skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My patch (which can be found discussed in the mailing list) provides a callback hook to modify the final result given the parsed details. I use it to modify assumptions: e.g., if you just type a year, for the final output, the library assumes the rest of the date should be jan 1, but if this field is the end of a date range, it should probably be dec 31 since "burglaries from 2001 to 2002" means the burglaries in 2001 and in 2002. I think it's an important function, and the original author agreed, but neither of us has had the time to test and time everything for all the relevant codepaths to make it into the library.

Other posters have had other complaints about missing functionality--some struck me as reasonable, some not so much--but I haven't kept track.
Ask HN: Getting a survey of customer interest without giving too much away?
So I've been in the process of developing a new website on the side as something that one day might turn into a legitimate company.

I was thinking that I want to get opinions from my target audience before I get too heavily into it, but I'm a little nervous about giving out too many details about the project for fear that the idea might be "stolen".

While more than likely this is just me being a bit too paranoid, I did want to see what other people had to say about this. How do you go about getting a sense of market interest in a new product and still remain able to protect your idea?

I'm sure the majority of my audience that I would talk to would not have the technical skills nor the desire to rip off the idea, but I can never be sure of course.
If someone resorts to an ad-hominem attack it seems that they don't have a logical comeback, or at least not one that can promote the verity of their argument over the others being proferred.

Ad hominem attacks very rarely take the form of genuine criticism of the person or indeed a criticism of the characteristics of that person pertinent to the argument at hand.

Most of it is just "bad mouthing".

Personally I don't have a problem with people questioning my character if it's pertinent to the issue.

I presume it's one of those role-playing things. People act out against what they are restricted in doing in real life - you can't just rant and rave at people without repurcussions when you're off-line. Online behind a veil of pseudo-anonymity you can try out your best swearing and put downs and make a game of attack those who seek logical conclusions by being simply inflammatory.

One very weak example (though I've had people on HN tell me they feel all my kind should be murdered!):I was having a mathematical block picturing a particular plane and asked in response to a story if someone could post a link to an online 3d function plotter; the response was along the line of "you moron that's the simplest possible plane to imagine" followed by 2 other helpful responses.

For one I don't see asking for help to be moronic, not all people have the same skillset, some of us have specific learning issues. For another the assertion that it was the simplest plane was plain wrong (no pun intended!).

So why did the guy attack me with vemon and false assertion - in this instance I feel he wanted to exert his intellectual superiority by attempting to belittle me. Others would then jump on this and vote him up and he gets a happy "I'm the dogs-bollocks" [that amazingly is a good thing! it means "supreme in this field"] feeling all day.

My tuppence.
Oh for fuck's sake. So what do you suggest? Bundle eventmachine with thin?

"He requires rubygems even though what he wants is eventmachine. What's the sense?"

Do you know even know what rubygems is? It is used to require other libraries. Like eventmachine. That is a textbook usage.

I was regretting insulting you before, but after hearing that, I don't anymore - you're an idiot.

Hey defunkt, do you endorse masklinn's comment above too?
My dad acted in the Theatre and so I had been doing Theatre tech since about 11 years old (and have many, many beautiful women as friends). With that experience in mind I can verify you sister's friend's claim.

When you come right down to it there are two things you have to realize about women.

1. As hard as it is for Men to comprehend the truth is attractiveness isn't that high on a woman's list. It's not that women don't like an attractive man it's just lower on the list. Here's an example I use to explain it to men. I, as someone who dated a lot of theatre women, like dating professional dancers (for reasons I won't be so crass as to spell out here). But I'll certainly be interested in a beautiful, smart, funny woman who isn't a dancer. Attractiveness to women is like being a dancer to me. It's a plus but not a deal breaker. Hence "average looking bald guy" isn't necessarily a deterrent.

2. Attracting women in general boils down to one simple concept: Stand out from the crowd in a good way. No women wants a guy that seems average to her. So when your sister's gay friend shows a lack of interest in a woman every other man drools over it makes that woman wonder why and gives the guy a sense of mystery to him. Hence he stands out in an appealing way which makes women want to take a shot with him and see why he's different.
at certain times, couldnt agree more. few weeks back was feeling so burnt out that had to unplug everything and elope on a vacation.
Great article. Accreditation has to evolve. At www.nixty.com we are working on a form of open accreditation - or personal accreditation - that employers/peers can look at to assess a person's competencies. Degrees are still somewhat valid indicators of a person's knowledge, but their predictive value is steadily decreasing for a number of "anonymous institutions". What is needed, instead, is a form of personal accreditation that is based on test scores, work display (papers the individual has written that others can download/comment on), resume, and recommendations. We hope that this type of open accreditation will yield strong results that can help support the current form of accreditation.
No, in aerospace he compared bleeding edge to bleeding edge.
This article has a lot of hyperbole and is lite on facts.
I note you didn't answer the question.

Computers add a little more convenience. Shopping is a little more convenient than catalog shopping, maybe. You can be "friends" with people by looking at their pictures and reading occasional snippets of text from them instead of spending time with them in person. It is much easier to adopt a lifestyle of sitting in an automobile seat, to sitting in a cubicle seat, to sitting in a reclining chair in front of a television or a computer screen, than it was in the 1950s. We've gone from listening to a transistor radio in our pocket to listening to music on our iPod. That's an improvement in terms of choice and convenience, but it that all we've got to show for the past 50 years?

What are the qualitative improvements in life since 1959? Taking just one thing he mentioned in the 50 years before that, the invention of antibiotics, is there anything in the past 50 years that compares in the impact to human lives? (Note how he convincingly argues it was even the enabler of the sexual revolution.)
Golden Rice? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice#Golden_rice_and_vit...
AfterStep -Just another windows manager for Linux
I don't think I can do this, lol.

I tried relaxing without work to do for a week recently during a school break and by the end of it I felt lazy and self-loathing... as if I had spent the whole week doing nothing but watching Judge Judy and eating Cheetos. I just think I enjoy having responsibilities and things to do.
I'm not sure they're all good ideas(!); if you give a "non-reproduction" bonus you'd need to have a system to retrieve it. Perhaps an additional element could be given in old-age pension to those without offspring?

I'm not sure we (as a society) want to reward not having offspring in the long term, just not having too many.
Ayn Rand's philosophy is that of a free economy that stresses the importance of the individual. A democracy is a political institution that stresses the rule of the majority. Rand idealized the self-sustaining individual. A democracy by definition cannot be sustained by one individual. So, it's a difficult analogy to make.

A better analogy would be like saying that a king has a right to abolish his monarchy.

Also, it is only self-defeating if the original goal was only to amass the wealth.

To continue the analogy to this point, a king abolishing his monarchy would only be self-defeating if his only goal was to be a king. However, if his goal as king was to make life better for his country, then abolishing his monarchy in favor of a democracy would be a very good move and not self-defeating at all.

Likewise, if the person's original goal was to produce and then dispose of the rewards as he wished, then doing so is not self-defeating. It's only self-defeating if his original goal was to simply have wealth.

<edit>
The other part of Rand's argument is that the individual has the right to dispose of their wealth however they please, because they produced it and they own it. A democracy would only have a right to dispose of itself provided it was the democracy that created itself in the first place.
</edit>
Did they tack a ^Z after the text so that when you TYPE the executable, you get just the "hi mom from bitphr33k / n3cr0ph1li4" or whatever?
Well obviously I can't communicate the full idea of "The Greatest Book Ever Written" in a comment, but I'll try :)

Strange things happen when you have 'recursion' / 'strange loops' / 'self reflection' / 'mirroring' / 'strange entanglement' / 'entangled heirachies' etc.

What are some examples ?

- "This statement is false" is true or false ?
- The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, position and momentum of a particle cannot both be known because they each influence each other.
- Turing Halting problem proof when a program is executed using itself as input.
- Human self awareness ? If I think about what I'm thinking about what am I thinking about ?
- Godel's proof that any formal system strong enough to be useful is either incomplete or inconsistent, to use an analogy he
proves this by stating in the language of the system the statement "this statement cannot be proved in this system". If it can
be proved the system lied (is inconsistent) or if it cannot be proved the statement is a truth that the system cannot prove and
hence the system is incomplete. (Obviously he doesn't use statements like that, he uses facts about the natural numbers but the same
principle applies)
- Chandelier cells in the brain, thought to contain an internal model of the brain's state. A model of the brain within the brain. Do they contain
a model of themselves ?

Ok, so if this 'recursion' / 'strange loops' business is mysterious, present at the heart of all interesting systems it must be pretty special, it must require magic or
devine intervention to come about, surely ? Nup, simple examples such as the 'game of life' can show amazing complexity and even this sort of 'self awareness' emerging from a simple initial state and a simple set of rules.

Best I've got at the moment.
Flex or Javafx or silverlite
Flex or Javafx or silver lite. Guys can you help me in picking up right technology for making a crossword. Idea is it should be download and run in browser without loading any external libraries.
When you have that many books it's a pain to find one if they aren't organised in some fashion.
This guy is forgetting what life was like before Google.
"...electric cars..."

"The Nash metropolitan got 40-mpg in real world driving tests, much like the overrated hair shirt Toyota Prius."

The technology is more advanced, but is it a real qualitative improvement over what we had 50 years ago?

He does explicitly mention nano-tech:

"Some wise acre is likely to pipe up and sing the glories of “Nanotech,” a “subject” which was “invented” in K. Eric Drexler‘s Ph.D. thesis in 1989. In the 20 years since he penned his fanciful little story, we have yet to see a single example of the wondrous miniature perpetual motion machines Drexler has been promising us “real soon now.” I wonder what his timeline for delivery of this “technology” will be?"

Do you disagree with that assessment?
"An app is a library is an app."

I've belated realised that you're either a really good troll or you don't have the first fucking clue what you're talking about. Well done, you got me.
Smule: I am T-Pain
It's nice but it's flash. Would have been much more impressive if it was done in JavaScript.
The article does not make the argument that life was better in 1959 than today.

The argument is that progress from 1909 to 1959 dwarfs the amount of progress from 1959 to today.

I agree that is in conflict with the headline. I wonder if he chose the title himself, or if it was assigned by the publication.
For me (and probably many other people), it is much easier to relax and chill out than to stay focused, concentrated and productive. Add to that economic reprecussions for slacking and motivations for being competitive workforce, and you will know why productivity books sell better than relaxation-HOWTOs.
The traffic might not prove anything, even if it were reliable, but the bottom line might. It may prove that sometimes its better to raise a bunch of money and spend it on ads.

At the end of the day it's all about profits. If they're spending $1m on ads that bring in $5m in revenue, and TicketStumbler is getting only a fraction of that organically, then Fansnap will come out way ahead in the end. And users you buy from ads frequently have a higher RPU than organic ones, and the difference is often more than enough to offset the increased acquisition costs.

Not saying that's the case in this particular instance, but I think it's a mistake to say organic traffic is necessarily a more meaningful metric than overall traffic when the end metric is money.
Does putting on makeup before going to the beach like the model depicted in the article count as relaxing and enjoying yourself? Just sayin.
I think that a lot of businessowners and accountants would disagree strongly about excel.
In the middle of the room. Or on top of another one, like I'm doing.

My particular problem is having hundreds of books in my Amazon shopping cart. When I finally NEED to order a book, I first get to hem and haw over dozens of books whether I should order them or put them in the oubliette (also known as 'wish list').
While Pixlr is awesome already, Sumo Paint is even more advanced:

http://www.sumo.fi/products/sumopaint/index.php?id=0
It's only ill-defined if you ignore accepted definitions.

"Organic" is not purely used in marketing but describes the method of production and indicates the specifics of the husbandry and nutrition of animals and the type of fertiliser and conditions of growth of plants. The specific definition is left to particular standards bodies.

Compare: Use of the word "judge" to mean "someone who determines what's right" dates way back, attempts to label a tiny subset of the population as "judges" [simply because they determine a specific type of judgement] is a more recent invention that bugs me.
When I was thinking of starting tarsnap, I just posted to my blog saying "here's what I think a backup service should look like; I can't see anything out there which looks like this; if I build this, will anyone pay to use it?"

Now, tarsnap is a bit unusual in that the technical aspects create a significant barrier to entry (even leaving aside issues of efficiency and performance, few people have the security expertise necessary); but as far as I know, nobody tried to steal my idea.
Have flex hours or even better flex days in the workplace.
"By knocking out two characters from the URL, that means your tweet content can potentially be 1.4% longer."

It's sad that this isn't intentionally a satirical statement.
I'd argue that enjoying life is also doing something and sometimes it's hard work to do so.
I meant of course, given the field of current discourse, "match a particular [DNA] fingerprint", as in the assessment of presence of known chemical structures at particular points in a DNA strand as is used in the field of criminal investigation.
Poll: Employed or Independent / Start-up ?
There is lots of talk here about 'starting-up', I'm wondering how many here have taken the plunge and how many are sitting on the fence or have decided to work for a boss.
- work for a boss
- sitting on the fence, still work for a boss but want to be free
- running own company with partners
Reading Underground
domain knowledge can certainly be helpful. whether the cs degree is useful depends on the domain. if you just need to put together a web application for a biomedical device your building, or need to do some complicated matlab analysis, then independent study is all you need to get those skills. heck, i didn't learn about web technology until after i had my bachelors.

if you're solving a science of computers problem, like algorithms or systems stuff, then maybe a computer science degree is mad helpful. sometimes the technology is the software. (eg, guided navigation ecommerce, airplane optimizing websites)

sometimes i rail against college because "i didn't learn how to build anything until i graduated and started working on projects all the time."

actually, though, college taught me a reach history behind the science and systems of computers, and how to think. it's like the difference between teaching yourself arithmetic to work at a checkout counter versus creating elegant proofs. there's a cap on how far the former will really get you.

it took me a couple years after getting the bachelors to really master building stuff (more so i feel that i get better every month). but now that i feel leaps and bounds ahead of where other people level off. being a "good" programmer actually saves enormous amounts of time after the prototype hackery. there are other advantages, too, such as promoting collaboration and fun.

the idea that an entrepreneur just needs a hacky program and that once they get funding they'll redo it doesn't make sense. more often one needs to make a real program (or site) and bootstrap things at least to show profitability and execution.

i don't see twitter as the exception to this rule because scaling is not the only component of good programming. but even so, i'm sure exceptions exist (ebay?).

my main point is that i feel like an entrepreneur in my soul and i love programming, but in a very definite science and systems way. a computer science degree was awesome. i also have a masters of engineering in computer science. it was a necessary step in my path to mastery (still ongoing).

i don't love another domain so i can't really speak to how well the two-at-once or one-after-the-other thing works.

most domain specific folks i know are way better off with a solid developer on their team. i love working with domain-specific folks who are passionate about the domain and charismatic enough to be the outreach and business side of the team.

just trying to add another side to the picture. there's a place for all combinations of skills; i've filled quite a few as my skills change and develop over time.
Statistics and probability are the foundation of Machine Learning. Information Theory and Machine Learning are practically homomorphic(1,2). You can't really be interested in Computer Science without being interested in Information Theory. Therefore, you're interested in Statistics. QED.

(1)http://themachinelearningforum.org/index.php/overviews/34-co...

(2)http://people.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Teaching/CS340-Fall07/infoT...
Ok, the chance your idea is stolen is not zero - but it's a lot lower than you think.
That said, there are a few things you can do without revealing your idea; use google trends to identify search volume for the problem you're solving, search forums for questions indicating frustration at the lack of your solution etc.

Mechanical Turk can also generate cheap data about the likely size of your market & whether your solution is viable. There was a post here yesterday with good advice on how to screen for quality there.
[edit] http://www.itworld.com/internet/76659/experimenting-mechanic...

I've also seen a friend garner some useful data with a small adwords campaign testing to see if people would click on 'solve problem x' ads - but that's a dubious tactic if you don't have a product yet...

Good luck.
I can't wait until this gets included in the Long URL Please FireFox-extension. My new favourite addon since this nonsense started.

For reference: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9549?version=...
Which is only a problem if you want to have a women's clothing store in preference to making a profit.

There was a TV program about a shoe manufacturer in the UK a few years back that started making larger womens boots. They realised later the demand was driven by transvestite males and that they could make more money in that market and so transitioned from being a womens shoe maker to catering for leather-fetishists and transvestite males. They simply followed the profit.

Inline with your comment, not all companies would be happy to make such a profit-driven move; but I suspect few shareholders would care not to.
I can definitely relate to this. I was following the David Allen "Getting Things Done" method for about a year, and it was great, but eventually I couldn't keep up. I just found myself kind of passively rebelling against the whole idea of productivity -- refusing to look at my next action lists, playing sudoku on my phone, just wasting time wherever I could. I think when you get in a situation like that, the only thing to do is a full restart -- reevaluate everything on your plate and decide what's important to you.

Lately I've found that I can avoid burnout by having 2 different projects going at the same time. But they need to be in completely different domains. For example, I'm working on a stealth startup and training for a marathon. I rest my body while working on the computer, I rest my mind while out on my runs. Yin and Yang. Doing things this way, everything gets done that needs to, and I always feel like whatever I'm doing is a fun break from something else.
Should Entrepreneurs Minimize Credit Card Debt?
To point out just one qualitative improvement the author completely discounts: the internet.

"Computer networks came a year or two after 1959 and didn’t change very much, other than how we waste time in the office, and whom advertisers pay."

Which, even according to his statement, happened in the 50 year window from 1959-2009.

You can't change facts to support your argument just because it's convenient.

Just imagine what your world would be like without google and email (just to name two aspects of the internet). We wouldn't be having this debate (maybe that wouldn't be a bad thing ;).
The problem with incubators
yup, whats the point in keeping a book when we know we aren't going to read it again? when I was a kid, I had a collection of about 900-1000 books, but realized no point in just hoarding them, so gave away those that I had read to my school library.

In addition to libraries, you could check out sites like bookmooch.com, I've used this particular site, it works as advertised.
EBay Acquisition Map Shows Where It Got On The Wrong Track
Organic traffic is not necessarily the best predictor of a mature company's revenues, but it is a more meaningful way to compare two newly launched companies.

The impression you get from the traffic graph is that Fansnap is leaving Ticketstumbler behind, while in fact it is entirely possible (indeed likely, under the circumstances) that it reflects mainly a gradual ramping up of ad spending. I.e. that what you're seeing is a graph of increasing losses rather than increasing profits.
I'd throw my hypothetical $25K on top of that, if I had it, for all the reasons you just said.
Aye, it hurts the worst when you don't get closure.
Wow. I ignore HN (and my traffic logs) for a day and look what I miss.

Glad you guys like it!