skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm curious why it didn't work for music recommendation for you. In the netflix challenge for movie recommendation, pretty much everyone ended up using SVD-based methods and variations thereof.

I expect the algorithm did reasonably well given the data available. Probably a mix of reasons why I was disappointed though:

* My expectations were too high, I didn't realise quite how hard of a problem good music recommendations are

* Dataset wasn't large enough

* Dataset was based on deliberately-stated opinions (ratings) rather than actual observed behaviour (listening data)

* I didn't find a way to use the timing data associated with the ratings

* Figuring how best to normalise the dataset prior to attempting SVD was tricky and I'm not convinced I found the best way

I admit I was also sort of naively hoping that the 'features' identified by SVD would have at least a vaguely-human-recognisable theme to them. The first 2 or 3 of them did but from there on in it all looked pretty random.

Also, like a lot of recommenders, it gave the impression of having based its recommendations on some kind of generic, averaged-out 'middle point' of your overall usage data.

Really I'd rather it clustered my usage data, then recommended new things in and around each of the clusters.

I have some ideas for what I'd do differently the next time around - that being one - but also ideas about how better to tie algorithmic recommendation tools in to human interaction.
This is why PowerShell rocks - superficially they're text pipes like any shell, but under the hood it's passing COM objects around. Nice.
Time to invent a new term for 'slashdotted' applied to HN. (Especially since HN seems to drive a lot of referral traffic). Any good suggestions anyone?
I couldn't agree more, I've seen horrible >300 lines POSIX shell scripts used for deployments and thought "This is a stinking pile of shit".
Nope sorry, I'm a total newbie when it comes to webapps too. Maybe you should start an "Ask HN" about it.
I downvoted you because you are drawing a meaningless distinction. "We" crack lots of stuff. The methodology behind cracking WEP is interesting, accessible, and worth understanding. It's a perfectly appropriate topic.
And it's also an issue in India: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/B...
London.

There are so many things happening here, every day, every night. The Anglo-Saxon cultural origins of England (which are shared by North America) mean people regard individualism and independence a lot more favourably than elsewhere which creates an ideal climate for starting up your own company.

As a leading global city, people are drawn here from all around the World every day so there's an incredibly large talent pool here. By definition, everyone speaks English here which can make things easier. As one of the main financial centres of the World, obtaining financing here is a lot more easier than at many other places.

England being an EU member, you can enjoy the advantages of being located within the EU (hiring, easy access to the European market, etc.); at the same time, there's considerably less government regulation than in other EU countries so you would have to deal with a lot less red tape.
Google Experimental - add simple "vi" style keyboard commands to your search
I can't believe this is hidden away, there doesn't seem to be a reason this would not benefit all users.

J,K,O,<Enter>,/,<Esc> are all that is needed to use the google without a mouse at all.

There is also 'Accessible View', which I thought would be the better way to go, really wanting to gain 'n' and 'p' to move across pages. Unfortunately, this mode is a bit much for me. However, for someone using a screen reader, I can see how this mode would be a huge step in the right direction.

Make sure to confirm your search preferences, I found my 'SafeSearch Filtering' had reverted back to filleted behavior.
Lisboa, Portugal, Europe

http://seedcapital.pt/2009/11/18/lisbon-by-the-sea/

-- MV
As I recall, a C compiler is not required to realize that

a -- b

would be valid if parsed as

a - (- b)

so creating this operator would be equally feasible. Though I don't think exponentiation is common enough to need one, especially in C where you couldn't overload it for rationals or bignums.
Some important projects have decided to be located in Portugal http://living-planit.com/aboutus.htm

-- MV
I recall a number of expat-ran startups in Tel Aviv when I lived there during the first dot com boom. US/UK presence is strong in the industry, and English often serves as a common language to Israelis, Russian immigrants, American expats, European sales reps etc. The TechAviv meetup, for example, takes place in English ( http://www.techaviv.com/ )
Extremely well written article.

It's great owning your own business and not worrying about a dress code, but I'll be honest here. Since starting my startup I've stayed in my boxers till noon one or two more times then I'd like to admit.
for $20 you can get a whole VPS at linode and host it yourself with a classic LAMP stack.
I'm also using Linode for http://wasitup.com. Thir pricing is affordable and I found them to give most bang per buck: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison
I guess it might be a regional thing.

Over here McDonald's burgers are so foul I feel like crap after eating them.
Your statement is correct but the sentiment of the headline is correct in portraying that there is a problem in the US economy.

According to government statistics released yesterday the economy has been growing now for a full year -- why do nearly half of small businesses think the economy is worse today a year past the end of the Great Recession than it was a year ago?

Here is more evidence that this recession is different than any other post WWII recession:

http://research.stlouisfed.com/fred2/graph/?s%5B1%5D%5Bid%5D...
Hackered?
You can just hit reply below his post to nest the comments. No need to twitter style shout outs.

What kind of hosting do you have now? Is it a VPS or plain hosted webhosting? If it is a vps I would say to go with linode for the money it looks like they overprovision there plans at hostican but I am just guessing. the front page of digg will send a lot of traffic so even then you should be employing caching of dynamic pages, offloading large media to CDN's or amazon S3, or offering a static page stripped down when you are on the front page depending on how much traffic. If you are experiencing massive traffic in bursts you can do the amazon dynamic provisioning of servers to meet the spikes in traffic.
Ask HN: Analytics package
I couldn't find a honest comparison of some of the bigger web analytics softwares (Google Analytics is the main example) compared to the newer ones (I believe there are at least 2 company on HN doing this).

We have a lot of small (1-50k of monthly pageviews) websites, given the small websites size is there really something cool we can do with web analytics?
Needless to say we're currently using Google Analytics and just looking at how many users/pageviews we make each month, no more analysis.
"Overloaded".
I do recommend Objectify - seems just about right: close to the metal, but manages things a bit better than the low level datastore API. Enjoy!
this is spam.....really!!
The basic fallacy is that individuals' yearly income is large is directly reflective of whether or not the US economy is in good shape, especially business owner's yearly income.

Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. Especially with large corporations in the US, when owners take huge cuts for their personal income/ bonuses/ etc that means that less money gets invested into capital; overall, this is a bad thing for the economy AS A WHOLE. So, actually, if we siphon more from the top owners/ earners and force them to reinvest into capital (human and otherwise), we might actually have a better economy.

(ducking from the HN libertarians...)
What, no primitive string type?
Overall, what's the cost of living like in Shenzhen?
What do you mean about HK being hard if you're not a native, and not being able to go out in shorts and sandals, etc?

Could you outline the steps necessary to start a business in Hong Kong? IIRC there was a requirement for a local "secretary", which sounded confusing.
Combinatorized.
you might want to check out http://said.fm/ it provides recommendations for podcasts.
ycombinated?
The VOIP users conference, www.VUC.me. The range of topics is all over the place, in a good way. It goes from discussing very small installations to huge 100,000 plus installs and the products and solutions used. Every week there is a new guest speaker giving a talk. They recently had a talk about providing a trial cell/voip setup to a remote island.
What kind of professional accepts a contract without a clearly defined scope of work? The author repeatedly talks about quality work, but I'm not sure he knows what that means. It sounds like the Big Company had a sucker on their hands, and they knew it.
http://prgmr.com/xen/ has some very good deals on vpses, but they seem to be sold out right now. When they get back, you can get a VPS with 1GB of RAM for 20 usd/month, put whatever you use for your blog software behind ngix and then put a small mencached server or Varnish server to keep the most recently used stuff in RAM.

Do that, and your service can take ./, digg, HN and reddit at the same time.

Or head over to nearlyfreespeech.net and let them host your page - their servers aren't the fastests in the world, but it is pay as you go.
Montreal, Canada, for:

* Strong, diverse and friendly startup scene. From 2 to 5 startup events every week. see calendar http://63sq.rs/52c (View @mtlnewtech for more). Many local developer groups (montrealonrails, montrealpython, phpquebec, js-montreal,dotnetmontreal, uxmtl, etc.)

* Strong existing angel investors + new VC funds being created. You mention Toronto but actually there is more money flowing in Quebec than anywhere else in Canada

* Montreal is half european and half north american, half-french, half-english. Lots of diversity, lots of creatives. Literature : "Nearly a fifth of the Montreal region's workforce forms a super-creative core: techies & cultural & entertainment types ... Montreal also benefits from its dense, compact geography. Most experts agree that innovation and productivity are driven by density, and Montreal ranks third among all North American cities in average population density"

* Montreal is 2nd happiest city in the world http://bit.ly/dAWLW5

* 4 universities, plus engineering and business schools, such as McGill University, Hec Montréal, @SUPINFOMontreal or ETS

* cost of living is cheap. Not as cheap as Bangalore of course, but cheaper than Toronto, Boston and of course cheaper than San Francisco or London, U.K.

* lots of initiatives, one startup incubator (@bolidea), another one coming in September, blogs and publications dedicated to the community ( http://montrealtechwatch.com or also upcoming @nextmontreal), student/entrepreneur groups (@Startupifier), startup weekends (one coming in early October), conferences drawing hundreds of attendees (wordcamp, rocococamps, startupcamp, podcamp etc), big startup space soon (@notmanhouse)

* plus of course many technology projects launched every month, in average 1 or 2 new products launching every week. OstrichApp launched 10 days ago featured on apple.com, BeyondTheRack funding, statusnet, vanilla forums, Tungle etc.
> I would have literal sizes be interpreted based on the first requirement of their usage, rather than having an implied default size.

That's a good idea, Ada and Haskell both do that.
Javaposse - http://www.javaposse.com/

Off the hook - http://www.2600.com/offthehook/

Buzz out loud - http://www.cnet.com/buzz-out-loud-podcast/

Android Atlas Weekly - http://cnettv.cnet.com/live/android-atlas-weekly/
A few podcasts I enjoy:

The Guardian's Media Talk podcast is normally very good:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/series/mediatalk

Robots, News and Views on robotics: http://www.robotspodcast.com

Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/

Radiolab: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/

Techzing: Startup and tech talk: http://techzinglive.com/

Mixergy: Startup interviews: http://mixergy.com/

Floss Weekly can be good depends on the guest: http://twit.tv/FLOSS
The system doesn't use SMTP and is not another spam filter. The major difficulty is the network effect. It would help a lot if spam was perceived as a real problem. To my surprise it is apparently not.

My analysis is that if there is no perceived cost to spam there won't be any obvious incentive to adopt a new system.
I think you're missing a good part of the show, it's alot more than conspiracy theories.
Seconding Berlin. Even though it's in Germany, the lingua franca in the startup community there is English. Quite a few London-based VCs swing through Berlin regularly. Off the top of my head, Soundcloud is a Berlin-based company with a London-based VC backer. (Disclosure: this one's always the top of my head because my friend Sitar sourced this deal for her employer, Doughty Hanson.)
How hard is it to live there or immigrate if you're not Jewish?

I tried searching for this question and turned up a lot of alarmed newspaper articles about a rising tide of non-Jewish immigration, and even government promises to do something about this.
Also, OpenText is there.
Yeah, there is always the danger that the data is just too little or too noisy. But the technical issues you mention (normalization, subtracting bias, using temporal data) all came up in the netflix movie recommendation competition as well so you can always look at how people handled it there.

Some useful information can be found in the report of the winners:
http://www.netflixprize.com/assets/ProgressPrize2007_KorBell...

There's a lot of fancy stuff, which would be overkill in a real system, but lot of practical info also.

Also, there was an article of the winners "collaborative filtering with temporal dynamics" which might be useful and I think it is freely available.
Aubrey de Grey: We don't have to get sick as we get older
Analytics is basically a statistical analysis of your log files.

I believe there are two aspects of what you can do with analytics:

1. You can actually get the log files for yourself and use a log analysis from a security and performance point of view. You can check which pages are being asked, what are the queries passed etc. This way you can check whether there are any loopholes in your code, vulnerabilities, scripts that are being accessed a lot, resources that need to be cached etc. Google Analytics gives you some of that data (top queries, etc.) but not from a security perspective.

2. You can plot data over time for each website and use them for marketing purposes i.e. growth over time

I hope the above helps.
Coral content cache:

http://howtogetfocused.com.nyud.net/to-do-list-2/the-to-do-l...
If you like this sort of thing, Johnny Long wrote an interesting book called No Tech Hacking: A Guide to Social Engineering, Dumpster Diving, and Shoulder Surfing (http://www.amazon.com/No-Tech-Hacking-Engineering-Dumpster/d...).
So when does the bidding end?

There would be no reason to ever stop bidding. To avoid losing your money, all you have to do is make another bid. Your opponent will probably realize that if he doesn't out bid you again, he's going to lose a lot of money. So he out bids you. Which really pisses you off, until you realize that you can avoid losing your money again if you just make another bid. The game goes back and forth until one of you dies of an overdose. Then the game ends by default, but the winner will have a tough time collecting his money from his dead opponent.
According to the italian anti mafia police force, mafiosi use skype to communicate to each other via voice.
(http://www.google.com/cse?q=Mafia+skype)
I would be surprise if terrorists weren't.
If you've got anything to do with hardware, probably Cambridge (UK).
A lot of these are (as drallison mentioned) either syntactic sugar or 'missing the point of C.' The author would like an exponent operator but this is something complex enough to require a true library function. Almost every C operator can be implemented in a handful of opcodes -- add, subtract, function call and memory dereference. Why include such an expensive function as a core operator instead of the library?
What is the Appropriate Dissertation Length?
Findings of your research and the contribution to the human knowledge are more important than the dissertation length. That is why there are no rigid limits on the dissertation length. Normally it can vary between 50 and 150. Learn about the length of the dissertation.
In Vitro Habitat: a House Made of Meat
I've been enjoying Dan Savage's Lovecast a lot - http://podcasts.thestranger.com/savagelove/archives.php

He's an adorably snarky sex advice columnist.
You could find a 'cheap' place but it will have to be in Zone 6 of the Underground which is quite a few miles away from the center of London. Additionally if you want to have decent offices you will pay for it - dearly
Yes. I made the same conclusion. I had the opportunity to talk about it to the mail adlinistrator of a big internet access provider here in France. There is indeed more than 95% spam but 4 servers is all it takes to manage 4 million users ! The mail network traffic % is also peanuts compared to youtube and others.

The only real nuisance for mail administrators is when they black list each others by automatic black listing systems. A human intervention is required to sort it out.

The cost is thus still too low to justify adoption of my system.

On the other side I had an interesting discussion with a big company manager. When I pitched him about my system, he immediatly calculated the cost of spam. With a few tens of seconds per day per employer to filter out the handful spam managing to get through the filters he came out with a cost around a million euros per year.

A system sold for a hundred tousand euros to this company could make it. But this doesn't solve my network effect problem. Access providers don't have such incentive. This confirms that B2B would be the way to go.
Hong Kong culture is absolutely merciless about people living on a low budget and running business on the cheap. Specially for foreigners. There, conspicuous spending is a way of life and you're expected to throw cash at everything. The way Honkies and expats make their living is to constantly rub other people's backs, host parties, exchange gifts and keep up appearances. If you're not in >$1000 suit and not seen in exclusive hangouts or driving a black European import, you're a nobody.

You have very few options for living (there are no suburbs or neighboring towns.) You either hangout with the tourists and transients merchants in the southern tip of Kowloon, and get nickled and dimed by merchants. Or you can suit up and live somewhere "decent", HK Island side and live the spender life I described above. Or you can live in the fringes of HK, in the New Territories, Lantau Island or some other no-man's land.

The first thing anybody will ask you is "where do you live". The location of your office is of prime importance. You will see most HK companies have photos of their office buildings, that's because there are a ton of paper businesses there and people go overboard to establish their solvency, if not their legitimacy. Everyone has a business card too.

The business registration requirement for HK is essentially $1k. Their laws are so flexible as to be an informality. If you have the money, Hong Kong will accommodate all your wishes. You just pay any accountant or lawyer anywhere in Tsim Tsa Tsui and you get a folder the same day. Then you take $5k to HSBC and open a business account. You're done. You ring up your favorite credit-card processor and get an ACH.
Thanks for the feedback. The background was originally white, and easier on the eyes, but it wasn't distinctive enough. The site looked like almost every other site. The yellow paint coat gives it charisma, but I might have over done it a little bit.

As for the custom domain name, I wanted to test it first before buying a domain. I used to buy the domain first and write the app afterwards. But most of the time, I was left with a domain name and no app. But yes, you're right, doing things properly requires a domain name. That'll give me the opportunity to change the name — since firetweets was just chosen randomly a long time ago.
I would agree with Vancouver for North America, and London for Europe area.
Now that you're mentioning other cities in UK, I'm currently doing an internship at a startup in Oxford. From what the guys are saying, the city is a great environment for startups, with an active community and a number of VCs, but it's not that much more cheap than London.
The unsolved issue in nuclear maritime is making it cost effective, including all life-cycle costs. The US actually had a couple commercial transports which were nuclear powered (NS Savannah being the main one, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah) , and the USSR built a few icebreakers and supply vessels, a few of which are still in operation.
I can only pass on the recommendation of Dan Carlins really great hard core history podcast http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hh

If you need an idea for where to start, you could start with the Ghost of the Ost front podcasts - extreemly enlightening, but bloody.
Econtalk.
I'll revert to white and put the yellow background as an option. I indeed didn't realize it might be a little too aggressive on a 24" monitor :)

edit: changed to white. I'll provide the theme switcher in the next release :)
The problem they have now is illegal immigration - either people coming on a limited time work visa and staying after it expires, or East African immigrants coming in via Egypt.

Either way, it's tough to get a work visa, about as difficult as the US or Europe. If I were doing it, I'd go on a tourist visa. All in all Tel Aviv is a great place to hang for a while, but if you're looking to relocate somewhere for a year or so I'd look for a cheaper and easier places in South America or Asia. Even Vancouver might be cheaper. (Or if you're an EU member there's Berlin and possibly some Easter Europe cities?)
"I'm honestly surprised (& pleased) he would say that outright. I'm not particularly familiar with the workings of the U.S. justice system but a disparity of 100 to one sounds fairly unjust."
You sound prejudiced against American justice if you can be pleased that he takes a certain position on something that you are unfamiliar with.
Part of the reason why there's a 90% success rate (if that is the case) might be that prosecutors in many jurisdictions are instructed to only pursue cases they believ are winnable
I had an unexpected two week stay in Berlin due to the volcano stopping air traffic. I fell in love with the place. A physically beautiful city steeped in high culture, but due to the communist experience, half the city has cheap rents. There's a long tradition of hacker culture here as well, spilling over into the artist and anarchist/radical politics scenes as well. Transit is ridiculously good.

It was very surprising how cheap everything was. Also, Doner Kebab (Turkish/German fusion street food) is a reason to stay all in itself.

I can't speak to the availability of startup capital though, if that's important to you.
Ask HN: Action-based OR Component based web framework (when and why)
Yes obviously this is technical doubt.

Got hired for new job as Java developer, previously working solely in PHP. Done with Zend Framework. Till I come with Java, I have no idea there are two types of web frameworks.

I need whoever has experiences in any types of frameworks action-based or component based to give some justification on when and why to use each of these frameworks.

(i.e. One is better than another at specific situation)

Thanks in advance.