skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we are in a bubble in the sense that none of this family of companies (facebook, zynga, groupon, twitter) increases the overall productivity of society as a whole (or even their user base for that matter) and yet still garnering such high valuations. Whereas if you look at the last generation of tech companies (especially google) did in fact increase the productivity of the overall society.

I think the overall emphasis on marketing is an outcome of commoditization of software. In an earlier hn news item, OReilly talked about the thing that is adjacent to whatever is commoditized becomes valuable. I think in the case of software commoditization, that adjacency is data. User data has become much more valuable because it is now the biggest moat that can protect a tech business. Its no longer the software and hardware The more ability you have to collect and monitize the data, the more defensible your business becomes. The only way to collect more user data is to have an effective funnel driven by marketing.

Thats my 2 cents anyway.
What's the likelihood we're in a bubble if everyone says we're in one and investors continue to pour money into tech?
A search that returns multiple types of resources is just retrieving a representation of a collection resource which can contain multiple types of resources. Canonical example: a typical web page resource is a collection of links to other pages, links to css files, links to js files, links to images, etc.

Each item in the list is going to have a URI for the item, probably some text that briefly describes the item, and if necessary it can have a value that identifies the type of item.

If I'm understanding correctly, your playlist resource is an ordered list of song identifiers, the song identifiers can appear more than once, and when you "delete a song" you're removing a single one of those identifiers. That sounds to me like an update of the playlist resource. The simplest model would be:

GET /playlist/{playlist id}
... client modifies representation ...
PUT /playlist/{playlist id}

That's not atomic and it puts some application-logic burden on the client, but you _are_ writing an API to allow others to develop full-featured clients, and maybe the burden also provides flexibility for operations you haven't thought of.

Another approach would be for the representation of the playlist to include a unique id for each item in the list: your song id + index. You're not using a DELETE method here though, because you're not deleting a resource. You would use POST to update the playlist resource:

POST /playlist/{playlist id}
operation=removeitem&songid={song id}&index={index}

This is the general RESTful pattern for doing a partial update of a resource, so the client doesn't have to GET and PUT the complete resource.
Thanks, I appreciate feedback. Looks good to me too, so I'll put that up later today.
"fast-paced environment" says more about the people than the environment...

Let's say, for example, that your environment changes at rate "10".

If you normally move at rate "7", this environment would seem fast-paced to you.

But if you're accustomed to moving at rate "15", you wouldn't even consider it to be fast-paced.

In my experience, what most junior and enterprise programmers would consider "fast-paced" would seem fairly normal to most senior or start-up programmers. It's all relative.
It's Census data - unfortunately from 2001 - we're preparing to upgrade with the latest data from the 2010 Census which is just now becoming available...slowly...

Thanks for the feedback on 11201. I anticipate issues like this in the data set.
Founder of VisualWebsiteOptimizer talks about how it all started.
Today's interview is with Paras Chopra, the fouder of VisualWebsiteOptimizer - a dead-simple way to create A/B tests.
We wanted to find out how he started and developed his ideea, what were his biggest lessons he's learned so far and what tips he has for all the future entrepreneurs out there!
Well, the R syntax is more intuitive than statistics itself.
Then again, what isn't?

Really though- rpy2 is a nice enough interface to R, and things like MCMCPack make R worth the effort.
How a simple comment on Hacker News made me quit my job and launch a startup
Oh, it's certainly about cost. When you talk about paying for your own transit, your own power, cage space, and remote hands, cloud providers can be significantly cheaper than owning the hardware. You also lose the administrative overhead of having to perform drive swaps when your units degrade -- it's just computing capacity that exists with a minimum of hassle to you. I think if you add up all of the variables, cloud can (and does) come out more cost-effective.

I think private clouds are fantastic for established stuff, and many companies use public clouds to their benefit as well.

I added this in an edit after you replied, but cloud is a term that is difficult to nail to the wall: my explanation to people that I like to run with is that the cloud is a way to think about your architecture.

Rather than have a DNS box, two Web servers, a DB box, and so on, then another server for every development environment, virtualizing the hardware makes a lot of sense. You get a lot more traction out of each U, and with a large number of of-the-shelf utilities, you can automate the hell out of that. Need a clean test environment to try an installation of your software? There are ways to accomplish that in minutes, and dispose of it and reuse the space. That to me is a cloud. Virtualization and automation on top of it. That's what Linode has been doing for nearly eight years now, so it's arguable that Linode pioneered the cloud space. In 2003, it was just called VPS hosting.

Integrating a public cloud and a private cloud makes a lot of sense, and a lot of established big-iron is taking this approach. Big players are realizing that the cloud makes a lot of sense, which we see with HP's announcement that they intend to enter the cloud market.
Smood it API Ruby library
> Is the disagreement here that you think wireless Internet is gypsum, and I think it's canned tomatoes?

You're missing the point. It's not like you can change the fact that telecoms (with current technology) tend towards a natural oligopoly. All you can do is rein in their market power via legislation.

> Competition and cost-based pricing are entirely orthogonal issues.

Not at all. Fundamental economic theory states that in a pure monopoly, sellers have the ability to set the prices, so they can price discriminate and charge each customer the maximum he will pay. In pure competition, the price will eventually reach the marginal cost.

Cost-based pricing isn't symptomatic of commodity markets. Cost-based pricing and commodity markets are symptomatic of pure competition.

> There is intense competition in the market for (say) beer, but it takes the form of a marketing dogfight of changing product attributes and highlighting instead of race-to-the-bottom pricing.

You're conflating the competition's intensity and perfection. As with beer, there's also intense competition among telecoms ("Only the AT&T iPhone lets you talk and browse the web at the same time", "Verizon has 5x better coverage than AT&T"). That doesn't change the fact that there's an oligopoly (both in beer and in telecoms). The fact that the products are not homogenous across the market further emphasizes this.
Europa League - latest news
How to do a social media check up for your site
I'm almost always interested in the actual values of things when debugging a part our systems at work. I need to know that the generator exceeded 3kW, or the PDF of the voltage was above 4V, or things went hay-wire at 11:31AM. It is easier to tell at a glance what's happening on a plot if there is a grid.
Opt-Out Cookie Error Earns Chitika A Whopping 55 Cents And An FTC Inquiry
May be I'm missing something here; Why there's even a discussion about RAID at the EBS level? When Amamzon says, "Amazon EBS volumes are designed to be highly available and reliable" and if we have to talk about RAID then the issue is on Amazon's end
You are comparing apples with oranges. I said competition is good because we are talking about blogging space. Imagine if there was only one blogging platform. It would not be a nice situation. So Wordpress and Blogger both developing actively is a good thing for the rest of us. It would be best if more blogging platforms could jump in and improve the space (not that there aren't others already).

Back to education and government. You are already blaming your paying taxes as a culprit for you attending bad government school. What proof do you have to back up your allegation? What if there was no public school and less government taxes and still no private school to provide you education? Do you think private schools are only going to crop up because government isn't charging more taxes? What guarantee is there that you'd have a good private school in the absence of any public school? Blaming taxes for all the ills of the government is a myth propagated by one of the political party. Check out the countries where there are no government schools of any quality (because people don't pay taxes and things are pretty much messed up all around). You'd be glad you attended public school in America irrespective of the quality compared to many other countries of the world.
This is a 'leftover' from The Like Log Study (HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300300)
Footbo Raises $2.5 Million, Swings For The Fences With New Fantasy Baseball Game
"An intro to Backbone.js" via slick HTML5 slides
You got to find something thats interesting to you, then it will be easier to stick to it. My friend and I have worked on various projects from start to end, but sometimes he comes up with good ideas that have nothing to do with his interests. You can get motivated for a day or two, but it drops off afterwards.

Find something you like, and force yourself to work on it in your free time. Don't give yourself to much time either, if you have 8 hours a day there is much more to waste. Once you got a good base you can spend more time (8 hours a day) cause you'll be invested by that point.
Alex Lanstein of FireEye on the Rustock Botnet Takedown
How is it possible to index the entire Internet's content, and perform nontrivial searches fast enough that a page of hits can be rendered as the searcher types? That may work on a small scale, but scaling up you run into complexity barriers. It's impossible in practice.

Oh, right, Google did it.

Your reasoning is exactly what the article criticizes: the notion of "that's impossible, don't bother" vs. "so what, let's do it anyway".

Our ability to handle complexity scales exponentially over time, and we're on a fast-rising part of the curve now; even if something is "impossible in practice" now, get started on the problem and predict at what point the industry _will_ have the technology to handle that level of complexity.

Hard != impossible.
Hard now != hard in the relevant future.
I disagree. What Twitter and Facebook both do is decrease the cost for new ideas to spread - HUGE value to society.

Twitter and Facebook are my primary news sources - and I'm not alone. I doubt the protesters in the Arab world would agree when you say Facebook and Twitter adds no value to their life.
I see this as a real issue. R is useful but sorta crappy as languages go. I have hopes for Incanter [http://incanter.org/] (a clojure-based stats environment), but it looks stalled out vs dead in the water. Even still, for basic stats it's pretty viable.

I would love to see a stats environment based on a sane, full-featured language that was ready to take advantage of multiple cores and GPU computing. Clojure has all the building blocks, but it's not built yet.
Robots, dutchmen and IBM create supersmart baggage handling system
If you start with the cloud, you best formulate an "exit plan".

Reddit for example doesn't seem to have one and seems quite stuck.
>Did the microwave only cook food that was specially labeled microwaveable

No, but it's a bad idea to use dishes that aren't specially labeled microwaveable. And, with older microwaves, metal was right out. (Apparently things are better these days?)
Low frequencies are convenient for large, slow motors like hoists and trains and will have lower inductive losses. For small, fast motors, a higher frequency may be more convenient.

Lights, both incandescent and florescent, will flicker if the frequency is low.

Aircraft and spacecraft use 400Hz because the equipment can be lighter and smaller.
>My wife always did a quick spoon-to-her-lips check on the food temperature as precaution.

You still need to stir, because microwaves can heat unevenly.
Ranking higher is hard, those sites have been around for ages.

We rank quite well on: "Nederlands oefenen" & "Werkwoordspelling" for example.

I don't know if he is obligated to send his yearly accounts to the KVK?

Getting more info on the marketsize is a good tip :)
Show HN: MindWallet.com  Insanely Organized Social Media
Show HN: MindWallet.com Insanely Organized Social Media

You can read this on MindWallet as intended here: http://www.mindwallet.com/?ItemKey=787541c7-0860-41ea-a21a-2322e06675c3&ParentID=48851752-ea96-40cc-bfb4-c8b07beba934

Hi HN. Here is my ‘project’: http://www.mindwallet.com

I’d love to get your feedback. I’m going to put a lot here about how I got here and where I’m going.

If you want a TLDR: I layered social media on top of the ‘todo list’ style app that has been popular recently because I think it is an amazing interface for do things beyond todo lists.

And here is a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNpAH7AGhIk (I’m sorry about the hiss, poor audio quality, and lack of editing..I’d rather be coding...I’ll fix it eventually)
Sounds like my last job. They had gotten burned a few times by waterfall projects failing, so their reaction was to try to implement waterfall even more rigorously.

You had to design and document the entire project up front and then break it out into individual tasks and estimate them. Two points that I thought were particularly horrible:

Your estimates immediately became hard deadlines. If you guessed 3 months ago that gnarfling the garthok would take you 8 hours and you were wrong, it went against you on your metrics. Even better, if you finished the job in less time than you estimated, they'd complain and tell you that you missed low and needed to do a more precise job of estimation next time.

I suggested to my boss once that if they insisted on having all this documentation written (seriously, we were supposed to write up docs on what the function names were going to be, what the arguments were, and what they'd do -- before we were allowed to write any code) then we should probably build some time into the schedule to make sure we could update them based on what we'd learned during the actual process of writing the code. He told me "I understand what you're saying, but that's not possible. We need all of the documentation done up front so that if we're behind schedule, we can add more people to the project and they can read that documentation to get up to speed quickly."

I looked at him for a few seconds, stunned speechless, then basically said "In my experience, that never works." A few weeks later, I was laid off, I suspect because I wasn't toeing the line and buying into the "new" Lean waterfall process. Best thing that ever happened to me, in the end.
Lesson for startups: start in the cloud, grow your business, build your own cloud.

Never trust critical parts of your business to others.
I have to confess that whenever I do any statistics (which isn't much, these days) I struggle with R for a bit and then say "screw it" and use MatLab.
Do you have a reason for that observation? I agree with it, but I don't have a good reason. People of pro-microsoft opinion often cite the relatively tiny numbers of Mac, Linux, etc users all the time, especially when giving rationale for staying on Windows, or giving a reason for why Windows attracts the most malware.

But you can't have it both ways: if there's only a tiny minority of non-Windows people, they won't have the juice to generally influence Microsoft-related article's ratings. It you want to have it both ways (Windows dominates to the exclusion of everything else AND those pesky Linux/Mac/whatever users are everywhere, upvoting critical articles), you've got a world view with a very basic contradiction at its core.

So: are there more Mac/Linux/Minix/LoseThos users, or do even the Windows users generally dislike Microsoft?
Well that sucks. I suppose the best thing to do is have the tethering apps not decrement the TTL, though I have no idea if any of them support that.
No one wants to pay for Google search.

Do I want to pay for anything? Not really, getting stuff for free is always good, but given the current crop of search engines, would I pay for Google search? Yes. Probably not much, as compared to the quality of their competitors, but I would easily pay $10 or $20 a year for "premium search" access, and if they really differentiated themselves as saving me a lot of time, possibly more.
trying to predict how the company is based on the job listing is on the same order of magnitude of effectiveness as trying to predict how good the candidate is based on the resume. There's probably just some rough correlation on a large scale. I used to have a lot of notions from reading various blog posts but too often they prove to be totally wrong in specific instances. One of my worst experiences ever was going after a clever puzzle online leading to arduous days of coding and grilling and more puzzles (invested so much time) only to get a sub-par offer and lots of 'hard negotiating' which i always avoid. fact is words like fast-paced, multitasking, excellent communications, team player, rockstar, a player, self motivated blah blah blah, I simply ignore. I imagine the same goes on in the other direction, so I no longer put them on my resume.
I'm not an EE so maybe this is all wrong, but from my understanding, Nikola Tesla determined that the optimum way to transmit power in the early days of AC was 240V@60HZ. 240V was the best tradeoff between safety and voltage drop, and 60HZ was the most efficient frequency for generators and motors.

The United States ended up on 120V because of Thomas Edison's lobbying, but took Tesla's recommendation of 60HZ. Europe took Tesla's recommendation of 240V but adjusted the frequency to the "more metric" 50HZ.
I've never understood how people can use EBS in production. The durability numbers they quote are bad and they wave their hands around about increased durability with snapshots, but never quantify what that means.

Hard drives are unreliable and they certainly don't fail independently of one another - but the independence of their failure is much more independent than EBS.

With physical dives and n-parity RAID you drastically reduce the rate of data loss. This is because although failures are often correlated, it's quite unlikely to have permenant failure of 3 drives out of a pool of 7 within 24 hours. It happens, but it is very rare.

With EBS, your 7 volumes might very well be on the same underlying RAID array. So you have no greater durability by building software RAID on top of that. If anything, it potentially decreases durability.

You could utilize snapshots to S3, but is that really a good solution? It seems that deploying onto EBS at any meaningful scale is a recipe for garunteed data-loss. Raid on physical disks isn't a great solution either, and there is no substitute for backups - but at least you can build a 9 disk RaidZ3 array that will experience pool failure so rarely that you can more safely worry about things like memory and data bus corruption.
I agree that this is difficult. I wasn't really thinking about competing providers though; more like complementary. Like getting IaaS from one company, CDN from another, DNS from another, etc. One could imagine a federation of pure-play service providers that might be able to compete against the more integrated cloud juggernauts while each company focused on one thing.
"Aristo" for jQuery UI
Github certainly makes my world a far better place, and to my knowledge they haven't taken any VC funding.
I recently had an EBS volume lose data for no apparent reason. I'm not a heavy EC2 user at all - I was just doing some memory/cpu-heavy stuff that wouldn't fit in to RAM on my laptop and using EBS as a temporary store so I could transfer data using a cheap micro instance and only spin up the big expensive instances when everything was in place. I ended up downloading files on an m2.4xlarge because the files I had just downloaded to the EBS volume vanished.
I'd argue three reasons.

First, airlines usually recruit military pilots, since the government was kind enough to invest $500k or more to train them as pilots.

Second, the era of airline pilots being a glamorous job is over. When major airlines add pilots, they usually come from a layoff pool.

Third, mothers are usually primary caregivers for their children. The schedule for a pilot is awful relative to the level of education required. It only really works if your spouse is in a job with very flexible hours.
>on the scale of evidence scientific studies are not the highest good,

Hear, hear. There's a highly effective headache medicine called Midrin which has been pulled from the market because the FDA demanded proof that it was effective, and it wasn't profitable enough to be worth doing the studies. It predates the law that required medicines be proven effective (as opposed to just safe), so it was grandfathered...for about four decades. Four decades of patient experience (plus however long it was on the market before that) ought to be enough to say, yes, this stuff does work.

>the real world trumps it (which is actually a core tenant of any decent theory of science,

"Tenet".
Nokia CEO sees no reason why Microsoft would buy Nokia
Come on young rubyist. embrace the dark side. You will like it. /jk

I went through the fist couple of chapters and all the python code I've seen so far is quite close to "pseudo-code" than deeply-idiomatic Python.

Considering the fact that the Prof. also wrote "How To Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with {Python/Java/C++}", you can be rest assured that he knows how not to trip up students with clever syntax.
Most tablets don't have a gatekeeper deciding what apps you can run.