skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Put up or shut up (I don't mean this in a mean way... read on).

There is a great data set to test this theory... Netflix. This article shouldn't end by just solicitng opinions, but with his results in the Netflix data set.
>and two extremely profitable groups (one in the case of Google)

Didn't Google announce last year that Android made a billion dollars of profit?
Thanks for confirming that you're living in a fantasy world.
10 Dying U.S. Industries
I agree with you on the tone but I think that's obscuring the real point behind the article which is Fred Wilson's advice to developers. The article is trying to discredit that advice (which was to develop for Android first). It uses his stock sale to demonstrate a pattern of behavior in which Mr. Wilson demonstrates a bias against Apple because of their secrecy. The article's point is that Apple has continued to succeed despite its secrecy so he was wrong to use that as a reason to dislike the company. Hence they believe his advice shouldn't be followed.

That doesn't mean he was wrong or failed on a personal level or as an investor.
Special report: How News Corp got lost in Myspace
interesting idea - i wonder if a hadoop cluster with nodes on virtual machines installed on employee desktops make sense? seems like a lot of work to install extra drives on all machines but deploying the virtual machines as nodes might be doable. the distributed drives could have the VM installed right on it. i like the idea.
Version control systems work best when they're dealing with files made up of lines of text. Bitmap images don't have this property, but vector graphics usually do.
Nice source code, readable, and well documented. The author uses generators when it makes sense.

I try to use ipython and pipe as my shell to see how it feels.
If you like Steve McConnell's work, you should take a look at http://www.LiquidPlanner.com, we built our entire product around the notion of ranged estimation so that your schedule actually captures some of uncertainty involved in estimation.

Also if anyone wants some more good books to read we have a list of some of our favorite project management books at http://www.liquidplanner.com/recommended-reading.
Hi hammock, thanks for the comment (I'm the author). For some reason you've reminded me of the motivation factors Dan Pink talks about. I wonder if trying to commit to estimates makes our creativity degrade in the same way as paying cash bonuses?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Hylke Bons wrote a very nice git-based Dropbox alternative with focus on collaboration called SparkleShare (http://www.sparkleshare.org). It's still in beta state but a few members of the GNOME design team are already using it to collaborate.
I'm in NYC. How does one email from a profile? I dont see your email address in the /user?id= page ...
I would caution against this. If you need the data to truly be protected, don't build it yourself. Here are some questions and issues that can come up:

* Using desktop drives, when 24 are mounted in a single chassis, the vibration from those drives will cause a higher rate of failure. Desktop drives were not designed for this purpose and are not made to handle the vibration and heat created by 23 other drives in the same chassis.

* When a single drive in your 24 drive chassis fails, how do you know which one it is? On an enterprise storage array, you have the ability to flash an LED so you know which drive to replace, or you have a direct mapping (shelf 2, bay 16) in the error message. If you built it yourself, how do you know which physical drive is /dev/sdzg?

* Purchasing a large number of drives from the same batch means they are very likely to start failing around the same date. Can you handle a double disk failure without losing data? How about a triple disk failure? Do you have hot spares capability?

* Are you scrubbing your data regularly to make sure those blocks on disk aren't getting silently corrupted over time? If you never read your data or scrub your entire disk regularly, the only time you'll find out if you've lost data is during a RAID rebuild, when you'll get read errors and have complete data loss (unable to read parity from another drive, double disk failure, complete loss of RAID).

* Are you able to use RAID 6 or additional parity disk technology to protect against double disk failures? What if I want 3 parity disks to prevent against a triple disk failure?

All of these considerations are things that will come up when you're designing a storage system. These are things that enterprise storage vendors spend months with engineers designing. Failure modes should be considered. In my experience with hand built PC server storage arrays, the time you are most likely to lose data is when you have a disk failure, and are rebuilding parity from another disk. If you have many disks from the same batch, a rebuild can stress the disks more than normal, and cause a second disk to fail. This is why RAID 6 is becoming more and more popular.

I would caution you to consider that cheap hand built storage usually ends up expensive in the long run, especially when you lose data that you thought was protected.
The SEC rules are pretty vague, so it's hard to say how much is enough information. They did ask Apple for more information though, which lends me to believe that they're more on the "disclosure is better" side. Apple's board of directors was also not amused by Jobs' policy of not disclosing his medical issues (Jerry York told the WSJ that he almost resigned after hearing the news but didn't so as to not contribute to the media drama).
http://feefighters.com
We're in the West Loop, at http://sandboxindustries.com/. Been around for a couple of years. Raised a note a year ago and a seed round a couple of months ago. Things are going great.
no. bad rumor.
When comparing numbers, did you normalize by time? Facebook places has not been around for nearly as long, so even if they have more people who use the service regularly at those venues, it wouldn't show up in the analysis.

Even so, i find this work interesting, thanks for the data!
I'd definitely go with 99Designs for Interior Design.

Buy Local Delivery Service also seems marketable though, however it wouldn't be so much as a lifestyle business.
I think I am in the minority in that I don't really care about being rich in the 'have millions of dollars' sense.

I am lazy and hate to do have to do things to maintain my life.

People don't build social apps because they love chatrooms and twitter feeds, they build them because they like the thrill of being successful and getting paid.

If I had a steady income stream of 50k a year (adjusted for inflation over time) I would probably never try and make money.. I'd spend my time surfing and disc golfing and writing fibonnaci generators in the shakespeare programming language.

However, that's not the case. Instead I am happy with the compromise of trading my time for rates that I would have considered absurdly high just a couple years ago while making low effort hail mary's at passive income streams.
Do we know if there is a difference in perception by the respondent if the scale is numerical? A scale of 1-5 might be seen as having different intervals than a scale whose range is strongly-disagree -- strongly agree.
Take a deep breath. Realize that your startup will consume you so look to surround yourself with 1) people that you can get advice from 2) people who you can use for feedback and 3) if it requires more than just yourself, so to find a team to work with.

Jumping from something stable into the unknown is probably the hardest in my opinion. The road ahead is going to at times seem unclear, just remember to put together a plan of being able to accomplish something, anything towards bringing your idea to reality.
KirinDave's point is that there is no "idea." If the groups are disjoint, there's no conspiracy, no way for them to interact with each other. If you and your group avoid the predators, then you will thrive. It doesn't matter that another group does not. Evolution happens at the level of genes, not groups.
If you happen to be a Vim user, and in the mood to try a bleeding-edge project, you might find this nascent Org-mode clone interesting:

https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3342
How Fred Wilson Built an Amazing Community at avc.com
Clever movie, great quote.
No kidding: As a result of the quality of Italian dubbers, Italians do not see anything unusual in Keanu Reeves acting skills. I brought this up in conversation multiple times a few weeks ago in Italy near Bologna. They think he can act.
Also - check out this list:
http://www.quora.com/What-tech-startups-are-there-in-Chicago
I'm the author of the article of this post.

I disagree with the idea that a game is all about the pop on the first day of release. Probably for console games, but definitely not for web games. Web games are services and can improve dramatically over time.

You don't HAVE TO get the same users to try it again. There are always tonnes of new users on the internet :)
Pixel Proliferation: A Toolset For Managing Screen Resolutions
It was revealed [the week of March 9th] that Rovio's hit mobile title Angry Birds cost only $140k to create and has already generated an estimated $70 million.

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/angry-birds-one-of-the-mo...
I don't think we could disagree more completely about basically everything.
as I understand it, that vote counts more than once based on your karma.

Unless there's been a recent change, each vote has the same weight unless it triggers voting ring detection.
Jean-Louis Borloo, who at some point in time was rumored to be the next Prime Minister of France, just launched (today) a new political formation, called "Alliance Républicaine, Sociale et Ecologique".

It doesn't really mean anything, but it spells: ARSE.

It's going to be fun when he shows his business card to British journalists...?

If you don't believe it (I couldn't), see:

http://www.lecentrisme.com/2011/04/actualites-du-centre-jean...
Time estimations is an industrial way of thinking applied to a post-industrial world.

In the post industrial world time isn't the problem but rather project definition and scoping.

In the industrial world the problem was already solved (machine was built, market often established and output depended on a few factors that could be adjusted. Need more output add more of X)

In the post industrial world every project is about problem solving and scoping.

To put it into comparison.

If we apply post-industrial thinking to an industrial world. It means that each time a product needed to be done if not the factory, then the machines would have to be developed.

It will take many many years before time estimation will die, but it will happen.
These points seem trivial and obvious. I would be much more curious to see performance comparisons, congruent external packages (what is the 'devise' analog in groovy) and how might your solution to the same problem differ in each framework.
> #2 Ruby forces you to learn "the ruby way". For folks who are only used to java, seeing ruby code is like...seeing another language.

This is hardly a point of difference between any 2 languages/frameworks.
Snoggle Media launch with new Ajax/CSS3 Layout
Via Google: http://www.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upl...

Would you be able to say if this PDF is the same as the $40 book on Amazon? It is freely available on Stanford's site.
I had a negotiation completely implode using glassdoor and payscale along with "insider" info on salaries at a company.

But I had naively given a complete salary history when asked early in the process. Since I was currently working for less than I had earned in years (academic/research job), it turned out that their expectation was that I would leave for 3% to 5% over my current base.

They were pretty perplexed when I refused to consider anything less than my previous industry base (which was below an offer I had in hand from other sources and slightly below market rates in my area).
Robo-warship sub hunter: Free Darpa crowdsauce game
"I am lazy and hate to do have to do things to maintain my life."
Haha! I thought I was the only one... I agreed with you til your last sentence. I'm a fan of minimalist living and so I've made it work for me. I haven't really had to make that same compromise you're talking about just yet.
I wanted to brush up on my math with a goal of shoring up fundamentals and understanding probability and statistics (not just formulaic solving). I was not sure where to start, so I have decided to start by practicing the fundamentals. Addition and so on. Khan Academy has that covered. As of today they have 'practices' that go from basic addition all the way through simple differentiation. Most important, if you run into problems with an exercise set, they have video links to the topic you are practicing. Once you have watched the video and understand the concepts, you can come back to the practice set. (RUPPPL - read understand practice practice practice loop)

You should be able to run through the set without much effort, but I think there is value in doing these simpler exercises. It establishes routine and steeps the mind for greater challenges.

I will likely add some permutation & combination stuff to my 'course work' before I go on to my eventual goal of understanding prob & stats. Getting exercise for these higher level topics will be a challenge.
i feel like this is an interesting step in the right direction

but... what happens if i want to read, process and write a log message....? thats three different bloom blocks that require 2 partial orderings.

instead of totally unordering everything, id rather have the ability to declaratively order functions for a request, where a function is a typical sequenced set of operations.

their examples arent particularly helpful, looks like most of these bloom blocks are single lines...
The Ethics (or not) of Massive Government Surveillance
Would I accept if someone offered to pay me that kind of money? Sure. Would I take up a line of work I hate to earn it? No, thanks. I work to live, not the other way around.
"Note that positive doesn't mean affirming groupthink, or karma whoring (which is hard here but looks possible) but adding to the conversation."

That's simply not true. There are plenty of examples of people getting downvoted for having a contrary viewpoint. Groupthink is alive and well on HN.
Petty corruption and backhanders are one thing.

Institutionalized, legitimized corruption is a different thing entirely, and yes it's at a new level these days. See Citizens United. See the recent decision allowing corporations to run ads in elections. (they broke the spending record in a MIDTERM in 2010).
I'm with you - I want to bank roll 20 years of doing whatever I want to do as well but I just can't find the motivation to do the day-to-day for the payoff that would come so late in life. I'm afraid the part of my life that matters (my prime years basically) most will be gone before I'm even ready to relax.
What you describe is, in essence, iterative development:
Producing quick prototype and then fix it until it satisfies production needs.
In the analogy, the catfish are used to make the cod more salable when they are killed and eaten. A hard "inspirational" quote to nuzzle up to.
How so? I've been using Passenger on my dev machine for over a year now. The original reason I installed Passenger on my dev machine was exactly because of how easy it was to get SSL and subdomains working; the app I was working on at the time had 100% SSL user logins, each routed to their own subdomains.
It's twofold:

1. (x)diffs of binary files are usually more expensive than text files.

For instance, consider a git-tracked bitmap image where you apply a global filter. If you add the revised image, and every pixel was touched, this will usually result in a large diff. So, git will either store the large diff, or the modified file completely.

If you, on the other hand use SVG with filter effects, the application of a filter will just add a few lines of text to an SVG file. This gives a small diff, meaning that the object can be stored compactly.

2. In the SVG scenario, you could easily spot the changes between both revisions of the image with a 'git diff' (since both files are plain-text). In the bitmap scenario, you can only spot the differences visually.
There's also:

http://www.builditwith.me/

http://collabfinder.com/

http://www.interhoods.org/ (currently in 7 cities)
ADD = Attention Deficit Disorder
Hi @kenjackson, this is Xavier here. How do you propose to validate this on the Netflix dataset? It is clear that you cannot use RMSE to compare to other existing approaches, right? The way to go would be to propose a different success measure (i.e. ranking based) and measure how different algorithm perform. And then validate this on users to prove that optimizing RMSE is not as useful.

If you give me a few months, I might get there. But this is the reason I wrote a blog post and not a paper ;-)
That isn't a list of all of the orgs, it's a list of all of the promotions. Marissa Mayer isn't under any of those people, she just didn't get promotion (having already gotten one recently). She's over location.
Ask HN: just found a big competitor for my niche. What do I do? 
I have been talking with some local martial arts studios about building tracking software for their businesses using a SaaS model. As part of the research process I stumbled across this company:

http://www.mindbodyonline.com/
http://www.inc.com/inc5000/profile/mindbody

On one hand I feel like my solution will be a better fit for my customers, but this company provides a very compelling and similar solution that is already built.

Has anyone been in a similar situation? How did you handle talking to customers about the competitor to learn how you could do a better job?
A game like this is truly innovative and amazing. It is so interesting to throw people into a world and see what they do first and what they build (how they behave). I also consider this a drug cuz its highly addictive!!
I don't know of any libertarians that think fraud should be legal. The doctrine of "caveat emptor" also makes an exemption for fraud.
As someone who has had a very variable income during her adult life (by a factor of 10x), I can't say I was much happier making a ton of money. In fact, I did it all wrong, and I was pretty miserable at times.

After a certain income level, I prefer to exchange money for free time. At this point in my life, I just sort of naturally live the Millionaire Next Door lifestyle, and there's only so many Chipotle meals and Threadless t-shirts I want to buy.

I learned the hard way (lots of dollars spent) that I prefer choosing my own projects, schedule, and interests to flying first class and buying designer clothes. It turns out that spending a lot of money is very stressful and empty for me. I was always worried about getting my money's worth and dismayed that nothing was as cool as I expected.
You could just map 5 to something farther away, like 6. In fact, this is how most ordinal inference techniques work anyways: by taking an interval method and learning cutoffs for your ordered categories. Learning more parameters comes with a big cost though, which is why in practice the cutoffs are often fixed from the get-go. Obviously, ordinal methods have been tried in the literature. There is a reason they are not used in practice though, and that's because the trade-off (being harder to learn vs modelling the data more accurately) is not favorable.
Emacs could be a stumbling block, but you don't need to learn lisp to use org mode. I initially ran into the same problem of getting to the point where I could follow a tutorial, so here's a 2 minute quick start. The next paragraph guides you through making your first org outline, and should leave you with the tip of the iceberg and a snorkel.

Once you have org installed, hit "Control-x f" to open/create a file, and name one "orgtest.org". Type "* first header" -- if it doesn't turn blue, type "alt-x org-mode" to turn on org-mode. Now type "alt-enter", then hit tab a few times -- it should change the number of stars (level of indentation). Leave it with two stars. Type "take dog to park" on that line, now hit "control-c control-t" several times. It should cycle through a todo/done tag. Hit a regular enter this time, and type "remember your frisbee". Type "control-c control-s"; a calender should pop up, click on tomorrow's date. Now type shift-tab a few times and watch the outline fold/unfold.

Note that the date line and TODO tag are plain text, as is the entire .org file. It could be helpful to think of org-mode as a code editor and interpreter for org markup.

I believe the above should take you to the point where you can follow org-mode tutorials and reference material, although if you decide to really dive in you should probably take some time to learn emacs as well.
I think that one of the major problems people have when giving estimates is that developers realize there is a lot of uncertainty add in all of the "'making $#@! up' fudge factors, technical hurdles, cogitation and exploration time, etc.", and then managers mentally strip it out.

The frustrating thing is that it means the uncertainty gets lost, and people just end of with a number, which managers may treat a fact, not an estimate. That's why I think it's a really good idea to give a range including both a low and a high estimate so you can let people know: "If everything goes right, it might take two hours", but warn them that: "It could take 4 days". Once people have that kind of information, they can make much more resilient plans.

That's why we always tell our CEO that it will take 2-4 hours or 4h-5d, and let me tell you, he appreciates knowing when we don't know, because a layer of false certainty is removed.
Five Techniques To Rebound from Startup Failure
Because not all of them read Agile Estimating and Planning[1]

[1] http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/books/1-agile-estimating...
There's another way as well; specify a range of time within which you expect the task to be completed. This also communicates your uncertainty about the estimate at the same time.
There's a company called Cleversafe.(com|org) that makes a product that uses dispersed storage. So in one scenario, you split a block of data up into 8 chunks and store them on separate servers. Only 5 of those servers are needed to reconstruct the data. It has better reliability than RAID and needs fewer disks.

You can either access the data over http as files, or it can be a block store accessible with iSCSI.

They have a commercial product (a colleague of mine is a reseller, I can introduce you if you want), and also an open source version if you want to build the servers yourself.
The word with the most forms, also the longest word in the world is the English 'strawberry'.

strawberry
strawberry-less
strawberry-less-ness
strawberry-less-ness-less
strawberry-less-ness-less-ness
.
.
.
∞
Pinpointing the Internet's birthday
We try to get to the bottom of the Internet anniversary confustion and see where it all began
From the article:

>Women in India are sometimes permitted, even encouraged, to “marry up” into a higher income bracket or caste, so richer men find it easier to get a bride.
Unpredictability is progress?