skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Awesome advice! It just so happens for my start-up we're working on language learing apps, and our first one is for Mandarin Chinese. Here's our first one in the itunes store (it's free!), would be great to get some feedback, as a single founder it's been tough to get constructive criticism.

iTunes apps page: http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/321speak/id382201422
our site: http://321speak.com
The internet does not need 'saving' by a bunch of people INSIDE Google.
A few questions. What gets classified as Wired and wireless? Suppose I use fiber to my wifi router is the wording twisted enough to count it as wireless? If that can be treated as wired, then don't you think even 10 years down the line most of our data will flow through fiber? Coz at Office, Home, Hotels, Airports etc. we would be using fiber till the wifi router...

Is the rate of growth of wireless bandwidth so much higher than the rate of growth of fiber bandwidth that we will switch to a very wireless centric internet?? Or will we use fiber till the wifi router in the future?
Apple Manager Arrested For Selling iSecrets
I'm still struggling with this myself, but these things are the ones I've tried that seem to be working:

1) Confine your contract time. I try to basically do contract work between 8am and 1pm. Other people only work on certain days.

2) Work with your clients to set priorities. Know what are the most important things to them, and tackle those first. This helps with....

3) Work a fixed number of hours. Don't do overtime. If you stay organized, estimate well, and stay on task, you can do your job and then stop.

4) Whoever else said to launch, I second this. You need someone yelling at you to get your startup shit done. Customers are very good at this job.
Sure, I would agree with you on that.

But for the other people, the ones not included in your 'some' I believe that drugs are used as an escape. I've known plenty of people that had their nirvana moment and then continued to use for years after because it's better than coming home and watching tv while waiting to go to sleep and start the 8-5 all over again. Walk into a gas station at 5 pm and see how many people buy a six pack on their way home. Or ponder the large amount of the population taking the legal drugs to alleviate depression.
Does anyone know what you get you buy the Berkeley DB products? I'm mostly curious if they've actually added new/cool things that aren't available in the open-source releases, or if you're purchasing licensing rights for commercial use, support, etc.
most patent or IP battles are resolved via licensing. Oracle has no incentive to destroy the android product (they don't compete in the mobile space) so the only outcome i expect is google possibly paying to license the technology.
That makes more sense. I was interpreting it as getting others to contribute to those projects.

I buy that argument in theory. The problem I have is that there really isn't anything that comes close to what jQuery Mobile is trying to do. Something like this is desperately needed. Sure, Sencha Touch is trying to do something similar but I don't think it's really in any state at this point to have the effect you describe.

As for jQTouch, if it fits the requirements, I don't see people stalling projects for jQuery Mobile. If it doesn't, you're either hacking it to do what you want or rolling your own. Both will probably take considerable time.

As for me, since nothing else out there really does what I want, I decided to roll my own highly customized framework. I'll keep a close eye on, and perhaps contribute to, jQuery Mobile.
Ah that does sound like a dud business wise. It would be nice to see more extensive stats for each site I use, like digg, forums, HN, etc.. but most sites and users could do without it. The user won't be paying for these stats, so the site owner needs to benefit a lot for the hassle. These stats are being collected one way or another but there is a lot of variation from one site to the next. Could it turn into a big hassle for some sites?

A site owner might put extensive stats to use to design a better community site. You could make some summary visualization of the user into their profile icon, so others know who they're dealing with. Sites like digg, quora, HN already have a lot of stats on individual users and it wouldn't be a big deal for them to create a visualization for a user. More recent companies like Etsy probably have some sales stats users can see. It's a small feature on many sites, most users don't need super detailed analytics.

Too many stats are confusing, many users who use 3rd party sites like ebay, etsy, don't want the hassle of what site owners go through, like looking at referrers. Some simplified online popularity graph might get adopted by site owners, but many users won't even understand that.

With that said, developing the idea itself further wouldn't hurt. I'm sure there are more market fits for analytics. An analytics social network where people compare their stats to their friends seems like a pre-requisite for this idea. Otherwise 'normal people' won't understand what the stats mean, there won't be a competitive or psychological incentive.
Lesson: Put a password on your router.
The problems referred in the article are those problems that people should have or could have solved but have not solved them. I thought it was obvious but it looks like I have to explicitly state it. Will make a note for next time.
It seems quite possible to me that paper quality is correlated with both number of references and number of subsequent citations?

I hate when statistical analyses that turn up correlations are summarized by stories implying a causal link: in this case, “reciprocal altruism”, and even worse, “a single extra reference in an article now producing, on average, a whole additional citation for the referencing paper” (my emphasis), which doesn’t seem at all proven to me. Everything the researcher himself says is of course either completely noncommittal (“If you want to get more cited, the answer could be to cite more people”) or else a platitude (“Scientists are subject to social forces as much as anyone in any other profession” .... really now??!).

To discover a causal link here would require artificially and intentionally (but without telling anyone) adjusting the number of citations in some random set of papers to be published (probably by including or leaving out minor or tangential citations), and then seeing how one group compares to the other in the future.

My speculation about reasons (other than learned altruism) the amount of correlation between references and citations might have changed over time: (1) newer papers are in general treading in more developed fields, in which the top researchers must be familiar with a broader set of previous papers, (2) dissemination of papers is easier than it ever was before and so for example when reading a paper it is trivial to track down all of the papers it references and then cite those directly, (3) expectations about the proper number of citations in a paper have changed over time and modern journal reviewers especially in respected journals are stricter about suggesting that authors cite every previously known idea, (4) relatedly, academia has become increasingly bureaucratically output-driven and so individual researchers are writing more (presumably smaller-individual-impact) papers, (5) if number of citations is increasing over time, and in general most works are cited most often in the few years after their publication, the whole structure operates somewhat like a ponzi scheme, where each generation of papers provides more citations to the immediately previous one than that generation provided to the one before it.
MP3 players from 5USD a piece, knock off ipads from 170USD[1]. Take or leave it, but there might be a huge US market here. I wonder what would happen if someone imported these and rebranded them- to be not so knock off. You might have to worry about US regulations- lead, safety- but if you could hook up with a decent manufacture your golden; thats what apple did(foxconn).

[1] http://www.aliexpress.com/product-fm/310761384-7inch-PAD-tab...
That makes a nice narrative but I don't think that the strategy made them unstoppable. MySpace had a huge head start and what happened? They got steamrolled because Facebook had better privacy, better design, better performance, and more features. Facebook's secret sauce is its engineering organization. Sure a lot of good ideas went into it, but lots of companies have good ideas, very few have the technical ability (or the balls) to roll them out as quickly as Facebook has.
"The end of stuff" seems rather hyperbolic. More like "the consolidation of gadgets I don't actually use that often".

The Swiss Army Knife analogy is telling: how much have sales of Swiss Army Knives affected sales of woodworking tools, kitchen cutlery, garden shears, fancy bottle-openers, etc?

I can certainly see smartphones supplanting special-purpose devices that have similar form-factors and UIs, such as hand-held GPSs. But devices that have different physical forms or interfaces will still retain their popularity for serious uses. For example, how many smartphones can be tripod-mounted? Anyone who spends hours typing large amounts of text on a laptop every day is unlikely to want to replace it with a smartphone (unless the benefits of increased portability so outweigh the inconvenient interface).

Don't get me wrong, smartphones are great, and increased versatility is cool, and having lots of gadgets in my pocket all at once is wonderful (I've carried the same Swiss Army Knife in my pocket since 1979), but there are times when I want buttons I can press without looking (like a stopwatch), or a device I can glance at unobtrusively without having to pick anything up or pull anything out of a pocket (like a wristwatch), or a compass I feel comfortable carrying in my hand while running through the woods.
Tried to find it, but unfortunately the video link is dead:

http://www.creativityworldforum.be/view/nl/6432289-Sessions.html#session1

There is a PDF though with a bit more background:

http://www.flandersdc.be/static/content/CWF08-day1-John_Cleese.pdf
I've been interested for quite a while in investigating flying ultralight / microlight planes, maybe gliders or even pedal-powered planes. Haven't ever done so though, nor do I know at all where to start looking, and have nowhere near the money I'd need to actually do any of it.

Until then, however, anyone here have experience with any of the above? Is it worth it? Anything major to watch out for?
Yes it does. If you followed the quoted sentence with one explaining that by creating Dalvik they specifically set themselves up for this suit I think it would be a little more clear. But I see exactly where you're coming from.
What other languages have first class continuations? Scheme does, some SML implementations do (smlnj has call/cc, IIRC), Ruby has call/cc* , anything else?

* But I've heard it's really not implemented for performance, and probably doesn't get used that much. I'm not really into Ruby, so...anyone?

Of course, you can do CPS yourself, though realistically you need first-class functions, tail-call optimization, and garbage collection or the extra bookkeeping will make it overwhelmingly complicated.
Or even better, change the default IP address for the admin login. This attack relies on a bunch of hidden iframes loading IPs that are common default addresses of the admin login page.
How to become a Pure Mathematician
This is one man's opinion, but I think the way the lugs are placed at the front of the shoe compact the impact with the ground. I had been running 8-9 miles on average a day. I integrated Newton's into my routine for 1 mile every day and at the end of the week I was having pain and had to take some time off.
That's a really long video to say something so simple:

You need to practice your craft away from work if you want to be great at it.

He lists a bunch of reasons why, and spends a lot of time driving them home... But I think the time is wasted.

Good designers/creators/developers/etc already do their craft away from work. Bad ones have a million excuses why they can't or won't. I can't see him changing anyone's mind as to whether they hone their craft in their free time or not.
Not to downplay a rather interesting vulnerability, but why does it matter if someone figures out where you are?

As much as I love my own real (not internet) privacy, I don't depend on people not knowing where I am. The success of sites such as Foursquare lead me to believe a large amount of people feel the same way.
Aren't you extremely wealthy compared to the average Thai?

It sounds interesting for someone in your kind of situation, but there's a lot of assumptions that are not universals: being fairly rich (or having skills worth a lot) off the start, being limited to cheap countries (the parent poster talked about going around the world, which sounds a lot more expensive than and quite different from staying on a beach in Thailand), having skills that can be applied via teleworking and short contracts, etc.
Is the PC Era Coming to an End?
Just How Popular are List style Blog Posts?
Walking isn't always better, but it can be a viable alternative and there are options in between. As far as I know there is no cheap alternative to Oracle RAC, but I know that there are cases where using a combination of Hadoop and PostgreSQL can replace an Oracle DB.
Linden Labs Announce Teen Second Life to Close
> It's also not a very compelling argument for threading to say "web programs don't share a lot of state, so you don't have to worry about synchronization".

Isn't this an issue with both models? Shared state is shared state, regardless of whether you use threads or an evented model. Unless you're only running on 1 CPU.
Phones don't need cell towers for GPS, if they have a GPS chip like iPhones and Droids! Not even ones with A-GPS... this is a common misconception.
The agreement spells that out pretty clearly. That's the point of it.
> Evolution is not random - ask any biologist.

First you say this. Then you say this:

> Random mutations are [...]

See, you're arguing semantics. Yes, evolutionary pressures force natural selection, extracting order out of the fundamental randomness, but the mutations of evolution are random. My point is we don't know which pressures forced which particular traits, so to draw specific conclusions about modern behavior based on evolutionary psychology is more in the realm of speculation than actual science. It's all so much guessing and assumption.
I may have been too aggressive trying to shorten that statement down to one line. What I meant was that item-item approaches, when used as recommenders, won't make recommendations of the 'users who hated X also liked Y' variety, and instead limit their recommendations to items that correlate positively with the user's favorites.

The usual approach for item-item is to precalculate similarities for all items in the set, using Pearsons correlation or cosine. There's no problem with negative correlations being used to make predictions, the problem comes when you try figure out what to recommend.

The recommendation step consists of looking at the items a user has already rated highly, and then looking up which items have a strong positive correlation to these, then determining which of these to put at the top of the list. Items with negative correlations will thus never be offered.

There's nothing to prevent one from throwing in anti-correlations of hated movies, but I've never heard of it being done. There's also nothing wrong with making predictions for every movie in the set and then choosing the highest (taking full account of negative correlations) but this is generally thought to be too computationally expensive.
I second what gruseom says: K (and Q, the newer version of K) is amazing. J seems more theoretically satisfyingly mathy to me, but K is a straight-up hacking language. It's really too bad that it's closed and oh-so expensive (but since it was made for real-time stock trading, and it works, I'm not surprised).

Here's a good intro, by Arthur Whitney himself: http://www.vector.org.uk/archive/v101/whitney101_74.htm
> And after this, Ocaml and Erlang moved to the top of the stack, past Scala and Clojure.

If the prospect of using the JVM bothers you that much, then why not try Scala .NET or Clojure-CLR?
I believe this solution is somewhat implied, yet not spelled out, in the summary:

> It's a separate essay, but I think this implies that type is best represented via properties rather than classes, because of the inherent inflexibility of classes.

It is rather unfortunate that the article switches from a self-admitted unsatisfactorily solved monster example into a completely different example.
class Creature
def doesElfLikeMe; false; end

# or
def method_missing(*a)
if a.first.to_s =~ /LikeMe$/
false
else
super
end
end
end

class Orc < Creature; end
class ElfMaiden < Creature; def doesElfLikeMe; true; end; end
# Orc.new.doesElfLikeMe # -> false
# ElfMaiden.new.doesElfLikeMe # -> true
Personally, I was on the lookout for new languages to focus upon, after playing with a lot recently. And after this, Ocaml and Erlang moved to the top of the stack, past Scala and Clojure.

If your reaction is common this could be very damaging to Scala and Clojure. Both languages need a steady influx of new developers to sustain and build their current momentum. If enough potential new blood balks because of this that's definitely bad news.

The whole thing sickens me. I've been very happily back on the JVM with Scala lately.
> There are many things for which the evolutionary cause is not obvious to us, but it doesn't make sense that there would just be lots of random truly superfluous aspects to us.

Sure it does. Look at our appendix. Look at all the diseases out there--almost every person has at least one almost-certainly non-advantageous yet obvious ailment. One can speculate that it would be advantageous in scenario A or situation B, but that's all it is, is speculation. Maybe something we have now was advantageous 5000 years ago, but we don't necessarily know why, nor is it useful to describe modern behavior in such terms.
I always wear injinji toe-socks with my KSOs, and never have a funk problem.
The Web Is Passing Most of You By… And You are Asleep
Proof That Game Theory Isn't Fully True
I mostly agree with Phil, but I still wouldn't call Microsoft an underdog. I mean, I recently fell in love with OSX, but my opinion still stands that Windows 7 is f'ing amazing, and still outsells (or is at least on more machines than) OSX by an IMMENSELY large proportion.
Whenever someone makes fun of my VFFs I say, "Let's do a little investigation. Put your foot up next to mine. Now, whose shoe is formed more like a human foot?"
Maybe he has a lot of pre-existing repeat-clients who always come to him for their tech stuff that he doesn't want to send away permanently.
I think I was too succinct. I'd disagree with "a good way" - it's "the way." Though you don't necessarily raise rates across the board, for every customer or every job. You do marketing. MARKETING.

Good customers, you explain your situation, raise your rates, but offer grandfather clauses if they're willing to guarantee some level of minimum work or pay upfront or with better terms. Bad customers, you double your rates overnight (and then do it again 3 months later). In between customers, you offer different packages that trade off them paying you more with them paying you more reliably, and/or offering you things that help you market your offerings better (referrals, testimonials, etc).

Additionally you specialize. If its something you don't like doing, you charge more. If its something that teaches you a skill that you can use for your nascent startup, you charge less.

Eventually if you're good, your "startup" becomes the R&D department to your burgeoning consulting business, and you've got something that feeds good things back and forth. The startup makes consulting more viable, and the consulting makes the startup more viable. Somewhere along the way you hire people.
I wonder if it's actually possible google forked some code they shouldn't have?

I think using java and writing your own vm are quite different cases.
Free Parking Comes at a Price
This tweet almost reads like a Haiku. Goes to show how 'short' doesn't have to mean 'stupid'.

But there is still room for shortening. I suggest:

'There are no heroes. Welcome to eternity.'
Whenever I've tried my iphone 3G's gps that had absolutely no gsm/3g reception from any carriers in the area, the phone cant get my location at all, even in a car or an open air beach.
An Indian takes over East India Co
To chime in with the others...
1. The Cessna 150/152 that you would likely train in at some point has a 15:1 glide ratio. That means if you are at 1 mile (5000 feet) above ground level you could potentially glide 15 miles before touching ground. You have some time.
2. You will be heavily, HEAVILY trained on emergency landing practice, to the point where you can almost do it in your sleep. Ten years after training and 5 years since I last flew, I can still tell you everything you're supposed to do, in order (though I'm too rusty to safely do it now).
3. There is an old pilot's joke about twin-engine planes: When the first engine fails, the second engine takes you to the scene of the crash. Engine failure, whatever the cause, is a reason to terminate flight immediately.
4. There is very little that makes a twin-engine aircraft significantly safer. Flying in instrument conditions (clouds, fog), water in the fuel, hypoxia and all kinds of other things don't care how many engines you have and will kill you just as quickly in a twin as in a single.

All of that said - for me, it is a great source of pride to have a pilot's license. I know the risks and take the steps I can to minimize them. But realistically, there are so many more mundane and common ways to lose one's life. You're less likely to die in a private plane than in your car. Flying is fun and a healthy respect for it will keep it fun and safe.
Chrome OS Running on Verizon? Seems Likely
Mammoth proofs and the P != NP attempt
Oracle remains evil, Google's nowhere close.
Personally, I think there is a lot of room for algorithmic improvement on recommendations. Most of the existing systems are really prediction algorithms, which have been shoe-horned into making recommendations. I think this is primarily because accuracy of prediction is easier to measure (RMSE) than accuracy of recommendation, and the academic papers need something they can measure.

I agree that inferring 'like' is also difficult, and definitely prefer explicit rating systems. But for a site like Amazon, it's often a reasonable presumption that a user who buys an item likes it. But inferring that they dislike all the items they don't purchase is much less reasonable. Same for viewing webpages, or listening to music, or renting movies. If you want to be sure of a 'dislike', it probably will require action from the user.
Hire a junior programmer with potential. Go for cheap and good, not fast. Cash expense should exceed any opportunity cost of waiting if idea is good.
Dugg for its accuracy.
It was definitely worthy.
And apple can't even remotely be called a monopoly, unless you are referring to their monopoly on products sold by apple.
He's not talking about desktops: Apple still has tiny (but growing) market share there.

He's talking about mobile platforms. Microsoft is very much the underdog after ignoring the platform for so long. Apple had a monopoly over good smartphones by beating everyone to market by such a large margin, though it's hard to call them a monopoly now that Android has been selling so well.
I run http://hackerbra.in and take items, parse for top comments and resave home listings with such comments. What do you do for parsing an item's comments?
I'd say that compared to Oracle's evilness, Google seems quite innocent and tame. Certainly the most evil company in this whole debacle is Oracle, not Google.