skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's much more than tags - in-text exact entities, deep categorization, related news, etc :)

The exact disambiguation of mentioned concepts and entities is what is exciting and underused by web developers right now.

Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta
The bitter-sweet part is that the author does not realise yet that he has failed, so it's an involuntary lesson.

As others have pointed out, being able to give up on an idea that won't fly is part of being an entrepreneur.
If you need any more help from us (Zemanta), let us know!

we know a lot about these problems & solutions, so send us an email at info@zemanta.com

Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta
Call for ethical debate surrounding use of "killer robots"
First ever Google Technology user group meetup in Singapore
Google along with e27 is bringing together it's first SG-GTUG which stands for Singapore Google Technology User Group. It is a non-profit group which aims to bring together all the die hard Google fans to discuss, share and learn all about Google's platforms and APIs.
Merkamerica - Dell XPS M1530 M1330 M1730 1340 1640
Merkamerica, The leader in giving you the lowest prices on Dell XPS and Studio Laptops including XPS M1530 XPS M1330 XPS M1730 Studio XPS 1640 and Studio XPS 1340 Laptops and Notebooks.
People have sold the idea of a product and a portion of their company to VCs, without having a functional or complete product.
Oh, I so have seen this Khalid type before. They are called "spammers".

The guy has assembled a team of the blackhat-coder type and spammed the AppStore successfully with random crap for months, looking to cash in on the 6-to-9 percent social engineering toll (anything works for this percentage of people if you have a big enough audience). Props to him for acting quickly.

Props to Apple for recognizing spam. Shame on Apple for not labeling this type of app-spamming as spam. It's crawling up the Top-Paid list, it's all over the AppStore's search results, and will bring the AppStore down if it continues (you can't quite install an anti-app-spam filter on your iPhone/iTunes).

Next on the AppStore: Apps that take your C.V. and hand it out to money-laundering types, with catchy descriptions like "find your place within an international team of highly-paid professionals!" and "99% employment success rate!", etc.

Creeping jumping limping Jeesus...
Sometimes people work hard on the sarcasm they completely forget about the humor. Reading this article is like getting served a hollow baked Alaska.
Given how finite phonemes are, couldn't one make a massive table of english syllables and then generate all their possible permutations? then copyright remove-if #'already-patented-p generated-sequence.
Yes, that is the real lesson here. Your project can be dead long before you realize it so the only way to find out is to have a soundboard of critical people around you.

You have too much emotional bonding with your project at that stage to see clearly.

The problem is that plenty of people will isolate themselves from criticism and actively reaffirm their connections with people that tell them what they want to hear (if only because they don't want to lose their friendship).

Giving up on ideas that don't fly is probably an integral part of every successful entrepreneur.

Just like successful VCs will turn down almost all of the 'maybes' in order to be able to concentrate on the winners. Why go after the high hanging fruits first ? It simply makes no business sense.
Bowline - A Ruby GUI Desktop Framework
This is true, but in those cases there is the perfectly respectable "N mistakes I made" format. The thing that rankles me is positive advice (you must do A and B in order to succeed at X) given by people who have just failed spectacularly at X.
I am interested in the "ugly hack". Did you use atoms or write your own coroutines with clojure-cont?
Excellent point, we should be hearing more from the winners.

Still, I've been part of a couple of failed projects before I set out on my own and I'm pretty sure that I would have fared a lot worse if not for my prior experience. That saved me a ton of time and money.

I still found plenty of 'original' mistakes to make though :)
Installing "Sugar on a stick" (Strawberry Release) On A USB Stick
I usually record my thoughts by writing an email to a friend. We each do this for each other: serve as an audience.
I love the fact that even though he's hung up on the traditions of the past he just can't bring himself to let go of the future. It's just too enticing :-)

This seems to be reflected in the title of his blog (http://pfarley.livejournal.com/) too:

"Elements of Past & Future Combined Into Something Not Quite as Good as Either"
Reporting Code Diff
In Bold Move Toward Free Online Fantasy Gaming, Turbine Ready to Open D&D
I did. But this is a prepared speech, by PG the essayist, of prose.

I guess the novelty factor for me in the interview was more of a social quality, through communication. The part of a person that does not show in prose.
>Robots for the next decade will certainly increase costs of chefs. You know short order cooks at most restaurants get paid close to nothing right? 10/hr = 20K/yr = 10% the cost of today's robots, and probably 2% factoring maintenance.

Robots don't just work 40 hour weeks. They'll work as many hours as the store is open. They also don't require benefits, the employer doesn't have to pay unemployment insurance, and they don't have to pay social security taxes. In addition, there are harder to quantify benefits like the fact that robots don't call in sick, call in drunk, etc, and they'll probably be less likely to do things like drop or burn food.

When you factor in all of that, a better estimate of the cost of a human compared to the cost of a robot would be more like 25%. The robot starts looking better. And the price of technology tends to come down over time.
Is texting and social networking ruining our relationships?
And even then, Apple should have nothing to do with it, that's between the copyright holder and the infringer.
FWIW, I posted something a step or two up from this on avrfreaks using the Arduino Duemilanove (less the Arduino fluff):

http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=vi...

Effectively you upload the program to the Arduino using avrdude, then you can send signals via USB from your PC using the *nix program to switch the LED on & off. The final programs weren't posted, but you can piece them together from the comments :)

It was heaps of fun. If you have an Arduino but haven't made the leap, I highly recommend getting down and dirty with more typical AVR stuff.
Ask PG: Would it be possible to do an A/B test on HN?
One week (or even a day) with comment and article points hidden from view to see what that does for the quality of the site ?

I'm very curious about this because I suspect that the visibility of the points is what is starting to create a negative undercurrent.

Or maybe leave them on articles but drop them on comments...
It's nice to see someone working on a project like this. As a personal project, I've been spending the last month or so porting my favourite Ruby methods to Scheme.

Mostly as a way to occupy my time with my iPaq while waiting in line.
A Formula for Quantifying Productivity of Web Applications
"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems."

Jamie Zawinski
But what if some new idea hits you while not sitting in front of the desktop?
Donnie,

If you can't do it on your own, you need to outsource the sales my man. Sign up with an affiliate network and let the pyramid schemers take care of it. Offer them something like 50% on all sign ups; you can afford to pay a big finder's fee because a CMS is something that people don't give up quickly once they start using it.

I would strongly urge you NOT to give it up and focus on the sales side of things, you're done coding for now.
After stage one there is one necessary step that the author has missed: to calculate whether this idea will bring any money (or at least cover the costs). It is painful to invest 8 months of one's life into something that wouldn't have produced any returns in the first place.
Reduce Complexity, Prevent Bugs
How realistic was the original energy target? Did they oversell it? I don't think that they'd have gotten the funding to go only as far as 5x10^12 eV. That may be 5 times higher than the tevatron, but the results are simply going to be, shucks we needed another trillion eV, lets create another largest engineering project and physics experiment ever.
Google Quietly Quadruples Its Newspaper Archives
If you like Dewdney try to find a copy of 'flatland'.
sms to 'self'.
Verizon readies Fios TV app store
Well, I just tried it. Didn't it since 4pm yesterday, and woke up at around 6:50 with the help of an alarm (which usually don't work).

I just had breakfast, and will not eat after 4pm today either, and see when I fall asleep/wake up without an alarm this time.
This is cool and all, but I'm really wondering to myself if it is really necessary?

Every AIR app I've run across (Flash or HTML based) has always ended up in the trash can. Either it's too slow, too obtuse, inconsistent user experience from the rest of my OS, etc. I find even the much flaunted Balsamiq to be inexcusably slow, so slow in fact I still prefer booting up XP in a VM and using Axure (which is better software anyways, but that's another topic for another day).

And I really wonder if these guys think they can do what Sun, Microsoft and - to a lesser extent - Adobe, have failed to do: build a cross platform UI toolkit without the aforementioned deficits. And then the filesystem abstractions and socket abstractions and the list goes on and on.

And, really, coding native isn't that hard on either platforms (I don't know much about Linux desktop dev, but I know plenty about Windows and just enough to shoot my mouth off with OSX). And it's not likely you're building anything of any serious complexity with AIR, Titanium, etc. anyways. I can almost guarantee you that I could build their example twitter client in Cocoa in roughly the same time and with roughly the same LoC metrics. I'm not saying that because I have a big penis, I'm just wondering what the true value of these cross platform tools are when they only deliver on a small percentage of what my particular OS has to offer.

It almost feels like you are sacrificing usability for a developer's laziness. For example, I built this in ~10 hours: http://videos.massify.com/prototype/shave.demo.mov - including the custom UI widget to visually create a video clip.

Anyways, cool work, nice demo, good luck!
The bitter-sweet part is that the author does not realise yet that he has failed

Don't be too dismissive; he is honest, writes well, and at least has the "business sense" to make an honest public resignation to fate. A calculated show of weakness is strength, specially in a commercial entity.
Hanging with hackers can make you paranoid
Exactly. It's so easy to jump in and code, without taking a good hard look at the feasibility of the business model, since hackers tend to look at the tech side before all else.

Spending a few days or weeks on the business model can save months of sacrifice, especially when building a product that is saturated with competition.
I tried Komodo Edit about six months ago. I really wanted to like it, but it was really just too slow (on Windows).
I was expecting a parody of Peter Mandelson, somehow.
A mixture of several topic-specific Moleskines, some A4 pads, post-its, blog, diary and word processing or calendar software. If it's a thought that's linked to something else, or a date, I often (in true GTD style) associate it with that date or object. Most of the time it's my "work", "home" or "daily" moleskine that gets the brunt though. And although they're not searchable, it's so much fun flipping back through them...
True. When my house was broken into while I was at university, by far the most valuable things there were mine and my housemates' textbooks (a couple of my housemates had law textbooks worth over £200 each, this was back when £1 = $2 btw). The burglars took all our cash, jewellery, CDs, DVDs and they even did the covering-the-floor-with-cereal thing mentioned in TFA. Amid all that, not one book was even disturbed from its shelf.
Google notebook is pretty good and i mostly use that. autosave, search, tagging. They don't develop it anymore apparently but it's still usable.
http://www.google.com/notebook
Two unknowns and their ambitious new computing machine (1999)
Ever tried to write more than a few pages of text/graphics with Word? It falls over pretty soon.

Yes, I do own a copy of Microsoft Office. Excel is okay. Powerpoint so so. Word is terrible. Entourage has good and bad sides - but has lots of problems when there are non-trivial amounts of data.

There is no excuse for the buggyness of MS Word.
Good marketing starts with a good product.
You are not violating copyrights, because you are not copying other works. However, as nobody would read that text, you can't really enforce copyright because they did not derive their work from yours.
Yeah, I didn't like this. He produced some solid work with Mongrel. He should get back on that train and get over the static. I personally don't care what has been said - I wouldn't even think people at a Ruby conference would care much either.
Thats great and all, but hes forgetting two very important aspects of a real OS: drivers and software.

Ok, hes not building a real OS, but rather a toy OS (presumably for the learning experience), so these things are not so much of an issue. Its actually a good article, IMHO, and I wish it had been available a few years back when I tinkered with writing my own toy kernel. The "Roll your own unix clone" title given here is pretty misleading though.
I wonder how many wind turbines it would take to operate at full power?
Sounds like an interesting experiment, but how do you measure quality?
I'm not really disagreeing with you - C# is later, has the benefit of Java being in its hindsight.

I don't know how Java does it, but .Net installs framework versions side by side (typically under C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework) so changes to, say V3.0 don't affect apps that run on framework 2.0 at all. Thus breaking backward compatibility for anyone (small or large installed base, doesn't matter) is not an issue when rolling out a new framework version.
The System Programming manual and the Instruction Set references (I do not have a copy of the Application Programming manual, unfortunately, and don't really want to read it in PDF form) are exceptionally good and have helped me back when I used to mess with toy kernels and also helped with Uni assignments. I'd definitely recommend them to anyone who is interested in kernel or assembly development.
Actually, then I'd be making the sunk cost fallacy -- thinking something deserves more investment simply because I already spent more on it.

In any event, I'm not sweating over costs. If it really is worth $11 more per pad, then I'm fine with that. I just don't want to pay for a hip brand for no reason.
In case it saves anyone else the few minutes' work it took me to figure out what this actually is and why anyone would care:

There's a tool called NDepend, which supposedly does all sorts of analysis on C# and VB.NET code. It has a vaguely SQL-like query language in which you can express things like "find all methods that are public, were present in an earlier version of this code, but aren't there any more" and can generate reports based on the queries. (Query language briefly described at http://www.ndepend.com/Features.aspx#CQL .)

The article being linked to here was written by (I think) the (principal?) author of NDepend, and describes how to use it to produce a report on what has changed in your code between two versions: what methods have been added, had their visibility changed, etc.

I'm not quite sure why Anon84 (1) posted a link to that blog entry rather than something more general about NDepend and what it can do, or (2) didn't post any further explanation. But perhaps my perceived lack of #2 is just because I'm dim...
Ask HN:  Collapsing HN comments?
Is this possible on HN, or do you need a browser extensions/script to do it? I'm thinking of writing a GM script to do so but I'm hoping someone else has beaten me to it because knowing myself I'd probably just get 75% through it then lose interest.
Interesting idea, but:

You have to worry about measurability. How would you measure the quality of the site? And how would you do it objectively?
"Some people in the UK people do tend to think it was a big deal to drive 100 k's to go somewhere."

Maybe so, but in Australia they'd also think it's a pretty big deal to drive 100kms. And yet in the USA, I remember one guy I used to know who drove 6 hours, two ways, every weekend to see his girlfriend, seemed to think nothing of it. Trust me, that is never going to happen in Australia.

Americans just love driving, it seems. They seem to like being in their cars more, almost seems like a second home. I don't know why.

Another thing I've noticed about Americans is that they equate their cars with freedom, whereas in many other countries cars are a necessary evil which, far from making you more free, is actually a millstone around your neck. If I drag a car somewhere I have to worry about it, pay for parking, can't drink, etc etc. Give me a train anytime! But Americans seem to see it the exact opposite .. go figure.
"While 14 al-Qaeda were killed, some 687 civilian deaths also occurred…"

That is profoundly disturbing. How can governments justify the continued use of drones with statistics like that? There needs to be an ethical debate, yes, and urgently.
This post aside, the new Lamson HttpMail class is actually pretty neat. Look at this example: http://dpaste.de/pocD/, which mixes Markdown, HTML and CleverCSS into valid HTML with inline styles.
A Case For Conservatism
Those are some mighty big words.
>> So why are newspapers so taken aback that we are discussing the stories they write?

I think because sites like Gawker use the newspaper work for their own profit.

I think the following analogy could be used: Let's imagine that as a professional photographer, you shooted a photo gallery, spending quite a lot of time and money while working on it, and then you published it on your website with ads to attract readers or potential buyer. And then, I as a blogger will take several of your best photos, publish it on my blog with a few lines on comments and a link back to your website. Since I will repeat this with other photographers as well, my blog will be quite attractive so I will earn money with ads, and since my costs are minimal, I will survive a lot easier than you. This seems to happen with the newspaper in this era, with the only exception that republishing photos would be stealing and considered illegal, while republishing words is just "quoting".
Certainly, I think your point about performance is a very valid one. Adobe Air lacks performance, especially combined with Flex - but I think that's more of an issue with Flash on OSX than anything else.

In my experience, Titanium (which Bowline is built on) has good performance. Certainly they're using all the native APIs on each platform.

Personally, I find coding native trickier than html/js/ruby - but that may just be lack of practice. However, I'm sure you'll agree with me when I say developing and maintaining one codebase, instead of three, is easier.

So, it comes down to developer laziness ;), and here I agree too. However, you could apply the same argument to use of Rails to build a website over C.
It's certainly an argument that's been around for a while. I personally prefer to think of it in terms of efficiency, if being lazy (writing less code) will help me build something faster, I'm all for it. I certainly couldn't code up 3 native apps in the same time as it took me to write that Twitter client.
YC Startups Unite to Drive Nail into Coffin of IE6
Total number of comments and clicks on the articles would be the metric. Time spent on site would be a great measure too.
I've been throwing my thoughts into text files as well. I just hate scrolling through a long text file to find something. Gotta figure something out...

Also, I use the webcam of my laptop to make snapshots of paper notes I've written (the paper notes then can be disposed).
I think that you picked a rare counterexample to the normal behavior of bloggers. Gruber does not write like most bloggers; he does an excellent job of finding interesting articles and piquing interest in them without using a large amount of their content. When his posts are long, you can bet that they are full of original ideas and material.

In the Gawker example, the blog post is eight paragraphs long, four of which are lifted directly from the source and the rest summarized from the most interesting parts of the source.

I think that if everyone blogged like Gruber did, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.
No one should consider themselves informed on the subject of "killer robots" without having read this:

http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/global/the-second-amendm...
Yeah, sorry, but Angels and Demons wasn't real.
sure, there could possibly be some value to it if the administration of the test were done under more rigorous standards and the results compared against statistical correlations. I mean just common sense should tell you that the correct way to use it would be to have a distribution of common answers in front of you with correlation coefficients of the answers of people with various mental disorders.

when you look at the history of the test this is not how it has been used. psychologists use patient answers as the starting point for their own interpretation of that patient's problems. it is psychoanalysis quackery all over again. the hypothesis are always descriptive and never prescriptive. if your hypothesis makes no predictions about behavior what is the point? it certainly isn't helping the patient. the whole point of labeling mental disorders is so that you can group people by what treatments actually help them, not so psychologists can get more research grants.
I don't know that this is the right way to frame the question, at least in my experience.

98% of making serious money in any business still has to do with good execution and process - it's ultimately about creating reusable business processes that can be replicated at decreasing marginal cost. That's going to be true whether you're a mattress store or a "next big thing" software concept startup. So, they have at least that in common.

Otherwise, more generally, there's the kind of banality you ascribe to bars, restaurants, movie theaters, etc. in every business, even a technology startup--and lots of it. If you're doing something you genuinely enjoy, that just means you're lucky enough that your drudgery/fun mix is something like 90%/10%, instead of the 98%/2% that applies to people who claim to outright to hate their work.

At the same time, there's both room and ample incentive for differentiation through aggressive innovation and novel concepts in these types of everyday businesses, too. So, just because they aren't hot Silicon Valley startups doesn't mean they neither benefit from nor require the same kinds of marketing, branding, advertising, sales cycle and operational challenges.
Hey TechCrunch, Sweden is not the worst greenhouse gas emitter
I think that both those KPIs are quite a good idea, but they can alos lead to quite wrong measurements: What if this leads to people just clicking on every comment link to find out if there is a discussion or if there is a new post... etc.

It doesn't meassure the quality of the discussion and the submissions.
Inventor's Bike Folds Into Its Own Wheel