skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can say without hesitation mercurial or git will be insanely faster for these operations. Remember, you work locally, and then push with hg/git. So when you do "git commit" it only relies on the speed of your hard drive/cpu. Commits happen instantly. Updates are needed very rarely (since you don't need to update to make new commits). Merges are so much faster it's not even funny. After merging in hg/git you wonder why SVN even had a merge functionality.

In addition to those conceptual differences, the actual act of transferring files between remote and local on git/hg is also much faster than SVN. Entire checkouts of git repositories are usually smaller (disk size) than the equivalent SVN checkout... of one version. This means less time on the network all around.
Insane Coincidences
This looks really interesting, though if one is looking for publicly available data, I think it's an open question of how much of the value is in providing a marketplace vs. actually doing the aggregation, organization and some analysis.

Two other interesting startups in this space that are focussed more on the data aggregation end are http://www.AnythingResearch.com and http://www.AggData.com (which has dozens of retail datasets just like the Walmart store example, presumably gathered by screen-scraping).
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/17...

Glenn Greenwald compares this linking of television and torture to the swing of public opinion in America regarding our government's use of torture.
Actually that was a typo. I meant to say that you can't separate them :)
Human behavior, for instance.
Google Will Soon Offer A Way For Users To Opt-Out Of Google Analytics Tracking
Is that really true? Seems to me like the monetary awards in copyright cases these days have very little to do with actual damages; see the recent P2P filesharing cases where the damages were over a million dollars for a double-digit number of files shared.
One of the key things from milgrim's experiment was the notion of giving up responsibility, the "teachers"in the experiment were absolved of all responsibility by the experimenters (authority). I would expect the same dynamic in crowds. Some people seem to feel that they cannot be held responsible for their behavior when they are in a crowd -- and to a large extent they are right. Before modern technology it'd be hard to keep track of who did what and when.

Note: It's hard to take "studies" like this seriously, if you've ever read milgrim's book it's amazing the length they went to try and verify their results; whereas nowadays studies seem to be a lot less rigorous.
> difficulty of finding trained programmers

This one in particular always really annoys me. I get shot down all the time for this reason and I really don't recommend anything a competent developer couldn't pick up in a week. That means no FP and no 'interesting' architectures because programming methodologies and different architectural approaches can't be picked up without real effort. That's fine, I'm okay with that and I don't lobby for it even if I do think it'd reduce the code base by 60%.

Shooting me down for hireabilty because I want to use yui3 instead of jQuery? Forbidding the use of SASS instead of CSS? If they can't pick it up, YOU DON'T WANT TO HIRE THEM.
Good post. I solved my mongo full text search problems 2 weeks ago using Ruby's Sunspot gem http://outoftime.github.com/sunspot/.

I walked through this tutorial http://masonoise.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/using-sunspot-for-... on using Sunspot with Redis and had it working with Mongo in under an hour.
The GPU cores share RAM, so there is no need to have local copies. Though if you run out of the 4GB available on Tesla/Quadro cards, it gets more complicated (but so would it on the CPU).
One or more examples would help.
The turpentine effect
There is 42.zip[1], which is 42 kB zipped, and 4.5 PB unzipped.

[1]: http://www.unforgettable.dk/
* I used to take shits in an outhouse and swim in the river where that same shit was dumped in. Though I didn't do this for long--eventually we got a toilet.

* Appear in the background in a movie scene with Judd Nelson (John Bender from the Breakfast Club).
No, it's about growth, in general.
I dont get the Hulu arguement? Viacom and Warner Bros. are the only two big media companies that do not own a portion of Hulu. It's a joint venture between Disney, Fox and Comcast (who is buying NBC/Universal from GE).
It is just more complicated. What count as a product? Is it per platform, per version? Is what you are building an enabling software?

Also, notice that there is no free provision for low volume, or internet broadcast.
Gah, I meant internship, sorry about that.
Direct link ... that sentence is riveting but the title here kind of includes the entire submission.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottvdp/4443360713/
Reasons I am skeptical: the conclusions have extremely profound implications for physics yet this hasn't appeared on my radar through an established journal.

Reasons this is believable: It answers two major questions I have with the current model.

1. Cosmic acceleration. This has been written off as the result of "dark energy." A total cop out, and worst of all, it violates the laws of thermodynamics since energy is being added to the system.

2. The concentration of positive amounts of mass during early stages of the universe should have created a black hole.

Overall I'm still skeptical, but on the other hand, this is a more believable theory that addresses those questions than I have heard so far. I'm very curious if anyone else thinks it may have merit on this basis. I would also love to know if anyone can independently validate the accuracy of the simulations.
I think that it is more relevant to the memory bandwidth (hundreds cores trying to access the same big chunk of memory).
Here's a startup idea: hackable cameras - open up the processing of the raw sensor data.
hmmm. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1008102
I am not claiming, and I don't know whether Stallman would, that copyright laws that can be shown to impede the progress of science and useful arts would actually be unconstitutional

This is my issue with that entire point. I don't see how current is hampering arts and science, really. Which is a problem because people can turn around and say so; which works to invalidate the argument.

It's a key point because it's what we need to consider when revising copyright law properly; but for dismantling the current law it doesn't seem, currently, a strong argument.
Ask HN: Where to stay in San Francisco?
hi everyone, first post here so please be nice. just got an interview for YCS10, we're flying in from London and don't know where to stay in San Fran :( Need somewhere for 2 guys where we can spend the time working, ideally v cheap, and obv with wifi. Any and all ideas very much appreciated... (and yes, we know about Airbnb, what we don't know is where in the city to be)
The variable was mostly just "large live audience egging the participant on".

If the participant were able to reason under contrary social pressure, he'd probably consider that the general (much larger) TV audience wouldn't necessarily react in the same way as the taping crowd, which is generally known to be prompted.
Check out some of the screen casts of CS4. It's pretty awesome.
Fair play and its origins: cultural?
Actually, since 1.5, svn does track merges.
Data Marketplace can help people who are looking for data connect with people who are able to collect it. One of the problems with all of the data online is that it is in too raw a format to be useful. Someone must scrape/combine/clean the data before it can be analyzed. By connecting business people who maybe don't know how to scrape data with programmers/aggregators who specialize in it, we hope to make it a lot easier to find useful data.
I'm a devoted mom and my first child has genuinely life-threatening health problems. Because he was constantly ill as a baby, I had little real choice but to wait on him hand and foot. By the time he was 2 years old, he seemed to think he was my lord and master and would imperiously order me to turn left or right when I was out driving and things like that. Over the years, we had a few confrontations (starting as early as age two) to undo some of his assumptions that the world revolved around him and so forth.

I don't have any regrets because his need for attention and care due to his health issues was genuine, but you can certainly go too far in either direction. My second child was much healthier, much more secure, and much more introverted. He would have hated me if I had doted on him the way I doted on his brother. So each child is different as well.
How a thought leader makes money.
As torial said many algorithms lend themselves well for running on GPUs. Algorithms can also be designed to be run on GPUs.

These guys are using GPUs to convert series of images into 3D models in biology http://vidiowiki.com/watch/m5xbpad/

These guys use GPUs in sound synthesis: http://vidiowiki.com/watch/w9h9mfe/
She certainly isn't a Ph.D., but a journalist who writes stories. I found the book interesting nonetheless, one can read it pretty quickly. It illuminated Perelman's decisions and provided insights into his character. Relating to math, it's certainly only for laymen.
I was half-expecting the prime-number-shitting bear: http://alpha61.com/primenumbershittingbear/
Ah, but that means they were better in some way relevant to business needs, and good enough elsewhere.

Theora is better in terms of cost, but that apparently isn't enough of an advantage to counter the technical shortcomings.
I'm not surprised you thought of that; Jessica McKellar's article almost sounds as if it was modeled after mine in places. I'm wondering now if that's due to actual imitation, or a subconscious influence, or if it's just a natural approach for someone to take to the subject. Which naturally leads to the question: was I unconsciously imitating someone else when I wrote my article?

(Come to think of it, I vaguely remember having in mind some of Isaac Asmiov's science essays when I wrote that -- one of the type in which he would trace the discovery of some principle through several refinements over the centuries. Those essays gave me an appreciation for the value of studying science in its historical context. But that's a much more general influence than what I'm referring to.)
I know Scott would probably never refer to himself as a "thought leader."

I picked that title because I thought "book author" wouldn't be as descriptive.

I like him because I find his _thinking_ interesting.
I rarely find people referred to as "thinkers," though, so I went with thought leader.
Gmail can be forgiven for not contributing useful content to the web at large. Everyone expects email to be private and not really available for repurposing. Anyway, gmail was written competently and it works well without scripting turned on, though its URLs aren't as RESTful as they could be.

But something like a public blog with content thoroughly entombed in a gmail-like interface would suck. Which doesn't stop people from doing it.
Yeah. Next stop, super expensive table saws that don't cut. Three cheers for tort.
I think the competition to be a YC company is high enough now that most companies show up the first day with an actual product.
from the developer's perspective, I gather. However, the lower x-axis already indicates this, so the curve is still poorly defined.
I'm sure there has been some inoculation in people who are informed of these horrific possibilities, which presumably is the goal of the documentary. I'm not sure if they'll remember next time they're pressured, but it should help.

But human nature certainly hasn't changed, and won't. Social pressure is still stronger than nearly everyone's convictions.

I see the expressed horror as mostly remorse over how the security and validation they felt (that allowed them to be so cruel) was a sham, and that now they're really seen as monstrous. They have a pretty good excuse; it's likely that most people would have embarrassed themselves as fully.
On the one hand, he has a good point buried in there: Hunch doesn't collect enough useful information, and it doesn't do a great job with it. Fair enough.

However, his basic hostility to the idea of recommendations coming from a machine seems misplaced. Presumably he's not out there railing against Amazon and NetFlix recommending books and movies to all of us... And they actually do a pretty good job.

Overall, a very poorly written article. Yes, yes, you'd like several semi-elite celebrities of Silicon Valley to do a better job with $12 million. And I'd like a pony.
what should the rest of us with real businesses call ourselves

If you were using traction, I would find more agreement with you. On feature, you can make a lot of startups look like POS.

- twitter is an inputbox where you write some random crap about you

- facebook is a freakin ugly looking profile page

1. If you couldn't tell, those are what facebook and twitter launched as.

2. May be you should be figuring out how to make your "real business" as big as twitter and facebook? Of course, you'd hate that and you'll claim you are happy to be running what you already have. So are the tiny startup dudes you seem to be railing against.

You have a very narrow sense of what constitutes a "real business" or a startup...which is totally okay because it's just semantics. It's just not worth getting bogged down on.
Within Google we've noticed that the people who complain about the process are most often the ones who don't get in.

How do you know that the basic question is what sank you? Is it possible that the interviewer didn't like the architectures that you came up with? Or perhaps you left the impression that you would not like to find yourself in a hands on position where you have to do things like set the sticky bit? (Based on this post I'd get that impression myself. But everyone here is hands on. "Architecture Astronaut" is not a job type we want to encourage.)

But whatever the cause, I absolutely guarantee that all three of the qualifications that you think we have are wrong. Because I am none of the three and managed to get hired.
That's my point - you can't A/B test something while making other changes too.
Social Gold Study: Impact of Holidays on Virtual Goods Sales
This whole "experiment" disturbs me profoundly, and for about a dozen of factors, of which i can only cite a few :

- They take the appearance of science, name this an experiment, when this is much more of a sensationalist TV show in the very style of the ones it's supposed to denounce.

- A (very big) flaw that the milgram experiment already had, but that this show suffers from even more, due to the context and to the size of the sample, is the fact that they're working on a sample that isn't representative in any way of the global population, but only of the people susceptible of answering the announcements -- in the case of this tv show, people willing to go on television, and that's probably not a small thing. Also this pretends to be a reproduction of the milgram experiment, while the conditions are very different. Obeying to a show hostess and obeying to a doctor isn't the same thing, and shouldn't be analyzed as being the same.

- Going further in my first point, while this is supposed to be scientific, it obviously is not. But even the motivations of the show are unclear. Supposedly it's there to warn us about the dangerous power of television, while it's actually obvious that the show is using the very mechanisms it's supposed to denounce. People act shocked while they satisfy those very appetites of violence and voyeurism. How clever.

BTW I'm french, and watched a few extracts of the show, but i didn't have the occasion to watch it in full. It looks very fakeish, and very disturbing too. I guess the minimum the show director could do is display some proofs of the veracity of the show.

Sociology, and human sciences in general, ought to be something serious, in the process and in the display. Mocking it while playing on people's indignation (which is almost as easy to exploit as their appetite for violence) is disgusting.
"Again: Hitler did not want to win some war and some partial victory.
He was talking about the 'Endsieg': the final victory."

Yes--German domination over the entirety of Europe. He bit off more than he could chew, though. If he hadn't allied with Japan and made a few strategic decisions better than he had, Germany would still have most of Europe today. That's not my point, though. My point is that, had Hitler been a successful conquerer, he wouldn't be nearly as hated as he is. Maybe that success would have involved slightly less ambition (but the same amount of genocide). As far as the brutality and genocide go, the main difference is that Hitler was so damned good at it. If you want to kill off 10 million people, it's far more cost-effective to enslave them and work them to death, isn't it?

On the other hand, consider the white domination of North America. The Indians were set against one another in various wars. If a tribe or band was defeated they were either exterminated or forcibly relocated to reservations. Treaties were repeatedly signed and broken--if we relocated a group of Indians to a piece of land that ended up being valuable, we relocated them again. We weren't organized enough to set up concentration camps, but we had enough room we could give them parcels of worthless land for reservations. If we didn't enslave them directly, we bought slaves from Indian slavers, which only led them to more warfare, so the winners could sell the losers as slaves. Incidentally, this is also how white people ruined West Africa.

Once white people achieved their "manifest destiny" over North America, they really didn't seem to care too much about all the genocide and mass murder and racism involved. Even today, a lot of them don't.

Incidentally, the German people turned against Hitler as soon as he started losing. I don't know that they really cared much about the genocide yet, but they were mad at Hitler because it was Hitler's fault that allied bombs were landing on their houses. If Hitler won, no one would have really questioned or cared what he did to get there, or why there was suddenly so much room in what used to be Eastern Europe for them to move out into.

"Hitler was no rational politician - he was a racist and mass murderer."

You keep acting like this is any kind of unique distinction among imperialists and conquerers throughout history.
CVS then. I haven't used either in years.
Amazon seeks Unpay trademark
Jason Kottke covered this at a higher level, where consumers are taking into account the format of the media and not just the content in their reviews (unlike your average critic working for big media).

http://kottke.org/10/03/the-new-rules-for-reviewing-media

They're leveraging what power they have from available tools (star ratings and reviews on popular commerce sites) to put pressure on the publishers.

Is it odd that Amazon doesn't denote (or possibly separate out) reviews from users that it knows purchased the book (or DVD, etc.)? Privacy concerns? The user is already expressing an opinion on something the have [ideally] consumed, thus tying it to their profile.
Seems like an awfully low signal to noise ratio in the requests at the moment. The vast majority of them are very unrealistic, in not outright spam.

"Request For Data
List of all Assisted Living care centers in the U.S., including name, address, phone number, website and any photos on their website. There should be about 20,000 of them.
Budget: $20.00
Deadline: March 25, 2010 10:40 PM"

Yeah... I'll get right on that...
Yes, I think it has merit.
Because everything done by a government should be for the public interest, even if one person or a small group is directly benefited.

I'm not a US Constitution specialist, heck, I am from Brazil. But that's usually how things are: You don't exactly need to keep saying "_this_ is for the public interest", because _everything_ should be.
Solargraphy: ultra long exposure photographs of the sun
i write code for gpus, sometimes. they're nice for many inverse problems - anything that constructs a map or image from some kind of measurement. in my case i work on geophysical applications.
Her point about "real life" not being as quantifiable as games in terms of how well you're doing is really interesting. A gadget like fitbit plus some kind of D&D scoring system would be pretty neat.
it's amusing how he calls Hunch the "la crème de la creme of Silicon Valley" despite them being in New York. Heh :)
Ditto to TC doing any sort of grammar checking.
Sorry, but you are wrong.

Generalized predators tend to have boom/bust cycles that are a small integer number of years. When the boom aligns with the cicadas, it sucks for the cicadas. When the bust aligns with the cicadas, it is great for them. Having a non-prime period would synchronize that boom/bust cycle with the cicada's cycle, and would make every generation a bad one for the cicada's strategy. Eventually this would make the cicadas go extinct.

There is no possibility of a specialized predator evolving because said predator would spend most of the time starving.
> By your logic all witnessable acts of good must be viewed with suspicion.

Suspicion that they may be profitable? I think you have missed the point. The assertion in question is that Apple is losing money by hosting this tribute. It may be the case that Apple will instead make money. A critique regarding the philosophy of altruism seems a little premature...
Yeah, it's true. We definitely felt like we were playing catch-up from day 1. Not that its a competition, but I think companies benefit more from YC having a working product earlier on.
If you want to live a programmer's lifestyle in San Francisco, then by all means keep your programming job.
For my part, I decided that not having to enter comments into a spreadsheet marked 'Game Changers' was well worth a 75% pay cut.

The 'realities of business' are not expensive for a sole proprietorship, if you are frugal. At $10/k a month, I could live like a king.
The bug carcasses do reek, I'm told by those who have better noses and walk through more.

I wouldn't care to deal with them every summer, but I'm glad to have seen it.
Why? The folks that hit it big know why.
i would guess double precision support is pretty much a no-brainer. it's a deal breaker for many numerical applications and isn't that expensive (amd/ati have 64 bit support too on the latest firestream cards).

fermi's cache, on the other hand, probably implies more trade-offs. but you can look at it as a necessary step in learning how to find a middle ground between gpus and cpus - which is the next big battle.
What the FOOP? Functional OOP in newLisp
This is an interesting question that we've been giving a lot of thought to lately. We hope that it won't be a big problem, but if it is we will need to implement public EULAs and a dispute resolution process.

In terms of multiple purchases, we suspect there will be some datasets that are more popular than others. A list of Wal-Mart stores for example could be useful to a number of different people, such as investors, real estate developers, business planners, marketers, etc.
Wikipedia could easily set a flag that says how core the article is and then users could select the level of inclusion or notoriety they want to see. It'd also be awesome if on every page they included some sort of visualization of editing activity & population of editors and the amount of viewers who have looked at the article in relation to the edits. This way a user can get a feeling of how many eyeballs have been on the page.
Hey hey. I was a Wikipedia admin for a year or two (until focus shifted elsewhere). If there are any guidelines that you'd like clarification on, I'll do my best.
We're working on it :)