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Is AI useful in industry? | mahmud: Are you kidding me? Statistical AI is the hottest thing in computing now. You might have heard of it as "Machine Learning".However, you wont see any of the human emulators that were being conjured up in the 70s and 80s. The new AI is in the business of synthesizing massive data into intelligence. |
What have you changed your mind about recently? | pg: The late Roman empire, thanks to Theodosius: The Empire at Bay:http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?bi=0&bx=of...I used to have very unclear picture of the late empire. Without thinking about it too much, I bought into the pervasive idea (probably due mostly to Gibbon) that the late empire had lost its Ro... |
Review Our (StackExchange Based) FOSS Community Site | sogrady: Clickable http://www.fossfaq.com |
What are your best resume tips? | tocomment: How do you list an achievement where you were part of a team?It sounds dumb to me to write: "helped build X". Any ideas? |
What have you changed your mind about recently? | RiderOfGiraffes: Whether I really belong here. I used to think it was a given, now I'm really not sure. So much stuff I'm interested in gets completely ignored, and I'm pretty sure it's been seen. There's the occasional zinger, but I no longer think I'm a good match for this community. |
What have you changed your mind about recently? | pasbesoin: Gun control in the U.S.. I used to be more in favor, with the goal of a safer society as well as one less inclined to the isolation of sub-populations.Now, I'm considering widespread ownership more in terms of a last bulwark against one or another form of totalitarian rule. Perhaps it is a limiting factor ... |
do you feel Google search result quality has gone down? | pasbesoin: In lieu of having a poll, I'll say in a comment: Yes, most definitely. |
What have you changed your mind about recently? | crystalis: I recently changed my mind about the quality of the producers and consumers on HN. |
what's stopping you from launching? | yan: For me, it's getting over the attrition of not starting what I really want to work on. |
What have you changed your mind about recently? | tel: My desire to become a doctor. As a college undergraduate in a biomedical engineering major there's a lot of contact and allure toward that field, but after extensive shadowing experience in the ER I realized that while I undeniably admire those who can become doctors, there is absolutely something missing, for me,... |
do you feel Google search result quality has gone down? | richardw: No opinion overall, but here are a couple tips:'Linux async io' -> select 'show options' and then 1-year view on the LHS.Sadly for the concurrent hashmap I got to 'concurrent hashmap "c" -java', then saw this very discussion page at #3 and I'm in an infinite loop until further notice. |
what's stopping you from launching? | fjabre: Yep. Same here: design.Well that and we've spent so much time on the main app that we don't have a workable login yet - our login process is akin to 37signals where we subdomain the account i.e. yourcompany.domain.com so it's not that straight forward.So for us it's literally too early to release since no one c... |
Ask HN:The actual benefit of Open Courses? | mahmud: I knew about MIT OpenCourseWare but knew that wouldn't help in the least bit for two reasons, one it is made to be taught at MIT so sometimes it may go above my head,So? If something goes over your head it's just a sign that you need to learn prerequisite concepts. Click pause and read a more introductory text,... |
What are your best resume tips? | btilly: First I think that anyone who is offering advice on resumes should be willing to present theirs. Here is mine: http://elem.com/~btilly/BenTilly.pdfI believe that a good resume is one that makes people look twice at you. It should lay out the facts in as compelling and concise a way as possible. Whenever poss... |
do you feel Google search result quality has gone down? | frig: It's google's success undermining the assumptions behind pagerank (!) leading it to perform less well.Before google got so effective people put more work into maintaining collections of links to other sites; hand-curated omnibus directories like yahoo and dmoz or narrower fields.As search became better this was i... |
do you feel Google search result quality has gone down? | lssndrdn: I agree with the points made by others here, about the quality of links being degraded in recent times, lots of SEO in lots of websites that are meant to just play with pagerank, and a general crowding of results with old and irrelevant stuff.I find myself alternating between google and bing these days, for s... |
What are your best resume tips? | DanielBMarkham: As a consultant, I have a sales pipeline that starts out with people searching for me on LinkedIn or getting a reference from somebody I know.The next step is for them to look at my resume. If that goes well, then the next step is a phone interview.It's all a pipeline, and my resume's main job is to get... |
Merchant Accounts & Payment Processors in the US? | matthall28: Paypal Web Payment Pro is a simple easy to use and very reliable Payment Processor/Merchant Account |
what's stopping you from launching? | BigCanOfTuna: I'm actually concerned about the graphic design of my startup. There is a pay-for-service component to it, and I have this feeling that if it doesn't look professional, no one will trust it. Anyone think that is a valid concern? |
what's stopping you from launching? | Tawheed: fear of failure. once you get it out there, it will be the true test. |
What have you changed your mind about recently? | maxklein: I changed my mind about Django. In practical usage, it does not save time. Most things are faster, stabler, more portable and easier to outsource than Django. So, gone from being a Django enthusiast to making PHP my main web language and Django for things like admin and cron jobish sort of things. |
What are your best resume tips? | j_baker: I typically turn in my resume using a a flat text file (usually using restructured text). It's really helpful because you really have no idea how the company's HR systems will mangle your resume. Plus, doing a resume in ReST just screams "hacker". |
what's stopping you from launching? | vessenes: Re-brand, user login system, some items that probably aren't critical but at least one person on the team feels 'has to be there'.This makes me want to release an alpha today. Okay, maybe tomorrow. |
what's stopping you from launching? | mooders: Two things - the design is, well, okay but extremely simple.. It just doesn't have that finished look about it.And the app itself is incredibly simple, which makes me second guess myself as to whether it is too simplistic that users won't pay the few bucks I intend to charge for it. I keep telling myself that ... |
What have you changed your mind about recently? | petervandijck: Now that I live there, Colombian food. |
what's stopping you from launching? | vgurgov: Can 100% understand this feeling and this is how I fight with this - just release this damn thing!Not even restricting alfa beta invite only users, just do whatever you can, get feedback and keep improving it! Design never can be perfect - even getting best designers workin on my site i still keep finding issu... |
what's stopping you from launching? | levirosol: Lack of functionality was holding me back. Then it was no mechanism for feedback. I'm still thin on functionality and copy, but I have a feedback mechanism now.www.SportsLeeg.comGetting over the "first release" hurdle is tough. So many "what if"'s remain. Once it's out though, motivation goes through the roo... |
do you feel Google search result quality has gone down? | wicknicks: In my opinion, information can never be retrieved from a single source. It always pieced together from different sources by the person with a task at hand. Google is a tool which can let you jump to different pages quickly and let you develop insights into the data they offer and put together your own judgme... |
What have you changed your mind about recently? | rrhyne: Obama. He talked change and kept all the same financial advisers of the prior administrations. |
Who changed your life? | bantic: Richard Feynman. I majored in physics because I was inspired by his intellectual curiosity. "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" is a great collection of his memoirs: http://tenniselbow.org/scott/feyn_surely.pdf |
Is AI useful in industry? | Oxryly: Any AI in use won't look like AI. When it becomes useful it gets decomposed into controllable components and then used. But it is used in many places. |
Who changed your life? | sli: I never actually met him, and he died before I could, but J Dilla is the entire reason I got into music. |
what's stopping you from launching? | neurotech1: My Biggest issue is that when you take the leap from "side project" to start-up, there has to be reasonable confidence that the idea is unique enough to make it as a startup.Somehow I wont be building a search engine this week :) |
What have you changed your mind about recently? | snprbob86: I used vim to edit a config file here or there for four years of college. I always hated it. I just couldn't wrap my head around command vs insert mode. Since I never edited more than a few lines at a time, I never really learned it. I thought it was just a stupid idea. Then, about 9 months ago, it clicked. ... |
what's stopping you from launching? | christonog: I'm having trouble discerning what the meaning of "launching" is when most people talk about it. Is it as simple as deploying something to a production server? Or trying to get one more feature in that initial release? Either way, there is no excuse for soft launching now if you have any working code. |
what's stopping you from launching? | auston: I agree with pretty much everyone else - design is KEY.Hiring someone like MetaLab seems unrealistic to bootstrapper's - doing it yourself usually leaves a lack confidence (at least for me).But I don't think you should let design hold you back, if it's useful, people will use it, THEN you can invest your real t... |
What are your best resume tips? | alphaBetaGamma: Put in the least amounts of skills that will still land you an interview.Writing "basic knowledge of Java" adds a lot of credence to "expert in C++". |
what's stopping you from launching? | weaksauce: Here's a link to the video if you haven't seen it yet:http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/24/startup-school-paul-buc...I couldn't find it on justin.tvEdit: Oops that's not the full video. Does anyone have the full video? |
do you feel Google search result quality has gone down? | nitrogen: Originally, a Google search for some Linux-related terminology would lead to an LKML post or white paper where that technology was explained. Now, most of my searches lead to dozens of user-oriented self-help forums where the questions are never answered. Finding information on actual development now requir... |
what's stopping you from launching? | kloncks: Simple for me. I am not done yet...Sorry if that was too inappropriate for a serious topic.What stopped me in the past was always the design/look of the site. |
Email for Startups? | zaph0d: Not at all, for Google Apps, Google doesn't set any Sender header in emails. We use it in our startup, try it out - http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html |
Audio from Startup School? | bootload: "... Anyone capture the (Startup School?) presenters with decent audio? ..."Agreed, because as good as the streaming is, the video streaming is patchy & you can't (that I know of) download it for later listening. |
Email for Startups? | percept: I think another consideration with Gmail (Apps) is you can't set the "From" address unless it's another Gmail address you own (somebody please correct me if there's a way to do this).So I wasn't able to emulate Craigslist, for example. |
Email for Startups? | dawie: I use gmail for my domain to. It's great! My web app is even set up to send emails from it. |
what's stopping you from launching? | cmelbye: Ease of use problems. Users have to upload SSL certificates, and Ruby's OpenSSL library is lacking in features and it's missing a lot of documentation, which is hindering efforts to handle different types of certificates and verification. Might give a message queue + a Python script a try... |
Scraping Answer Sites for ML Project? | tocomment: That's a cool project. Let me know if you need any help. I'm not sure what I could do but it sounds interesting.Here a couple ideas that might help (not that I condone violating a site's TOS).Have a random time interval between each page download so someone looking at the logs doesn't see a regular pattern... |
what's stopping you from launching? | megaduck: Plain old incompleteness. There's a number of bits where either the interface or the backend component aren't finished yet. Unfortunately, they're not optional.The launch will be soon, though. We've got a big roadmap, but that's not going to stop us from launching the moment the app does something (anythin... |
what's stopping you from launching? | prabodh: I am working on something for which similar products exists in the market place...So making my product beat the existing alternatives is taking time for me |
what's stopping you from launching? | symptic: School for me.There seem to be a lot of mentions of 'design' though. Honestly, it doesn't matter how good or bad your product is. Get -something- out there for other people to use. Run a private beta of just 5-10 people at first who are willing to critique everything to the ground. Then your design will fall i... |
Is AI useful in industry? | gamble: There's plenty of applied AI out there, but since the '70s people prefer to call it something that sounds more practical, like 'machine intelligence' or 'soft computing'.Part of the reason people don't notice it is that many of the applications are 'hidden' in embedded systems, especially control systems and co... |
what's stopping you from launching? | justlearning: oddly enough for me - losing interest in the project. Once it's out there, I want to work on something else. |
Is AI useful in industry? | bhousel: Video Games.. |
Email for Startups? | dstorrs: Thanks, everyone. Based on your advice I went ahead and signed up for Google. We'll see how it works out. |
Statistics for hackers? | pmichaud: This is a site that's really good for beginners:http://www.statisticshowto.comAnd it's really relevant here because the approach to everything is step by step -- the author of the site probably doesn't realize it, but the tutorial steps practically read like pseudo code... seems like it could really help you.... |
What are your best resume tips? | RiderOfGiraffes: I've written about this before:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=728863I freely admit I'm unusual, but then again, so are you.Here it is again:If you apply for a job with me, I want to know why I should employ you. I want to know how you will add value to my company. I want to know that you will brin... |
what's stopping you from launching? | cmars232: A worthwhile idea. After trying a few projects, I've come to realize that it's going to have to be something I care enough about to sacrifice my time and energy for and sell without feeling fake.I really have no clue what that is. All I want is cash money really. |
do you feel Google search result quality has gone down? | Edog: There seems to be a consensus that SEO is distorting Google search. I think I can refine that a bit. It appears that Google is using a "don't feed the trolls" strategy in response to link spam. Here's my evidence:"The Modbookish" is an inconsequential six member Ning social network, but doing a Google search on "... |
what's stopping you from launching? | lwhi: I think graphic design should be thought of as graphical engineering .. in the sense that a good graphic designer is always trying to find the very best way to approach a problem.Poor design isn't down to having bad aesthetic taste or lack of artistic skill - it's down to a lack of clarity in purpose.Good design ... |
Montreal meetup? | igrekel: This time of the year is extremely busy for me but I'd try to join. |
What have you changed your mind about recently? | alabut: NASA and the ability for a government program to be startup-like, as well as my impression that test pilots were selected only for bravado.I'm reading Carrying The Fire, a book by the Gemini and Apollo astronaut Michael Collins. I was totally caught off-guard about how fast-paced, creative and generally entrepr... |
Dealing with controversy | parse_tree: What did you do that was supposed to be "impossible"?What do you mean by "attacked"? (Phyiscally?)"Controversies"?The whole thing is very vague. :-) |
How do you market your web app? | schindyguy: that all depends on your budget |
Most efficient practice schedule for learning? | tokenadult: This should get you started, the primary research source for many of the current ideas on deliberate practice:http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti... |
Most efficient practice schedule for learning? | ggchappell: You could try SuperMemo:http://www.supermemo.com/I found out about it from this article, which was posted on HN a while back:http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia... |
We want to find a Adobe Air Co-founder/Advisor | schindyguy: We are also thinking a javascript genius would work well too because of the nature of Adobe Air. Thanks again for looking |
Most efficient practice schedule for learning? | parse_tree: In my experience, LONG practice sessions are much more effective than short ones. E.g., I've found I get far more out of one 8 hour practice session than four 2 hour sessions.I'd also say you need to do it intensely - you've got to be into and "feeling" what you're doing. If you're just sitting there waitin... |
What have you changed your mind about recently? | timinman: My political persuasions have changed radically over the last 20 years... And I used to find politics interesting. |
Email for Startups? | Scott_MacGregor: If Gmail turns out to be not what you wanted, GoDaddy is pretty good for e-mail too. The interface is easy to use, and the help files are also very good.I'm using GoDaddy right now for the startup e-mail accounts and am very happy with them. No complaints whatsoever. |
Dealing with controversy | pbhjpbhj: Whatever your method is have you successfully shared it with anyone. Are the doctors concerned that you had a specifc form (atypical!) and that those with some other form will be tempted to avoid medication to their own detriment. How ahve you been sharing your info. Is there some way you could persuade a med... |
do you feel Google search result quality has gone down? | stbaker: Hi, My name is Steve Baker and I'm a Software Engineer in our search quality team here at Google. We take these types of complaints seriously and use them to debug the problem/brainstorm solutions.For those of you who have been forced to use + or quotes to get google to return what you want, we would love if ... |
What books helped you learn Rails? | ApolloRising: There are quite a few choices. You won't go wrong with any of these from amazon. (URLS provided by amazon, not a spam or affiliate link)Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional) (Paperback)
http://amzn.com/1590597664Simply Rails 2 by Patrick Lenz
Permalink: http:/... |
do you feel Google search result quality has gone down? | MattCutts: I think the the results quality on Google has been the same or better over the last few months; one thing we have been looking at is helping less savvy users who might mistype a word or type extra words that they don't really need in their query. That can be a little more annoying for power users, but on the... |
What books helped you learn Rails? | tptacek: Don't learn Rails. Learn Sinatra. You can pick up everything you need to know to build complex web apps in Ruby off three pages:* http://www.sinatrarb.com/intro.html* http://datamapper.org/getting-started.html* http://datamapper.org/docs/create_and_destroy.htmlI'm not saying Sinatra is better than Rails (altho... |
What have you changed your mind about recently? | protomyth: This year has brought me to the belief that the forth estate is dead and has been replaced by pundits of all shapes and sizes.You can argue where every news organization fits on the political spectrum (other than they all fit at one of the sides and the middle is an illusion), but I don't think there is any ... |
What books helped you learn Rails? | Janteh: Agile Web Development with Rails, 3th Edition served me well. Still going through the advanced sections, I think it covers most aspects. I have no experience with the book you mentioned so I don't know if they are similar.http://amzn.com/1934356166 |
What have you changed your mind about recently? | steve19: Nobel peace prizes. I used to see them as the ultimate award that could be earned and the ultimate award which humanity could bestow on an individual. Now I see them as a powerful and influential political tool.I think many people came to that conclusion many years ago ... I am a bit slow on the uptake. |
How to learn the art of web design? | jakarta: once you know how to use the tools, it is good to learn some theory... for layouts check out Grid Systems in Graphic Design, it gives you a very Swiss approach for building a grid and then fitting content to it.Khoi Vinh is another guy to look up, he heads up design for nytimes.com and is a huge proponent of u... |
What is the value behind OpenSocial? | bemmu: Facebook might be bigger, but I wouldn't call OpenSocial a failure since around a hundred million people are using it.I've been writing an app that is supposed to work both on MySpace and Mixi.jp (~20M users), both use OpenSocial. While theoretically you are supposed to be able to write once and run everywhere, ... |
What books helped you learn Rails? | trevorturk: I'd read the guides and then try to understand how a simple example application works. Then, try to deploy it to Heroku, make some modifications, and see your changes in the real world.Here's some links:http://guides.rubyonrails.org/index.html
http://github.com/trevorturk/static/
http://heroku.comI think tp... |
Best CMS -- preferably in Python? | SwellJoe: I've been through the selection process way more times than I like, and have been unhappy with every CMS I've deployed (five of them, to date: Zope, Plone, OpenACS, Joomla, Drupal).Drupal is the least bad option I've come upon, so far.But, I have very wide-ranging requirements, probably beyond what you're dea... |
Building a domain-specific search engine. Advice, experiences? | paraschopra: Solr can serve great for your purposes. As far as domain specific crawl is concerned, maybe you could use our semantic classification API which takes in a URL and tells the DMOZ category it belongs to - http://www.wingify.com/contextsense/ |
Building a domain-specific search engine. Advice, experiences? | gtani: Some other helpful books:- Data Mining, by Witten and Franke; describes basics , how to use Weka, which they wrotea couple java-based books from Manning:- Collective Intelligence in Action (by Satnam Alag) and- Algorithms of the Intelligent Web (Marmanis, Babenko) |
What is the battery life really like on i7 laptops? | mdemare: You'll get more answers on a site like superuser: http://superuser.com/search?q=i7 |
What to do when your code is stolen? | davidw: Talk to a lawyer? Not much else to say - only a lawyer will be able to look at your contract, examine the situation, and tell you if you have grounds to do anything. |
What to do when your code is stolen? | indiejade: http://www.willowvillagesquare.com is the site I developed from scratch. My company name has been removed and replaced with "Radio Homes, LLC". . . |
What to do when your code is stolen? | RiderOfGiraffes: IANAL ...Generally, default contracts (those in effect if you don't explicitly have one) state that anything you do or produce while working for a company belongs to the company.Sucks, doesn't it.If that's the case where you are (and it varies from region to region, country to country) then you have no... |
What to do when your code is stolen? | cperciva: During the 2 weeks I was an employee, I built the company a website to showcase this townhome community it is developing.Ok, so... during the time that you were an employee, you were told to do work; you did it; and your employer owns the work you did.What did you think was going to happen? |
What to do when your code is stolen? | indiejade: Sexism. That's what this basically boils down to. . . Evil Sexism. Hire the girl as a secretary, rape her of her talents, and steal her credit. WTF. |
What to do when your code is stolen? | RiderOfGiraffes: OK, there's more emerging as we delve deeper.Firstly, it appears that you worked on this web site only outside of the hours you were being paid for. Is that right?Secondly, you were doing this work in the time allocated to your own company as an opportunity to show what was possible. Is this right?Th... |
What to do when your code is stolen? | indiejade: I'm extremely talented and adaptable. As "secretary" I endured the pain of answering telephones and routing calls. Whether or not I worked on this web site in or out of official "work hours" is irrelevant. I did work on this site mostly away from my official "work hours," answering the damn telephone.The ... |
What to do when your code is stolen? | wolfgang: Get a lawyer. Good luck! |
Is AI useful in industry? | known: Short answer: No |
What to do when your code is stolen? | TeHCrAzY: Been there, done that, lived with the mistake. Would all the stress, emotion and distraction of pushing further be worth it in the end? I'd just call it a learning experience (and a loss), toss the whole thing into history and move on with more interesting things. |
What's the better AIR development strategy? | ideastone: I've had a lot of success using the FlexBuilder plugin for Eclipse. Also, you can just use the straight up open source flex compiler and write all your actionscript and mxml by hand using your favorite text editor.Also, I would just use ActionScript and MXML instead of HTML/AJAX. Actionscript is basically ju... |
What to do when your code is stolen? | radu_floricica: What RiderOfGiraffes said so far is what I also know about the subject. To summarize:- Worked produced while employed as a programmer belongs to the employer. "Signature from a painting" doesn't apply: they have not only ownership but authorship, too.You have two ways to beat this, and both depend on th... |
Most efficient practice schedule for learning? | pella: From my collections:Review of Mnemosyne vs. Anki vs. SuperMemo
http://nihongoperapera.com/mnemosyne-anki-review.htmlOpen Source Anki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AnkiOpen Source Mnemosyne:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemosyne_(software)Some science:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curvehttp:/... |
Ask HN:Is there anything like Word of God? | gdp: If I were to believe in such a thing, it would not be because of a book. Things that are true by virtue of their truth are nonsensical.I'm also not sure about answering this at all, because I think it's pretty far off topic for HN. |
Ask HN:Is there anything like Word of God? | DanielBMarkham: Gotta flag this.HN tries to stay away from pointless arguments (cough cough) about religion and politics and such. It fails quite miserably at this, but anytime there's a post that seems obviously controversial that is not technology related everybody piles on and flags it.Sorry about that. |
Ask HN:Is there anything like Word of God? | hop: digamber_kamat,Where are you from? |
What have you changed your mind about recently? | Klondike: Hacker News, after reading this thread. I think I'll become a regular. |
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