skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure if I am an "expert" on this, but Reddit came out after Digg and sold. MySpace and Facebook came out after Friendster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#History

There are plenty of players out there who come out after others do. I have a friend who runs a successful rebate shopping side that launched well after others did.

They all seemed to have some kind of advantage or find some kind of niche when others were doing well. Location may be your advantage, or ease of use, etc. Good luck!
Fair enough (and the last point certainly is true). My use of "dynamic languages" was a lazy way of referring to several less strict, highly expressive languages. I used it in the sense that Yegge used it in his talk that I link to. While writing it, I had Ruby, Python, and Smalltalk in mind.

I should point out that my lack of consideration of Java was more due to my perception of it being C++ (a language that I have written far too much of) without all the fun or peril.

You are entirely correct that it isn't the type system that makes a language, but it does provide a convenient if highly inaccurate way to speak broadly about a set of languages.
It also gets annoying when people discuss things and in the end discover they are talking about different things, you know. When a networks guy talks about bandwidth, he might refer to bit rate or channel capacity, but for an RF engineer, bandwidth is measured in Hertz. Interrupting the commnunication of ideas is bad, but communicating imprecise ideas is close to useless.
How cool, I've never heard of those. Thanks for the idea, this might allow me to get closer to my desk, but it looks so strange!

http://www.comfortchannel.com/images/Kneeling_chair_A.jpg
Definitely not. Google is the canonical example of a startup entering a crowded market and just doing it better.

If you're from India, you're probably familiar with http://www.smsgupshup.com/. I don't know too much about them, but my understanding is that they're very similar to twitter, but managed to grab the Indian market by catering specifically to those users' needs. I think I remember reading that sms was a much bigger focus for them because of the availability of net access in India. Sometimes doing it better means doing it better for a specific subset of customers.
How to outsmart Google? Easy in just a few steps:

First, overthrow whatever governmental system is currently in power.

Second, install a 'communist' government who is friendly to your business.

...

Profit!
The difference is techniques that are developed for special purposes, but turn out to be useful for more general cases, versus techniques that become more and more specialized, resulting in a decreased possibility of ever using them for anything but increasingly specialized areas.

Perhaps the human brain's neural wiring that was required for throwing could have been, and was, subverted into something else. Better negamax alpha-beta algorithms for chess (that require the programmer to know more and more about chess to make any further research progress) will never be useful for anything but chess.

What seems to have died is the dream of any kind of useful generalized intelligence. Any kind!
Easy. Nobody's options are worth anything, but retained employees get a retention grant from the acquiring company.

Private company shares are very risky.
>>if you'd have asked anyone (anyone!), in any AI related field in 1980, where AI would be in thirty years what would they have said?

Uhm, Hans Moravec isn't exactly "anyone". :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

Edit: To be clear, Moravec shows that you misrepresent the AI field of that time. But sure, he wasn't the mainstream.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. If you want to try something you have to code it first. That's true in any language. After that it's just hitting Ctrl+S for me, in any language.
Ask HN: Review our App feature: Twitter search/Analysis/Share
Yes, I was thinking of doing the same thing this weekend– trying out all the chairs I can find, especially anything mesh. Thanks for reminding me! :)
This is the end of user-created content in Italy.

Fortunately other countries are not this irrational. Today.
The big example: Google & Altavista.

Answer: it depends on the market and that market's dynamics. What are the switching costs? The network effects? In your case, the first is fairly low, but the second may be significant, amongst current users. New users may be easy to attract, if you can get blocks of friends that aren't in the existing services.
Do you mean to imply that people who have consistent negative experiences are startups are somehow constitutionally different from people who have good experiences?

Because to me, it just looks like luck of the draw.
Don't those get uncomfortable being in the same position after a while?
Very cool idea and concept. However, I'm not convinced of the utility of rating a movie compared to it's trailer. If the movie has a shitty trailer, but is actually an OK movie, it will get high ratings. If it has a great trailer, and is a great movie, it will get average ratings. Why should I care about the "quality of trailer" to "quality of movie" ratio? What's the advantage over a rotten tomatoes rating, for example?

What I think stands out the most is the super easy access to the trailers. I would come to your site just to see what movies are coming out and watch the trailers. The other sites that offer trailers, at the moment, are barely worth going to because of how much spam they have everywhere.

As far as my first impression: I was confused at first, until I saw the top tagline. The google text ads at the top were very disorienting. It looks like navigation, and immediately causes me to question the legitimacy of the website. I basically ignored the slideshow thing, I'm not sure why.

Scrolling down I notice names of movies coming out. Ok, and so what? Further down I see ratings. Ok, I get it. I think you should put popular movies with ratings first. (Perhaps take the top 10 grossing movies, and only use those that are at least a week old... odds are everyone has heard of these) Just seeing a movie name with a screenshot was confusing at first.

When I watched a trailer I was pleased at the trailer quality and speed at which it started. Now, where do I vote? I have no idea. I can become a fan or follow you on Twitter, but where the hell do I vote? Do I have to sign up? There's no login anywhere... Eventually, after two or three trailers, I read that text that said I need to login with FB or Twitter to vote. You should make that text stand out, for sure. I just assumed that it was the standard "share on Facebook and Twitter" thing that I see elsewhere.

Finally, were I to commit to your site and actually want to browse around (which I have), I would expect more content and more means to sort it. What are the highest/lowest/most voted movies? That definitely needs to be there.

That's all for now... sorry about the disorganization in my post. Best of luck.
checkout jameslist.com - they are in stockholm ...
I got the impression you didn't see it as more general than that. And I think it's worth noting that STM is a solution the problem you presented.
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Java's problems are far worse than just typing. I consider lack of lambdas to be much more limiting.

Types contribute greatly to the verbosity and line noise of Java. They also are a big part of the reason design patterns and complex hierarchies are abused in the language. The duck typing that is common in dynamic languages can be a tremendous help for the reuse of code. Open classes also enable code to be reused in ways that had not been intended. These are dangerous features, but used effectively they can result in great productivity.
I think Clojure will be my next major language. Been going back and forth between Haskell, Erlang, and Clojure. (Never liked Scala, lacks focus.)
Again with the straw man argument. If you're worried about being the 3.2 group manager responsible for etc etc etc, manage your career better. Crappy roles and big companies aren't synonymous.

So, let me respond. What looks better on a resume:

"I was developing Rails apps to link Facebook to Xbox for iPhone users", or

"I designed, implemented, and successfully deployed the first 3 revisions of Instant Bloomberg for Bloomberg, which provided IM capabilities to everyone with a BB terminal".

Because Bloomberg is notorious for crappy 3.2-group-manager-of-GS-integration-backend-foo-XYZ development jobs, but I have a couple friends who got to do Instant Bloomberg.
To be clear, us and chimps do have a common ancestor which links us, although that's true of any two extant species of any kind of life on the planet, not just us and chimps. To describe that particular specimen as "missing" is accurate, but it's a rather melodramatic adjective - it's not like we need that one specific specimen in order to discover anything about our relationship to chimps (or whatever else).

So really, "missing link" is just a headline-grabbing way of saying "common ancestor that we haven't dug up yet (and probably never will because fossils are extremely rare)".

Regardless, Ardi does not "disprove" a missing link in any way, shape, or form. Ardi does not invalidate the theory that there is a common ancestor between us and chimps; she merely shows that it probably doesn't look like we think it does. Until now, scientists figured the common ancestor looked more like a chimp than a human; now we know that's probably not the case.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=855793
How about we look at actual data?

http://www.publicpurpose.com/hwy-fatal57+.htm
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

Total highway fatalities (in the US) have gone down since their peak in the 70s. This despite the fact that the population of the US has grown tremendously and the total vehicle-miles driven has grown even more so. The number of fatalities per vehicle mile has dropped by nearly a factor of 5 since 50 years ago (and has fallen 20% in the last decade alone).

If people are driving more dangerously, the data surely doesn't show it.
Nice site. I would use it to decide which movies to watch based on the ratings. And I would like the movies playing now to be at the top (not the one's coming soon).

During the process of deciding, I might encounter a movie that I watched, I would vote for it.

BTW, what is the incentive for people to vote other than what I have described above?
I would suggest adding comments apart from just ratings.
Sometimes a movie appeals to me so much that I look forward to write something about it. It works the other way too. I've seen enough horrible movies that I come home so pissed that I need to vent. :-)
Most useful feature of iTunes 9: "Automatically add to iTunes" folder
I think that might indicate a fundamental issue with what you're doing with your business.

One of the biggest rules in business, and even more importantly startups, is FOCUS. While your technology/process may apply to many different areas and industries, you realistically can't tackle and market to them all. Therefore you need to focus the process/technology into one area/industry and there should be an easy to understand compelling case on why it makes life better and easier.

There's a reason why you're only given 1 minute.
No, unit tests will not help with parts of this. Take today for me as an example: I need to update some python code which calls the database through SQLAlchemy. I can't remember half of SQLAlchemy in my head, so I begin digging for what I want in the documentation. No Carrot in 5 minutes. Around 10 minutes in, I find it, just to realize that I am poking at the low-level framework of SA. I hack up the code as I think it works. Application explodes somewhere deep inside SA with a missing cursor.

Then I spend about one hour trying to narrow down how I call the thing incorrectly. I also search for the error message, which prompts an upgrade of psycopg2 for a bug. Doesn't help. In the end, I realize that the calling convention I use is wrong and I should have called the thing differently.

This kind of problem is trivially mitigated with any static type system which is just a little stronger than what Java or C buys you (ocaml, Haskell).
There's nothing particularly magical about emotion - it's just a low level computation by our subconscious that we don't have conscious access to. Happiness, anger, fear, etc are all responses to the environment we evolved because they produce (or at least, did at one time) useful actions. It's the mechanism the brain used to make predictions based on data before it developed a consciousness.

An AI would make predictions based on data just like a human would, but the mechanism it used to do it would certainly be different.
It's totally nuts.

24 hours is probably a little on the sluggish side for a response, but still well within the accepted normal response time for a takedown notice (or a cease and desist).

I really fail to see how the executives can be directly held personally responsible for this, and how it could possibly amount to 3 years in jail and a fine if they're found guilty.
The trend has also been to make the toy actually available to operate from inside the packaging.

So there are all these intricate ways of tying certain parts down but letting others stay free, all while a hidden microswitch is held down by another piece of plastic to cripple the toy in a demonstration-only mode with less battery wear. Oh yeah, let's not forget the preinstalled batteries. Wanna bet the Amazon toys have none included?
Does HN need a sister site for this sort of advertising? Is there already somewhere else? Or is this regarded as appropriate?
As if that's even remotely feasible.
Is this science or "science"?
EURISKO is a development in the last 30 years (though just barely).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko
I wonder what words they consider to be "positive" and "negative".
I saw the bicycle calling provider, but my "yeah"-sensors somehow didn't fire. I don't think that kind of thing will see widespread adoption.

I've been reading about this too often, but nothing seems to have happened yet. How widespread is the micro-finance?

If any of these things would take off, maybe it would enhance economics to a point where people could afford real computers (or at least "real" mobile internet devices like the iPhone). In any case betting on an enormous market for WAP and SMS apps seems like a wild bet.
Some really nice quantum computation notes: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ae/papers/qc.pdf
Most of the mobiles built in the last few years support HTML quite well, but as you may know pure HTML is very little part of what we call Web (2.0) today.
My point is that there IS no serious "pure" AI research these days. Your image of lots of pure AI researchers wasting their time is a fantasy-- those people don't exist. People work on applications.
James Urquhart: Infrastructure 2.0 Young Turk
That is true, but then again hardly any specimen we find is going to literally be your great^n grandparent. When an animal dies, it rarely leaves around a fossil; so most or even all of what we've found is stuff that is closely related to, but is not exactly, our ancestors.

A visual analogy would be that we're an apple from the top of the tree; the fossils we find are apples from lower branches. Our apple didn't grow from theirs, but the branches we grew from did grow out of the branches that their fruit grew from.
Yes, I took it on a Twin Air flight back to Fort Lauderdale. You guys have made a lot of progress, since I was there. Congrats!
The "ad," I prefer to refer to it as an opportunity, has been posted where high-quality, ruthlessly competent indivividuls might be congragating. Please do not consider this spam and if the community feels the posting is inappropriate then I will gladly take it down.
Actually, I suspect the bigger effect is driver and passenger airbags becoming standard.
See for yourself: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal....
If you are illiterate, SMS and WAP won't do much good either. But you can pay the micro-entrepreneur to read stuff for you, maybe.

Also, a netbook surfing via GSM might still be better than nothing. My first modem (1993) was probably slower than GSM, but I still used the internet a lot. YouTube was not around yet.

Apparently they do have electricity, because that would be needed for the phones, too. Especially the Nokia ones that need daily recharging.
What drove you away from Haskell? Expressiveness there is just awesome, it must've been hard to walk away from that.
That's not entirely right. It should be:
print ((n+1)*n)/2

(fold the sequence in half, which gives you 100 + 1 on one end and 50 + 51 on the other.)
doh congregating is the correct spelling!
5 game changing project management tool
In cases where the founder has started other companies before or the current company has been around for a while, you can (and should) ask former employees of the company how the founder and the work environment are. This saved me a ton of grief when I took my first job. A very helpful former employee told me all about the company and told me which group to join (I had some choice in the matter).

Sure, there is no guarantee this won't change, but there is no reason to believe you can't vet for founder or team quality at least initially.

And if/when the dynamic changes, quit. It is true that as an employee in a startup you don't usually have much control over how much you make from your options. But you do always have a choice - whether to continue working there or quit.
Looks like a really bad article on a possibly promising treatment...
Yeah, I am just thinking about all of the phones that have browsers sophisticated to handle most modern web apps. Even if the built ins can't handle it, you've got Opera which probably can. 3 of the ones I mentioned are even webkit-based. This seems the way of the future, not WAP.
Couldn't you argue that java.util.concurrent.* (and its equivalents in Python and Ruby) already did a lot for concurrency? It isn't Erlang style concurrency (not the actor model), but it's a lot more accessible than mutexs, semaphores and condition variables.

That being said it would be interesting on what fills Java's niche for Erlang-style concurrency ( there's some fairly interesting work done around Scala's actor model: http://wiki.github.com/jboner/akka )
thank you for the answers...other big problem is getting the funding in the initial stage..Our revenue model is location based advertising..but to get that running needs lot of money..but without userbase VC doesn't seem to be interested..So we are planning to launch our service before end of this year and get a reasonable user base in say 6 months and then look for the VC funding to get the ads running on our platform...is that the correct/good approach or if not please suggest your thoughts ..thanks
>>What seems to have died is the dream of any kind of useful generalized intelligence. Any kind!

This looks strange, could you elaborate?

Right now, we seems to be just a few years away from a new age in robotics. They will have some self learning, but at first not be much smarter than insects.

For instance, there are cheap systems that can (roughly) understand what they see. And yes, the robot vision systems are specially built for that -- but the same functionality in animals has afaik also lots of specially built hardware.

Does it really matter if we have to specially build systems, if we can e.g. make system-building-systems as smart tools?

Edit: Some syntax and word choices, etc. Also, on consideration, I make the same point as the GP (StrawberryFrog), but he does it better.

Edit 2: Hmm... Another argument, then: Even if generalized learning will work in practice, it will probably be inferior to networked systems where problems are automatically found and then solved (and updated) from a central location -- like bugs in operating systems. Since everything will be on the net soon, all future generations of robots will probably work like this.
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Aura Kasih, Julia Perez, Agnes Monica dan Luna Maya semua dijamin pasti lewat :) tamu dari jepang ini bernama Maria Ozawa yang mempunyai nama panggilan Miyabi dan tentunya semua orang tak asing lagi mendengar nama ini seperti makanan khas Jawa yaitu serabi manis yang punya fatwa halal dari MUI dari pada Vagina Miyabi.
> will make AI winter a continuing reality.

This will be a good thing. Theoretical development thrived under the AI “winter”.

I am going to throw the rooster in the hen house and say it: It seems that a large part of AI is thinking up new functions with parameters to be tuned. These parameters are called something exotic and words “neural” and “network” is used liberally.
Key idea: if N people sending emails to each other are all on Gmail, then Google can keep only one copy of the email discussion and show it to all N of them.

This is why gmail-to-gmail emails arrive so quickly.

More generally, rather than using point-to-point protocols to make N(N-1)/2 pairwise connections between N people, there are certain new possibilities if everyone just maintains a single link to a document (a Wave) hosted on the server.

Wave is kind of the inverse of P2P. Downloading is more efficient if you can simultaneously download from N people. Uploading is more efficient if you only need to upload to one server.
As someone who has only recently taken his first steps in web design, the requirements above seem daunting, hehe
There is a corollary to this which almost runs counter to the author's argument. In my experience, if you work for a startup where you enjoy your work, and the startup gets acquired, chances are your work will start sucking within the year.

This is both because the culture will change very fast (except in rare cases) and almost always the type of people who enjoy working for startups find it very hard to enjoy working for BigCos.
> Given that the endogenous production of retrocyclins could also be restored in human cervicovaginal tissues, we propose that aminoglycoside-based topical microbicides might be useful in preventing sexual transmission of HIV-1.

That's a long long way from the sensationalist tone of the terrible linked article. We already have the above. (Condoms.)