skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Skeptical but excited. Will definitely be studying this at the weekend. I had been working on a long writeup on string matching but stopped the project for lack of recent progress.
I'm doing simultaneousness processing of 700-800 transactions on my dual core laptop on the JVM. I think on a production grade server a thousand or so is not going to be an issue.

Your Garbage Collector and program's contention is going to a bigger scaling bottleneck than the JVM itself.
You are speaking of the one and only Jon Skeet. I think this had something to do with the NDA Microsoft MVPs sign (MVPs get confidential access to future plans, early looks, etc)
In my (limited) exposure to the think tank "industry", it seems that many make a fair chunk of their bottom line through memberships; companies buy memberships to receive publications & analysis, newsletters, networking opportunities and a voice in any policy processes the think tank can get involved in.

Some member companies will pay, partially or fully, for their memberships with services rendered; which means the think tanks have ready access to good and plentiful legal representation & financial advice/management, which must help lower costs quite a lot.
I don't buy it. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights was built to be amended should change be necessary. More importantly, it is clear that the Bill of Rights is, to some degree, a cobbled together response to the specific grievances the colonies suffered from dear old England, rather than some platonic listing of the rights of man. (I'm looking right at the 3rd amendment here. It doesn't seem like it belongs in the company of say, the first and the fourth.) My point is that not all of the points in the Bill of Rights were created equal, so ascribing equal importance to all of them seems misguided.
This is awesome. One thing about storenvy though, if I were to trust my business with you guys, I would want to know that there is a future and you aren't just figuring it out as you go along.

I would say figure out a way to monetize it in the short-term (perhaps transaction fee on all the sales), that way, your sellers can be confident that you are a going concern.

Just my $0.02.
Devoting such a significant percentage of your time and resources to what likely amounts to less than 1% of your users doesn't sound like a wise business decision in most circumstances.
> Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring but it will not be under the foot of a dictator at least we know that - and how could that be bad

In 1917 the Russian people got themselves out from under the foot of the Romanovs and into the hands of the Bolsheviks.
Maybe it's time that somebody check how many VP8 patents (assuming Google acquired them them with O2) are violated by H.264?
Fox Sets 'Die Hard 5' Director
Bruce Willis will return in the title role.
Yes it's important, no it's not a waste of time. Aside from the people who intentionally turn off JS in their browser, there are people with readers or other interfaces that don't support JS (or, not well), and most bots trying to crawl and find and possibly link to your content are going to behave, at best, unpredictably in the face of a JS-heavy site.
A Lack Of Rigor Leaves Students 'Adrift' In College
To be fair, the guy had to manage an unscheduled move from kansas to sf, including family in one week. At the same time he had to figure things out with the cofounders. In such a short timeframe, isnt it understandable that YC werent notified earlier?
This is covered. We'll be releasing loads of new stuff involving $$ in the coming year. But it's still free!
The Creativity Crisis: What went wrong—and how we can fix it.
HP Veer too small for 3.5mm headphone jack and microUSB port
They looks nice, but they do remind me of the logo diarrhea mentioned here: http://uxhero.com/ux-theory/logo-diarrhea/

Put those logos on the back or make them very subdued.
Is it just me or by saying "Hey, if you have a patent that VP8 infringes, let's talk" MPEG LA implicitly admits that they do not currently own or are aware of such patents?

Either way, MPEG LA just unlocked "patent troll wannabe" achievement.

Like we needed another example showing how patents are limiting progress and innovation by creating government-sponsored rent seeking entities pocketing large sums of money at the expense of everyone else.
Thanks for the link. It looks like a nicely made app. Can you tell your friend the feedback form on the website is broken? It redirects to a google spreadsheet which forgets your initial form.
Cisco is the next Nokia.
read the whole thing. don't jump to conclusions.
Here, here. It's a joy to see the technological advancement from the race teams trickle into road cars through the years. BMW's current M3 V8 was once manufactured on the same floor as their F1 V8s.

This is also one of the big losses we every-day drivers will suffer as a result of BMW, Honda, Toyota, etc., abandoning the sport.
Why Quora Works: Entrepreneuriship Is Best Learned Experientially
(I just put a space :) )
People, Not Things, Are The Tools Of Revolution
The author states that preprocessing takes O(m) time but that is on average.

A quick review of the code makes me think that its worst case is actually on the order of O((s * (s + 1)) / 2), where s = m / 2.

The Achilles heel is the hash function. It's trivial to create collisions and have the insertion time for word w turn from O(1) to O(w).
MPEG LA does not own any patents; they're just a broker. This is the same process they have used for all previous patent pools they have built; MPEG LA puts the burden of finding relevant patents on the patent owners because the owners have the incentive to get patents included in the pool.
To say that something runs in amortized O(n) time guarantees an upper bound on the average time per operation in a worst-case sequence of operations. It does not deal with average-case time on random or typical data.
it seems that his algorithm is faster because it exploits the model of computation (memory aligned accesses and multi-byte operations). He gets up to a constant factor more comparisons for free.
I think, yes, for content oriented sites (seo benefit, helps to allow people to continue to view content, etc), but if it's an app/utility site, I think there is no point in adding to your workload...
Microsoft Lawsuit Against Salesforce Just Got Ugly
I came here to say this too. I'm reading Drive by Daniel Pink which does a compelling job of illustrating and explaining the consequences of Deci and others' research in this area. It's a more business focused book, but he discusses this exact thing.
Python and Ruby aren't really "scripting" languages in the modern sense of the term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scripting_language#History .. 10-20 years ago, sure.

Calling them such does them a disservice. They're just as "general purpose" as Java, say. The distinction made in this post seems to be more about the problem domain and using a realistic language to tackle it rather than the language itself.
Pattern matching performance also depends on the alphabet size of the text. In his experiment he doesn't report the alphabet size of the text nor does he provide results for different text collections.

The algorithm itself looks very similar to the one used in agrep proposed by Wu and Manber [1].

I also found the book "Flexible Pattern Matching in Strings" to be a very good reference on all things related to pattern matching [2].

[1] S. Wu and U. Manber. A fast algorithm for multi-pattern searching. Report TR-94-17, Department of Computer Science, University of Arizona, 1994.

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Flexible-Pattern-Matching-Strings-Line...
Big O notation is frequently used to refer to the average case bounds of an algorithm. Haven't you seen an analysis of quicksort?
A substantial part of your $260 valuation
Comes from Terminal Value (I.e. Post 5 yrs)
And a 8% perpetual growth rate is an
extremely aggressive rate.

Basically, to justify the current value,
The 5 year CAGR has to be way, way higher
than 30%
Links to specific statutory provisions of various states: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1970276

Flow chart for analyzing employer rights: http://www.ontechnologylaw.com/2010/12/diagramming-a-legal-i....
I didn't say it did. On the other hand, unless the author of the algorithm is really clueless (edit: or knowingly making a probabilistic statement), I'm sure he meant amortized time.
I could reasonably ask for the judge to have the common sense not to make such an outlandish request in the first place.
It could be just an abuse of notation, in the same way that people say that Quicksort is O(n lg n) on average. Sure, on perverse data the best time bound you can prove is O(n^2), but on random data you get expected O(n lg n) time, and on typical data with good partition selection you can generally expect to not go quadratic.

(You could also use the O(n) time median algorithm to construct a truly O(n lg n) Quicksort, but that's just a fun theoretical side-note here.)
I'll hunt around a bit, but I don't know of any off-hand. As to evidence of the attitude, I point to abandonware sites. Technically illegal many times, but companies getting uppity about things they don't sell appearing on abandonware sites is exceedingly rare. Similar to anime companies vs fansubbers prior to the anime being translated and sold in that particular area.

Since you seem like you may be interested: looked at http://www.groklaw.net before? They've had quite a bit of activity on IP laws, last time I checked (as has the rest of the internet, but still).
I guess it depends on what type of queries you expect; if you want to find the same (fixed) substring across a body of (dynamic) texts, the O(n) cost of preprocessing (suffix trees/arrays) is terrible.

If, on the other hand, you have a fixed "corpus" and a dynamic query, O(n) search time (this algo, purportedly) is terrible.
I'm assuming he is only comparing online algorithms which process only the pattern not the text.
The video is geoblocked
this was the original purpose of pandora, back when it was known as "savage beast."
Jason, the issue is not whether the sample is large enough--a 30+% response rate strikes me as very high, and I suspect given your support volume you're getting several hundred responses per day.

The issue, instead, is whether the people who choose to respond--to take another step after their support encounter and rate the quality of service--are representative of all users, including the majority who do not rate the experience. That's a tough hypothesis to test, and I suspect it could cut either way: the happiest customers may choose to respond since they so enjoyed the experience, or the angriest may choose to respond since they want you to be aware of their disappointment. Finding out which (if either) of these is occurring is tricky, though.

That said, I certainly don't mean to impugn what you're doing here. I love the transparency and I think you probably are getting a fairly good snapshot of overall customer satisfaction. Also, even if there is a response bias, you can safely use these numbers to benchmark over time, which I suspect would be very useful.
I worked for a company that not only had this clause, but it extended to any and all inventions pertaining to the employers line of business for 12 months after employment terminated.

When employment terminated and I intended to go work for a competitor, I was given a letter explaining that the business of my employer was "software and hardware" and was told verbally they would aggressively pursue that claim. The also notified the company I was going to work for who then withdrew the employment offer. Probably wouldn't have stood up in court if I had a few million to pay attorneys. As it was it cost me around $30,000 in legal fees to deal with and I was unemployable for a full year during a time when my expertise, which I had gained on my own time before working for these people, was very hot.

In the end it doesn't matter one whit what the law says because to maintain your rights you will have to fund lawyers longer than their staff attorneys are willing to harass you. In practice, you run out of money pretty fast.

You must not sign these sorts of contracts or work for these people in any way shape or form if you want to avoid big trouble. When they inform you of these clauses, regardless of what the state law says, they are warning you they intend to create legal problems for you if you ever try to work for anyone else.

Remember this one thing. If you do not have unlimited pockets you have no legal rights in a contest against a better funded party.
In this case, it is an app site. I was sorting thinking along the same idea.
"... Those who started programming in the 1990s came of age when a major revolution was being effected by Java. ..."

Java revolutionary?

C was revolutionary. It allowed hardware independence compared to assembler. BASIC was revolutionary because it made programming a computer easy enough for kids. Perl was revolutionary to hack the web, as is PHP. TMTOWTDI. But the true revolutionary language is still probably Lisp. Python, Ruby, Javascript are still evolving in a Lispy sort of direction.
The Internet Scores Its Second Victory Of The Day, Borders Nears Bankruptcy
On that page, someone asked what the red-blue cluster is at the bottom. I checked out a few dozen accounts in Twitter and it seems this is a cluster of Arabic software industry people and entrepreneurs.
Great site! I was just browsing your blog and saw that you're also in Victoria, BC! Great to know there are other HN/startup folks in the city. :) Good luck!
Well, it's actually Intel.
Does vim really do working sets, or can you just keep track of working sets by doing [a bunch of geeky stuff]?
Nokia Appoints Chris Weber to President of Nokia Inc. (US)
The number one reason I love Pandora is that it offers an ad free paid version with higher quality. Its dead simple and does exactly what you want it to without tacked on social networking.
For a person, yes - there's little you can't do with $2B that you can do with $50B. For a country, though, it's the difference between a single shuttle launch and three years of NASA's budget.
Nevertheless, it's inexcusable to be proposing a string matching algorithm without at least mentioning why suffix trees can't do the job. At the very least, showing that your algorithm beats suffix trees in any instantiation does wonders for credibility. For the record, suffix trees can be built online as well:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/kq55005qu6479276/
You just made a comment at least two other people made before you, so I'll let my answers to those stand here too.
Jessica Tapia y Álamo Pérez Luna terminan relación
The hashbang technique could be easily worked around by a company with the resources of Google, and the PR ramifications of GoogleBot violating robots.txt would be pretty big.
Try to make friends with founders whose products you like who happen to be in say the 500Startups portfolio. You're not the only one in this position.

The founders of Bee-Shopy moved from Spain to be a part of 500Startups. Use their product, help them get users, give constructive criticism - just be helpful & build rapport. Then, tell them your story.
Phantom Flex camera slows down time with incredible 2,564fps 2080p video
I enjoyed this related article a few months ago on the problem: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_...
I'm not big on extrinsic rewards as a parenting tool. But sometimes kids like having structure. I'm a go-with-the-flow type. My ex husband is a more structured type. When we began homeschooling, we tried it my way -- and it was a disaster. This kids hated it. So we tried it "daddy's way" -- and it was a disaster. The kids hated it. The kids were, surprise surprise, somewhere between their two parents in that regard. And they also differed from each other. My older one is more like me and my younger one is more like their dad. We ended up setting up charts and stuff so the kids had a tool to track activities and goals without having to bug mom all day, every day about how much more there was to do and so forth -- we did this more for the kids' sanity than for mine. They hated not knowing and having to ask so much.

So I think it depends in part on how one uses something like this. I don't think it has to be about the top listed point: Motivate kids with an end goal in mind. It can be more about their next item: Track progress towards goals. It's just a tool. I'm sure different parents will use it differently, depending upon a variety of factors including their parenting philosophy.
Pentagon’s prediction software didn’t spot Egypt unrest
Ohai Niket! Glad you made it :D. When do you guys start?
> You can imagine the chaos that would result if any employee could state that, "no, that valuable IP that I came up with might have directly concerned what my employer was paying me to develop, but, in fact, I developed that particular key piece on my own time, etc."

The company has an even bigger fear: the employee will see where the market is heading, or where the company is heading, get there first in their spare time, and spin out a competitor. Or get a patent.

Owning spare-time IP that's related to the business seems reasonable to me. Of course, that assumes a good defintion of "related"...
True, seems that the MBA is awarded by the University of Wales though, which is fully accredited.
This is why different communities accept p-values at certain levels (typically <0.05). You have to live with some amount of uncertainty when the data generating mechanism is random... that is unfortunately the nature of the beast.
If you look in the later pages of the article, once they've finished with the hyperbole and pop-science spin, their actual plans look pretty reasonable. They want to use a chip combining memristors and conventional microprocessors to control a robot in a complex obstacle course. The hope is that some kind of neural network will be helpful for such tasks, if they figure out the right layout for the neurons and interconnections. If that's the case, then they have the hardware to make this potentially faster, more compact, and more power-efficient than more conventional approaches.

tldr: This isn't about general intelligence. It's about improving robotics: computer vision, motion planning, integrating multiple senses -- that sort of thing.
The Importance Of The Price Tag
Digg undoes more changes, discontinues RSS import
But is that legal?

Even if it's legal, the other manufacturers will just abandon Windows Mobile 7. Not a nice scene.
In this case, neural networks have the advantage of looking similar enough to networks of memristors that you may be able to cram a big neural net into a small, low-power chip. It's not a huge breakthrough in AI, but prove very handy for some applications.
Sure, but they use a lot more space (even if you use suffix arrays instead of suffix trees) and are generally only worth if you search for more than one pattern on the same text.

In most academic papers I have read that deal with online pattern matching suffix arrays/trees are generally not compared.
Citizen Space: End of one era, beginning of the next
Tweet to Nokia employees from Google
I can see the other side. YC's requirements are not a surprise (and are quickly Googleable). If Jon's cofounders weren't on board with YC's requirements (namely, moving to San Francisco), that's something he should have been aware of before pitching and getting accepted, and probably should have come up during his pitch -- to YC, it could have been a sign that he didn't know his cofounders well.

My knowledge of this is limited to reading the comments here and Jon's blog post, but it's fair to see YC's side as well on feeling a bit blindsided. That's what I read between Paul's lines, anyway, specifically since he used the phrase "up front with us".

Not pointing fingers or anything, just understanding both sides and responding to you specifically.
If I were managing an incubator with 1000 applicants twice a year, and 2/3s of a founding team decided they didn't want to join the program, I would take that as a vote of no-confidence from those two members.

In a lot of situations in life, you have imperfect information and you have make the best judgment call based on what you have. Maybe those 2 guys didn't go to YC because of family obligations although they'd really love to, but maybe they just thought the startup team didn't really have legs and was just a side project.

At that early in the game, the 2 cofounders knew the author better than PG did. I'd make the same call.
Netflix is not what's new but what's good.

Exactly. It's like the early days of DVD -- you had people whining and moaning about the lack of Star Wars or Titanic, when there were already more great films in release than you'd ever have time to watch. Netflix streaming works the same way -- you can't turn on the TV with the intent of watching a specific Hollywood A-list movie, but if you turn on the TV with the intent of watching something good, you will not be disappointed.
Does this mean that MPEG-LA has concluded it has no existing patents in the H.264 pool that are essential to what VP8 does?

Rather than reading tens of thousands of claims to find ones that apply to VP8, MPEG LA has outsourced that work to the patent holders themselves. If you want your patent to be included in the VP8 pool, you have to speak up.

If they did, wouldn't those be the seeds of this new pool?

Yes, I would expect that the VP8 pool will basically be a subset of the H.264 pool.

Who would license some percentage from MPEG-LA knowing they couldn't get a license for the rest from Google.

Google could get in antitrust trouble for refusal to license VP8 patents after claiming that VP8 is "open".

Couldn't Google just buy who ever steps up and says "I have essential patents"?

You mean like Sony, Philips, Fraunhofer, Mitsubishi, Columbia University, etc.? http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx
So it's not clear just what the advance here actually is. Just how is this new technique different from the old ones? Could we at least get a size comparison against current processors?
Polaroid Photo Layout in CSS
Annoucing bigfxlib an open source Adobe Flex library for handling big data
FYI, we were all full-time, the business was already profitable and we were all living off of the income it was generating. The startup clearly had legs then and still does.
Double platinum album by Enrique Iglesias
Came in to upvote you. Offshoring is an operations failure and is not always an indicator of programmers' skills.

We work with extremely slow connections and antediluvian software/hardware tools. All managerial decisions are taken by incompetent managers whose main skills is to shepherd as many people as they can. For technical queries, we have to wait for at least a day before someone from the client side can provide an answer.

The IT team from the client side never wanted us as they see us as job stealers and highlight even the smallest of our mistakes in a Daily WTF style because it helps validate the stupid-offshore-programmer notion everyone has. This is one of the more serious issues that no one wants to talk about. The xenophobia from the client kills any chances for meaningful conversation. We are low cost workers and are treated like one.

In the last 12 years that I have worked as an offshore developer, I have had very few meetings that were at a time convenient to me. To this day, I have meetings late in the night from 10:00pm to 12:00 morning or early morning before 7:00am.

Cut us some slack guys. Not all of us are uneducated, illiterate coders who speak bad English and write worse code.
Um, O((s * (s + 1)) / 2) = O(m^2). Quadratic, not exponential.
A big life decision like that takes at least a few days to process and decide. We had 7. Things got pretty crazy in that week, understandably.
Would you please clarify this statement?

I thought that there was plenty of progress in the field...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network
John Carmack about Android Renderscript
More appealing than anything else Nokia has done in the post-iPhone era.