skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dropbox's core competency isn't cloud storage, it's continuous client syncing. If anything, moving towards not using the local file system at all hurts Dropbox, as they lose the part of their service that makes them special - syncing all files locally.

On top of that, I can't imagine removing a local file system would work as a general purpose solution. By the time network bandwidth catches up to today's bus speeds (probably years away), the new bus speeds will be that much faster, and that's what people will want. Managing files locally may be a pain, but that's a UI issue. Users want native performance. Cloud files are a leaky abstraction. Dropbox gives you local files and abstracts away cloud storage and syncing. That's the way to do it.
Yes (for adoption) and no (for having server support).

But those are two very different problems ;)
I say well done to Notch. I am not a fan of Minecraft but I think he has done a great job in how he has managed the business and development. He has been very open, never promised too much and kept to his word in continuing development. He has built up a lot of respect from the gaming community and people such as myself as a person who has integrity. I wish him all the best in the future with Minecraft and any other ideas he has. I like the way he has done things so far and I have no doubt if he continues what he is doing he will continue to be successful. I just hope he doesn't let the money change him and he just ditch Minecraft after it hits 1.0 or sells it off. I highly doubt he will though.
And I say informed opinion beats uninformed opinion no matter where the person is.
I sometimes wish I could downvote submissions if for no other reason than to try and clear out faster the submissions that really have nothing to do with HN (eg certain pure politics posts). I'd rather HN not turn into an ideological battleground.

As for comments, I don't downvote if I disagree with something. I will downvote comments that make huge and important factual errors or are rude or otherwise obnoxious.

What I actually find a bit more irritating is that someone will come up with a well reasoned comment with links covering say 6-8 paragraphs and get 2 votes. Someone will correct them on a minor and largely irrelevant point and get 18 upvotes.
Üzlethelyiség, Üzlethelyiségek Miskolcon
On another note regarding Finnish language:

The word-forms of the Finnish noun kauppa 'shop' (N=2,253), generated automatically by Fred Karlsson

http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/genkau2.html
A couple of guesses. They probably have a lot more cat5/cat6 around than 3-conductor 12 gauge copper wire (not sure if it is cheaper by the foot).

Also, the network switches can output the PoE, so maybe it is easier to wire into/from the racks or overhead than a seperate AC line with conduit.

Labor installation and material costs may be less.

Also, since it is DC, and not an AC lighting source, interference may be less (just a guess).

And as you mentioned, the lighting as instrumentation.
By transition i mean being more than storage solutions. Its computational network power, location independance,security etc. all the things related to cloud. You remember SETI project? Wouldn't be great if something is already integrated within.

I don't see any bad in company-only tunnel visions as long as it drives innovation.
I hate it when the scrollbar extends while scrolling. Please don't do that.
In my 3 + years here I have never downvoted except by accidentally clicking the link. I do not think downvotes add any value whatsoever.
The web site he is promoting is very creepy.
Re "environmental contributions", that was part of the discussion, but thinking about it - estimating total effort and elapsed calendar time are very different!
Check Peldi's talk from Business of Software 2010 http://blogs.balsamiq.com/peldi/2011/03/13/bos2010/
tl;dr Stop worrying , start developing.
Trade Minister Says That Releasing IP Enforcement TPP Treaty Text Problematic
Window 7 finally matches XP marketshare in the USA
Uruguay did not have enough data to be listed, but the years I took the Cambridge and Oxford language tests (FCE, Proficiency, etc.), Uruguayans were in the top spots (the #1 overall got a scholarship to Oxford, and she was Uruguayan).

Of course, the demographics very much the same as Argentina's so it wouldn't be a big difference (we're not an Argentinian province by political accident and meddling by Britain - not that we mind :) ).
I've been running the AeroFS beta for a couple of weeks and am very happy with it.

Nothing high volume or stressful, but it has done what it said it would quickly and efficiently, and the client even worked behind the moderately aggressive filters we have at work.
>the languages of the top 5 countries have a ridiculously small speaking population

Dutch has over twenty million native speakers, Swedish has ten million. That is not ridiculously small. Even Norwegian's four and a half million is, on a global scale, very respectable. To say nothing of the fact that the number of "translated sources" is not a function of the number of speakers, but of the wealth of the country and the spread of written culture (which is very high in all of these cases).
Ender.js - The open submodule library
You would think. But the article says You might have thought that scarcity would lead to girls being valued more highly, but this is not happening.
Singapore wasn't in the study because English is Singapore's first language. (Article mistakenly says that the reason is because it's too small.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore
I don't like the tone of the article. They include a chart which seems to indicate "Fred Wilson is an idiot", but if you read Wilson's blog his decision had nothing to do with him being bearish on Apple's growth potential. It had nothing to do with iPhone vs. Android. It was because Apple was not being forward with investors about Jobs. That's a legit reason to pull out of company, regardless of how things have played out since. The article acknowledges this to a degree but has an overall tone of "Fred Wilson failed".
No, if I use * with no space it doesn't show.
This basically turns your android phone into an overpowered arduino which runs java. Genius. I can see some brilliant hacks coming from this.

Pre-order here: http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10585 ($49.99)
MongoDB on Amazon Web Services
> and also feasible given the prevalence of vector graphics.

As a designer who has had git on his "To Learn" list for way too long, can you explain what you mean by this?
Just for counterpoint: it would be easy for new users to figure out what a good post is by reading and paying attention to the scores they get. One gets a sense for what makes one a -4, another a mere zero, or some other a +47.
Abstain from downvoting? I've in fact adopted the tactic of agressive downvoting.

Spurious logic? Downvote. Personal attack? Downvote. Comment scored higher than I feel it should? Downvote. Metadiscussion? Downvote.

I lurk on the new comments page and ruthlessly wield my downvoting power like a foul-tempered monarch. If you're one of those people whining, "Why was I downvoted?" -- well it was probably me. And I'll downvote your whining too, and anyone who replies to your whining, and anyone who whines about whining, and I'll downvote your family and kids too.

Note that if you downvote too much, the votes aren't counted, so you have to upvote once in a while too.

I flagged this Poll too. Take that, Internet.
This is common thinking with everyone.

My parents thought I should rather be a janitor, or maybe a shop mechanic than a developer because it would be "good, steady work" and I wouldn't have to move away to find a job. Utterly stupid, even the people I worked with on a paving crew said programing was a better career than anything else. Remember, one of the arguments against not having children is "who will take care of you when you're old?"

But on your point about "emancipation of the future generation." There will never be such a thing, due to the inherent selfishness of a population. This is why adoption is not a big deal: even if it's not you're genes, it's still your mores being instilled on the next generation of your tribe. Which is why the fear of racial shift is so idiotic: in fifty years we Americans will still be loud, stupid jerks no matter what our skin color.
You might have jumped the gun a little bit. But what's done is done so now you have to put your head down and barrel through it. I would take gspyrou's advice, just get to work.
I have a similar problem actually.

In high school and even the first year of university I was pretty much a natural at math. I'd been doing algebra and trigonometry since I was 10, calculus since I was 13 and started on differential equations at 15.

Not that this made me any kind of child prodigy mind you but it was a fairly isolating experience because my first 18 years took places in isolated towns with <15,000 people so I just didn't come across other people like me or with similar interests. But I digress...

The second year of university maths bored me senseless and it sucked all the fun out of maths for me. Three hour proofs, numerical methods (in particular) and so on. So I stopped doing it and just did CS instead (originally I'd been intending some kind of double major equivalent).

Having not used calculus (for example) for years I can still remember how to derive/integrate, etc. So I retain a decent part of what I knew (or so it seems). But the one area I suffer in, largely because I never got that far, is in deciphering academic papers. This applies to CS too, which is where it's a pain.

I like dealing with actual code rather than abstract ideas put in text (and the vaguest of algorithms that you can't just take an implement, or at least I can't).

So my situation isn't identical to yours but I really would like to know how I could improve my maths and CS in this area.
The Virus That Blocks Itself
The prediction context is somewhat different than the analysis context, I think. For predictive recommender systems, the most relevant part of this analysis is the critique of error measures. It may well be that MSE is not an error measure that aligns with the system's actual accuracy goals (e.g. something like perceived quality of the recommendations).

When it comes down to it, the end goal is just to predict whether someone would like something, and/or present them a list of the things you are most certain they'd like. In the analysis context (as with much of HCI), the scales are being used to draw qualitative conclusions about tasks and preferences, so it makes sense to directly attack erroneous modeling and assumptions, because it can lead to wrong conclusions. But for prediction, erroneous modeling only really matters to the extent that it means we're: 1) optimizing the wrong thing; or 2) doing optimization suboptimally.

#1 is important to get right, but #2 is more of a "whatever works" sort of thing, and we even have fairly good automatic methods for deciding. If treating ratings as numerical data empirically leads to good predictions, then it's fine to do; if not, then it's best avoided. Many recent systems avoid even having a human make those kinds of decisions, by throwing in a giant bag of possible ways of slicing the data, and then handing off the decision about which of them to use, and how to weight them, to an ensemble method. Iirc, that's what the winning Netflix-prize entry was like.
Why do VOIP apps on both platforms lack bluetooth support? I think that's a more interesting question to ask for mobile "phone" OSes.
Show HN: Comparing checkin counts from Foursquare and Facebook Places
Peter Drucker has claimed the lack of Middle Managers to be responsible for the early declines of Ford and Edison Electric Company. Their presence itself isn't a failure, it's their role and management.
I find it really hard to understand why TIOBE keeps being brought up as an authorative source when time and time again people demonstrate its inaccuracy. Could it be just because there's no serious alternative?

Has anyone considered a more serious method of comparing programming language popularity?
The author refers to Don Reinertsen who is a proponent of kanban in software development. For a brief explanation of kanban and how it can help improve estimation, see: http://flow.io/how-kanban-can-help-you-increase-your-teams-c...
Things get murky though, when we're discussing something so inherently culture & values based like where to draw the line with film classification.
QR codes or something like it will eventually be the way Dwolla and Paypal do mobile-to-mobile transactions. I've thought of a mock up of just using ONLY QR-like codes to transfer money between two people in the same room, it would be fast and easy and assuming you used your Dwolla pin as you confirmed the amount you were spending/charging, it would work perfectly.
My Twitter/OAuth code stopped working last night...
HN - I performed a quick analysis of checkin counts for different kinds of businesses on both Foursquare and Facebook places. Also, looked at sheer number of places in their respective databases. Mostly obvious conclusions, Foursquare has approx 10x the venues and 10x the number of checkins but it does vary quite a bit depending on category of business and which city you look at.
Fred Wilson is an investor and investors are expected to have at least somewhat of an understanding of a company's outlook and make investments accordingly (although Fred invests in private, not public, companies). As such, it's his job to invest based on fundamentals and deliver solid returns for his portfolio.
Apple not being forward with investors about Jobs turned out to not be a good reason to dump the stock. Apple has never been very open about anything - that is the culture of the company and it's no secret (no pun).
Twitter hasn't been very forthcoming with people who develop for it's platform - having abandoned a chunk of them recently. Not to mention there's been a lot of shuffling in management. Will Fred dump his holdings in Twitter?
Bing is not really providing anything more than google's service. It only shows "big company's" routine of trying to drive others out of business. Death for Bing.
For posterity's sake, when would have been the right time to leave? Keep in mind that the nature of my previous work is such that I did not have spare time on nights/weekends to continue working -- hence I just cut the umbilical cord :)
because they actually try to give truthful answers, instead of making up numbers like everyone else.
> Asian languages are rather "grammar-less" (not that such a thing is technically possible), at least compared to Indo-European languages.

Interesting you should say this, given that Mandarin (for example) has nearly the same grammar as English as far as word order and lack of a case system goes: Mandarin words, unlike words in French and German, aren't changed based on their role in the sentence, and Mandarin words don't have grammatical gender. English happens to be radically unlike most Indo-European languages in precisely the ways that make it fairly similar to Mandarin.

> While English grammar is far more streamlined

All languages have the same amount of grammar, distributed differently. (It's like a waterbed: Push the lump down here and it springs up there.) English does more with word order and context than German, for example.

> The phenomes used in each language seem like the least important part.

Heh. Try saying that when you have to hear and reproduce a vowel sound that sounds like a warped tape, or a consonant that sounds like the speaker is rubbing gravel together in the back of his throat.

> Lastly, it's worth pointing out that there is as much variety in Asian languages as Indo-European languages.

And in Africa. And in the Americas. And so on.
That visual charger is slick.

A little OT, but does anyone understand why there aren't usb-to-ethernet adapters for android devices? I have an environment where I cannot use wifi but want network connectivity.
Full Text Search on Heroku – Tender Lovemaking
NZ does have a major point of difference from the US - the courts will often "award" the costs of the case from a successful defendant to the originator.

This tends to discourage abuse of the legal system for intimidation, as there is a risk it will backfire on you and you will end up paying for all lawyers involved.
I think the valid free-market response is ultimately "caveat emptor". Your proposed solution violates the NAP, which most libertarians hold as axiomatic.
I do like working in the dark, but I live in a place where sunshine is abundant.
elapsed calendar time and total effort are often the same in a customer's mind. Time is actually money.
I think that's one of the objectives of this article; provide that alternate perspective.

I thought that Bing was the true turning point as well, but I never gave Live Search a fair chance then, and I don't think many others did either.

To me, it looks like the author saw Bing/Live Search as something truly transformational within Microsoft. Public perception was that Live was a failure. But if I understand currently, the team was easily beating internal estimates extremely fast . For one reason or another there was a team reorganization that coincided with the PowerSet acquisition and the Bing rebrand. While there was a jump in market share, the foundation of the Bing team was taken out from under them and replaced with MS status quo.

Bing's death isn't a result of their success or failure as a search engine. Bing's death refers to the loss of something that could have made a difference in Microsoft, internally. The death of a team that could have done something truly great , (EDIT: as said by Cicero, when they were at their peak).
I think no one can estimate time, not just developers.
What's the difference between this and just using github? I think it's just the daemon-ness of dropbox. It would be cool to have something similar for arbitrary git repos that runs 'git fetch' periodically in the background. (or something fancier, if you want to scale it out) That keeps the conflict management at the git level, and you aren't keeping history of history anymore.
I prefer to take my advice from someone who has demonstrated the ability to repeatedly run projects and estimate them in advance to surprisingly high accuracy. I therefore recommend Software Estimation by Steve McConnell, available at http://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Pract....
Ask YC: how many of you want to be rich?
I know everyone says that to succeed as an entrepreneur you have to do it because it's what you love, not because you seek monetary wealth. I agree, to the extent that doing it because you love it has to be your primary motivator. but I also see nothing wrong with wanting to be rich, as long as you recognize it's a side effect of a very successful business. yet I feel like this sort of brazen aspiration is stigmatized. I know that a multi-million dollar payday or billion dollar valuation is a huge long shot, but to me shooting for it is part of the excitement of creating a business.

does anyone here consciously want to make millions? is some degree of megalomania an asset in the tech startup world?
Video: Ruby Hashes
The complexity of the formula seems to match the complexity of the problem: three lists of decreasing integers matching the three groups, multiplied/divided as appropriate.

The hard bit is having the intuition to see that this is right, which is just what Bill Dubuque's answer goes on about in the linked article.
That's not necessarily a change in the codebase, that could be the system learning from associations in queries and results it gets over time (something I know Google does and has for years, at least).
Good post Ash (good to see the discussion being consolidated)

IMHO - it's usually due to the lack of "up front planning" by Managers / Analysts.

If you compare building software to more general "building endeavors" (for example building the Olympic stadium) then, IMHO, developers are really the "construction workers" (the people actually doing the work). However no intelligent Olympic committee would countenance starting work without (for example) an architect making an incredibly detailed plan (and even a working replica model).

IMHO the problem we suffer from as developers is most often diving in too fast because:
a) we're the construction workers
b) when we do use Architects they are "construction workers too" (as opposed to being a trained with 'different but complimentary skills - it would be hard to imagine Sir Norman Foster laying bricks)
This is why Kanban and its focus on lead time is more valuable than Scrum and its focus on velocity, IMO.
Genexus the Uruguayan Genexus? I've never thought this will be ever mentioned in HN :D
I don't see any reason why it wouldn't. I do plan to test that later today though.
I wonder if it's possible to assign a weight to each of the possible scores to correct for the "perceived" distance so you can still use all these existing tools in a statistical valid way.

Also, this observation could be interpreted a bit differently:

> The probability that a user changes her rating between 2 and 3 is almost 0.35 while the probability she changes between 4 and 5 goes down to almost 0.1. This is a clear indication that users perceive that the distance between a 2 and a 3 is much lower than between a 4 and a 5.

It seems a bit counter intuitive that the distance between 3 (neutral) and 4 (positive) is smaller then 4 and 5 (very positive). You could also interpret this differently. When a user changes his mind, he has to change his mind in such a way that the difference is significant enough to also change the review (is the review now a little bit wrong or very wrong). This means that he might actually see the difference between 3 and 4 as larger then 4 and 5, large enough for him/her to change the review. This effect is dampened the amount of time the user actually changes his mind this way. If you look at it in that way then the amount of pairwise inconsistencies are the wrong way to measure the distance between these ordinal categories in this particular case, because there actually might be two mechanisms that cancel each other out.
Yea the Base 64 export is what caught my attention.
Ver La Fuerza del Destino Capitulo 20
Of course, it can be effectively argued that standards bodies can be non-profit rather than government. A truly free market and "regulation" are not at all mutually exclusive.
Citation needed.

I think maybe you're basing your statement on a healthy dose of sampling bias.
I just installed it, apart from the fact that it gave me an "AeroFS Drive" I can't remove (I suspect the older version installed this but the new one deprecated it) and the fact that I can't sync any two arbitrary folders, it looks perfect.
Didn't get into YC? Up your funding odds with the MassChallenge
May be because software development is a creative process or the same reason why Artists won't tell you how long they will take to finish a painting or Authors repeatedly miss publisher deadline for books.
Here comes the HN circlejerk about how we should all be felatiating him because he made a profit, who gives a fuck about ethics.
TLS is just a layer, which replaces `telnet` with `openssl s_client`.
Similarly burned-out, I'm having trouble caring about design: learning about how it interacts with other disciplines and practicing the skill on these issues, rather than just practicing design itself, is essential. Design, like math, is a problem-solving application and there's definitely a "feel" that can be lost.

These solutions can definitely be abstracted out to other areas, but really--what part of math can't?
btilly, thanks for the reference to this. I've added it to my Goodreads list.