skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Definitely, and in fairness these are situations where there's a huge investment in MS technologies, with entire teams dedicated to supporting and maintaining the infrastructure. It isn't feasible to throw it all away without a serious commitment from the highest levels of the organization, and a multi-year, multi-million-dollar implementation plan to do so.

But at the team and individual developer levels I think there's lots of room for good open source solutions, and this option isn't always considered because developers are looking to MS for the next big thing.

I believe this is reflected in the certification programs too, because they don't focus as much on building a sound programming foundation as on making good Microsoft evangelists. From Microsoft's viewpoint, why not? But it's that divergence again from the company's perspective.
Zuckerberg slept with my girlfriend!

Do you see what I did there? Anyone on the Internet can accuse anyone of anything. And you can do the same in a court document -- when you sue someone, you don't say "I think the person I am suing is a fine and upstanding citizen." You come up with anything that sounds bad and could possibly be true, just in case you're right or the judge buys it.

This is a non-story. Facebook is shady, but there is probably no securities fraud involved.
WSJ's Flash-Based Visualization of the Flash Crash
I had this idea myself, basically machine learning as a service about 3 years or more ago. Somehow, I also knew Google would implement something like this. So while I still consider this a viable startup idea, I knew it would be tough to compete against a behemoth that already has tons of data and experience training countless machine learning algorithms.
Here are the job descriptions that will probably be of the most interest to HN readers:

senior python engineer: http://www.stickybits.com/jobs/senior-python-engineer/

android engineer: http://www.stickybits.com/jobs/android-engineer/

VP of engineering: http://www.stickybits.com/jobs/vp-engineering/

business manager: http://www.stickybits.com/jobs/business-manager/

Lots of exciting features and partnerships in the pipeline, and a chance to collaborate on a daily basis with our awesome co-founders.
Rob (RC) and I (JA) tend to disagree on things all the time. For me it wasn't as much about the money as the pleasure of using Rails, and I know Rob also loves using Rails. The money was basically what made the decision easy, here were our choices:

1) Continue to use a platform that costs more and isn't as much fun.

or

2) Use a platform we both love using and works out to be cheaper.

Pretty simple decision really.
Yes, you can. Actually, I won't wait for you to ask. It's called One Day, One Job and the URL is in my profile.
Undercover Chinese reporter exposes Foxconn working conditions
this currently doesn't support SVG which means no support for the iPhone and iPad
You are assuming that we would spend more time using RoR then ASP.NET, we have found this to be the opposite. We build out and deploy features in much less time then we would on ASP.NET now.
I know. My current project goes near 4 claims on 5 patents, till now (I don't make infringement, but still have found myself near some mines). However my point is that you can't blame MS for this, but the patent law. Either change it, use it, or remove it. You have 3 options.

Most users here are saying that "ethically" MS is doing wrong. This is not an ethical issue, it's a legal one (MS isn't the only one, recently Apple, Nokia, etc). The problem of patents it's been around for decades, or at least years, why haven't anyone fixed it. America is a democracy, right? Now go and change the law, if you can.

Or, wait for a replacement of the current patent system, I think it's only a matter of years, now.

EDIT: Of the 5 patents I was talking about, none of them use the invention on an actual product.

EDIT2: clarified 2nd par.
The article makes some good points but ignores one essential factor. As much as this "millennial" bored-again-generation will change the enterprise (the big corporations) these big corporations will change them even more. The author as a millennialist does not realize that those retiring boomers are really the "hippie" generation. They had no less revolutionary intentions when they infiltrated the enterprise in the late 70s. When the millennials will be retiring the enterprise will not be much different (they may have updated their current XP Professional set up though) but the revolutionary millennials will look not much different than today's retiring boomers.
BDD on .NET? Check out the S#arp Architecture, it's designed to be the RoR of the .NET world, and it has some nice BDD tools, plus scaffolding for IoC, Unit Tests, Services, and MVC.

http://wiki.sharparchitecture.net
This statement is ambiguous anyway. This is a civil suit and not criminal case. Secondly, from my understanding, only the SEC via a federal court can "ban" someone from being a director in a public company.
You should work on estimating, or use software to model how much real time it takes for a given amount of estimated time (like fogbugz.)
We didn't look at Mono because the amount of code we had was fairly trivial and rewriting it in Rails actually let us simply alot of it and write it better than we did before.

I love Mono though and I am actually using that on my other startup (http://adzerk.com) instead of rewriting since I have so much more code there.
Both as a virtualisation host and I've dabbled in a bit of kernel debugging using it.
The article is flawed, but his profile still doesn't seem to play by the rules. When I go to facebook.com/zuck there is no option for me to request adding him as a friend. In normal privacy settings you can specific that either everyone can add you as a friend or only friends of friends. I have two mutual friends with Mark Zuckerberg.

So either his profile has some additional privacy setting (i.e., to only send out, not receive, friend requests) or something else is at play (like he has hit the friend limit -- I'm not sure what that looks like, to be honest).
Uh, this was meant in the "Wow, totally cool!" sense and not the "We welcome our new overlords" sense.
The other important piece is milestones so you know as soon as possible when the deadline is at risk. It's one thing to say "Yeah, we have to delay the launch by a month" 6 months out, and another to say "Yeah, we have to delay the launch by a month" 1 week out.
Wouldn't it make more sense for you to at minimum mechanically vote in every election you can where a Baby Boomer is running against a young whippersnapper? Maybe even give some money to the latter if it looks like he can win?

Note also that culturally the classic Baby Boomers (e.g. the Clintons and G. W. Bush) are different from those who were born at the end of the demographic Baby Boom, who are labeled as being part of Generation Jones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Jones; e.g. Obama and myself :-). I think we might be a bit more accommodating of new technology and all that it brings.
Webfont comparison: Google's, Typekit and Font Squirrel
As a non-techie, I don't understand the language example they're using. It seems to me many prediction engines are originally built to try to forecast winning lottery numbers or other such gambling events. Google expects me to believe they did this for language?
"First they ignore you, then laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." (Gandhi via Robbie Williams)

Rightly identified and well addressed by epi0Bauqu. And also worth noting that this sort of constructive criticism is a great sign of positive market traction. I'm bumping into DDG more often on the web, which is excellent.
I'm not sure why I even blurred it, I don't care one bit.
Whoops. My bad.
Google webfont previewer:
http://code.google.com/webfonts/preview
I was guessing that google (in their never-ending desire to consume more data) would want to use us as guinea-pigs to improve their algorithms. It's not 100% clear to me, but from the terms of service:

By submitting, posting, displaying, or transmitting Data on or through the Service, you give Google permission to process your Data for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its privacy policy. You hereby grant Google all licenses to your Data necessary to process the Data and provide you with the Service in accordance with its privacy policy. As a part of the Service and through provided interfaces, Google may allow you to remotely access, view, and download results of the processing of your Data. (via http://code.google.com/apis/predict/docs/terms.html)

I imagine that they might claim the right to use your data anonymously to improve their algorithms, much like they do for your personal data in their other apps. I mean, what better way to refine their supervised learning algorithms than via an endless supply of training sets? But I hate wading through legalese, anyone have any insights?
I'm sure the settlement was well-documented... much more documented than any supposed rendezvous with your girlfriend.
This type of myopic anti-Google thinking is getting old. Do your homework, read their service agreements. If you don't agree with them, don't give them your data. If they sound reasonable, assume that Google will respect them. After all, they are not stupid, they understand they cannot tarnish their business reputation by violating a customer's trust. If I'm wrong and they end up being stupid, they can be held accountable by law.

In fact from their TOS (http://code.google.com/apis/predict/docs/terms.html):

4.2. Google claims no ownership or control over any of your Data. You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in the Data, and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate.
The cool stuff about Lisp for those of us with day jobs — PART 1
For most people though, I would think a service like this could easily prove to be good enough. What would you suggest that would be a significant performance or productivity improvement over cloud computing?
This is music sort of like the writing you get from a Markov text generator. Except much better. Has anyone gotten any good thoughts or ideas from a Markov text generator? And that illuminates something about music: the patterns aren't as complex as language.

This is going to cause a giant re-ranking of composers, as those whose music seems most like computer-generated stuff will seem less impressive now. (That will be wrong, but it's what people will think anyway.) Interestingly, the ones who create the noisiest stuff will benefit the most, whereas those whose compositions are perfectly expressed in the linear notation of sheet music will lose out. Ramones in, Beethoven down, Rachmaninoff out.
SharpArchitecture, while swell and neat, doesn't scratch the itch of "this stuff really isn't that hard". There's a metric s* ton of concepts and code in there that are more suitable for a military defense system, let alone a startup.
I don't feel that bad, considering it seems like Zuckers has been an unethical solipsist since the start. These 3 perhaps had more than just money taken from them by Zuckers "jackassery".
The point is that they took a large number of documents, which are clearly labelled as to language, gave it as a training set to the machine, and they now have a classifier that lets you input random text and tells you the language it was probably written in.

In principle you can do this with any data set and any set of discrete outcomes.

In general, though, you should expect that the resulting classifier won't give you much insight on why it came up with the answers that it did. Plus it frequently is less accurate than a trained human. But it is much, much cheaper.
"self made" means not inherited from your parents.
I have learned Ruby on Rails and I am amazed that after three weeks with RoR I am more productive than after 10 years with .net

I reported my own experience moving from Asp.net to Ruby on Rails in my blog a few days ago:

"How an experienced developer multiplied his productivity tenfold"
http://aymeric.gaurat.net/index.php/2010/how-an-experienced-...
Agreed -- look at their own example data:

wine,5,1,1
no-wine,0,0,10

This data is meaningless to anyone who doesn't know what the columns mean, and you don't have to tell that to Google.

And you can of course replace the labels with any other text you want without affecting the algorithm.
Investor Dave McClure: ‘Open is for losers’
Python Makes Me Say God Damn
Depends where you go. I have a (fairly) general interest site that gets about 100,000 unique visitors per month, and only about 55% of them use IE. Cutting out 45% of your potential market is quite a cost for a bit of lazy programming.
I rarely seen any RoR clone took off. I don't mean to talk bad about them, but I'd be worried about the community and momentum behind them. I wouldn't want to use a niche technology to find out that I might have to extend or take ownership myself down the road when their leader decided to resign to pursue something else because they find their work no longer rewarding nor interesting (well, to begin with, they're cloning a popular framework instead of coming up with original ideas or being a visionary).
Your assumption here is that the blame game somehow is the path to productivity and "the answer". This, to me, means you have a lot of other problems where you work - your platform doesn't matter at all.

You're very right, however in that no one gets fired for using Microsoft - but that's changing. Don't take my word for it - ask the guys in Building 42 - they know it too.

You touch on a very particular, hot topic in the IT world - that having a phone number to Microsoft will solve problems. Sometimes it does - but most often that comes at more than a bit of a price :).

On the flip side - my support channel is Google and I find my answers in about half the time as I would with a topic such as ASP.NET MVC. Rails is quite mature and people have tried everything with it - found where it's great and where it blows. I've had more to read on it than you can imagine.

Anyway - it is a sad truth and one that's about to change as the old guard at your company cycles out and are replace by people with knowledge and pedigree - namely people like me - who will systematically cull the policies that don't make business sense, and keep the ones that do :).

This doesn't mean "ax all things Microsoft" - it means "find the best value and leverage it". MS is changing its focus as it sees this - it knows this shift is coming - it's why ASP.NET MVC is Open Source and SQL Express is free, and more is on the way :).
Everything We Know About the BP Spill. Seriously, Everything
Also from the TOS, in the section directly above the bit you quote:

4.2. Google claims no ownership or control over any of your Data. You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in the Data, and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate.
Ask HN: Where to hire a great web designer?
I'm working with two start-ups in San Diego that are both in need of a great internal graphics designer.

About to start posting listings - any gems out there for finding talent?
But isn't that the case with virtually any technology? We've used C, C++, Java, C#, VB, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Flash, etc... We always look at the stack and make a business and technical decision about what to keep and what to toss.
Because the codecs are unsandboxed native code running in the browser process with full access to your user data. That you downloaded from the internet. To enjoy pornography and pirated media (and pirated pornography!). It'd be a perfect exploit delivery vehicle, and on a newly-prominent attack surface (see the recent @font-face exploits)

It's a much bigger problem on Windows because shitty DirectShow codec packs have a huge install base -- I wouldn't be surprised at a hundred million! It'll be a little better now since XP users won't get it, and the codec pack situation has cleaned up a lot in the last few years.

The IE team is doing the right thing for the situation they have. Anybody that cares is going to be using a different browser, their support for <video> just means that we won't have to use a Flash fallback for Vista/W7 users that allow updates.

Google is unlikely to prompt IE users to install the WebM codec on Youtube, since it'll work better with h.264 anyway.

Apple doesn't use a whitelist now, but they might in the future. Their attack surface is more constrained, since it's only the code they ship directly (the library, their default codecs, and the pro stuff they ship with Final Cut), Perian/libavcodec, and Xiph/liboggplay that are actually installed anywhere. No cambrian explosion of repackaged hacked codecs to deal with.
It'll be awesome if google hosts non-romanized script fonts, too. Many sites in other languages require you have a certain font on your machine.

Here's a good example of a font Google should add -- Saab, a Gurmukhi (Punjabi) font.
http://guca.sourceforge.net/typography/fonts/saab/
(free, gpl'd, unicode 4.0, opentype)
Not weird at all. In Purgatory, the sky is red all the time...
...younger peoples' stories about drinking, clubbing, getting high and dating - when I really wasn't at all anymore. Strange - once I loved that stuff and couldn't imagine not loving it... and then it just got boring.

Do you think those things got boring as a result of doing them too much? i.e. do you subscribe to the idea that you can "get it out of your system" while you're young? Or do you think it's more a result of age? Once your friends start getting married, you feel the need to settle down too?

I'm asking because this subject has been on my mind a lot lately. I'm 25 and don't really feel like I've "gotten it out of my system. On the other hand, I feel like I've kind of started down the "settling down" road in such a way that I can't really be 21 again. Any thoughts or words of wisdom?
Manage to sell anyone Kratom while you were there?
tl;dr - MySQL coming to Google App Engine
a book-free way to do it would be to start with reading an introduction such as: http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/roundup-scala-for-java-... (not really entertaining, but good content)

Once you are done with that, read articles on the fantastic Daily Scala blog: http://daily-scala.blogspot.com/ . There are LOTS of useful little morsels in there.

For a beginner asking questions, stackoverflow is IMO the place to go, the people on the mailing lists can sometimes be a bit hostile towards newbies.
Apparently it's possible with 1 Mhz, 3 voices and 64 KB ram. :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTFhiHBALto
But why? My cost right now (aside from hardware, which is net even) is 0 - without the hoops. Also - the testing story is much better.
I knew you would make that comment
... and D. E. Shaw, who still publishes theoretical biophysics papers (not quite a software guru, but still writes code)
Did you miss the phrase, for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its privacy policy? That phrase tells me that the ONLY thing they get permission to do with the data is use it for processing your requests.

And they definitely need that. In order to process requests, Google has to make a bunch of copies of your data, create models, etc. Furthermore Google will need to keep copies so that it can use the model it generated for future requests. If the data that you have uploaded is confidential, proprietary, etc, then this requires copyright permission. (Particularly since in the previous clause they made it clear that you retain full copyright.)
I'd think you'd need to at minimum adjust for age; I'm wondering is their workers are younger than average and if those older kill themselves more often than average, but anyway you look at it I'm sure the distribution is not simple.
I used it to check my answers on all my differential equations homework this last semester. I was excited to see it did fourier!
Forum is hosed, but somebody got a screenshot (Reddit). http://www.imgdash.com/uploads/89bf455cab.png

Shameful.
First, start by recognizing there's a difference between a web designer and a graphic designer.
I believe this will hinge on the details of how Facebook represented the value of the securities to ConnectU. Representations of the value of a security are legally perilous. If Facebook's lawyers at the time were good, I imagine Zuckerberg will get a pass. If they missed the dots on a few "i"s or the crosses on a few "t"s, then Zuckerberg could be in for a long ugly ride.

I am not a lawyer, but I worked in the securities industry in a regulatory supervisory capacity (series 24, plus a mess of others).

Good general advice: Any time you feel the urge to tell somebody what your stock is worth, avoid the urge unless your legal department is involved.
Look a few comments up - also (from MS themselves) running a site on SQL Express is not a good idea. I would never do that. Once you leave express, you need to license (for the web) by the cpu - which means you're about to cough up a lung.

Ask Jeff and Joel how much they're going to owe - I think it's almost to 6 figures :).
When is $10,000 peanuts? Seriously - I'd rather bonus a developer that money then hand it over for something I can get for free.
@rms: What concrete things did you work on? Were you writing papers, or coding AI, or...? The Singularity seems like such a broad area of study, how do you gauge progress or even decide what to work on?
The purpose of the example was to show how the Prediction API can recognise the language used just from a few words. So, the data given to the API is a few words in French, and it's prediction is that the language is French. I believe that they're already using this technology in Google Translator. You just type in a few words and it immediately recognises what language is being used. Then you only need to choose the language to which the text is to be translated.
Very forward thinking, I'm glad dev-in-VM is moving forward.

I actually planned on creating a Vagrant box (vagrantup.com) for reddit development to ease the development for Reddit. I was waiting until after I got another release of Vagrant out to do it (for no other reason than personal time management), but I'm motivated by this to do this sooner.

I'll take a look tonight and see if I can do this sooner rather than later, which will bring this to VirtualBox.

disclaimer: I am the developer behind Vagrant.
I'm stealing this quote :) well said. Also look at getjar
Tell that to MySQL which runs like an ape through a mud bog on Windows.
The Ramones and Punk may be the wrong example. Most punk, early or late, relies on pretty simple structures.
Conlon Nancarrow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conlon_Nancarrow) did some really wild stuff with similar pianos (technically, I think they're called reproducing instead of player). His stuff is so complex that it's impossible to humanly play, so punching paper was his only option. I'd certainly consider him a hacker in that regard.
The tracks from the latest album are a LOT better. They are obviously played by a human. Here's an example (search YouTube for 'Emily Howell music')

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEjdiE0AoCU&feature=relat...

I'm really surprised the author of the article didn't try to get a snippet to play (edit: they do on the page 2 of the article). The music still doesn't quite do it for me but if you consider the potential of future versions it is pretty amazing.
No, I did see that, but to zoom in further, what is meant by "in accordance with its privacy policy"?

For Google's other apps, their privacy policy lets them confidentialize and then use data about you to improve their services. Don't see anything that stops them from doing stuff with your data as part of "providing you with the service", without giving up your ownership of it.

Yes, I'm speculating. But it just struck me as a reason for google to offer this service. And honestly, if I were a user I might be ok with them using my data anonymously to improve said service that I am using.