skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fun ideas, but this is over-analysis. The movie is as it appears to be. There is no justification for taking a minor aspect of the plot (that the dream-sharing device is only briefly explained) and using it to concoct a whole new layer underlying the movie. The spinning top at the end is a red herring -- it's Christopher Nolan having a little fun with us. The true indication of what happened, that Cobb has reached reality, is in his ability to see his children's faces at last. That's the give-away.
I’m Holding Out For A Startup Pioneer
I use Engine Yard for an e-commerce Rails app. Deployment is simple with a post commit hook. I simply commit and push to Github and the rest is done. You are on your own unless you fork over at least $250/month for a support plan though.

I've used Heroku for smaller Rails and Sinatra apps.

For my Windows Dedicated running some .NET apps and a Linux VPS for a few Wordpress blogs, I use Liquid Web. I feel they are better than most hosts as far as speed, support, and reliability but not yet a Rackspace.

I use Amazon Cloudfront for content delivery and S3 for backups for all of these sites.
You should have sent at least one email to someone you have never met telling them that they should stop using tables.

/bows out of the race :)
New Robot Surgeons Can Operate Without Human Assistance
Poul-Henning Kamp benchmarking tips (for all the micro-benchmarking nerds)
Consider a tiling window manager if you're a Linux user. Doubly so if you're a console jock. I find it's a great way to cut down on mousing time.
Guy looking at a stripper in one of the pics. Classy.
I "third" this sentiment. This was Nolan teasing us a little bit, but at the very last second, the top was starting to fall over. The true indication that this was reality is in Cobb's ability to see his children's faces.
Engineers sometimes remind me of the two guys that used to live next to me that spent every day tinkering with the engine of their Camaro out in the garage. I'm sure it was pretty tricked out but it also spent 9/10 of its life up on blocks instead of actually driving somewhere interesting.
For the laughs alone I recommend everybody read the job descriptions he posted. He's a funny writer. Here's one favorite example from the Web Designer reqs:

"... and you should be able to use HTML and CSS well enough to defend your work against Internet Explorer."
Exactly. That's what is meant here by storage.

Make your water hotter when there's a surplus of electricity, that way you'll need less later when that surplus might be gone. If you have control of millions of water heaters, that's a lot of buffer.
I would strongly urge a doctor who gets sick to either use a pseudonym or go to some other hospital at which he's not listed as a doctor. MUMPS code and its schemaless shared-everything database (for medical records!) is terrifying enough all by itself before you give it edge cases like "this doctor is a patient".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
Cydia has already fixed this (it'll prompt to update base package). Can also manually fix via SSH access:

chmod 755 /private/var/mobile/Library; chmod 755 /private/var/mobile/Library/Preference

Then reset network settings. Fixed!
Cydia has now released an update to their base package to fix this. It's a permission problem (can manually fix via SSH too):

chmod 755 /private/var/mobile/Library; chmod 755 /private/var/mobile/Library/Preference after that Reset Network Settings
ooh, ooh new favorite: "You should have had a prior job that made you question your profession."

I'll shutup now. Really, go read that page.
Well, in any case, installing the profile from

http://m.peacefulinsanity.com/Tether.mobileconfig

didn't enable tethering on my 4.
Thoughts on web development: automation, code generation, and scheme
I think in that case, it would probably be a problem in most countries (unless, say, you're from the EU and pick another EU nation etc). There are nations like Costa Rica that have an entrepreneur visa, but AFAIK you have to employ certain number of locals and show some upfront investment to get it.

If I were in the OP's position, I believe I'd incorporate (if I really need to at all) where I have citizenship, then work on the product wherever I choose.

If you're talking an office with employees etc, that's a different story, but if it's a couple ppl working from an apt or cafe, perhaps with other staff telecommuting from where they live, I can't imagine this would a problem anywhere.
There are many vendors in China working on similar products, with in-core open source technology and fashion lookings as well established products.
> OK, I got it. Well, each URL is still a (60,000)-dimensional vector, just that 59990 entries happen to be zero and the 10 that are non-zero have certain values which show how many times that tag was chosen. Problem is that not the same ten are nonzero for each URL. Did I get it right?

Correct.

Interesting suggestions with the PCA. One of the strengths of having most of the vectors contain 0 values is that it makes computation much, much easier, even if the vector size is so large. I can quite quickly dismiss any vectors that have 0 dimensions in common. If I were to condense the 60,000 dimensions to something like 20, I'd have to do far more calculations to determine the top matches, as it would be tougher to distinguish vectors that are clearly not a match. I'd have to switch algorithms to something more suited for "more data points in less dimensions," which is something I'd love to do but cannot afford to spend time on right now.

If this type of analysis is as flexible as you say it is, then its possible I could get some gains from condensing the dimensions down to something like 1000, or 500, which would take care of superficial similar tags like "tech" and "technology", while still maintaining the diversity that is there. Looking at the most common tags, I can say with pretty good certainty that many of them will not be correlated enough to condense them together without losing some inherent "match" capability -- but then again I know nothing about PCA.

I'm not at all familiar with PCA. I'm going to go research it as soon as I finish writing this and other responses. If you could, though, perhaps you could explain briefly how it works? Your explanations resonate well with me. As I understand it, it's a method for projecting high amounts of dimensions into lower amounts, probably by figuring out correlations between each dimension then "combining" them in some sort of way. Something akin to creating the desired number of projected dimensions such that their orthogonality is as high as possible. Am I on the right track?
I think there are a couple reason.

Haskell is a significant departure from most other languages commonly used by industrial programmers. It's a relatively shallow learning curve from Java to Python to JavaScript, but making the leap to a pure functional language is very difficult. Path-dependence plays a huge part here. This isn't just a matter of "people being afraid of what's different" as the article suggests; there are very rational reasons for a profit-seeking firm to exploit the fact that their developers (and those available to hire) are already relatively proficient at writing procedural code.

Another, more important reason, is that Haskell is too intellectually demanding for most industrial programmers. I consider myself an enthusiast of functional programming, but achieving anything practical using purely functional code remains extremely difficult for me, even though I regularly dabble in it during my free time. The Haskell IRC channel can be helpful, but it's very difficult to square "Haskell is easy enough for anyone to learn" with the inevitable "you are too stupid/impatient/incompetent to use Haskell effectively" taunts you're likely to hear, when you're asking for help to perform a simple task. Many Haskell evangelists don't understand that most developers aren't nearly as smart or dedicated as they are.

I'd be curious to know where most Haskell users believe they lie on the distribution of programming ability. I'd estimate most of them lie at the 99% percentile, and that any of them arguing otherwise are doing so out of modesty. (Note that I'd include dedication and curiosity in with intelligence in this metric.) I believe the most likely explanation for this is that Haskell is a particularly difficult language to use effectively.
The Hurd: GNU's quest for the perfect kernel
Gratuitous harassment of whistleblowers at the US border and Wikileaks' director unable to visit the USA at all. Hiding documentation of official misconduct in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by persecuting journalists.

Is this what we elected Obama for?
Ask HN: Do you have any startup related regrets? Epic failures?
I've heard so many optimistic stories of "failed" startups where the founders continue on to new startups, or end up leading better lives afterwards regardless. But the whole time I'm thinking "there's got to be some downside to all this..."

There just seems to be this great optimism within the startup world that even if your idea or company fails, you're still fine, and I'm curious to if anyone has any stories of that not being the case.

Where are the startup stories of terrible regrets and failures? Is there anyone who's said "I wish I never tried that" or "those years were a waste of my life?" and why?

I've just found the startup industry to be extremely optimistic about things, and with so much attention on all the epic successes, I'm looking for some truly epic failures; mainly to keep my feet on the ground and in touch with reality.
You're right. It does satisfy some of the "knowledge gaining" aspects of travel though.
Even where other jurisdictions have made laws, often very little has been done.

For instance the European Union was due to be fully compliant by 2010, but not a single government is likely to make the deadline: http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=441
They charge you for just having a phone that can use data? Or they charge you because you are actually using data? If it's the first then it is crazy.
Using this exploit is it possible to install any app ? I mean by passing the app-store ?
This is not useful without audio, and personally I suggest that the author get #39 out of there before the inevitable bruhaha.

Choose your battles carefully, [I assume] dude.
EasyDNS has been fantastic.

http://www.easydns.com
Frenzy As Delicious Founder Joshua Schachter Raises Round For New Startup
Benford's law is about the distribution of the leading digit, not the trailing ones.
I think the ending is several things at once, which is why I like it.

One, it's a red herring as you say, though I'd put a slightly different spin on it. Cobb has chosen his reality, he's had his catharsis and made a very intentional decision to let Mal go. That's true regardless of if the ending is a dream or not.

Two, it's an intentional denial of catharsis for the audience. It's a setup without a payoff, tension without release. Here's the interesting part about that- the audiences I've seen it with provide their own physical catharsis, their own reality-based relief of tension, by laughter or by applause. These physical reactions both release the real physical tension that has built in their bodies and also returns them to the real world, outside of the filmic dream.

Three, it captures the feeling of a certain kind of dream. How many times have you dreamed of almost having the answer, of almost knowing something you want to know...and then abruptly waking up? Yes, exactly.

It's the best ending shot to a movie in quite a long while.
I really like his rant that starts at the ~62 minute mark and ends with this:

"PHP is just a damn tool.
It's just a hammer; it's boring.
It's not that interesting. I'm not that interested in it.
But I need a working tool to solve problems.
I'm really, really interested in problems.
The tool itself; if it works great. If it's broken I fix it.
But I don't spend my entire life fixing it.
PHP is damn ugly.
It'll always be ugly because we're not going to spend the time to sit
and make it pretty.
We're spending our time building actual solutions and fixing problems.
And the tool works. You can build really, really fast things with PHP.
And yes, it's not pretty. If you're a CS major or if all sort of for
the purity of coding; PHP is not for you. But then you're not probably
not interested in building things for end users."
This is my personal list of RSS feeds, which I've been curating for many years, so I knew exactly what data was coming. It was a one-time hack: it got my RSS feed list into the database, and was never excuted again. It was also only for local testing purposes.

I think that it would be pretty crazy to import simplejson on the Python side, write extra code to dump the data to JSON, look up how to do it in Ruby (because I don't know off the top of my head), and add the code to load it from JSON. That effort would not change the outcome by a single bit. For other theoretical data sets, it would, but this is not other data sets.

If this code were ever going to be used again, sure, I'd transfer it in a safe way. But this is the equivalent of `grep`ing and `cut`ing at the Unix shell – the goal is to get data from point A to point B, never to be revisited. I reject the idea that, in this particular case, extra effort to serialize and deserialize JSON data is superior to adding five characters of str().
What most other languages do, though, is exactly equivalent to Haskell's unsafePerformIO. If you want to interact with your environment in possibly-destructive ways (and sending a message out of the runtime, whether to the network or the OS, always has the possibility of being destructive, because you can never guarantee what a system not under your control will do in response to your message), just accept the reminder that it's not functional/idempotent/memoizable/whatever else, and do it.

This is going to sound like an odd analogy, but saying "I won't use Haskell because I want to do IO, but don't want to unsafely do IO", makes you sound like a person playing a fighting game who blames their loss on the game not being "fair." If you're playing to win[1], and there's an "unfair" tactic, you use it yourself. If "cheating" at Haskell lets you do a higher-quality job, faster, than either using a different language or "playing Haskell as it was meant to be played" (i.e. being a scrub) then why not?

[1] http://www.sirlin.net/ptw
Linux 2.6.35 is out
http://www.namesarecheap.com has performed great for me for the last 5 years.
Really amazing input, thank you. Unfortunately, this stuff is over my head, in two ways.

First, I haven't touched C++ in five years and don't want to spend weeks figuring out how to get my data from MySQL loaded into those data structures, how to create sockets so my PHP scripts can connect to it, handling errors, etc, etc. It's probably not as hard as I'm imagining it to be, and I'd love doing it, but I personally can't afford getting sucked into those details (no matter how appealing they are).

Second, I'm not familiar enough with the math of this library to know how to use it. I have about 200,000 vectors with 60,000 dimensions, each vector being extremely sparse. Given one vector, I'd like to compute the dot product of it with all others, then sort by value. I have no clue how to do this with that library.

It sounds like you have a lot of experience with this type of stuff. How much do you think my results could be improved (specifically)? Which results do you think are insufficient, and why?

Thanks for your input, I'm excited to nerd out on this type of stuff... even if it is over my head at times.
Get your PhD in JavaScript
Can you name a single startup that failed because of their inability to scale?

Development speed is way more important than scalability. Like Paul Graham says, the vast majority of startups fail because they make a product no one wants or because they never launch a product in the first place. Faster software development means you figure out if your product is a dud faster, and you're less likely to run out of morale before you've got something substantial.

I've been working on my current (unreleased) project with Django and jQuery on Linux for about a month. Here's all of the stuff I've made use of from the Django, jQuery, and Python communities:

http://code.google.com/p/django-command-extensions/

http://south.aeracode.org/

http://github.com/dcramer/django-ratings

http://github.com/pydanny/django-uni-form

http://github.com/robhudson/django-debug-toolbar

http://github.com/alex/django-ajax-validation

http://fabfile.org/

http://orkans-tmp.22web.net/star_rating/

http://jquery.malsup.com/form/

http://plugins.jquery.com/project/ScrollTo

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/

http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/

There's no way I could ever use a niche framework after having drunk this reusable code kool-aid.

Even if Django weren't scalable, if I really was on the road to being the next Facebook or Youtube, there'd be plenty of time and money to rewrite in something that could scale.
You understand everything most developers should ever need to know about normalization if you get the following two sentences.

The key, the whole key, and nothing but the key. So help me Codd.

(For those who don't get it, the first sentence describes first, second and third normal forms, and the second sentence names the guy who is responsible for most of the theory behind them.)
Can you name a single startup that failed because of their inability to scale?

yeah - friendster.
While I agree with your general premise and Bangalore isn't "Best startup city outside US", there is some good out there.

Entrepreneurial and technical competent hacker is a rarity anywhere. Obviously you won't find it in a under-grad who took up a job in IT, just so that he/she can prepare for MBA. But there are programmers out there, who are good and are in programming for fun of it. But then, are they entrepreneurial? Will they work for a salary cut? From what I have seen that depends.

"There aren't any universities doing pioneering/cutting edge research (no not even the IISc, their research quality is at best mediocre) which might form the basis of a successful startup."

Again for a lot of startups this might not matter. How many of startups in US spring from Basic Research? Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot, Six Apart... agreed that some of them had hard engineering problems to solve, but they wouldn't even fall into border line case of Basic research.

Riya example might be bad in someways because for a startup, it is bad idea to stretch yourself just for being cheap. Apart from IT services sector, if one is looking to start something great here, keyword isn't cheap. Inmobi started here and from what I have heard they are doing good. Zoho runs from Chennai. My previous startup marketsimplified runs from Chennai and is doing good.

I agree with lack of support system, Government, VC et.el, but if there is a problem it primarily lies with us, programmers.
Le Blackberry trop incontrôlable pour les pays du Golfe
We use Django, Linux (Ubuntu for both servers and developer machies), PostGIS database, memcache, Apache, etc. and of course Eclipse, Trac, etc. etc.

Haven't reached 1M hits per day yet, but I'm about to experience a bit of preemptive load testing to find out where the initial problem spots may be.
I have used Network Solutions for over 6 years and have very good experience with them. http://www.networksolutions.com
If you love the beach, super cheap to live, eat (fresh food) and really good devs but hard to find, consider Manila.

I am from Silicon Valley but have been here for almost 7 years. Downsides: traffic, small startup scene and hard to raise money. But there's a new local fund focused on local tech going after the world. They just funded my startup. I can make intros.

Subscribe to http://thestartupdigest.com Philippines to get a feel for the local startup events.
Shark Week at Discovery Channel
You seem to know quite a lot about this type of stuff. It's great. What's your story?
For those saying "this makes me want to appreciate life more. or want to splurge now at the possible potential of death, soon." - I say to you, be rational.

These kinds of articles are examples of the availability heuristic - "in which people predict the frequency of an event, or a proportion within a population, based on how easily an example can be brought to mind."

Although every little emotional piece of content relative to death makes us think a little harder about our own mortality, it is still in our best interests to plan for the future. This article does not decrease our life expectancy.

If you want to somehow balance extremes, look at your average life expectancy based on things like living conditions and genetics, cut it down five years, then appropriately plan your financial and life goals around that new, tempered (and likely preemptive) end date.

Your friend dies in a car crash today. Your mother is diagnosed with cancer tomorrow. Fortunately, life is no less fragile than it was yesterday, and with all certainty, it is actually less so with continued medicinal developments and ongoing life-extending research.

Yes, this is powerful. Yes, it shoulld make you appreciate life a little more. No, it should not offer justification for a life of poverty and shortsightedness.
I'm interested in the Philippines. Is there a startup culture in Manila or Cebu, and what does that look like?
> I’m either going to launch an open source operating system for unmanned aerial vehicles, or build a first person shooter to teach non-violent solutions based on buddhist principles. Or a pet food review site. Which one do you like best?

I lol'ed.
A few posts down from the link, the author of the game describes how he came about writing it. It's a great window into the game creator's process of working, and a very good read.
FWIW, the guy who made this (Ed Fries) was the VP at Microsoft who oversaw game publishing for the original Xbox product cycle, which I assume explains the choice of Halo. He was one of the VPs who worked up from the technical ranks, not a pure business guy, but I still wouldn't have expected him to be writing asm. Pretty impressive.
I truly can't wait to see what Ze comes up with next. The Show was a great contribution to the internet, and he has created a ton of engaging and clever online games in the past few years. And, all without financial backing (he said The Show took him hours each day; his only payment was donations).

I'm thrilled that he found investors to give him money to just do something cool. If anyone can create a cool game and/or start up, it's Ze.
Yep, the SEA startup scene is in full throttle in the past few months. The recent buyout of Koprol by Yahoo, Octazen by Facebook is definitely a sign.

IMO, you can't go wrong with Manila :)
I'm not much a fan of that sentiment. It's the same sentiment espoused by people who don't have time to design software properly, or test it, or do exception handling. The tool is an important part of solving problems, but having an elegant tool helps keep the tool itself from becoming a problem. There seems to be subtext in that rant which says "prettier languages are inferior because they're written by academic snobs who don't have any experience actually writing real software", which is just patently false.
He made a good point about using HipHop for static analysis though. The weird code he found in WordPress via HipHop was a bit disconcerting considering how many copies of it are running.

The performance stuff was pretty boring. 30 minutes of talking to go from 9 to 34 reqs/s. My VPS provider can increase my resources by an order of magnitude in 1 minute.
I like this line:

You should know by experience that whatever you don’t understand you can learn quickly.