skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> NPEs should not be allowed.

If so, then the industrial revolution of the 19th century and much of our nown technological progress more recently would never have happened. Research conducted by B. Zorina Khan and Kenneth Sokoloff found that 2/3 of the 400 "Great Inventors" of the 19th century (including Thomas Blanchard and Thomas Edison) were NPEs.

In fact, what was hisorically unique about the American patent systemn was that it was the first in the world aimed agt encouraging ordinary workers, farmers and artisans to participate in inventive activity. So even though most such inventors didn't have the capital to manufacture their products and inventions themselves, they licensed their discoveries to large firms who could.

The trend continues today. In fact, that's why people like Roger Hoffman, perhaps the most prolific patentee of new environmental and anti-pollution technologies, are able to keep inventing -- i.e., by licensing their discoveries to larger firms.
Not so awesome.

There were mostly FB-games. Things like "Who Has the Biggest Brain", word games (speed reactions), like Word Drop and Word Challenge in FB.

(I don't know anything about these games; I just have their names and a datapoint that they were good to verify daily shape and trace mind effects for medicines, etc. For some specific problems I'm not going to discuss.)
All of that can be explained by attempts at viral marketing. They don't want be 'outed' as the source, not to sabotage YouTube but because the viral kids won't promote BigCo.

I don't know if this will be Viacom's position, but it's one that Google should be prepared for.
> Within Google we've noticed that the people who complain about the process are most often the ones who don't get in.

Self-selection (in both directions)?
That's a pretty worthless article. But of course, anything bashing Microsoft will do well with the HN crowd.
I'm getting an error when trying to upload a CSV data set. :( Not very encouraging to be prompted with an error at my first attempt to use the product. Maybe TC jumped on the story a little soon?
it's horribly hard to accurately predict what will work and what not, and they do have some caching ability (what would cache a texture map when rendering an image).

but what you are perhaps missing is that it's ok for gpus to read memory, as long as you have enough threads. they can switch context very quickly, so one set of threads can request memory (hopefully a contiguous chunk) and then drop into the background and let another set of threads do some work (on the same processing unit). this is critical to their efficiency and is very different to a cpu, which instead relies on cache and "sits doing nothing" if it needs to read data from "afar" (obviously there are trade-offs - there's only so much local memory for state, for example).

i worked on a problem that was not as "nice" as you might hope - the memory access was unpredictable to some degree. but i still got a speed up of "tens" on a cheap ($200) graphics card, compared to a meaty xeon. it's more robust than you might expect.
Click this button to say you want to join an open source project
It is interesting, but I'm curious how a paper got written on this in 2001 and accepted. It is the same explanation that Stephen J. Gould wrote a popular essay on many years earlier.
Although I havn't seen the show, I doubt that it could be considered a scientific experiment. At best it highlights the Milgram result to a modern audience who may not be aware of it. Experiments like Milgram's would be unlikely to get past any ethics committee these days, due to the potential psychological trauma caused to participants.
Wow, this sounds like a massive underground patent-licensing play for SawStop. http://www.sawstop.com/

Another bullshit lawsuit that leads us towards a world covered in Nerf.
See Goldman Sachs.
Why Flash is Here to Stay
Hmm, about 5. No more than 10.
See http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_algorithm/all/1 for a fluffy introduction to what's possible. (I hope I got it right that compressed sensing is related to inverse problems.)
Http://www.habbo.fr/articles/1430-le-code-episode
Currently, Wikipedia is 95% text and 5% images, with negligible amounts of audio and video served up with a cumbersome almost broken Java thing. Barring substantial changes, I’d go so far as to say Wikipedia’s audio and video are irrelevant to users and browser vendors.
>Within Google we've noticed that the people who complain about the process are most often the ones who don't get in.

Well, yeah. New employees aren't going to want to start off on a bad foot, so they won't say anything. But I have several friends who've been hired by Google and they all told me they found the recruiting process to be extremely frustrating and, at times, insulting. Their experiences are really no different than mine (I applied for an APM internship a couple years ago, and passed two rounds of interviews and submitted an essay before being turned down, so you guys must have been at least a little interested in me).
Pentagon adds wikileaks to list of enemies
Good luck. And thanks for the links, I'll be looking into it. You mind a PM if it get's interesting (just to bounce ideas off someone)? I'm looking into machine learning stuff myself and can imagine some interesting integrations with this subject.
Errr.. As noted in the end of the video, the F used to stand for "functional", but FOOP recently gained mutability, so now it's more a historical misnomer. It can stand for whatever you want. :-p
Hey, it sounds like these guys would be a perfect customer for ITA's Needle. Needle provides a GUI-based way for nonprogrammers to scrape data, clean it up, and get it into a structured database where they can create views on it and all that databasey stuff. http://www.needlebase.com/
Real-time Brand Management — Lessons from Virgin America's Hellish Flight
I would redesign the site to be more enterprise like than web-application-like. This is more b2b. I think I am going to buy or sell some data on this site.
I take the point to be that if the judge doesn't uphold the DMCA safe harbors, they need to tell Youtube what they can legally do.

Viacom's stated alternative is for Youtube to divine the intent of the copyright holder. Arguing that the alternative to DMCA is absurdity and divining the intent of Viacom would have been impossible will tend to undercut this alternative.
The New "Skilled" Labor
Fundamentally bayesian antispam, netflix, and amazon all win because they generate recommendations as a side effect of user actions (ideally "what they buy/watch", but even just marking things with stars or tags). Hunch is a failure because it tries to get users to explicitly generate recommendations.

Humans are unreliable self-reporters.
Some data providers already have a master DB, so all they need to do is write a few queries and pull the info and sell it n times.
It's sensationalist for the simple reason that they are able to convince people to go as far as almost killing a man or at least causing some major damage. I'm not sure why sample bias or anything else trumps the fact that when you put people in groups their propensity for committing horrific acts goes up.
That's true, it is hard to predict. But I really interested to see what is the most optimistic prediction for my particular problem to work on the GPGPU. In this case, I don't think LRU cache will do much help since it has a uniform access pattern (every piece of data has to be examined to every proposed feature). However, you do remind me that may be load-ahead fashion of caching strategy will help. And if the needed data is load to cache with some synchronization method to guarantee all current running kernel will use the piece of data to its examining feature, the performance gain may achieved. Actually, I gonna spend this weekend to try out.
The article says the simulations took 60 hours on a "486/DX-33". That brings back memories. Anyone could rerun the simulations on a modern PC by writing about 50 lines of code and 10 minutes of runtime.

While it is easy to criticize odd-ball theories, I think it is more fun to try to think of tests that might support them or disprove them.
Perhaps your argument is not coming through clearly, but this was not an actual TV show. It was a documentary where the experiment was staged to be a TV show.

Obeying a doctor and a show hostess are indeed different. All things being equal, the latter is much, much worse.
hmm, i hope somebody replies to this comment
You can use GPUs to accelerate machine learning algorithms.

What can you do with machine learning? Basically everything: "Applications for machine learning include machine perception, computer vision, natural language processing, syntactic pattern recognition, search engines, medical diagnosis, bioinformatics, brain-machine interfaces and cheminformatics, detecting credit card fraud, stock market analysis, classifying DNA sequences, speech and handwriting recognition, object recognition in computer vision, game playing, software engineering, adaptive websites and robot locomotion." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning)

In our lab, we have developed a package called Theano (http://www.deeplearning.net/software/theano/), which allows you to take Python numpy code, adapt it slightly, and then automatically compile the mathematical functions in a optimized function graph which is transformed into C code and compiled to target the CPU or GPU. Which means to say, your matrix mathematics and machine learning algorithms just got a lot faster, with little cost in programmer time.
Culture Jam - Documentary - Relative Level
High-Speed Camera Scans Books in Seconds
i don't really get what you're doing, but have you considered making one dimension of your work vary over feature? if you arrange that correctly then you only need to scan the memory once (all features read the first byte of memory; then all features read the next...)
Why would they need a plugin for this? Surely a "don't track me" cookie would suffice?
Compressive Imaging: A New Single-Pixel Camera
whee, it worked!
Wouldn't dark matter provide an alternate explanation for "filament" structure in the universe? The results of the Millenium Simulation seem to fit his qualitative description, and it was run with 10 billion particles, so it's definitely got enough resolution. http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/virgo/millennium/
Chris Hughes [Facebook Co-Founder; MyBarackObama Founder] Launches New Startup
All of this hoopla over a damned cartoon mouse.
BTW, if you ever need to send an exe via gmail, zip it then change the file extension to something like ".google". Gmail lets it right through.
You're not hosed when things slow down. It's easy to disable caching on a development machine and identify the slowdowns.
Underpands Stealing Gnomes [video]
>Perhaps your argument is not coming through clearly, but this was not an actual TV show. It was a documentary where the experiment was staged to be a TV show.

"Perhaps your argument is not coming through clearly but this was not an actual murder, we did just kill somebody for the needs of the documentary."

It was a TV show. It's being displayed in large parts in the documentary. The fact that it has been sliced with pseudo scientifical comments doesn't change the nature of it.

> Obeying a doctor and a show hostess are indeed different. All things being equal, the latter is much, much worse.

Agreed, but in case you didn't notice, i wasn't judging from a moral standpoint, but from an experimental one.
Agreed. This field is has a little hard evidence and a lot of circumstantial study.

One of the best things I've read on early child development though has to be NurtureShock. The longest chapter is the reference in the back.
Though it turns out leeches are actually useful for modern medicine too. Being mean, I would say that is where the analogy to SVN breaks :)
How funny! Right as I start talking about my startup to buy and sell datasets, it turns out YC had something like this in secret the whole time. At least I know I'm doing something worth while.
And if you needed to scale? If you needed more servers, bandwidth, or staff? Then what?
There's a lot of good info in these old threads

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t...
Hi guys, I am the inventor of the Spiral Eye side threading needle. Your conversation is very interesting to me. It is from a very different view point than what I usually hear. My needle is new, but I have been selling them for over two years, on line, in some stores and at state fairs and events. There is a huge market for them. A needle is the most ubiquious of tool in the world. It is used in surgery, to mending, crafts, to fishing. The design I came up with has a very precarious geometry to keep the thread inside and not snag the material you are sewing. The technology to make it did not exist fifty years ago. I also have just been written up in a newspaper in Denmark and my website sales have gone through the roof. Maybe the Danes sew more than the Americans.
lol, basically ... we're too big to be responsible for our actions.

brilliant!
I think that's the point about the culture of quitting.

If you have a culture where employees are expected to move on after a few years, the people who are playing politics and trying to get entrenched for job security are really easy to pick out. (They've been there 10 years while the average stay is maybe 3 or 4).

No amount of ass kissing will save you from being the weird guy who can't move on.
w00t to you too
Posterous (blog with email submission) now has time delay.
For production ready, scalable FTS, you might be interested in Lucandra: http://github.com/tjake/Lucandra, which powers the http://sparse.ly/ twitter search site.

Higher level overview of Lucandra: http://blog.sematext.com/2010/02/09/lucandra-a-cassandra-bas...
Your model makes the assumption that "people of the world submit ideas" and "vote". Gaining a userbase, even nonpaying, is at minimum - half the battle.
> Can you give an example of an idea you can't implement without breaking the main line of work?

I guess you will always be able to refute any example.

The important thing is: While you can put yourself under that restriction, you will pay for it.
Actually, gaming is already saving the world, and let me explain why:
The big problems of the world Jane described included poverty, hunger, climate change. These are actually pretty easy to solve, but one thing always stands in the way: big, corrupt government.
So, how would we fix that using games? well, notice that the governments run on the labor/consumption of their people. Since lots of people have already 'escaped' to virtual worlds due to the addictiveness of the games and/or the economic depression occuring in real life, governments are able to steal less and less from their people, thus they have to get smaller (or print more money/hike up tax, which pressures people to withdrawal). As more people leave the 'real' world, there's no choice but for the large bloated governments to default and collapse.
Web Designer Interview – Design Vetica
Will there be bids for exclusive rights to a certain data source?
With scheduling of posts for particular times, it's easier to seem like a pro, so I like this feature. Implementing it as keywords in the subject is a bit unwieldy I suspect due to subject line length limits, but at least they offer it. In the comments I also read about the site lettermelater.com, which offers delay of email. (PG has a blog on posterous.)
I never have really understood why debtors often seem to have no legal obligation to pay their debts. I mean, a system where all the lender can do is call and say 'please pay us'? That makes no sense.
Just mentioning CRSP makes me feel slightly woozy.
Where's the BlackBerry love Chad?
I hope this is at least a tenth as awesome as it sounds. Have you used it?
The Periodical Historical Atlas for the history of Europe
There is no possibility of a specialized predator evolving because said predator would spend most of the time starving.

A specialized predator could evolve to have the same cycle as the cicadas. Which is the point of the theory for why the cicadas have a prime-number cycle: it decreases the chance that a predator species will happen-upon a cycle that only sometimes aligns with the cicadas.

The cicadas themselves are so numerous that no general predator species will have anything close to a chance to hunt all of them.
Perhaps it is a loaded statement :-)

Thanks, I learned something from your points and research.
Thanks for the warning, I appreciate it. I think I'm fine, though -- I have a friend who works at CRA doing GST, and he (unofficially) agreed that avoiding Canadian customers should be good enough, and also commented that the CRA is unusually reasonable about honest mistakes, so even if I did screw something up, the worst I'm likely to face is being asked to pay the GST myself.
That's correct. However, there are still some significant issues with Subversion's merge tracking. There's an excellent blog post that summarizes these issues here:

http://blogs.open.collab.net/svn/2008/07/subversion-merg.htm...
What was this man's role at Apple? The wiki doesn't say much.
Actually 5/27 is probably lower than the proportion who've usually launched by this point. I must be losing my launch-nagging edge.
I've just gone through the process (succesfully), and while it dragged on longer than seemed necessary, I didn't find it insulting. What exactly happened?
Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products. We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.

Jonathan Ive, SVP Industrial Design at Apple
I think his point is more that the common myth of the natural born "genius" is not what society commonly thinks it is.

You can be born mentally genius at something, or innately talented at some physical skill or other, but that the "genius" or "born talented" people we see in society really owe a lot more of their success to practice rather than any innate quality they were born with.
I don't think they pretend that this is science - it's for a documentary. I also don't believe the point is to "denounce" TV shows. The real point may be clear in this quote from a participant;

"I wanted to stop the whole time, but I just couldn't. I didn't have the will to do it. And that goes against my nature," he said. "I haven't really figured out why I did it."

We think of ourselves as having control over our actions. We're pretty good as justifying most of the things we do within mental models we make of ourselves. However, the reality is that often our actions are driven primarily by external forces. The human brain is full of biases created through evolution that shape our behaviour far more we often like to admit. I think the feeling of disgust that media like this induces is primarily that realisation. We look for reasons why it can't be so.

The good news is that once you start to understand where our biases are we can compensate to a degree, or at least include them in our mental models.

Wikipedia has a nice collection of cognitive biases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases and http://lesswrong.com/ is an interesting community trying to educate itself on this topic amongst other things.
I wonder about this, given that other non-primate species seem to have an innate sense of fairness. Culture almost definitely plays a part, but it's probably not the whole story.

Here's another study, showing that dogs have a sense of fair play:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9794478...
> It was a TV show. It's being displayed in large parts in the documentary. The fact that it has been sliced with pseudo scientifical comments doesn't change the nature of it.

I do not understand your objection. Are you arguing against using a TV game show as a guise for the experiment or against showing the documentary of the experiment disguised as a TV game show* (because it cheapens "serious science" somehow)? Or that people who watch the documentary are not doing it because of the science but because they want to see the fake TV game show and therefore the documentary should not be shown, or that the experiment should not have used a TV game show because people who watch the documentary do not really want to see the documentary but the fake TV game show?

* Anyone else been watching "'Allo, 'allo" reruns?
While it's possible to stay in San Francisco, the YC stuff is all in Mountain View, I believe, which is about an hour away from SF by car or train. It's also cheaper to stay in Mountain View or elsewhere in the Valley than in SF.
I was referring to the competition to get in.

It makes sense that if YC is getting more applications than their applicants will be better and more prepared. Several companies in this round had already produced several products, were ramen profitable, and had been operating for sometimes years previous to becoming a YC company.
I think you guys are doing the right thing by not worrying about EULAs and other protection mechanisms at this stage in the game. Stay focused on satisfying your customers and improving the product as much as possible until you start making major headway.
Away3D Lite and Haxe - Z Sorting
Hee hee! You're insane.
That's stretching correlation to causation.

First, the two studies are more than 25 years apart. Society has changed, and so have we.

Second while participants believed they we "on a tv show" it's a logical leap to believe that this would somehow be a extenuating factor than if they were at a gathering of some other sort.

A 15% jump, to me, would show that the variable of the "TV" played a part.

There is absolutely no evidence to support that.
I kind of feel like no one here will care/be able to relate, but these are some of the things I am proud of:

* I graduated high school as STAR student and a national merit scholarship winner -- while missing 18 or 19 days of school every year and dragging myself to school sick much of the rest of the time and also being called "lazy" and told I "wasn't really sick". (I wasn't diagnosed with CF until I was almost 36.)

* I was also inducted into Mu Alpha Theta in 11th grade (the earliest you can be) and was state alternate for the Governor's Honors program in the subject of Journalism.

* I have a 22 year old son with cystic fibrosis who has not been on antibiotics in 12 years and has needed no medication at all in 3 years or so.

* My sons and I live without a car and walking is our primary mode of transit, in spite of two of us having CF which means we are supposed to be deathly ill.

* My divorce was amicable in spite of my family background. (In contrast, when my two siblings got divorced, their spouses made attempts on their lives.)

* As of last summer, I am drug free, having gotten off about 8 or 9 prescription drugs and then gotten off the OTC drugs that replaced them.

* I genuinely like men, as friends and lovers, in spite of having the kind of childhood that tends to produce women with multiple personality disorder.

* I am the one who decided to get divorced, not my husband, even though I was deathly ill at the time and had been a homemaker almost my entire adult life.

* Now that I am basically well for the first time in my life, I think my best years are ahead of me, not behind me. I'm 44. :-)
Are there many companies that have launched before YC? Do you encourage or discourage this?