skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm surprised the salvation seller is making any money. The most basic tenets of Christianity specify that regardless of the sin, acceptance of Jesus guarantees salvation. How can someone not know this, yet still care enough about the state of their soul to pay $50 for a readout from an explicitly Christian source?
If you type the name of a company really fast (not the ticker) and hit enter before the autocomplete pops up, it will not find any information. Example of the url you get when you type "Microsoft" really fast http://freerisk.org/viewtables?ticker=Microsoft which doesn't work.
Apple rocks with iTunes 9, iTunes Store improvements
A prosecutor though would have to prove that the questions were irrelevant, which would be hard to do, unless you blogged about how the questions would be completely irrelevant on your high-traffic website.

All you need to do is link the questions to something. As in:

How many brothers/sisters do you have? More brothers = +1 girl, and vice versa. There is no requirement to have any sort of science behind the reasoning of whether or not your +1 assertion is correct.
Are their many people who know user experience design and graphic design? I admit they exist, but they are a rare bread.

Obviously that is optimal, but I'd say if you are a startup you should get funding that will help you get the right people on your team instead of a jack of all trades.
What's really "wrong" with the Loebner Prize is that it's a very simplified Turing test (five minutes of conversation) which doesn't promote the development of actual thinking machines any more than a paper airplane competition promotes the development of transcontinental airliners.

Really?

If all we had to begin with were paper airplanes, then a paper airplane competition would certainly promote transcontinental airliners. Before powered flight, studying paper airplanes was certainly one valid way to make progress. And the limits of today's AI in many ways make it seem pretty close to paper airplanes - so seeing if they can every fly across a room seems entirely valid.

SHEESH, it's hard to find even a metaphor in which this controversial prize doesn't advance our knowledge.

Consider, human behavior is very ad-hoc. AI as a field has neglected ad-hoc interaction, preferring more logically specified activities. If a computer could hold an effective five minute chat, it would be so far above what currently exists as to be breath-taking. If that's done with 'tricks', it's time to start understanding the 'tricks' rather going on and on with the systematic or whatever approaches we might have thought were the proper way to do this.

Oh, and the reading test sounds easier than the interaction test - MUCH easier.
or get a Flip.

This does not seem obvious to me. The Flip Ultra (4GB) is $149, the Ultra HD (8GB) is $199. Compare the iPod Nano at $149 (8GB) and $179 (16GB). The Flip may be a better camera, but the Nano is clearly competitive, even ignoring it's other features.

whose net result is lower hardware sales

The Nano is the top selling iPod model. They released a new model with at least one significant new feature that wholly replaces another product category in the same price range.

How do you conclude that will result in lower sales?
Yes and the base of the web is insufficient. I won't get into it now though, I haven't had a coffee yet.
Mini Ask-HN: What's the coolest piece of swag/kitsch that you've ever gotten from a booth (or a company in general)?
IPod nano with video camera: $149
"Attention grabbing"? It's a tabloid paper. That's what tabloid papers are for. As for "wildly inaccurate", it simply has quite a strong bias, but so do lots of papers. The Guardian is no less partisan.

I wouldn't buy a copy of the Mail, but I'm tired of reading fatuous name-calling of this sort from people who've never read the paper.
Hey, hey, let's go easy on the "superstition" part, OK? :)

One man's religion is another man's superstition, I guess! And shaving off the hair is pretty harmless, as "superstitions" go -I mean, I got a lot of friends pretty non-superstitious types who shave off their hair here in the valley.
Ask HN: Anyone Heard of Joseph A. Cordi
Just got an email from Joseph A. Cordi (LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/josephcordi) which I first took to be generic spam but now wondering if he (or his firm) scraped the posts here and sent out more targeted spam. Anyone else get this email or know anything about him? There's no mention of how he got my email information. I guess another possibility is that he scraped DNS records I guess. Whatever the case, sounds a little sketchy. Here's the text of the email:

"I was looking for the opportunity to introduce myself. I helped start the New York office of Advanced Equities Inc. (AEI).

"AEI was established in Chicago in 1999. We are a full-service investment bank with a focus on late-stage private equity. Historically, we provide our clients access to companies seeded by the top Silicon Valley VC firms such as Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Benchmark, and Khosla Ventures.

"A great way to describe my firm is that we have filled the void created by the departure of Alex Brown, H&Q, Robertson Stephens and Montgomery from the private equity market. With all the rules and regulations resulting from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the $50M IPO no longer exists and companies are mandated to incubate that’s where we come in.

"I have a network of tech executives and entrepreneurs I work with who I keep abreast of the individual rounds of funding which we lead for our portfolio companies and give them the opportunity to invest at angel size levels on a case-by-case basis into our later-stage deals.

"If you potentially would have an interest in receiving access to our deal flow, call me when you have a couple minutes to discuss further or, alternatively, let me know the best time and number to reach you.

Joseph A. Cordi"
What's amazing is that 3 terabyes costs about $300 nowadays. Include good components, power, redundancy, maintenance, and it probably comes to $1,000 per year.

So this feature is actually pretty cheap to do, unless I'm missing something.
I agree. Unless the domain name is s*x.com I wouldn't pay for it and certainly wouldn't give equity in exchange.

Your product will brand the domain name not the other way round.
Uh,

It's not as if the machines are acing the Loebner version of the test or anything. Obviously, the test is dumbed-down to allow Bronze metal winners. Seems like a logical even if so much else about the contest seems mired in the persona of Hugh Loebner.
No harm, no foul. Besides, this is a different report and might say something extra. The reference is for the discussion so people don't needlessly repeat points.
... it's not really an SEO blog. He's was an affiliate marketer who made a lot of money and is now trying to make more by pimping his own brand. He's actually quite controversial in the SEO/SEM/SEWhatever community because of stuff like this: http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/05/07/seo-has-no-future/
Would the analogy be hire a DBA, Sys Admin, Back-end Developer and a Front-end Developer? Programmers have really stepped it up in the past few years and I feel that the UX/UI/X designer group hasn't. I don't know about you but I'm going to wait and hire the person who can do all these tasks. It's true they are rare but not because it's hard, but because they got lazy and didn't adapt to the web. Sounds a lot like Madison Ave doesn't it.
Not to rain on your parade, but DC has lots of drawbacks too compared to a city like Portland. One of the most distressing things about DC is how little crime is segregated into neighborhoods. People get killed even in hip areas like Georgetown and Adams Morgan. Truly the egalitarian dream. There were bodies found in the Georgetown canal while I lived there.
I never implied the similarity that you are seemingly calling into question.
Also, this test actually doesn't seem as valid a simple conversation, since dealing with the apparent unpredictability of conversation is one of the real challenges for "real AI".
(Edited title after posting)
LinkedIn URL: http://www.linkedin.com/in/josephcordi
I think if you don't have somebody fighting for the user, the front end will be a reflection of the complexities of development and won't be a reflection of the user's behavior and needs.

I think a UX person ensures that development is a strategic process centered around the user, which in the end creates better products that people use and want.
Every time I read "terabyte", I have to pause, because my brain goes "That's gigantic!" and then a little voice says, "It's the same size as the hard disk in my desktop...it cost $89."

I have the same sort of weird mental disconnect with SD cards. It's just hard to fathom 32GB of data fitting into something about the size of a quarter.
"what is the point of user experience"

... What is the POINT of user experience

This is why there are so many badly designed sites out there.
It's not quite 50%, males are born slightly more often than females. Something like for every 105 boys born there are 100 girls. You can stack the odds a little more in your favour by always guessing "boy".
It doesn't quite sound like spam. If you're a spammer, you don't sell investment banking deal-flow; you sell herbal supplements, or something else that most people will want.

It looks more like he sent a cold-email. If he wants better results, he might want to customize it a little more.
AM Analytics, an incubated startup, seeks a lead developer / co-founder
AM Analytics (amanalytics.com) was recently admitted into the Berkeley Ventures (berkeleyventures.com) incubator program. AM Analytics is seeking a talented web application developer / co-founder to lead the development of our social media and market intelligence dashboard.

About me: I'm a recent college graduate and I moved from the east coast to the Bay Area to work on the venture full-time. We have one adviser in the Bay Area, and two part-time employees on the east coast. I am ideally looking for someone who lives in the Bay Area to work with me full-time in our Berkeley Ventures office.

Please see below for more details:

AM Analytics is a web startup committed to building the most comprehensive social media and market intelligence dashboard available. The AM Analytics team is a combination of individuals passionate about leveraging social media to help businesses make informed decisions. Our current team has backgrounds in internet technology, government security, financial analysis, market intelligence. Although our team's education and experience is diverse, our goal is to deliver a single, integrated social media analytics platform to our customers.

Responsibilities:

As the lead web application developer, you will own the application design, implementation, and maintenance of the AM Analytics platform.

Requirements:

1. Experience with web scripting and application languages (Python, Ruby, etc)

2. Experience working in an open source development environment (Linux, Apache, SVN)

3. Experience with Model-View-Controller (MVC) web frameworks (Django, Ruby on Rails)

4. Experience with REST(like) API's, XML parsing / handling, JSON, etc.

5. Expertise in HTML/CSS, including familiarity with good
information and aesthetic design principles.

6. Experience with Flash / Action Script

Big Plus:

1. Prior social media application development experience.

2. Fun person to hang out with.

3. Enjoy building an innovative web application that makes customers happy.

Interested? Please email alex@amanalytics.com for details.
"approved independent websites."

Lame.
Skimming through user comments I see a lot of people pointing out that the original design showed more shoes than the redesign. This is a key point that the redesign author missed completely - Zappos sells shoes, you can't make a shoe-selling website and then spend more time talking about company culture than shoes.

Also interesting are users who point out that the original site has less "ads". People don't see testimonials and "how Zappos rocks" as insightful, they see them as obtrusive advertisements.
Attending college is more about gaining status than learning.

If the effectiveness of learning is in question here then we would have already seen a decline in college attendance.

Yet college degree has only become more obligatory over the years for even the most mediocre jobs, despite the fact that employers know whatever students learn in college rarely contributes to real world job skills.

Online college will only take over if it becomes more prestigious than traditional college. However, currently they seems to be on the same status bracket as community college.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all about changing the broken education system. In fact, I have a hybrid distributive model of education, but it will take too long to explain here. An article is due.
Thanks - I knew you could buy external mics but didn't know Apple sold mic headphones.

I have the original touch that doesn't have a speaker.
I agree. I was thinking of spam in a generic sense. He had to have generated a bunch of these and bulk mailed them or else he would have taken the time to customize them.
Oh, that's great news. I must have misread the announcement page. Thanks for clarifying.
Technically, everyone should be fighting for the user. The customer (or a representative thereof) should participate in all UI design decisions. Having a specific "UI person" sounds like trying to shoehorn agile methods into the middle of a BDUF process. (That's not to say it wouldn't work, though. I believe game companies do it all the time--a "game designer" is just a UX designer for a UX of which "fun" is an integral component.)
Serving up thousands of requests per seconds from 3 TB (while continually adding and updating more data!) is a lot different from just archiving it.

A _lot_. :)

To put it in perspective, 100GB is pretty much the limit of what you can serve from a single mysql machine, for instance. This will vary depending on exact workload but that is a reasonable ball park number.
But since it is a pretty stable and simple structure it is written in a lower level language for either stability or performance or opacity.
nosql....its like the first two weeks of dating

but then the bloom comes off the rose and suddenly precomputing all of your results gets tired, particularly when they all propogate changes into each other's records

lets boil it down: the sql model stores data and computes answers with the query facility

the key-value model stores answers.

there's no magic here, you could hypothetically jigger mysql et al in the same way...just dispense with any decomposition of data, any features of the query language, and turn it into a key->answer system. throw caching in front of it and you've pretty much rebuilt cassandra, but with more robust pieces
I don't know about you but I'm going to wait and hire the person who can do all these tasks.

That's a great approach if you can pull it off. But I can say from personal experience that trying to find someone who truly meets all those competencies is quite difficult. It's amazing how many "web designers" are just people who can slice Photoshop files; they have no understanding whatsoever of what makes for a good, workable design for the web.
Yes, I've received a similar message. I do have my email address listed here in the public info. I took it to be spam, as well, and just deleted it.

Interesting how cold contacts are problematic in both directions; from entrepreneur to investor and from investor to entrepreneur (though I'd never heard of AEI, and it sounds like they are middlemen rather than actual investment decision makers, and so that makes me less likely to respond, anyway).
Navy hopes to make jet fuel from seawater
FinViz: A Financial Visualization Dashboard
and i ready my gun
So, you wouldn't buy a copy and yet you claim others have never read it ?

To put the guardian and the daily mail in the same column is doing serious injustice to the guardian.

How about faceless aliens spotted at Wimbledon ?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1031062/Faceless-ali...

Or this one ?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-491757/First-picture...

or this ?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1160904/Resea...

I rest my case.
Entrepreneur advice: Break down brick walls
#2 is crucial. I've exhibited at events where almost no one was buying technology. Worse, many of the people who stopped by and seemed interested were not people who would make software decisions for their organization.

You have to do your homework. Go beyond reading the event's website and literature. Just because it seems like the right crowd for your product doesn't mean it is. Or maybe it is, but the tradeshow floor is in a weird spot or only open during lunch or a keynote making it difficult to sell. Ask others who may have exhibited or attended before you buy a booth.
In the far future, programming will work the other way around.
I was thinking "WOW", as well, but breck's right. This shouldn't really be that surprising any more given the price of disk storage these days.
Media Companies: Don't Blame the Internet
LG KS10 Black Slider Unlocked
LG KS10 is a fashion conscious multimedia handset which is an Internet browsing focused 3G phone. The handset comes complete with Symbian operating system complete with Internet browsing with Google.

Discount Price : $139.99
Coupon Code : LKS10 (FREE SHIPPING) (Offer Limited Period Only).
Ok then you should know it doesn't do audio input either. You need gen2.
Who is most engaged with email?
3 TB of disk is easy. 3 TB flowing quickly from disk to RAM to CPU cache and back out again is another story.
My suspicion that it wouldn't be _that_ hard to be convincing in the context of the competition comes from reading some of the chat transcripts -- see, e.g. http://loebner.net/Prizef/2008_Contest/loebner-prize-2008.ht... for last year's winners. The conversations with actual humans seem fairly dull and formulaic, the judges don't seem to attempt any particularly sophisticated interactions. Already the winners are managing to convince about 30% of the judges, so getting that above 50% doesn't seem too hard.

Incidentally, I just had a chat with last year's winner elbot (see elbot.com) and it's got some pretty clever special-case interactions built in. For instance:

me: What is 4 times 4?

elbot: The answer is: 17!

me: Haha, very clever.

elbot: I'm glad you agree, most people think the answer is 16.
Have used both varnish and squid on production servers, currently serving up to 500K+ uniques daily using varnish.

To put this into perspective, this is only a couple hundred requests per second (I'm assuming a "unique" equates to ~40 item requests). Either Squid or Varnish can handle that load with ease from a single box (roughly ten years ago, my previous company built a 550MHz, 512MB, 1x7200 RPM IDE disk Squid-based appliance that was conservatively specced at 70 tps, and adding a second disk pushed it up to 110 tps).

This is what I meant by performance not being the most important factor in most deployments of this type (though it certainly matters a lot; and faster is always better, since it results in better retention, more sales, more page views, etc.).
Solving a problem a second time is much more profitable

This is compatible with the OP's point - hackers often look for novel solutions, not necessarily novel problems.

But the terminology here is very uncertain - problems and solutions interact in very complex ways: the "assembly line" solution solved the "horse shit all over the roads" problem. Google Wave might end up solving the problems which ORM's and databases are solving - that of storing and synchronizing data structures across machines.
In a ship with a nuclear reactor producing plenty of surplus power, I could see this becoming practical under emergency conditions. I worry, though, that the sensationalist title and the omission of the energy inputs required in the article could lead readers astray.
Using Cohort Analysis for Business Optimization
A step-by-step on using Cohort Analysis to extract valuable insights from unstructured company data.
Of course, in a relational database you wouldn't (generally) be storing the vast majority of the data in question...you'd be querying for it. That's not to trivialize the improvement in performance here, just to point out that this probably would be 100GB in a MySQL database.
What about refraction?
I almost subscribed immediately and probably will. The key thing about ARS that makes them different from the average news site is that their quality is consistently high, they aren't obviously pushing a particular viewpoint, and more importantly their analysis is in depth and intelligent without being monotonous or pedantic.

I'd love to pay money to subscribe to a newspaper that was like this.
The second story you link to was also covered in the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/nov/10/india.internatio...

The third was covered in the Independent, a (former) broadsheet which I think most would consider as respectable as the Guardian: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/belief-and-the-bra...

[edit] And the first story was covered in the Telegraph, another broadsheet: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2238...

The news in the Mail might be a bit hyped but it's not "wildly inaccurate". I don't read it either, and wouldn't, but it's not exactly The Daily Sport.
yea same. That theme must have happened while steve was in the hospital.
It's really not rocket science. If you understand what Snort is doing, you know pretty much everything Sandvine does. Generally speaking, the commercial high-speed products do less than Snort, because they have hardware constraints.
In SQL systems, you can easily shift the computation cost from at read time to at write time. That's what triggers are for. When new data comes in that changes a result you know you need quickly, a trigger can automatically add to a work queue to update a result table.

Since the trigger has automatic access to the contents of the new data (and old data in case of an update or delete) the computation to update the results table can often be made much faster.

Every situation is different of course, but it's overreaching to say that SQL systems have no options beyond read-time computation of results.
The generalization of Rob's avoidance of new sports and Slava's startup into the category of "new things" doesn't fit. The OP's post was about the effects of social pressure on his choosing to start a company before and after his decision, and the role YC played. The example of Rob only doing things he was good at relates because Rob was influenced by a similar model of success, failure, and social expectations.
Ask HN: UK undergrad wanting to spend a year in the US
In the UK a lot of universities offer you sandwich year as part of your degree in which you spend a year working in industry before completing your final year. I'm at the point now where I'm starting to think about where I want to work for that year and having been lucky enough to work as a developer in a startup and another small company I've decided that it's definately the route I want to take.

I've got a few ideas floating around and would love to be able to commit to one of those but a year isn't long enough and I'm quite keen on finishing off my degree.

So... it would be great if I could come over to the valley for a year, but I find all the Visa rigmarole a bit daunting considering I would only be there for a short period. If anyone has some experience of this and thinks its feasible I'd appreciate your comments. Also, would a startup be inclined to hire an undergraduate (admittedly a reasonably productive one - that's what I tell myself anyway) for a short period of time?
I read in several blog posts that Cassandra has its share of data-corrupting bugs. http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2009/07/06/up-and-runnin... mentioned that even Facebook does not use it as a system of record. Wonder how Digg deals with that.