skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be more impressed by this massive IBM advertisement, if the computer received its information the exact way the other contestants did (verbally / visually looking at screen).
Apple is the forbidden fruit. Tempting, seductive and ill get you kicked out of paradise.
Why? In this case, Watson use a buzzer just like the human contestants. It still has to take time to figure out the answer.
Drastically smaller? If you're talking about the US economy, GDP is $5 trillion larger than in 2001. That's a 50% increase.

[0] http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=ny_gdp_mk...
That's kind of like saying if a car company owned 95% of the market, they wouldn't be a monopoly becuase you can always just ride a bike.
Or to give Watson a taste of the human world perhaps they could route the signal via a congested cell carrier data plan.
How to stay healthy while working at a startup?
no. there is no bubble.

that means there's nothing to pop. the first time around there was no plan for making money and there were hordes and hordes of companies throwing ridiculously expensive spaghetti at the wall to see if it stuck. everyone and their dog was filing for an ipo.

this time around?

there are relatively few companies with ridiculous valuations... and guess what? they're all making money. and tons of it. for god's sake, even twitter started turning a profit in '09. groupon? $800 million and more in annual revenue is a just fine pe ratio for their valuation. their financials make sense. people are paying for their services. and all those companies not making money yet are bootstrapping on next-to-nothing rather than taking on tons of investment.

it's different this time because it's not about the squishy-touchy-feely "we know better." you can't count on people knowing better. no, it's different because there's real revenue and real business models involved.

bubbles happen when there's no income to back wild speculation.

companies are offering percieved-as-valuable services and are getting paid for it.

they're primarily taking investment for expansion, not runway extension.

most of the money is from private investors instead of zillions of get-rich-hungry public speculators from an ipo.

i mean, it's only natural for information-based companies (instead of say... webvan) to go from 0-60 faster than we've ever seen in an environment where information is enabled to go from 0-60 faster than ever in recorded history.

things are fine, folks. back away from the stupid "bubble" panic button.

m3mnoch.
AAC to mp3 conversion? If you like crap sound quality, sure.
I like it, and it amused the more suspicious part of me to think that it might just be a way of gathering a database of vulnerable sites without having to put in the effort yourself.

On your "before you scan page", you might want to mention the possibility of a large number of emails, because it can come as a bit of a surprise.

And you might want to limit the number pages on an initial scan because big sites seem to take a hell of a lot longer to process (an I apologise right now for being a bottleneck). I concur with Marketer the possibility of emailed results would be a real benefit.

Is the monthly plan intended to cater to individual sites, or is it aimed at web designers who might be interested in scanning their creations for vulnerabilities? If web designers do feature at all they might appreciate some sort of test data they could print out and hand to clients as evidence of security.
Pretty much. I do believe even SCO asked for one.
I'm pretty sure the Apple II series all emitted NTSC analog video out, and the two common monitors pre- //c (Monitor // and Monitor ///) were green only.

As a child I remember piping the video out through our vcr to the tv and being quite disappointed by the fringe-tastic picture quality. Ahh, the bad old days. :)
It would also be pretty easy to dismiss zealous advocates as PR ops as an attack strategy against advocates. Maybe that will eventually mean sincere advocates will end up having to blog more with their real name and photo to be taken seriously.

Anonymous is basically a nebulously distributed, decentralized, persona ops group. They manage to be taken seriously without revealing real identities because they can successfully prosecute actions against high media value targets.

EDIT: They also continually try to convince the Internet at large that they shouldn't be taken seriously.
The New Path to the C-Suite
Question: What exactly do companies do with seed/VC money?
Obvious answers include: pay themselves, pay for servers, etc. Why do companies need so much? Why do they need money at all especially for a web startup?

The bigger question I have is what does the VC money earn you, besides taking away more ownership over the company that doesn't make a dime yet (as opposed to a bootstrapped product idea) ?
Using CPI-adjusted dollars is an incorrect way to measure inflation. We know CPI overstated inflation a LOT (the Boskin report says about 1.3%/year, up to 1996). Correcting your figures for this, we find CPI+Boskin adjusted median household income is actually up 72%. (This assumes CPI was not overstated after 1996.)

http://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/boskinrpt.html

We might have 13.2% of people below the poverty line, but on the other hand virtually all the people currently below the poverty line have flush toilets. That wasn't the case in 1968 (see the link in my previous post). In fact, people below the poverty line in 2007 have a standard of living comparable to the middle class of 1968. Most of the poor live in a house with < 1 person per bedroom, a complete kitchen, 1/3 have a dishwasher, 2/3 have a washing machine, about half have AC, most have a car.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf

My grandparents were middle class, and they didn't come close to that level of prosperity.

And the majority of people below the poverty level work less than half the year (by choice). Only 15% of poor adults work full time, 50 weeks a year.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf
I agree with you, and as someone who gained an interest in startups before anyone started calling this recent trend a "bubble" I ask myself one question:

Will this change what I'm doing with my startup right now?

And the answer for me is a simple "no," as it should be for virtually any founder.
It's perhaps more simple to make this decision when you look at what your goals are.

If you'd like to have fun, stick around, take a few classes and party. You could graduate earlier, but into what? What happens after that?

If you'd like to jump into a job at a high paying, well known company after graduation, you better start looking for internships with high paying, well known companies.

If you'd like to be able to tell people you've been to another country, go to another country. I don't say experience, because I personally think that takes more time than a typical vacation and involves getting outside what you read about in the travel books. It's up to you, but many people just want to be able to say they travel, and have been outside the country, so if that's you-do it. Believe it or not, if you want to experience somewhere cool and interesting, sometimes you just have to travel just outside your hometown. You could join half the USA and fly to a foreign country and stay in a hotel. You could also get to know all the hiking or mountain biking trails, or raftable rivers in the region you live. I like to think there are great experiences all around, just have to spend the time to look for them.

Personally, I've done all three. Spent two years living and working in a foreign country, interned one summer with a fairly well known tech startup, and worked two summers on campus. I'm with a large, international company working full time now. They all ended up kind of connecting, as one experience generally helped lead me towards another.

Starting a business while working full or part time would make for a very interesting and potentially worthwhile experience as well.

If you frame this question in terms of where you want to be (i.e. at a startup, at a big company, in grad school, married or no, in a different part of the world, in debt vs no debt), it will help you identify experiences that can help you get there.
1.8 years ago is not "recently". Got it.
Even by disabling Bluetooth, the battery life of these watches is abysmal.
Lot of people including Mark Cuban predicted that Youtube is a sinking boat and that Google made a horrible mistake in buying it. Look at the present situation - youtube is raking in 1B per year.

Any market leader facebook/zynga/twitter with their user base can become a cash cow with enough focus. No one else in the world get internet companies like valley/US does. This is the single most reason every other country's .com company gets traded in nasdaq.
That's just exactly right. Back in the 90's there were companies IPOing 6 months after having raised a first round, which was usually in the millions of dollars range, and without a shipped product, without any business model, etc.

Now said companies actually do have disruptive business models, and are actually adding value to the world and creating wealth.
It's true that some of those are overvalued, but that's not a bubble at all.
Oh, true. I meant only in the sense of market stability which is above all psychological.
Wikipedia Growth Animation
Games do pretty simple things on the GPU. Download textures, then transform them. They do a _lot_ of it, but conceptually the operations are not actually all that complicated or varied, by and large.

Browsers have this little thing they have to deal with called "text". Turns out that stuffing reasonable text into a texture and then scrolling it, say, is not something GPUs can do a good job of. This is why games just bitmap all their text and it looks like crap, by the way. I doubt you'd want text in a browser to look like it does in most games.

Browsers are working on making this faster, by the way. But it also turns out that not only are GPUs designed around stuff that games do (which is not the same set of stuff that browsers need done), but so are graphics drivers. The parts of them that Firefox 4 has been trying to use are clearly undertested, because they're ... rather buggy. Which is why there's now a driver blacklist (whitelist on Linux) and so forth...
The Future of Search: from PageRank to PeopleRank
Mostly salaries, sometimes buying customers.
Like sciolistse said I think the "unfair" part was a bit of editorializing.
NovelPoster: The Writing is on the Wall (Kickstarter)
It wouldn't make much difference. OCR on the text on the screen would be fine.

If it had to do speech recognition for Alex Trebek, that would make it more difficult.
I'm not so sure about that. It's a fact that raising money now is way easier, and you tend to get high valuations, so many founders should probably fundraise as long as the current hype stays up. It may easily be that next year valuations will be way lower for web startups.
Even a melody is protected by copyright law if it's longer than X tones (X depends on the jurisdiction).
http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2010/12/are-posterous-fudging-...

I'm not sure I'd trust statistics put out by Posterous on usage given they still consider counting bot hits as genuine page views an acceptable practice.
Was it really bureaucracy?

Nokia didn't seem to have any trouble producing nice looking, well engineered hardware. My N95 was probably the best cell phone I've ever owned. What it really looks like to me is that they were a hardware company whose upper-management didn't understand software very well.

My N95 ran Symbian S60 3rd edition. At some point Nokia decided that they wanted to protect S60 users from malware, and that they were going to do it by requiring all applications to be cryptographically signed. Unlike Apple and Google, Nokia didn't want to shoulder the burden of running their own authentication infrastructure. Instead, the 'Symbian Signed' policy required applications to be signed with a TLS/SSL certificate. Those are typically pretty expensive. If you wanted anyone to use your little free S60 utility for auto-rotating the screen or setting location-aware themes, you had to stump up for a $700 TLS certificate to sign it. Guess what happened to the free-software ecosystem on S60.

Later, Nokia had what seemed to be a pretty good start on a Linux-based OS called Maemo. What the article doesn't say is that Nokia inexplicably joined forces with Intel and sent Maemo on a long and probably pointless integration detour with Intel's mobile Linux solution, Moblin.

Given that Nokia probably wasn't going to start making smart decisions wrt software anytime soon, getting software from someone else was better than being squeezed out of the smartphone business altogether.
One other thing. The expensive thing with shadows is not just the compositing, but recomputing the shadow itself. Any time something changes about the thing that's casting the shadow you have to rebuild the shadow. If the change is of a kind the GPU knows about (polygon moved or rotated or whatnot), it might be doable on the GPU. If it's something like "the width changed and the text layout has to be redone", you lose.
Good god, man, you can't be defending this tripe.

Fascism has a definition, and it involves getting all of the biggest corporations on the same page with the government to create a totalitarian state. (Communism differs in that the government is the whole deal).

We've been funding energy research for decades, and there are a lot of reasons for the government to try and kickstart green energy. This is an experiment with the funding mechanism, people complain about the grant system all the time, silicon valley works, so someone said hey let's give this a shot. It's not fucking fascism.

If it was under the DARPA line item would you be more ok with it?
In the comments the author says, "(I am) just saying that on balance for a large project you shouldn't willy-nilly start adding in Scala."

I think I can do better than that.

"I am just saying for a large project you shouldn't willy-nilly do X". You fill in the X.

The "willy nilly" weasel word takes care of all possibilities and prevents counter argument. What a dumb blog post (and argument).
"To whom brother"
This is a great idea, actually. This was supposed to be a demonstration of natural language parsing and information retrieval, not a demonstration of a computers ability to react quickly.

We already know that computers are good at the latter.
I think it has been pretty much solidified that the economy is not going to experience a double-dip.
>but I'm just wondering how common this kind of lock-in is

This is very common. One of the primary purposes of employee stock options is to create the lock-in effect you are talking about. That is why they are sometimes called "golden handcuffs".
RSA: Internet Security Alliance President Larry Clinton
Many people who know me consider me to be "left" but it makes sense to me. The Internet is just a medium. It doesn't favor any particular viewpoint. There's this idea from summer movies that the "good guys" are always hip with the new tools. That's not true. If anything, it does tend to be the underdogs or insurgents that are the early adopters, but this status has nothing to do with "good/bad" or with any particular political affiliation.
Companies can't "own" the experience you gain as part of your career, otherwise you'd never be able to leave any job and continue with the same career/skills. The only potential issues would be if the new company is in the exact same industry and market as the old one, then you might hove some non-compete issues to worry about. However, most of those are not enforceable.
Um isn't that the Imperial March?
What about threads or background jobs for the long-running tasks? No web request should take that much time.
I have never thought that you might be paying people to log into your personal hackernews account to post something on your behalf. I do think often that the typos mean you don't value my time as a reader.
The Couch-Fort: Noise-Canceling for Screencasts
Then your monitor's brightness is set too high.
I really disagree with the author in terms of metaprogramming. One thing in particular jumps out at me:

> Ultimately, a programming language that's useful for large-scale programming projects needs to have clear, unambiguous grammar and syntax so that any developer familiar with the project and the language can instantly figure out what's going on.

Wow. There are just so many things wrong with this statement. Let me enumerate them:

1. Scala does have a clear, unambiguous grammar. If it didn't there wouldn't be a Scala compiler. I think what the author means to say is that languages need to have less flexible grammars (like Java does).

2. Just because you can use all kinds of wild things to obscure your code doesn't mean you should. If you prefer the "boring" way of doing something, then go for it. You just have to understand that just like anything else in programming, it's about tradeoffs. Does the benefit gained from using a DSL or operator overloading outweigh the costs? Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

3. The idea that a programmer (even one who's familiar with a project) can look at any given piece of code and instantly understand what's going on is a myth. Even if that snippet of code makes perfect sense, you also need to understand the state the program is in before that piece of code executes. Again, it's about tradeoffs. You need to choose the method that allows programmers to understand code more quickly. Sometimes using metaprogramming is the way to do that.

I will grant the author that there are valid reasons not to choose Scala, but I don't think he's hit them.
Really? 9.0.597.98 seems to be scrolling smoothly on Win 7 here.
SAP doesn’t have to sell an ERP client through the App Store; they can just have the SAP server put up secure Web pages that end-users with iPads access. End-users can either suffer the limitations of an HTML-only client or they can suffer the limitation of a client that won’t run on iOS. (When it comes to “enterprise” software, end-users tend to suffer, no matter what....)
Irony of ironies, I actually got a lecture from a PS3 engineer about how insecure SSL is with only a server-side certificate, along with a demonstration of sniffing the traffic via Charles. I had to point out that A) you have to accept Charles' root cert and B) distributing client certificates for a consumer web app is a non-starter.
I expect we'll have to agree to disagree on this, but there's a case to be made that it objectively damages you.

Consider this question on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Why-did-DuckDuckGo-block-Mahalo-com

You are one of the closest conceivable people to the question, and your answer got downvoted because it was ostensibly broken English, which made it look spammy (and thus, kind of ironic)
Rather than make a new thread, I figured I'd ask here - for a newcomer to web app development looking for a framework to learn, would you all suggest Rails or Django or something else?
Speedy Learning through Analogy
Judging from the other content advertised on the page, the Daily News is not a master of subtlety.
"If you live in a nation with rule of law and wide ranging protections of freedom of speech like the US there is no need to be anonymous in the vast majority of cases."

Sorry, but my irony detector is broken apparently. Do you truly believe this? Care to expand? Not trolling FYI.

As for "they", well, no one really knows who they are. But "they" are the pillars of every good conspiracy. (Slightly tongue-in-cheek).
Definitely, that's why Olark has been firmly sitting on my AdBlock blacklist from the first time I ran into them.
I've been using AppEngine for years and I am very happy with webapp, easier and simpler.
I think I remember reading that Watson didn't buzz in until it was sure it had an answer which was giving the human opponents an advantage because they could buzz in based of thinking that by the time they are asked for their answer they can have come up with the correct one.

Looks like they must have overcome that issue.
Rubinius Announces Plans for GIL Elimination, JIT Improvements, Targetable VM
Very cool. I won't be attending, but watching you invite companies on TWiST and hackernews ensures I will follow the news of the event since I can visualize all these people coming together.
This kind of armchair economics is surprisingly popular here, given that HN has a smart community. Sure, the economy is worse right now. But when you say that it will hurt "once the pension/money-printing funded tech bubble bursts," well, what does that even mean?

The Federal Reserve is printing money and handing it to VCs? That's not right, banks have very high borrowing requirements and won't just lend money out freely. [0]

Retirees' pensions are going to explode when the bubble pops? Tech stocks only gained 2% last year during a strong year for the S&P 500. [1] Meanwhile, the companies in question are all private, so no pensions should be involved.

You have a nice if-then statement going, but the "if" is the ultimate question here. You can't just assume it away.

[0] http://www.minneapolisfed.org/bb/ (see December and January Beige Books)
[1] http://seekingalpha.com/article/231109-s-p-500-sector-perfor...
But that is true of advertising in general, I think. Whenever you deal with ads, it is about how many people you can reach with it. Nobody is willing to put a big ad in the middle of the desert, right? Are freeway billboards bad revenue generators just because thousands of cars have to pass by them?
I am puzzled at why this comment is so popular.

You have a website. With a login form. People gave you information about themselves. They are contacting you from your website which they are logged in to.

Exactly what is creepy and dangerous about having the information that they gave you knowing that it would be stored in your system be presented to you when they use your service to contact you??? Guess what, odds are that they are going to do something like ask about the status of an order that they made, and you're going to pull up the account and have information about that as well! If you can't, then you're incompetent and can't provide good customer support.

Really, I understand privacy as much as, and probably more than, the next guy. (I'm one of the rare people who cares enough about mine to have avoided Facebook.) But really, this is bog normal for what happens when you contact customer support at any competent place. Any place that doesn't have the ability to get at information like this is going to have customer support so bad that you won't want to go back.
Big Data / Data Mining / Machine Learning 'ish stuff. Yeah, that's kinda broad, but generally speaking there's a lot of cool stuff going on there. Of course everybody is all amped up about AI at the moment because of Watson, but even outside of Watson there's a lot of stuff going on in this sphere.
Right. "With whom am I speaking"? sounds stuffy at the beach. "Who am I speaking with?" sounds lazy at the opera. "Whom am I speaking with?" just sounds confused.

A similar example that annoys me is the American pronunciation of the wine Pinot Noir ("PEE-no NWAR"). I say make up your mind. It is either "PEE-no NWA" as in French, or "PEE-not NWAR". The mixed pronunciation just sounds confused. Plus, it goes great with peanuts.
Very good point. There are certainly tactical moves that will change due to conditions, such as fund raising. But the general "run for the hills" attitude I see in many of these posts isn't productive. It's almost as if I see people hesitant to start because they fear that things will fall apart in short order. Maybe I'm reading to much into it.