quan

I know a font police is going to catch this crime, I hope it's appropriate for the posit notes :)

Hi HN,

Here's a little background about gistpoint, I was an FPGA developer working on DSP systems at a big company in D.C. Last May, bored of my job and frustrated at my career progress, I took the paths most travelled and quit my job to wander around the world. Along the way, I picked up ruby/rails and javascript because I want to transition into web programming. The learning curve was steep coming from the hardware world. Plus running from city to city also made it tough to maintain focus. 2 months ago, after many false starts and months of distraction, I finally decided to push it through completion.

gistpoint is a web app that lets you search and submit summaries for online articles. It's unique in that it has a scorer that rates how relevant a summary is compared to its fulltext. This is done by analyzing several factors such as information coverage, sentence grammar, word stemming, etc. So the best summary will rise to the top and gets shown as the default. No signup/login is needed to submit summaries, and quality is controlled without voting. When no user-submitted summary is available, it will extract the most relevant passage from the fulltext. From my experience if I just naturally summarize an article I just read, the scorer rates it highly compared to the extracted one.

Please let me know what you think. If anyone wants to know more about the scoring algorithm, I'll be happy to write a post about it. I definitely open source the summary extraction and grammar gems on github. They're already on rubygems https://rubygems.org/profiles/50055 for you to download, I just need to create the documentations.

>>I also want to suggest that it might be interesting to have some non-numeric display that still allows for the 'quick scan' that you mention.

I agree with this, may be displaying a color coded dot in place of the comment score. The color can be computed from a log function of the score, and we only need a few colors to indicate the different types of comments without giving too much information away.

It looks like something I would integrate for my current project but your term suggests that the api is only for personal and non-commercial uses.

I think the reason Linda won't get out of bed for less than $10k is because they pay her that much to stay in bed

Here's a similar HN discussion awhile back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442022

I found AZ ratings to be mostly useless, what would be better is the total number HN/SO points accumulated from all the recommendations for that book.

edit: not a mix, but separate points for each community

I agree with all the points except for the one that believes it's within Apple right to do whatever they want because it's their hardware and platform. Let's forget that the hardware really belongs to the iPhone/iPad owners for a moment, but if it's defensible because it's their platform then it's more reasonable for Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast to take a cut from all sales and profits happened via their network. It's their platforms, which took them decades to build. And surely there's value added when they offer preferentially faster speed and more secured transaction to whichever companies agree to pay them. It would be hilarious if an ISP starts demanding 30% cut from every sale Apple makes that originates from their network.

I think there're 3 reasons for the (perceived) degradation:

1. There's a significant increase in the number of submissions over time while the number of frontpage articles remains the same (30). This leads to shorter articles lifespan. So if you visit HN as often as I do in a day, you will encounter a lot more good articles and also a lot more bad ones (the good to bad ratio may be the same, but our brain doesn't compute ratio intuitively, so it just gives more weigh to the majority bad articles). Note that 'bad' here just means stuffs I don't find interesting.

2. Wider range of topics (kind of related to the first point). So any given veteran will be less happy now that there are more articles that won't interest them.

3. Points inflation as the result of more users. 2-3 years ago, an article with score above 50 points is decent, now they're so common (may be a points exchange calculator to convert current score to score x days ago? ;-) )

If reputation is that important, then StackExchange's partition strategy is actually very effective. If you want to find good coders you go to StackOverflow. If you're looking for good photographers, you go to SE's photography site. There's no need for a centralized reputation hub. The reputation of a great coder on StackOverflow can't be diminished as a result of the creation of some new SE's long tail site.

But I doubt online reputation is that important. The reason I visit StackOverflow is to find answers to programming questions, not to look for experts. As for the experts, they don't need high karma on some Q&A site to get job offers.

The "autocomplete your life" slogan at the end of the video puts a smile on my face

If Wave were created by a smaller company, it would not have been able to garner that much hype and tech blogs ink and therefore wouldn't have attracted that many adopters. In fact, without Google's reputation, a small company creating such a product and protocol would be dismissed as too obscure and complicated.

I thought Wave was awesome when I tried it out with all my engineers friends. But then we somehow stopped, I didn't even remember how or when we stopped. Wave just seems like a really cool software that solves problem nobody has.

I had to check to make sure I didn't sleepwalk and submit this because almost the exact same thing happens to me. I quitted my job 8 months ago to travel and work on my ideas. 2 months in, I fall in love with my current girlfriend. After a few months of long distance relationship as I traveled around the world, we now live together in the most romantic city in the world, Paris.

During the day when she goes to school, I work on my project. At times when I can't stand the loneliness, I get out and just hop on a random metro to read or observe people. At night, we cook, talk, and watch movies together. I'm having the best time of my life even though the future is a little scary to think about. I hope you enjoy yours as well, best of luck to your startup.

I never have a startup or call myself an entrepreneur, but this post makes me despise these 2 words. Whatever they want to call people who tinker with projects, work a lot, and take risks (hackers?), I want to be in that club. If the money comes that's great. I don't want to act all serious and write business plans, get an office, raise VC money in order to become an entrepreneur. If these constitute an entrepreneur, I'm fine with not being one.

Hey, I just quit my job recently and my goal is to travel to as many places as possible for a year. My flight to Saigon is this Sunday, and I'm planning to do the whole country tour from Hanoi to the South for about 2 weeks. Let me know if you're interested in meeting up, just dropped you an email.

Here's the visualization of the current poll snapshot (as of 11:47pm EST): http://hackerpolls.heroku.com/polls/44

Disclosure: I created this awhile ago and almost forgot about it until I saw this poll

I used to daytrade IPOs like crazy during the 2006-2008 period. From what I read from the many IPO boards that I participated, you need to have an account with the underwriters of the IPO in order to get allocation. Usually, these premium accounts have higher fee and your balance must be above some amount ($50k-$100k). When there's an IPO you can ask for shares, and the underwriters use this information to gauge how hot the IPO is and adjust the offer price. When they allocate you shares, you can decide to take it or not. Some people say they rank you based on how often you fulfill your promise, so if you always ask for shares but seldom buy you won't get allocations for hot IPO.

I don't have these types of accounts so I never get pre-IPO allocation, but what I did on IPO day was continuously refreshing the page to catch when it's first open (IPO usually open b/w 10am-12:00). You can almost always buy at lower price than the offer price within the first 15 minutes. Most IPOs (~80%) close lower than the offer price on the first day, and they continue to go down after that, you don't want to touch these. The remaining 20% are hot, and you know they're hot b/c the underwriters keep bumping the offer price up. I only played these and for very short term, from only a few minutes to a few days.

I'd time when the price starts bouncing back after the first 15 minutes, probably b/c more people realizing the stock is opened to the public and buy in, and buy 300-400 shares. After about 20 minutes of insane rising, the price will start to level out. At this point, I'd sell half of the shares to lock in the profit (~5% gain). I'd keep the rest for the next day, if the stock closes lower than open price then it shows weakness, I'd get out and never look at it again. If it's higher, I'd keep it for 2-3 more days.

With this strategy I was able to make a lot more than my day job. There used to be 7-8 IPOs every week, and a couple of those are hot so I was able to test this strategy for awhile. There were weeks that I made 20% on a position just over a few days (if I remember correctly the IPO was STV). There haven't been a lot IPOs since then and I haven't followed the market lately. May be it's time to start watching again.

The "motherfucker" page doesn't load, maybe I can help him with some web development at only $1,000/hr

I recently quit my high-paying job, in fact, today is my last day, and "randomly walk around" is exactly what I'm going to do. For most of my 27 years, I've been trying to do the "wise" thing by getting good grades, graduating from a good college, working at a good job, finishing my master, etc. For once, I want to be foolish.

My number 1 reason for quitting is I want to get off the addiction of the constant paychecks. It's easy and safe, but the trade off is the predictable and unbearable daily routine. Everyday on my way to work, I know exactly which lanes to switch to on 495 for the optimal travel time. I log on and off the computer at work at roughly the same times. Once back at home, it's sad to look at the reflections of myself and the clock in the bathroom while washing my face and know that the same action happened at exactly the same moment yesterday. As for long term, I know exactly where I will be (in the best scenario) in the next 15-20 years if I continue to work for this or any other big companies.

That's no way to live life if you look at the short time we have here. That's why I take the year off to travel, not only to break the daily routine, see new things, and meet new people but also to taste the danger of having no financial security to motivate myself to act.

Before quitting, I've consistently worked 2-3 hours everyday after work on side projects. But the passion and focus cannot be there after being exhausted by 8 hours of work and knowing I will still get the next paycheck even if my projects fail. So now I'm excited to have my 8 hours back. Let's see how this foolish thing will work out.

The guy in the video says it's brought back (usually from the States) by a friend of his. His explanation for the unresponsive screen is due to Apple disabling the device remotely, probably triggered by failure to input some passcode .

He just describes how the new phone is a little taller but not as wide as previous gen. He also mentions that both the front and back are made of glass.

That's about what I can make out of the noisy background.

Contrarily, I think that any civilization capable of reaching Earth must also exhibit the most humane (aliene?) characteristics such as love for justice and respect for other lives. I'd imagine with their great power, every individual in their planet can, with the flick of a finger, wipe out a large portion of their own race if not entirely. They must have learned to coexist or face self destruction. It's a prerequisite to freely roam the universe.

What about killing for their own survival, after all respect for the lives of one's own race doesn't translate to respect for lives of others. This may be true, but with their intelligence I'd think they're smart and reasonable enough to explore other possibilities. I don't think aliens in soon-to-be-out-of-resources ships desperately flying around the universe for energy is a scenario advanced intelligent life forms planned for. It's more likely that they accept a peaceful conclusion to their existence.

Of course, it's very possible that we're all wrong since we're projecting our own primitive reasoning on species that are a lot more evolved.

I've been following this matter closely over the past year. Words on the street is that Vietnam is in deep economic trouble with rising inflation and they need/got a bailout from China. Many high ranking officials voice their opposition but somehow China still won many mining contracts.

There has been a ramp up in suppressing free speech and government policy in Vietnam over the last few months. Many key activists were imprisoned and websites/blogs that criticize the Communist Party were hacked or ddos attacked. An admin from one of those forums told me at the peak during the trials of those activists they got 20k hits/s, the majority of those came from machines in Vietnam or China. Some sites that do not have the expertise or resource to counter the attacks were forced to completely shut down

The ultimate solution to this problem is getting rid of gift cards altogether. Just give cash. People complain that giving money is not thoughtful. Like going to the nearest CVS and paying $105.95 for $100 American Express card any more thoughtful.

Gift cards only give the illusion of being thoughtful. I'm not sure why people are offended when receiving cash. There's really no up side compared to cash. It's less convenient for both the giver and receiver.

I guess it's a cultural thing (I'm Asian). I've always received cash from my parents and relatives and love it. I can spend any where, any amount, or not at all if I want to save it.

Even with such innovation, it would never match the iPhone touchscreen and I don't think Apple is willing to compromise like that. If Apple do think in this direction, I think it's more practical for them to have 2 equal size screens, an iPhone-like touchscreen for videos, games, and dynamic web browsing and an e-ink screen for reading books, magazine, and static web contents. The touchscreen can be used to control and navigate the e-ink screen (think of your laptop monitor being the eink screen and the keyboard being the touchscreen). It can be folded in like a laptop to protect the 2 screens or fold out (with both screens on the outside) when in used.

Now that is one way Apple will convince me to drop updwards of $600 despite owning a Macbook, iPhone, and a Kindle.

That first percentage is for the general population. The original poster included them with the option names

There're probably less than 50 polls, it's overkill for a small hobby project like this. Plus people can add/update future polls manually.

With some free time over the past few days, I created this app to learn github, mechanize, and try out Highcharts (no affiliation, I just though it looks nice). Please feel free to add any missing polls.

here's the link to the exact same poll: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240

I only started working with Rails about 6 months ago and was blown away by how easy it is to deploy apps. The whole set up literally took 5 minutes, and I didn't even know how to use git. I seriously considered their paid plan for a side project. But then I found myself reason "yea, I'm paying a premium for the elegant deployment flow and easy scalability. I'll use an extra dyno and turn it off at night to keep cost low. Maybe I use ferret first and then if thing picks up I set up an EC2 for Solr or Thinking Sphinx. Permanent storage? Well, I'll force my users to post picture somewhere else initially." So then I started looking at Linode and Slicehost and found that it's not that bad, especially with Passenger.

I'm a potential customer, I love their simple design and can't stop promoting Heroku to friends. I hope they succeed in solving those limitations and keep cost down in a reasonable range so that I can happily give them my money.

I also experience these lows quite often, about once a month. They usually don't last for more than 3 days, and all my energy and passion come back. It's still tough to deal with, especially when you suddenly feel like there's no purpose to the things that just yesterday gave so much meaning and excitement to your life. I learn to cope with them by training my mind to take a moving average of my feeling. This way I'm constantly reminded of my overall long-term sentiment.