skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everybody is trying to use W|A as though it's Orac (Blakes7) but this is an NLP layer (not a particularly impressive one, it seems) atop a calculating encyclopedia. When it is able to latch on to some encyclopedic value it is able to make calculations with it. At first glance it seems useful for scientists, however, they already have much more domain specific and sophisticated models that they are already using. For example, knowing where the ISS is relative yo my location, for anyone that this matters to, they already have the software, for the rest of us its little more than a novelty. For the average person the data is not accessible enough unless you learn to speak its language.

Its another Powerset, trying to provide more accessible pathways to data tables. NLP seems to be a very tough nut to crack because Powerset is embarrassingly poor at this (despite some very clever people working on the problem) and W|A follows in their footsteps. Given sufficient data and much better parsing of that data this could be useful. Comparing it to Google is pointless because Google is a search engine, and W|A is not. W|A is a knowledge retrieval engine. CIA World Factbook on steroids.

I think the project should get government funding, expand the datasets dramatically and it will become another way to lookup facts and perform calculations on those facts. A useful tool for people in their everyday lives, but the sophistication needs to exponentially expand to have 'everyday usefulness', for example, if I can do queries like 'trend crime rates in San Francisco by neighborhood', or, 'aggregate opinions on canon 5dII, summarize' etc.

We are looking at something very primitive, but the concept is one very worthy of further research. When we figure a way for data models on any topic to be represented in a consistent and universally accessible format (akin to what Wikipedia is as a human NLP level) and these nuggets be shared such that an engine like W|A can process them we will really be on to something...
I think such an idea would be very useful, but with any such idea it is open to be abused. However, with an appropriate community behind it (this being a good example) and good implementation, I can see it working.

What concerns me is startups which wish to run in Stealth, how could someone give advice if they need to be in the "inner circle" to provide help and guidance? (Presuming a VC isn't used).
How shall this work at the end of the chain?
Does the postoffice somewhere print the actual address on the envelope or does the postman get a bunch of letters without addresses and has to perform the lookup again?
Implementing Equals in C#
Maybe they're syllabic (which would be reasonable, given the number of distinct symbols), and the language uses repetition of a syllable as a case marker, or just as a stylistic flourish? Perhaps it's used for emphasizing standalone nouns: Scis-issors-ors (scissors), vehic-icle-ickle (vehicle), o-sho-cean-shan (ocean). Likewise, if you're carving it in a building, why not write 'museum' as MVSEVM?

I know it's a conlang, and Serafini is probably just putting us on, but the ancient Mayan script does some pretty remarkable calligraphic somersaults, too.
"It's not true. Skype comes from Sweden which has a famously high top tax rate."

Skype was written by three programmers from Estonia-- a country with a flat-tax and much less economic equality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=hi+there

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+are+you%3F

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+can+you+tell+me+ab...
There are lots of easy things that Google hasn't done. Some easy things aren't all that useful. I'm sure Google could beef up its calculator, but would that help them in any significant way? Probably not.
As someone who has to nag someone else to wake up and get up, can I just say how disruptive it is to what I'm trying to do. Instead of concentrating I'm constantly checking back to see if they need another nag. So the sleeper isn't just consuming their own time, they're affecting the quality of mine too.
Ask HN: Using personal code at work
I'm developing a number of web applications for my university over the summer months in PHP. I've been working with the language for years, and have developed a number of custom database and template handling classes that I can hardly live without. I want to integrate these into the projects I’m developing over the summer, but I don't want to get bit in the ass if I use them in a personal project in the months ahead.

Has anyone here run into the same sort of issue as me? Is it a legitimate concern, and is there an easy way to address it? I'm perfectly fine with opening up/sharing my code with the rest of the world if that might solve the issue. Would a simple confirmation with my boss hold up in court?
It is interesting to parallel Wolfram with Thinking Machines founders.

It is a rather little known fact that, trained through TM catastrophe, its founders went on to form a stealth company, called Ab Initio, which is wildly successful despite having no marketing. Indeed they're actively avoiding it through NDA contracts to the point that general public doesn't exactly know what exactly their products do.

I am not ridiculing Wolfram, just wanted to point that above is as an interesting anecdote.
Google might be the next company that is "too big to fail"
While I haven't used it, Processing (http://processing.org/) sounds like it may be worth a look.
I knew a girl from Hatfield who thought Devon was in another country.
Interesting discussion about the decline in ad coverage (the number of query responses that have a paid ad). Comscore (http://blog.comscore.com/2009/05/longer_search_queries_drivi...) thinks it's because longer queries have fewer ad matches. Arrington thinks it's due to ad budget declines and better matching on the part of Google et. al. Arrington said that techcurnch is getting more click throughs in spite of this.

I was wondering if this is the recession or a longer term trend towards fewer ads.

Aside: A few days ago I googled "FCC chairman" to find his name. The sole ad was from eBay offering to sell me an FCC chairman. Washington corruption has gotten a whole lot more efficient.

The grammar Nazi in me: has the distinction disappeared between fewer (countable as in coins) and less (non-countable as in sand)? Arrington and others were using less when they should be using fewer.
They're talking about 'rewriting history'. In a version control system. That's more than a bit scary...

... but apparently I'm the only one who thinks so?! Come on. Git has some neat stuff, but it's not that hard to mess up your repository. And that's a bad thing for a tool that should be either helping or staying out of the way.
To me, this illustrates a breakdown of our education system.

Why was this kid not noticed, and nurtured? Not to play the nerd card here, but I can almost guarantee that if he had had an exceptionally good throwing arm (instead of an affinity for chemistry), his school would have noticed and would have helped him develop.

Maybe I'm just bitter because I grew up in a small town and saw this happening all around me. This story reminds me a lot of a very close friend of mine that used to manufacture all kinds of different chemicals in his garage, used some of the same social-engineering skills to obtain the necessary equipment to do so (accurate scales was always a problem because people though he was making meth), and was completely and totally ignored by his school.

It's depressing; excelling physically seems to be more important than excelling mentally.
Where does that leave us?
Why is everyone comparing Google to Wolfram Alpha? Google is a 10 year old company! I wonder what answers Google served up on Day 2...
That surprises me. My impression was that AI from the AI-winter era has quite the opposite paradigm from NKS (or evolutionary methods or whatever). I thought it was more logic based.
to make this better, the post office could support openid, do the lookup, and then deliver the mail.

i like it, but doubt the post office would ever figure it out.

so you need to start your own postal company to do just this, deliver mail to domain names and openids
The same point could be made about Java ("we noticed that language feature x lead to a lot of probelms in the field, so we decided to leave it out of Java").
As far as the 'court' thing goes, I'm not sure why you would be concerned, as long as you can prove that you wrote the code before joining the company.

Seeing as you are open with sharing your code, you can do it in such a way that it builds your cred as a coder, and it could even be a bit of PR for your boss (if you want it to be).

But I'd definitely sit down with your boss, and explain the situation. If you're with a small company, I don't see why it would be an issue.

Best of luck
The impact of this story amazes me, and reinforces one point rather well.

I lived in San Francisco for 2+ years, and would tell the exact same story to anyone who would listen. Nobody ever bothered to listen.

It took someone from Southern California to actually get the story out there, because the PR culture in Norcal is so busy sucking up to power that they neglect to ever look for anything resembling the truth. Silicon Valley would be much better off if Techcrunch, Mashable, PaidContent, and every other PR blog there went out of business tomorrow.
Ask HN: Rate my startup, Nrds
Your feedback is much appreciated. Thank you! ~ Jan Paricka
Maybe the RescueTime folks can tell us the impact on office productivity in that period.
Why spam?
even wolfram does not know. what a let down.
Danger Mouse's EMI-killed CD will be released as a blank CD-R, just add download
SQL and a JOIN?

Not what you asked for (and certainly not what the cool kids use), but why not?
It's becoming increasingly hard to argue that the labels are fighting p2p for the sake of the artists.

How they can sue their customers, stifle their content producers, and stay in business is amazing.
This guy need Dave Ramsey! http://www.daveramsey.com/
To the extent that the organization believes that it has "arrived" and the focus shifts from customers or the people that it serves to catering to the management then a gleaming headquarters serves as an outward physical manifestation of attitudes that presage decline.

It could be that a gleaming headquarters blinds the leadership to threats and the need for continued change.
Not true, Look at chrome, Its mostly leveraging various externally developed pieces of sw, and then adding some sauce (process isolation) into the mix.

Google unlike other companies knows how to leverage open-source for its profit and does it like no other
I have done it before. I put my personal copyright in the code. Then I ask permission in a letter to to include it. I have never had a problem. This was in the days when every line of code was part of the crown jewels. It is a legitimate concern, but easily handled, very unlikely to appear in court.

You do need to give them pretty much open ended permission to use the code. A BSD license might make it easier, because they know how to deal with licenses.

If the code is closely related to their core competencies, it is much more complicated. For example, supplying trading algorithms to a bank.

If your code is really generic, maybe all you need is a comment telling where the code came from. Still mention it to your manager.

Aside: I consider it good professional practice to mention in comments the source of an algorithm or code snipit. Future maintainers will appreciate.
He isn't remotely proposing a new kind of science. All he is proposing is to do regular science, but use cellular automata as a framework for new theories (rather than PDEs).
Framework for what? You'll probably need to give us more details. For starters, will it be a mostly read-only or write-heavy database? What relative priorities are you placing on speed, data consistency, ease of ad-hoc queries, etc.?

Based on the few details you've given, I'd consider SQLite (http://sqlite.org/). It's relational, but very lightweight and runs in-process. It's also open-source, quite mature, simple to use, and interfaces very easily with C.
Hah! That was the first query I made when trying out Wolfram. I'm sure they were prepared for some of the popular, "expected" queries. Overall though, I found most of my queries to return no results. Most of them were based on similar queries to the screen cast. Its an interesting product and I look forward to seeing it improve.
You're not entirely correct on that point either.

The goal that i have as someone who's building tools for GAE, is to sufficiently abstract the GAE tools so that you aren't building specifically to AppEngine's infrastructure. DataMapper is a great example of an abstraction layer that allows you to build application code that is portable across infrastructure.

The goal is to be able to build an application on GAE, and if your requirements change at some point and GAE doesn't fit, you can migrate off of it without substantial pain.
I don't know if this will fit your needs, but couchdb is pretty fast. It's under active development and still alpha, so things do change. As for multi-key, it's a yes and no sort of situation.

If you want to do an intersection you can, unfortunately it's in a sorted order.
for example: [key1, key2, key3] won't match [key2,key1, key3]

If you're trying just get all images matching a key so your structure looks like:

{img (url, binaray, etc), tags: [tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4]}

you can run a simple map function over the data

function map (doc)
{
for each (var tag in tags)
emit (tag, null);
}

which will allow you to then get all images by tag:

key=tag

It doesn't have a c++ api, but it uses http as its interface so you can use curl..
"The decline of chewing" is the real title. Totally worthless.
Information Week needs to go back and read the statement, there wasn't a 5% drop in internet traffic. The claim was that Google makes up 5% of the internet traffic normally and it was slow or down for a minority (17%) of users. If it was down for all those users (it wasn't) and they didn't go anywhere else (they did) the drop would be .85%--a veritable drop in the bucket. Considering all the buzz of the problem net internet traffic probably increased as people kept checking, blogging and bitching about it.

> But if you happen to be Google and your content constitutes up to 5% of all Internet traffic, people notice.
NKS (or evolutionary methods or whatever)

That'd be it. Can you define the paradigm? State the idea and the method?
Additionally, it's pretty quick to get an application up and running on GAE as well. Not entirely trivial at the moment, but it's getting close (still waiting on the release of a couple gems before i can say that's the case).

If you want to see one way to get an application up and running here's one:
http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/wiki/GettingStarted
I think they have disabled it in Ubuntu? But I believe it used to work, if it doesn't still, in other distros. I mean half the reason it's verboten to run as root is that you might accidentally type "rm -rf pics /".

I am too afraid to find out, anyway.
I would publicly open source the code, placing it in either Google Code or Github with a BSD or Apache 2.0 license. Doing this will protect both you and the university from using random (though your) unlicensed code in the project.

Placing the code in Guthub or Google Code will make it much easier to validate that it is truly open source and will allow the next developer on the project to download the latest updates.
Yeah, and with AppEngine, you can build an app, deploy it, and continue to hack on it, and improve it without having to pay any money, Heroku gives you 5 megs of space free, yeah? AppEngine's currently limit is a gig of storage space, 46.3 CPU hrs, 10gigabytes of incoming, and 10gigabytes of outgoing traffic PER DAY.

Both EC2 and Heroku cost you money as soon as you start to use them.

So, sure i will agree, it's easier to get up and running on Heroku if you're a vanilla Ruby dev. AppEngine's scaling is a lot more sensible economically imo.

And this absolutely not to knock Heroku, they are doing some really cool stuff. But for speculative projects, AppEngine is nice, and free for a lot of uses.
The purpose of every educational system is to prepare humans for life. Supposed this we should include at least two new school subjects - meditation and a teaching on HOW to consume information. We see our body as a machine but tend to exclude our mind.
Evserver - Lightweight Asynchronous Python WSGI Server
When I decide to marry someone, I am not going to treat her like a security or an asset or some other financial instrument -- she's a human being. I think the concept of a pre-nup is evil and derogatory

Well, what exactly is the "rationale" behind getting upset by a pre-nup?

A pre-nup means two things:

-- You acknowledge the very real possibility that your marriage might come to and end.

-- In case it ends, the guy doesn't want to part with half of everything he owns (and possibly alimony etc).

So, do you get offended because your guy "doesn't think it will last"?

When someone in a job interview asks you "where do you see yourself in 5 years", you probably think it's a silly question.

Do you honestly think you can predict how things will feel 5 years from now, let alone for the rest of your life? As Prince said, electric word, life - it means forever, and that's a mighty long time.

Or, do you get offended because your guy doesn't feel like he'd happily give you half of everything in case you do get divorced, because that obviously means he doesn't really truly love you, right?

As a man, you could turn the whole thing around and declare that any woman who declines a pre-nup is not worth marrying because she only thinks of you as a bag of money - a financial instrument, if you will.

To me, both of these reasons for getting offended by a pre-nup are just nonsense.
"The purpose of every educational system is to prepare humans for life."

If only, if only. Very little schools teach us how to deal with the latent abilities of our mind.
Patents outside national jurisdictions? That's funny.
I think I found the problem! According to the debugger, the client is using IE6.
Greed's Saving Graces
Since when polluting valuable community information resource with paid commercial fluff became acceptable?

I fail to see what pollution has happened here. Both NKS and Wolfram Alpha are pretty serious endeavours, that most hackers should be aware and probably interested in.

Aggressive promotion poisons the well for everybody. People come to HN for the honest information and opinion exchange with the like-minded, not to be bombarded with PR.

You're mixing various concepts here... "Aggressive promotion" is, effectively, what most entrepreneurs need to do at some point to get some users on the system. The problem is not with promotion or how aggressive with it. The problem is with "unethical", brutal, blunt promotion, like spam.

I don't think anyone here has something against "aggressive promotion" in the form of interesting information that happens to relate to something that someone is building. Except for you, perhaps.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+What+is+the+Matrix%3F&...
I am. I almost didn't go there because, yes, this isn't really HN material, but you did ask :)

We could discuss it further I suppose, but it's somewhat dull well-treaded material IMO. Anything about the definition of anarchism is up for debate of course, but completely un-checked capitalism certainly does not inherently result in a society that fits the criteria. What could possibly be anarchistic about a society full of wage slaves? That's certainly one likely outcome of such a society (note I'm not saying it /would be/ the outcome). Corporations can - and do - coerce every bit as much as the state does, if not more.

If you're an anarchist and not a socialist, fine. The term "individualist" works well. It's not the ideas of free markets and commerce, it's the /term/ capitalist. The word itself is pejorative. Anarchism is traditionally a leftist movement that came from the same kind of time and place as communism - "capitalists", the class, are the enemy, and exploit by definition. In the world of political discourse in which anarchism lives, If you call yourself a capitalist, you are essentially saying "I exploit others who actually do work as my source of income". You are NOT saying "I think free economic exchange is a good idea", which is probably what you actually mean to say. If you want to have serious discussion with anarchists, you can't call yourself a capitalist. All you will get is endless tirades about why you are not an anarchist, like this one. You might as well show up at a hard right think tank and call yourself a libertarian-stalinist.
San Mateo Apt  Valley Startup Hostel
I'd like to use my apartment in San Mateo to give startup teams from other parts of the world a chance to experience Silicon Valley culture.

When this batch of the iAccelerator(.org) ends in September, I'd like to invite the RedAnyway(.com) team to spend 6 months there. In the meantime I'd like to sublet the apartment to another startup.

I mentioned before that I'd take equity / convertible note from a YC company, from anyone else I'd prefer cash. I've been asking $1600 / mo on craigslist, but I'm negotiable. My primary goal is to have cool people there doing interesting work.

http://picasaweb.google.com/fcmurray/SanMateoApartment#

http://wheresfreeman.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/freemanindia
http://iaccelerator.org
http://www.linkedin.com/in/freemanmurray
Wolfram Alpha: The Wikipedia Killer
The labels are distribution companies in the era of the internet. Staying in business without suing customers and stifling content producers would be amazing.

http://mattmaroon.com/2009/05/01/hacker-news-disease/

Edit: Perhaps I am being misunderstood. I am saying they are screwed and dragging things out to hold on to profit. How is this a controversial position?
We need fewer laws related to marriage, not more.
I do vipassana but with a different organisation (www.dhamma.org). For the last five years I have meditated for the recommended 2 hours a day (mostly every day). Its a big time commitment and I often wonder how different things would be for me if I'd taken up painting or playing a musical instrument instead.

However, I don't regret the time I've spent meditating as (knowing me) I would have squandered those hours anyway. Its often easy to forget the benefits of meditation and I sometimes question whether I should carry on. However, in common with others I have talked to, when I stop for a few days all the old thought patterns come back such as anger, fear, arrogance, sadness and desire for material gain. I still feel these things when I've been meditating but they don't control my actions and distort my thoughts nearly as much. Yeah, if I stop meditating it becomes obvious I should start again as soon as possible.

Meditation isn't for everybody. Only a small proportion of Westerners who try it actually carry on practicing long term. However, I'd recommend anyone thats curious to give meditation a go.
tags + sql = bad
WolframAlpha comes closer to living up to the hype than anything in eons.
The recession is killing chain restaurants. So why is P.F. Chang's thriving?
what does "multi-key-value" mean?

This problem description is nearly incoherent.
This is a very reasonable solution. The field is mature and performant with good open source solutions like MySQL and Postgres. Look elsewhere only if you have monster scalability issues, many distributed nodes, oddball requirements, or you just want to learn.

Edit: oddball requirements == things that relational databases dont do well like text.
I asked it "tallest building in the world" and it wasn't sure. I figure they just need to up the universe of stuff it knows.
Danger Mouse, who is half of pop group Gnarls Barkley

Jesus, this guy's whole life is one big ripoff.