skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was a pretty interesting read. I think the important lesson from the demise of Friendster as well as the subsequent demise of MySpace (which some people try not to admit) is that engineering actually matters. Friendster failed because it did not work. It was too slow, sometimes pages would not load at all and it was too easy to spam.

So it got to the point where people had to take forever just to delete the spam from their folders, because it would take a couple of minutes to open each message and discover it is spam.

The article talks a lot about business decisions, but the business side does not really matter that much until you get your web site to work.
A Swiss Army Knife for Analyzing Three-Dimensional Images
I wish them luck and agree with Paul Miller's comment on needing more work on trust, provenance, and licensing rather than syntax. N3 is very easy to work with, but issues of trust/provenance are hard problems. Another problem is monetizing semantic web projects because, as an example, advertisements don't make sense in a context of software agents collecting information because they would be programmed to ignore ads.
Google's stock price taking a nose dive.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=Google

I don't know if this is a fiscally responsible thing to do for a public company. Google should've think twice before pulling out of China. Once they're out, they can't go back in again. Say goodbye to the (soon to be) largest and fastest growing market in the world.
Where do you get this information about public opinion? My experience is that the white collar workers who use Google side with Google... and nobody else knows what Google is.
F5 Week in Review: March 15th – 19th, 2010
I was actually aware of that. I've just been inspired by GitHub to use the word "fork" in a more inclusive manner.

Anyway, it really doesn't really matter who maintains the the fork. The important part is that with Open Source anyone can create one.

If your fork is better it'll become the canonical version. Just look at what happened with XFree86 and X.Org.
Well, yes and no.

In Java for example, an "int" is 32 bits, even on 64 bits machines/VMs ... where the address space can reach 16.3 million terabytes.

So this little bug can byte, but only if you're manipulating large datasets in memory. And then it's easily discoverable, on top of managed languages anyway (since the index used on an array can't be negative).
Does anyone know what the cost for this service is - say for approximately 300 words, 600 words, and so on?

(rough idea)

Love this!
Thanks for the text, but I have a US proxy.

Btw, imageshack is blocked too.
I went to college with a large number of Chinese international students, my ex-gf was Chinese (and thus my circles are full of them), plus I am Chinese (well, Taiwanese, but shhh)

Most internet users in China are well aware of who Google is - though Baidu still has a strong grip on the search industry than ol' Goog. The overwhelming opinion I got from the Chinese I know when this issue first surfaced in January was "good riddance, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out".

Remember, the younger generation in China right now almost religiously, dogmatically believe in the party line. It's frightful.
The interviews BTW are Friday to Monday, 4 days. Many teams probably stay until Tuesday. Hackers and Founders sounds interesting, might drop by, thanks for the suggestion.
They don't take their own advice; their homepage is so busy!

http://www.webcopyplus.com/index.html
Analyst: Google A "Buy" Regardless Of China
Google Schmozzles it's own Analytics
Google Will Redirect China Users to Uncensored Site
When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools
My favorite bit of the article.

[Abrams] was particularly vexed by the company's apparent obsession with partnerships. "At the board meetings they would say, 'We should do a deal with AOL," he recalls. "And I'd be like, 'Guys, the site is not working." He never got anyone's attention, and in 2005 he was stripped of his chairmanship.
That's a great take-away I think. I think that is one of the reasons Facebook was so successful. I've been a member of Facebook since 2004 and I can't remember a single piece of spam I've ever seen through it.

In 2004 when I joined, it was a pretty simple, no-AJAX standard PHP site and worked very quickly. From there, it just took off and they were able to hire some of the best engineers and server architecture people out there.
Does the envelope full of money go to your useless excuse of a son? And what is the parent's lapse in such a situation?

Interesting, baffling stuff. Thanks for sharing.
Is CS becoming like particle physics?

They should also mention the very nice recent flow of ideas from theoretical physics into the field of probabilistic inference:

Many algorithms that make the analysis of these data sets possible either originate from or are widely used in [particle] physics. Examples include message-passing, mean-field methods, variational inference, monte-carlo methods, and many others.
Ask HN: Rate my startup - www.plupper.com
It would be nice if they listed the status of Appengine too.
Could this be the first big salvo in a protectionist effort against Chinese imports? It certainly provides some political cover for the Treasury to declare CN a currency manipulator in the next couple of weeks.

Are there any projections out there of how tariffs would affect technology the markets?
Stunner: China Set To Announce Record Trade DEFICIT In March
Event Cancelled
Awesome, except the munged copyright symbol. Pretty unusual for Google to have encoding issues in copy (and not to be using the entity).
http://www.google.cn now redirects to http://www.google.com.hk/, and there is a line of message saying 欢迎您来到谷歌搜索在中国的新家, which means "Welcome to the new home for Google Search in China".
Hey, that's enough to boot and run apps. Also, if you diddle the image with one of MS's tools, you can jam a gui into it, in theory.
I think you make interesting points, but I respectfully disagree with your conclusions.

You wouldn't recognize a Dennis-Ritchie- or Claude-Shannon-to-be if they would spit you in the face

Nine out of ten times, sure, nobody would recognize Dennis Ritchie in the rough. But if you're hiring the first five employees, you don't care about nine out of ten - you care about that one time you do recognize a promising candidate. Every selective process has a false negative rate, there is no way around that. Amazing people get turned away by all kinds of smart people in all kinds of places all the time. If you have ideas on how to lower the false negative rate without increasing the false positive rate, I'd love to hear how you'd do it.

What gives you the idea that people with such potential would apply at RethinkDB?

Because they already have. Smart and driven people apply for the same reasons smart and driven people do anything - they're interested in the problem, and have an innate desire to solve it. In any case, if you sit around and wait for great people to apply, the sourcing part of your recruiting process isn't done right. If you want great people, you have to go out, find them, contact them directly, and then do everything in your power to close them.

People that botch their interview because they are nervous can't be better than you?

Of course they can, but again, it's about increasing the false negative rate to lower the rate of false positives. I can afford to turn some great people away, but I can't afford to hire someone who isn't great. Any software startup that works on hard technology has the same constraints - if you hire people that are anything less than stellar, you significantly lower your chance of success. In a startup you (mostly) don't have geographical limits for your customers, but the corollary is that you also don't have geographical limits for your competition. When you're targeting every customer in the world, you're also competing with every company in the world. Going into that with anything but the top-notch team is suicide.
I live and run a business here in Beijing. The majority of my customers are young adult mainlanders (white collar, 18-35 years old) and my employees are mainlanders as well. Also my girlfriend of 6+ years.

I don't find any of what you say to be true. Especially the part about religious and dogmatic belief in the party line - most of the Chinese I deal with find the gov't obnoxious and untrustworthy. Of course, that could vary with socioeconomic class, but even my relatively young workers, who are of a different social group than my customers, seem to feel that way as well (poison milk, bribery scandals, etc). In my experience, the people who are supportive of the party are usually older (40-50+).

Odd that our experiences are so different, and I'm not sure where we'll be able to find objective data to resolve the differences in information.
What's interesting to me is that companies are either looking for superstars or code-monkeys. There's no middle way in the hiring process.

And the results are many times not those wanted ... those looking for superstars end-up with subpar performance, while those looking for grunts will end up with good people that will leave sooner or later.

I once did an interview were on one task I had to program a DFA for a Lego-mindstorm with the technical questions being pretty heavy for the kind of work they did ... like if I were at Google, how would I model an algorithm for finding similar links (with the discussion flowing to sparse matrices, distance functions, clustering)

... only to find out that they were a company that did online quizzes, with the developers involved building them with a semi-automated process involving an Office-plugin that generated PHP code and some fixes here and there to make it work where the generator failed. One day I'll submit the story to DailyWTF. That project manager interviewing me had to be on crack :)

Not saying it's the case for RethinkDB ... they look like a fun project. Just wanted to share my experience with the current state of affairs.
Several threads about this cool service already, but it's worth a mention:

http://www.nxdom.com
SCAMPER: An acronym to aid creativity and idea generation
If you've got a site and want to test a long-page ad, here's a template that works pretty well:

- Here’s what I got: Just say what you have, don't sugar coat or spend a lot of time dancing around.

- Here’s what it will do for you: what problem are you trying to solve?

- Here's what it did for other people like you: testimonials.

- Here’s what to do next: Just come right out and ASK for the money, tell people what to do. Don’t ruin the close.
Organization could have been better but this was a fantastic event. I could pretty much listen to Dr. Dunning all day long.
In contrast, here's a 2004 interview with Charlie Rose at the height of the companies growth explaining what Friendster is.

http://bit.ly/9EAhU9
There's few entrepreneurs I look up to as much as Spencer Fry. Well written story of Carbonmade's story.
Easier with Firefox smart keywords

http://johnbokma.com/firefox/keymarks-explained.html
I'd personally like to see more support for people gathering more diverse data sets. If private companies feel it is in their interest to share their data with others and contribute to scientific knowledge then this is wonderful. Obviously if your result is to be believed, you will have to share data so that someone else can attempt to replicate your analysis or compare your results with other methods. It is nice to have benchmark datasets, but there is a danger that research on "object recognition" can become research on the "caltech 101" dataset.
I'm just wondering where you get this public opinion, which is quite different from what I heard. And I'm in Shanghai, China.
Tonight there's another ACM Data Mining lecture in Mountain View. The subject is "Large Matrices beyond Singular Value Decomposition" given by Andrea Montanari, Stanford Professor in Electrical Engineering and Statistics.

http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1326#more-1326
Yes, it is somewhat similar, but there are many ways to approach this market. It's the same like any recruitment business: although you should ideally cater equally for job seekers and employers, at the end of the day you tend to focus more on one side of it. Same for functionality, which side uses it more actively and for whom it is more casual. It will take years for social recruiting to formalize and to see, what actually works and what not. There will be a lot of experimenting in the nearest future.
Subtitle C—Other Provisions SEC. 3021 (Standards and Protocols) might provide some work opportunities. It might be more work for hire instead of statup stuff, but someone might come up with an idea.
Everything concerned with computation in both the abstract and in implementation.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968013 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131606
You can have this one for free guys, I'd love to see it implemented:

New Traffic Lights System.
Initially this would work in tandem with the existing traffic lights grid system. In each car would be a display in the driver's field of vision, displaying a mini-traffic light (red, amber, green). This could be attached to an in-car display, or as 3 standalone lights above/on the steering wheel or other convenient location. When the lights turn green, all drivers in a queue see the green light come on, and receive an audio alert (like a 'ping' when the microwave is done). This would allow all drivers to move off simultaneously, which would improve drivers' reaction times at the lights. I think this would improve traffic flow and reduce congestion, and is totally possible with current technology.

All sorts of new improvements over the current traffic lights system could be made using this as a starting point:

- as mentioned in the article, priority for emergency vehicles built-in

- if a driver approaches a junction where the lights are red, and he/she is the only car approaching that junction, the lights automatically turn green. This could be achieved by imaginatively using current technology (road traffic sensors, cameras, GPS, etc).

-'Traffic Shaping' - using many sources of data from sensors on cars and on the road to divert traffic around obstacles and blockages. The model could be adapted from the practice of internet traffic shaping, except in a non-evil way in this instance!

- logging of traffic accident sites by police, and traffic is immediately diverted away from the area once the accident is logged.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_shaping

What do you think? I'd love to see this happen, I think it has the potential to improve motorists lives greatly. Feel free to add further feature suggestions.
Saros - Distributed Collaborative Editing and Distributed Party Programming
Surprisingly ignorant about what the word "Genocide" means.

The Sith were not a people. Calling their prosecution "genocide" is like calling the death penalty in the USA a "genocide against murderers".
I'm not sure I'm down with this "explanation" in the article.

I have no problem calling the Sith, or at least their behavior, evil.

The Sith - or at least those we have seen in the movies - are power hungry, and practice behaviors that are inherently chaotic, unsustainable and ruinous: murder, deceit, using people as a means-to-an-end, etc.

They are behaviors we find in sociopaths.

Since (at least in our culture/race) such behavior is generally seen as problematic and bad, we rightly call the Sith/Sith-like behavior "evil".
Those are good points, but just below the pictures he states an important result from his study:

"I picked examples where users scrolled more or less all the way down — often there's no viewing of the bottom because users don't scroll that far."

I don't know exactly how frequently "often" is, but I think those examples were just to show what happens when people actually do scroll down. He's suggesting that most of the time they don't.
IPhone A Supringly Large Player in Overall Game Market
Pulmonary hypertension associated with connective tissue disorders
Pulmonary hypertension may be associated with several connective tissue disorders, including scleroderma, mixed connective tissue disease, systemic lupus erythematosus, and rheumatoid arthritis
What is it about these "clickbank"-type self-contained pages that purportedly lure so many to part with their cash? Anyone that have one of these long-ass-single-page-big-bold-font-with-testimonial-blurb pages explain the allure of these things? What is the attraction? Is it the big bold typefaces? Is it the shill-y feeling testimonials? I have to admit, it does stir something non-negative in me to read on, but I just can't quantify or describe what it is I'm feeling. It's kinda like an attractive revulsion to it. Weird.

There's a gotta be a study on the efficacy of these pages, I'm sure; but I bet I'll have to pay $19.95 to read it.
EA Prerelease Paid DLC Plans: How they're planning to charge for demos . . .
speaking as someone who plays in that end of the pond, I don't get it. I mean, if I'm underpaying you, isn't that enough? I mean, I know that eventually you are going to get a better job; if I didn't think you were valuable, you wouldn't be working for me. Why would I want to hurry it along? or make things so unpleasant that you quit and go work retail or something?

I find that often the sort of people who are working for below market rates are used to being treated badly, which seems backwards to me. I don't know about you, but the more you pay me, the more unpleasant bullshit I am willing to put up with.

The thing is if you pay people enough to cover the bills, even if it's not "market rate" you can keep people for a while if continuing to work for you is more convenient and generally less pain than getting a better paying job, so it seems like it is in the employers interest to avoid unnecessarily antagonizing employees.
It wasn't a lot of people. That was one eye tracking study from one user.
See my other post below, but to add:

A lot of what I'm basing this observation on is poking around in Xiaonei (Chinese Facebook knockoff), the chatter in there is alarmingly (and almost militaristic) anti-west. This may be because the part of the social graph I was looking at was mostly upper-class Chinese (being that my main "in" with the Chinese is international students/expats, who are much better off that most).

It is likely (in fact, most probably) that the working class Chinese would have entirely different views.
They really should offer to relocate them to the US
There are more potential connections between my cat and your dog than there are atoms in the universe. It's meaningless; just exponentiate something big enough and you get over the atom count :-)
New Cell Phone from HTC: Desire
My attitude is that such clients perhaps knowingly put you in financial peril with this behavior, possibly because they believe this is effective motivation to get their project done on time and/or to spec.

Since this can have a broader effect of rewarding unscrupulous behavior in particular freelance market, I try to be prepared to absorb the costs of walking away from a nasty client at any time. If this puts the client in jeopardy because it blows their schedule, that's precisely what they earned, and perhaps they shouldn't be contracting freelancers in the first place.
Not your parent poster, but his comments were very similar to what I heard in Chongqing, which is more traditional and less cosmopolitan than Shanghai/Beijing.

My friend in Beijing has a completely different attitude.

Tiny sample size, just my personal experience.
I guess if you can't find the promoter to fine, you should be helpful and inform your citizens the event is cancelled. :)
I love Jabber.
The article by Kenschaft the blog author cites, recommended to him by one of his readers,

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

is a very good read. (This link may be behind a paywall for some readers. It has been posted to HN before.)
So, the logic is that green consumers would think they have already done something good and so they can afford to be a bit loose in other things?

This logic looks like BS to me.

And why is this about green consumers in particular. This logic applies to anyone who does anything good in general. And what exactly is the 'dirty little' secret here?
Account Settings: Services - Shareaholic
What about providing good service so that the others don't want to get lost? Or are _all_ of your clients making their business decisions based on some rumours?
Ask HN: Could Google effectively go to a shadow "war" with China?
This is something I've been wondering: Could Google run the Chinese traffic through enough proxies that they could effectively pull down the Great Firewall? Or would it be very difficult to scale that level of dynamic avoidance? Besides pissing off the Chinese authorities, would they be breaking any international laws? I'm pretty naive in this area so any thoughts (and links) you could provide would really help to satiate my curiosity. I'm fascinated that a company, with vast resources, could effectively change censorship as we know it and without clear repercussions (besides further attacks from the Chinese). But is it possible and doable? How would something like that play out?
How Google's Eric Schmidt Lost His Mistress, His Partner and Steve Jobs
The copy on their site is good. The amount of words is not relevant. Long copy sells.
Nice job adding the word "startups" to the title... It's sort of like adding "in bed" after reading a fortune cookie. Soon everybody will be doing it.
The Startup's Rules of Speed
Show HN: A tech talk I just held (websockets, canvas, node.js and redis)
I think the different experiences comes down to socioeconomic status - my impression comes from Chinese expats, in particular international students. This demographic is best summed up in a single word: "over-privileged"

These are the direct beneficiaries of the current regime, and I even personally knew a couple whose parents were unabashedly in the bribery business. They all tow the party line something fierce... scary, especially since they're "destined" to be the Chinese leaders of tomorrow :S

I'm glad to hear that "normal" Chinese aren't nearly as bad as the ones I've met. This gives me hope.

About the poison milk/bribery stuff though: even the people I know don't agree with these things, and are more than willing to admit the government's failure in preventing these things. However, if you dare bring up Western-style agricultural/industrial policies as a means to mitigate this sort of thing, you are in for some major hostility. This may be unique to the demographic I talk to, but basically only they are allowed to criticize the Chinese government - if you represent some kind of western ideology you're frowned upon.
What If... Microsoft Bought Novell
CloudCache - on-demand caching on the cloud
yep I can confirm this, if you ever try to do some MS Exchange programming I guarantee you will: A) Have a lot of questions B) Will find most of your answers on EE not on SO.

SO is better for finding iPhone or C# related answers.
Probably someone created a spreadsheet with measurements and pie-charts showing the actual costs and benefits of the current government :)
Top computer games of all time
> are emotions (love, hate, agony, fear) evil?

I am not a Star Wars guru, but I always took it as allowing your emotions to control you led you to do evil deeds and become evil. After all, a purely emotional being will be selfish, vengeful, and a whole host of other negative things. Love, anger, hate and fear are selected in the movies because they are typically the most powerful emotions, and the most capable of consuming you and causing you to act rashly and out of character.

The Jedi went to the extremes in their personal beliefs (avoiding love and anger etc) to avoid the 'slippery slope' downwards.

This is, of course, just my take on the matter.