations in PHP is pretty cool, even if it is ultimately a hack.

PS. Juno looks nice though I'm not a huge fan of frameworks that return rendered html from controllers. But I do like it's Sinatra-esque simplicity.
heh, wii fit seems to encompass novelty like a nintendo game and exercise in front of a TV.

ah: wii fit for PC (but avoid patent infringement).
When you use Last.fm and install their software thingy, it tracks what music you are playing on your computer. (I think its called "scrobbling" or something).

I think the analogy is that their software will show what papers you have on your computer, which would indicate that you have read them and might reference them.
That may be true for 'most' founders (although I suspect it is far from universal), but I think it is fairly evident that Peldi has chosen the latter path. See:
http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=587

Peldi doesn't seem to be viewing Balsamiq as a stepping stone to getting rich and working on his next project in pursuit of some unknown end state; for him, Balsamiq IS the end state (or he hopes it will be).

If you really truly enjoy what you're doing - and it is clear he is - is there really any point to suffering some optional pain in exchange for a greater payout at the end?

(Standard caveat - Peldi, if you're reading this and I am way off base, please feel free to correct!)
Oh man - I was listening to public radio this morning and the guest actually said that he thought the inventor of Twitter would go down in history alongside Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel Morse.

It's mildly innovative, but let's not go nuts here..
Nice article. Peter Falk was great, way back when.

As "Columbo" for those who don't get the reference.
I'm a vim user and I've been using snipMate:

http://github.com/meese/snipmate.vim/tree/master
Drat, I was hoping for a link to a Hannah Montana website, because that would make <i>me</i> happy.
"Hacker News" doesn't support HTML tags? Are you f*ing kidding me?
Agreed, a NYC or Boston conference would be good.
PHP has its flaws, no doubt.

It's little known that doccomments are a PHP language construct that can be reflected over just as Python's doc strings can be introspected with __doc__.

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.reflection.php#la...

Thus !Route GET, a/good/$programmer is just as much a language construct in a PHP program as @route('a/good/:programmer') is in a Python program. The key difference is Python defines at the language level how that particular bit of script is expanded as a decorator. Recess does its expansion of annotations at the framework level.

Python is a much better and more thoughtfully designed programming language than PHP, for sure. PHP has loop holes, doccomments is one of them. PHP does not do anything, by default, with a doccomment, but it does give an opportunity to introduce meta-data on classes, methods, and properties and easily reflect over that meta-data and then it's up to the programmer to define a 'DSL'.

In this sense PHP offers something powerful and dangerous. Recess choose a simple data format, such that parsing can be expressed in a regexp that is then processed by essentially 'Constructing a class of type [FirstWord] and call init method with array of [Following words as a PHP array] - finally make these annotations available through reflection'. Not too much different than annotations in Java/C#. Simple enough that the danger is mostly negated and the utility makes the 'hack' justifiable.

For a better-written justification of why this design decision was made for Recess: http://www.recessframework.org/page/on-hiding-our-dick-tracy...

(Aside: This is why I'm a huge fan of Scala - extending a language with the language is awesome.)
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Hackety Hack was demoed at Art and Code as promised. Supposedly, _why's just cleaning up bugs and what not to get it presentable before throwing it out there. I had a friend who helped out with the Art and Code demo and he said it's functionality was really impressive but it was still a bit buggy. I think _why really wants to make a splash with the launch and so is being somewhat conservative with the release.
The Consequences of Real-Time Information
While I respect the cleverness of his hack, it's the kind of thing that sets off alarm bells in my head. Much like fancy template metaprogramming tricks in C++ did, only worse since it actually breaks the semantic contract that the language imposes for comment blocks.
Why is marijuana legalization always the example? "You know, there are a lot of ways we can stabilize Medicare, for example by legalizing marijuana..." I'm just saying!
I'm very upset with Twitter staff about this change. They hurry up to update the original post, even deleted some sentences, but still.

I've discovered almost 80% of my following list via replies to people i didn't follow from people I already followed

People are using this hashtags to tweet and complain about this: #fixreplies, #openreplies & #replygate
This is not entirely stupid. My biggest pet peeve is people who carry on what should be IM conversations on twitter. Eg @jack are you read yet?. @jill No doing hair. @jack hurry up!. @jill shut up! etc. Most such conversational tweets begin with @user.

People will adapt to this. If you want your followers to discover someone you are tweeting, just don't start the tweet with @user. @user is for conversations. That way both conversations and recreational tweet reading can stay alive. It makes sense to me.
There are those who say that Google is a parasite that profits off the rest of the internet, displaying copyrighted content of others and managing to sell ads for the privilege. Of course, the people who say these things are quickly slapped down, by folks citing how, without Google, nobody would find those web pages anyway, and Google is doing them a great service.

I have to note that this sort of data scraping shown here, by Google, with no incentive left for anybody to actually travel to the original source web pages, seems to make the first groups case much, much, stronger.
The Madoff affair
"What will you do in the event of hash collisions?" the professor asked.

The interviewer was priming for this particular answer: Keep the buckets in a linked list. Each time you increment a bucket, move it to the front of the list. When you're counting frequencies, this approach will mean that the most frequently occurring keys will be closer to the front of the list.

I know this because I was asked a similar question in an interview with a certain well-known PC software company. I didn't know the answer either, but still got an offer.
I would venture that this article is either fake, or cars.com has an incompetent marketing/dev team. At my current employer we optimize down to the hour-country-keyword, so how could cars.com be wasting all this money on irrelevant clicks?
Bot nets clicking ads on their own sites? Difficult to detect, but nothing Google and Yahoo can't handle detecting.
There's some really good stuff in here. I definitely agree that aligning corporate and personal identities is pretty crucial, at least for someone on the core team of founders. Sometimes you can fake this I guess, but it's hard to evangelize a product or service that you yourself wouldn't use.
Linux.com is back
Why I wrote The Geek Atlas
I've always had this option switched off as I found the noise was too much (and I only follow 240 people). With all @ replies turned on you only get half the conversation when you're not following the third person.

I found the best way to find new people to follow is to visit the profile pages of people I find interesting and see who they are conversing with. This way my twitter stream is not filled with @replies that are less relevant to me.
“Click fraud should be at the top of the priority list with Obama and the F.T.C.,” said Jeff Chester

Questionable judgement of priorities aside, isn't this really the responsibility of the ad networks? What is the FTC going to do about such a complicated problem.

When I read about all of these problems with click fraud or a network not paying out, I can't help but think there may be an opening for a startup to develop a more concrete method of connecting an advertiser with a user.
Fritzing - opensource circuit sketching tool for Arduino
Didn't the article discuss cloaking? Even if you did optimize the time and keyword, country would be intensely difficult.
Looks pretty cool - I've been very eager to get into hardware hacking (after getting comfortable with functional programming). I wondered about the "legitimacy" of Arduino boards and if they could really support real world apps, so I googled for some examples...

Simply put, it's amazing. This alone (open source gameboy!) is worth learning it: http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2008/10/using-inputshield-to...

And a quick link to some other projects that I imagine will spark a few hn minds: http://hacknmod.com/hack/top-40-arduino-projects-of-the-web/

How common are local meetups for the hardware hacking novices? Hardware people are sometime hard to connect with (even harder than the average CS student...). I'd love to start diving into this!
Seattle is “Minor League” Innovation Town, So We Shouldn’t Be So Smug
What were they be spending 31,000 a month on? YC companies are expected to get by for 3 months with just half of that.

"an outsized sum was spent on professional services (legal, branding, design, etc…)."

You can get good branding and design for cheap if you know where to look. The only real (large) necessary expense I see here is legal services to draft up contracts and agreements for co-owning art. Why couldn't they make a deal to pay the lawyers after they raised their next round? Don't startups do this a lot?

It seems as if their quick demise could have been avoided (or at least delayed) if they had kept their burn rate lower and focused more on sales instead of marketing. In the end your sales numbers determine whether you live or die.
Actual Photos of Maruti Ritz Revealed
Connecting your E-commerce to Twitter
Arduino are mostly used by starters. Coz it's very easy to learn programming it. There's always been discussions on Arduino vs Picaxe (like Intel vs AMD) :P here http://letsmakerobots.com/node/80 and http://letsmakerobots.com/node/5696

I guess they mean Atmel vs Picaxe, coz the Arduino is actually a dev board that uses the Atmel ATmega328 chip (previously ATmega168).

If you are starting out, it's better you start with an Arduino, later when you are a pro, you can buy only an ATmega and use it. I have a lot of electronic guys laughing at me when I said I bought an Arduino for $30, coz they said it could be done with just a $3 ATmega chip. But it's a lot easier doing things feeling safe that there's a community to support you when something goes wrong.

Arduino dev board isn't for finished products (although you can use it). Basically meant to make physical computing easier to learn for hobbyists. The Arduino Duemilanouve has currently is sold with an ATmega328 chip that runs at 32Mhz and has 32kb of memory. The older Arduino Duemilanouve or Diecimelia boards came with a ATmega168 chip running at 16mhz and 16kb memory (2kb for bootloader + 14kb programmable). If you are looking to make something complex like mobile computing stuff, you should checkout Gumstix at gumstix.org (often refered to as computer-on-module) and also the ARM-based 400mhz Beagleboard (beagleboard.org $149). Beagleboard, I heard lacks a sound module though.

The Arduino's programming syntax is similar to C, and it's simpler when compared to programming a barebone chip like ATmega or Picaxe.

P.S: I'm not a pro. I just learned how to control a DC motor with the Arduino last month. So I might me wrong.
Agreed. With all that's going on, it's not the government's job to regulate click fraud. It's up to publishers and advertisers to figure it out.
D-Link adds CAPTCHA to home routers
The 0.7 version isn't too bad. I give it to people who want to learn ruby but don't want to buy a book. There's a simple interactive learning tool that is useful if you've never programmed in your life before.
At a fundamental level I don't understand what fractional art ownership is, who would pay for it, or why they would pay for it. I understand what fractional jet ownership is and why timesharing a vacation condo works, but fractional art ownership seems to me to be fundamentally different. Where was the evidence for need? What do people do today in lieu of fractional art ownership?
New Steps Towards A Real Invisibility Cloak
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-05/new-steps-towards-real-invisibility-cloak
A Guide To Choose Nice Michelin Summer Tires
If you're near LA, there is Machine Project (http://machineproject.com/), probably a good place to meet some hardware hackers. Also http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Workshops has a list of workshops in many other areas. Most of them (including Machine Project) look pretty introductory.
doesn't work for either AMS journals or front.arxiv
You may as well just use evernote's webclipping service, 'cause honestly if you're doing research and you don't know what your target community is, nor do you know who to ask for good papers to read, you probably shouldn't be doing research in that area
Make it an option.
It looked to me as a marketing blurb for Click Forensics
Agreed. While reading through the article, it feels like an over-analysis of what is really a no-brainer: a solution to a problem that doesn't exist in a bad economy. Sure, many great ideas probably seem absurd initially, but that's more the reason to minimize burn rate and increase longevity (which isn't evident from the 9-month number they cite).
Sploj: Project Euler meets Brainf*ck
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I can't answer directly for Jordan, but I would assume that their costs were a lot hire than you would expect because they were working in the ultra-luxury goods category. When communicating in this market, everything is about extravagance- from your website to your office to you business cards. Building a company in this market is just a lot more expensive than getting feedback on consumer web app.
What licensing can do is block competition to the established powers. Do you think it was from the goodness of their hearts that Microsoft was pushing the attempt to license "software engineers" and programmers a decade ago.
Clickable:
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-05/new-steps-towa...
From the Twitter user standpoint, I think the change is +-0 (no noise I'm not interested in is down, but potentially interesting conversations/information by my friends is not easily discoverable any more).

From API standpoint, this will force API users that relied on friends_timeline call to return all updates (to, e.g. back them up, or forward somewhere) to manually request timeline for each friend, so they turned the operation from O(1) into O(N) calls, which, considering the rate limiting, is not insignificant.
Hi-
People already physically share their art with other people and institutions over the course of the year, think of all art in museums that is "on loan" from private collections.

Fractional ownership would enable art investors to diversify their portfolios and would reduce the entry point for investors in the space. Also, unlike planes, art is an appreciating asset.
The World’s Most Efficient Windmill?
This only affects you if you only follow jack XOR jill. So, if you like them both, you're still going to be annoyed.
So... I have a personal experience with newcars. I would be very surprised if their ad optimization team was really on the ball -- they tried to recruit me as a quant for a $15-$20K pay cut for a company that isn't a startup and offers no equity but the potential of a 10-15% of salary annual bonus. So this speaks to the quality of people they are willing to afford.
Quite. This is very different from Alpha (and somethng I've been waiting for from Google for a while). Alpha's not trying to be Google, and this doesn't look like google trying to be Alpha.

You know what Alpha reminds me of most (as a tester - try it out yourself on 5.18)? 'Insert Field' in MS word, where you can insert the date & time, or a reference to a cell in an Excel spreadsheet, or some other piece of external data, and have it automatically update every time the document is loaded. It's sort of like having widgets but being able to call them up with a simplistic natural language interface.

Not all of Earth's <Alpha: world population> people will appreciate this, but it will probably be popular in <Alpha: countries with most universities per capita>. (see?)
I don't understand why almost every (except for Django) framework author insists on hiding regular expressions in his routing scheme and instead forcing developers to use his homegrown language with slashes hardcoded. It's not like the developers are afraid of regular expressions, are they? This is so painful, i have to undo the work of those routers sometimes to get the results i want.

Luckily this is Python so it's possible to monkeypatch the implementation.
Microdata in HTML5
Don't get me wrong, I think it's very cool that they're doing this kind of work, and I hope it takes off. What I was really responding to was the idea that this approach would "crush" a more traditionally curated database. At least in the short term, I don't see that happening, because the number of really high-quality data sources is still pretty tractable, because a lot of what's on the web is just going to be echoing/distorting those primary sources anyways, and because trust is such a huge part of that market.
I want a copy, and I want a copy now.
Why follow people who use Twiter as IM anyway? One of the great things about Twitter is that people don't get too offended when you unfollow.

I think people will adapt to this however, though there may be a different style of replying to people to get around the changes (e.g. "To @jack: Are you ready")
Seems like Google is playing catch-up to yahoo for once. This has searchmonkey written all over it. Yahoo though, seems to be still without its mojo so cant see it capitalizing on this thing - even assuming it goes big.
I think skmurphy understands the theory behind fractional art ownership but is simply skeptical such a market exists in practice.

Is there an established market for shared art ownership (besides fractional donations for tax purposes)?

If not, then I think there's a more direct and simple lesson from the failure: if there's no existing market for your idea, the most likely reason is that people don't want to buy it or use it. Thus you better have solid evidence there really exists unmet demand, probably via experiments in the earliest stages of the venture.
Hi gwc, Peldi here. You go it exactly right, Balsamiq is not a 'startup' in the pg sense, but rather a lifestyle business...I hope to be working on/for Balsamiq Studios for as long as possible, and to continue to have a great time doing it. The goal is to build a small company of rock-stars who do great work, delight our customers and love to work together every day. What's not to like? ;)
More stories of laid-off workers becoming entrepreneurs
I think the first step is transparency on the part of the networks like Google and Yahoo! and the rest. They need to share more (all?) the data they have so they can be scruitinzed by the advertisers. Right now, Google is essentially saying "Trust us" and frankly, that's not enough.
I first thought of George's imaginary company on Seinfeld: that's Vandalay Industries.
Actually, I think the fun is just starting! We still don't have offices, and our titles are made up and meant to be fun.

But in a sense I do hope that we transition to a more "standard" small business, that was the goal from the beginning. :)
Yup. These underhanded tactics makes them seem less like the 'victims' of the music companies.

This can diminish their cause quite a bit in the eyes of the public, not just for themselves but for anyone else that might face a similar lawsuit in future.
While I have the eyeballs of some hardware people, does anyone know the logistics behind taking a basic circuit + micro controller design and sending that overseas to be fabricated for you?

Do you hire a firm to take care of moving all the various parts between factories, or this something a single factory can handle? What order of magnitude is the minimum lot size?

And lets say you wanted to get your finished design into some plastic molding, how would you go about that?

I know that's a whirlwind of questions, but I think it's something a lot of software guys are really in the dark about and yet would like to know.
Hi vaskel, thanks for the idea. I consider launch date (6/19) to be the yearly milestone, so we're not quite there yet. I already have something planned for that day, but I probably will do a yearly summary at the end of 2009, just like I did for 2008: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=531
Any HN users worried about coming bandwidth caps effecting your businesses?
Twitter is just one decent take on real time pub-sub systems, which has been around for a while, previous incarnations include mailing lists, usenet groups and various forums etc. Twitter simplified the pub-sub of short messages from/to mobile devices and takes advantage of the aggregate knowledge. I think Twitter will be successful (profit!) in business marketing/networking, simply because it makes pub-sub simple.

I personally will probably never create a twitter account to follow or be followed because I'm more comfortable being a private explorer/observer (reading thousands of feeds and commenting occasionally)
ideally companies that don't want to work with customers should wither and die. it's generally artificial barriers to entry that keep such crusty behemoths as the telcos entrenched.
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Apple responds to Microsoft's Laptop Hunters
I think it's supposed to be Gregor Mendel, the Belgian monk who did experiments on peas to identify heritable traits. Pair a tall bean with another tall bean, you get a long offspring bean. This is where the phrase mendelian genetics comes from, and that's what I thought they named the company after.
That certainly allows for an increase. It's a different type of market with different requirements. I have respect for the man in the arena and I'm positive there's more information that I don't know; I'm just genuinely curious as to how one could spend that much money so quickly.

Realistically a fancy website and business cards should not cost you more than a few thousand/month. However, a nice office in a good location with fancy decor could really burn some cash.
> What's not to like? ;)

"rock stars"? :-)

Other than that, complimenti, and looking forward to meeting you at some sort of news.yc meetup in Italy:-)