skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Something that is really missing in my opinion is a good opensource OpenCL [1] runtime for regular x86 CPUs using both muticore optims (a la openmp) and vector instructions (SSE). Bonus points if your OpenCL runtime can also leverage the nouveau and/or the open source ATI drivers.

Having such a runtime available as a standard lib packaged in all linux distribs would make it interesting for lowlevel vector math libs such blas / lapack / atlas and convex optimization solvers to have an implementation based on OpenCL kernels that would work (almost) as fast as the currently manually optimized C + simd intrinsics code but could also 10 to 100 as fast whenever a GPU is available on the machine without having to re-compile anything.

Some advanced and very promising machine learning algorithms (e.g. algorithms of the deep learning family) can really benefit from the computing power of vector processors such as the GPUs.

Right now everybody who wants to be able to gain the perf boost of GPUs uses CUDA but:
- it's only useful on NVidia GPU machines (e.g. not on Amazon EC2 machines for instance)
- it's not opensource hence has to be manually installed on every single machine you want to use it (no apt-get install from the official repos). This which makes it a heavy dependency for your pet machine learning library: be prepared to support CUDA installation problems on your project mailing list.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL
I think it's fascinating that a single engineer, who they had on staff, was able to write a patch in one night that improved performance by their messaging system 5x...

... and hadn't already done it.

This isn't meant as a slight against Heroku at all. They've got an incredible team of engineers. But imagine if Ricardo had said "hey, I could write a patch today that would speed up our messaging system 5x, should I do it?" the rest of the team would've said "OF COURSE!"

It reminds me of what happens to your brain when you launch a site. Even before you get feedback, somehow the knowledge that people can use it drastically changes your motivation system. Things that before seemed important are obviously not. Other things that were invisible before become the singular focus of your resources.

Maybe we should do fire drills...

* Your requests are suddently taking 100x as long to complete. Go!

* Your "runway" disappears due to an accounting error and you have 7 days to turn a profit. Go!

* 50% of people visiting the site have no idea how to use it. Go!

How could we achieve the focus and clarity that a crisis brings on, without having the crisis?
Chances are pretty high their regex for email validation only matches 2 and 3 letter TLDs.

At my current job I noticed that all of our email validation for all of our sites was limited to 2 and 3 letter TLDs.
If you do anaphora resolution you should maybe look at this recent paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.154...

it's simple enough to get running, fast, and outperforms the state of the art of a couple of years ago.
Many schools publish public salary statistics for the graduates of last year. Some reports are better than others, but I’ve generally found good information that way. Just google "[school] salary statistics". For example, here's a pdf for Carnegie Mellon School of Computer science, which says last year there was a mean salary of $75k (which happens to be high compared to other universities I've seen): http://www.studentaffairs.cmu.edu/career/students_alumni/pos...
You know how when people count lines of code, and other people say it is a meaningless metric?

Number of employees is the same way. You can arbitrarily change the number by outsourcing non-core-business jobs. Like HR or payroll or whatever.
Android App Secretly Forwards Text Messages
Ask HN: $0.10/GB/Month for storage, unlimited free bandwidth. Interested?
I'm highly considering starting a cloud storage company, with an offering similar to Amazon S3 with a lower price per GB for storage and unlimited free bandwidth.

In terms of background, I am a software developer who has been building high end servers for nearly 10 years. I've assembled a team of engineers who understand the complexity of managing petabytes of data.

As a team, we have spent the last three months developing a server strategy that is scalable and supports very fast transfer speeds. Nearly every component within the server has redundancy. Because we are building the servers ourselves, we can afford to replicate any uploaded data over three servers.

We have developed a partnership with a high-end datacenter management company in Montreal to provide the colocation and bandwidth. Their partnership has allowed us a dedicated 1000megabit line to each rack, and can pool this bandwidth to allow an overall connection of a few gigabits per second.

Our server design and the partnership created allows us to have an overall design that allows for triple redundancy across a few datacenters as well as very fast access speeds.

We can profitably offer this at $0.10 per GB stored without ever charging for bandwidth.

Fully understanding the brand name appeal of Amazon and Rackspace, is there room for a new entrant in the cloud storage market?

Is having the datacenters in Canada an issue?

Looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say.

JB
Hmm. http://news.ycombinator.com/asks and http://news.ycombinator.com/tells don't seem to point to anything.

Might go along well with http://news.ycombinator.com/offers
I totally disagree with this. If someone is going to put up an "Offer HN" post, it should be because they kick ass at something and want to share their expertise. The last reason should be because people with limited experience want to get their feet wet and use HN as guinea pigs.
My bad. I should have searched first. Thanks for pointing it out.
Waiting for Oracle to become Sibyl Corporation... Kinder, gentler, more feminine.
Thanks for posting this: I read this paper some time ago but completely forgot the name of the authors.

It is indeed a good "tricks of the trade" paper. I real enjoy such papers.
"once users engage with this particular feature, they become less likely to purchase"

"this is clearly users' favorite feature."

Your description is a bit vague, but here is what I am thinking. I am wondering if these folks were not going to buy anyway, but they stop to "engage" this feature because it has gee-whiz appeal. So basically you are presenting non buyers with a toy and since they are not busy with the task of buying anyway, they play with the toy.

Be careful. Correlation does not (always) imply causation.
> “We can’t build it for the iPhone because it wouldn’t make it past the App Store approval process,” Mr. Tanjeloff said.

The app is, by definition, spyware. It secretly, continuously forwards all SMS messages to a third party, and “there is no visible icon or shortcut to access it.”

It’s like an ad for iPhone.
Well, I can tell you that your advice definitely helped me get over my small irrational fear of taking/holding money as an ad network. Everyone else I asked those questions just shrugged and said "You should ask an accountant".

I know it will seem odd to many of these grizzled veterans around here, but, just a few sentences from you, and I feel like I've overcome something significant. Thank you.
The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness)
Good point there, it is a little inconsistent, since this was just launched it should be safe to rename it from 'offers' to 'offer', and perhaps set up a 301 redirect so existing links aren't broken.
Python totally, and here is an excellent book to help you get started:

http://sheddingbikes.com/LearnPythonTheHardWay.pdf
Offer HN: I'll add your company's jobs to our search engine
If you have jobs listed on your company's website (and you aren't a staffing company), I'll add them all to http://LinkUp.com for free (we spider the jobs daily, so it is set it and forget it).

Just email me (eric@linkup.com) the link to the page where your jobs are and I'll get them included asap. It is a great free way to give your jobs more exposure without having to do any extra work.

For an example of our search in action, check out http://www.linkup.com/results.php?c=Twitter
I'd love to get your thoughts on http://track.com - thanks! Email is rich@ that domain.
Aren't the stats that something like 50% of developers applying for a position don't actually know how to code? If someone can eliminate those people so you don't have to waste your time on them, it might be worth it.
This tutorial is missing a crucial piece of information.

Firefox: Go to about:config, set network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true.

Otherwise you'll be leaking out information on which domains you are visiting.
For those who want to avoid having their text messages tapped, Mr. Tanjeloff suggested “keeping your phone close by, or make sure people trust you.”

He really said that? Zoomed right past the event horizon of potential parody.
This is essentially a non-discussion depending on how they're using Mongo. I suspect that they, as we are, might be making use of Mongo's ability to query documents based on embedded objects, which means their only choices would have been a traditional RDBMS with JOINs or MongoDB.
I suspect a person like Sorkin appreciates the drive to "create art" for no other motivation than to create, but I think the disconnect is the failure to recognize a work such as Facebook (or anything IT related) as a work worthy of the same motivation. I think some people see such a work (stripped of all wealth, fame, and power) as about as noble a calling as mowing a lawn. Thus the necessity to juice up that part of The Social Network with drugs, women, and parties.
What I've Learned Founding 3 Tech Companies | betashop
I would think not voting would be the same as "I don't really care" in this case.
Ops sorry, "replica" is the important part here.

There's no replica in the system. There are clients (clients of messaging system are sql servers) that are not realated to any other sql server in no means, which receive the same commands from a web application in the very same order each time.

Replication is lightweight and done in the sql proxy by replicating the messages, not in the sql servers. Simply it's a 1-1 connection between a web-app and sql-server, but the messages are multiplied by the number of sql-servers which made it a 1-N real time cloning system.
There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. You can get away with claiming that to n00bs. But folks that really need a lot of bandwidth may actually feel more comfortable if you say you will provide them with 100MBPS solid BW than "unlimited".
Any post that starts with "Offer " gets included in the list: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839808
These sorts of careless generalizations are just that, careless, and generalizations. They don't help much, except to spark arguments and debate. I think Mark should have stopped at, "They got X wrong", instead of presuming to know what "Hollywood" does or does not understand.
I've 3 invites for blekko, grab them:

http://beta.blekko.com/join?s=3f98948237a42a9d8cb3d419a9f56b...
http://beta.blekko.com/join?s=9a562143ccfd0985d1e69d5f44625f...
http://beta.blekko.com/join?s=6511fac4e86d1c0c90a6e0115be464...
Offer HN: Pimp My [JavaScript or Objective-J] Code
Post a chunk of your JavaScript or Objective-J/Cappuccino code that you think could be improved and I'll try to suggest improvements. Send me the code (preferably on gist.github.com) and I'll post a response here with my suggestions.

Inspired by Wil Shipley's "Pimp My Code" series for Cocoa: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22pimp+my+code%22+site%3Awilshipley.com
Interesting writeup. The thing it seems to not address is that a different sharding model might have not worked for foursquare's data access needs. In this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1769982 HN post harryh alludes to the fact that using user ID as the shard key was a design decision. Their current design requires that an entire user's checkin history be able to be loaded for calculating badges so sharding by user ID might have been necessary to guarantee not having the performance overhead of multi-server retrievals. From reading the various write ups it seems like the real problems (using the current load all data for badge calculations method) came from getting too close to the max memory and then the issue that foursquare's checkins weren't filling full pages so migrating data didn't actually give nodes 1 & 2 any place to write new data to (in memory) until after compaction could be performed.
I put on my skeptical hat when I hear claims like that. I'd have to see extremely solid evidence to believe it.

Nice site! Layout is cool. I haven't dabbled too much in ETFs or tools for researching them, so I'll have to pass on any judgment due to a lack of context. Still, I'm sure someone will find some use for it.
I believe you can just leave out the http:// altogether and Twitter will still pick up the link.
With Chrome I occassionally run into problems. For example, there was a time when I couldn't get my Amazon cart to work with Chrome. I popped open IE and it just worked. My bank used to not work with Chrome, but now does. I recently had a site where the links in the sidebar weren't clickable, but I know I had clicked them before. Went to IE and it worked.

Printing is also really hit or miss. Weird font sizes, or sometimes blank areas. Not browsing proper, but still worth mentioning.

Admittedly this doesn't happen often, but enough for me to notice.
Scary stuff? If he was really that scary I'd go as PG for Halloween and watch all the little future entrepreneurs wet their pants when they see me. Either that, or I'd float them a couple bucks each for 6% of their candy.
I guess what I was referring to is that sometimes things just blow up.

At a certain point Rainbow sandals became the defacto sandal of southern frat boys. Did they market to them? No. Some influencer decided he liked them and it slowly spread. Now it's just the established norm. Most of society just follows trends. And if you're a company, you are at the mercy of these trends. Yes you can try to create them, but you can fail just because your rival got lucky.

Did Smirnoff Ice instigate Bros Icing Bros? No but they're sales spiked because of it.

Did PBR market to hipsters? No but they adopted it as their own and now PBR reaps the benefits.

Run DMC wrote about Adidas without being paid a cent. Was Adidas really BETTER than any other shoe brand? Adidas just kind of got lucky.

You may throw something back at me about reaching influencers... yes you can try to do that.... but to a certain degree you're at the mercy of society's whims.
Unless, on the day you start, the company announces that all bonuses will be reduced 75% until the company "makes its numbers." You don't have to be at a place long term to get screwed.

A fair question to ask when negotiating would be what % of the bonuses are currently paid, and when was the last bonus cut. Might give some indication of the reliability.
Offer HN: Marketing Advice
Why Me?

I've been in marketing for 7 years, I've done (successfully) just about every area of digital marketing you can think of, and probably some you can't.

What I'm Offering

Two hours free consulting to 6 businesses, anywhere in the world (you must speak English) spread over the next 6 weeks.

How to Pitch

If you want me to take a look at what you're doing and offer some advice, message me the site address, elevator pitch, business goals over the next 6, 12 and 36 months, and I'll get back to you to arrange a time that's convenient for me to go through the recommendations. Alternatively, leave them in the comments below. Either's fine.

Please note that I'll be choosing the businesses I look at based on how much value I think I can add, not on size/coolness/funding etc. If I don't choose you, I'll still try and take five or ten minutes to nose around and offer some words of wisdom, but obviously being only one person, I don't scale well, so the 2 hours is limited to one company a week.
>Everyone understands it in a general sense. Every 'lay' person I've ever met has some hobby they 'geek out' over, as its own reward.

I think you're either wrong here, or are using "geek out" so generally as to make it pretty much meaningless. Playing Halo, drinking fine wines, and whittling figurines are not equivalent to IT creation. Having a passion for those former things does not automatically allow one to appreciate the latter.
I find this sort of uninformed armchair analysis to be unfulfilling.
<i>There would be no AJAX today had Microsoft</i>

I was loading AJAX data into hidden <frame>s in Navigator 4 using a JSON-like hack in 1998. It worked just fine.
There's one wrinkle I see here, speaking as an Aaron Sorkin fanboy.

There's a lot Sorkin does that just shouldn't work. His dialogue is extremely lengthy and, in the case of The West Wing and Sports Night, he completely threw out the idea of using internal (team) conflict to drive the narrative, choosing unity instead. His President of the United States was extraordinarily idealistic and principled, even under fire.

This is a long way of saying I think Sorkin does it this way to amuse himself. He creates things he, himself, would like. He certainly feels an obligation to his audience, as the parent comment mentioned, but overall he writes the characters and dialogue in a way that gives him pleasure.

edit: Even going so far as to inject the idea of taking pleasure from writing things well into his scribe characters: Danny and Casey in Sports Night, Toby, Sam, President Bartlet and Will on the West Wing.
The trouble is that they have messaging servers, a routing mesh, and caching servers which are all loosely coupled and deployed on separate boxes. They could take down all dozens of pieces of their infrastructure and roll them all back to wherever they were on that previous date, but this is not better for several reasons:

1) it take much longer than just rebooting the isolated service. Can you imagine Google shutting down every one of their multi-million boxes, rolling them back to a previous state and spinning them up again?

2) they'd still be at risk for incompatibilities with their databases, etc. the problem with unexpected imcomptabilities is that they're unexpected.
The OP's second paragraph implies that he did reply and explains his post.
Late alpha feedback would be very useful
simplesecurityra.com
"I'm pretty curious about all this since he didn't reply to my reply."

So he emailed PG back, and didn't get a response. Having attempted that, I would say that posting on HN is exactly the thing to do, at least in this case.
Real-time cross-platform texting
Today In JS Episode Two: Today's JavaScript News All In One Place
you're right - it was killed after 6 weeks, but if you read the post-mortems/insider "scoops", it seems as if the Sidekick team wasn't allowed to make the product that they wanted to make. Features were getting pulled, changed, and strip-mined.

You illustrate another problem - I don't know why MS would view it as "battling" WP7 6 months later:
1) 6 months is a LIFETIME for a phone. The Pre went from amazing, potential company-saver phone to dud in less than that.
2) At the end of the day, all the money goes back to Microsoft. Why is that a battle? Internally it's a battle for mindshare - but MS needs to realize that they're both on the same team. Apple is happy cannibalizing its iPod sales for iPod Touches/iPhones.

3) If Microsoft wants to grow, several products are going to overlap. There seems to be a convergence towards "the one true device". A year from now, MS is going to start worrying if mobile phone sales are creeping into their netbook sales - they already worry that Office 365 sales are going to creep into Office licensing
Is Apple About To Cut Out the Carriers? (with its own Sim card)
Isn't the pitfall here that someone could store a 1 gigabyte file on your service and then transfer 5000 gigabytes a month. At the end of the month you collect your 10 cents.
It's just spyware. It should be forbidden.

If you think you need something like this in your relationship, your partner deserves something better than you. If you think your partner betrays you, talk to him/her.
Musopen.org would love some technical help if anyone is interested.

email in profile.
-Aaron
Now someone just needs to write an app that monitors for this app.

The malware/anti-malware wars have begun on Android!
There's also another side to this story: headhunters benefit from "selling" developers at a high price, and usually they are way better negotiators than the average developer. Most of the time, that money saved doesn't go towards a signing bonus or a salary bump, but stays in the pockets of the employer.

Also, if you're confident about your development skills but not so much about your interviewing skills, having a good headhunter basically doing the initial salespitch for you can be very helpful.
The annoying thing is that e.g. flash will ignore that and try to open a socket. This means that it will use the regular connection and not the tunnel.

This also means that hulu decides not to work because flash doesn't respect proxy settings... :(
Not just your life partner, but people could use it with their manager, business partner, person you're interested in dating/stalking.

Given that text messaging is the dominant means of communication for many people, it really becomes crucial that you don't let your phone out of your sight.
Why would it be any good?

Obviously, the local VPN avoiders who would implement this would get blacklisted, so its a no-go.

And there is the basic fact that Pirate Bay has shows, with no IP screwery.
Wow ! Thanks. taking you up on that offer. Hopefully I can pay it forward with my current skillset ! Oops, missed it by minutes ;)
Some really good PDF on how this works in Europe, the Netherlands and comparisons to US law. (I took me quite some time to find something looking authoritative enough to actually read.)

"If Alice has stored her key on a diskette
or a smart card, and if Polly is certain of its existence and Alice’s possession of them, she can
summon Alice to deliver it – at least, in the United States she can, and also in European
countries, according to the European Court’s decision in Saunders. In the Netherlands, article
107 paragraph 1 DCCP, however, prohibits Polly from commanding delivery from suspects."

Further on (page 11) goes on to state that a key that doesn't exist in the physical plane might be considered admission, and therefore protected. That is unless it is demonstrated that the suspect used the same key (elsewhere) recently -- in which case it's already "admitted" by the suspect and the s/he needs to deliver the key.

http://rechten.uvt.nl/koops/THESIS/cryptocontroversy-ch08.PD...
/offers (and /offerless) aren't permanent yet: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839988
I'd love to be able to search those contents. I'm pretty sure I had a few Geocities sites, but I'm not going to download a terabyte to see if it's in there.
it might help to not think of your engineers as costs.
It is possible that the scope of our considerations do not overlap.
I suspect a lot of those just serve up H.264 directly and not via <video>
I have a real estate themed project as well: http://www.agentshowroom.com
I'm waiting for HML Server Edition.
> and can pool this bandwidth to allow an overall connection of a few gigabits per second.

How do you prevent one customer from hogging all the available upstream bandwidth?
Their is actually a virus scanning app that I installed just to see what it did.

I like that is like the desktop and open enough to be abused. I prefer that to approval process based systems.