skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, but if your instance count goes over 1 for a time, your site will spend an equal amount of time down, presumably.
Productivity, billable hours, and expert craftsmen
So...Google appears to have created an app platform that no one wants to install apps on. Great.
Nope. Maybe once JRuby supports select() properly.
Do you even know who Christopher Soghoian is?
I have done some work with RAAMs and other simple recurrent network based methods. It's terribly tedious, you can hardly represent more than five symbols or so.

I did my Bachelor's thesis on related techniques (pressing variable length strings into fixed sized vectors to deal with neural nets - URL below) - I can only say pertaining to neural networks that the decoding capabilities of NNs are severly limited. I actually developed a Jordan Network with a conventional additive sigmoid NN that could encode/decode more than 40 symbols! The technique was based on Cantor coding, but I had to set the weights by hand and could not retrain without losing performance (unstable fixed point attractor of Backpropagation through Time) - i.e. it's kind of a dirty hack.

It's also really hard to adapt parameters for sufficiently large nets (so my idea is that you need huge nets to represent language). In order to deal with this complexity limitation I've also looked into reservoir computing style networks (Echo State Networks) which use a large randomly initialized network paired with a linear learned network. ESNs may be good at modelling many kinds of temporal dynamics, but their capacity to represent relations seems rather limited as well.

So making an arbitrary length string walk into a vector may sound attractive, but either (a) don't expect to be able to decode it using conventional NNs or (b) don't expect to acheive compression, i.e. blowing up your representation may help (cf LVQ nets) and using compressing techniques such as Hinton's deep belief networks won't.

http://gpickard.wordpress.com/2008/11/11/well-heres-my-actua...
Apple baby Aza Raskin on the secrets of great User Interface
In other news, undisclosed client employs Chiat\Day to push anti-Microsoft message over a period of one decade.
99% of my apps require 0 permissions. I really believe that a lot of my success comes from this.

I never download anything that requires anything other than the Internet permission, maybe Location, and sometimes SD Card modifications (though I hate that one too).

Some of my competitors that are completely free ask for phone identity, contacts, etc, and yet they are soaring to the tops of the ranks.

People are downloading anything, and not worrying about anything.

Unfortunately, the average user still has the mentality of "So, I have nothing on here they can get". Which is obviously idiotic as the hacker will use YOUR phone to do something illegal possibly. I don't know why people don't get this???????
This will be a HUGE pricing increase.

My applications are heavily optimized for low CPU usage, but now they removed CPU usage based charging and added a bunch of new charges that I haven't optimized for. I did some initial calculations and basically unless I do some major redesigning I will face a 61x price increase. Based on chatting with some other GAE users, I can confirm that such huge price increases aren't limited to just me.

This is quite ridiculous. I feel like I am part of a bait-n-switch scam.
So 60+ out of how many?

I must admit. I cant wait to hear the types of startups that made the cut this time. It would be incredible to know (or scary as hell) to find out if any of them are in essence, similar to what we want to do (or are in the process of doing).

YC has made it possible for some really cool technologies come to the marketplace. And YC has inspired many like me to get off our collective asses to chase our dreams. Even if what I am currently building does not amount to a whole lot, the essays of PG has sure inspired me and will in turn inspire a lot many more who I will be sure to recommend it to.
GTD for the lazy.
Well, I've had millions of downloads of my apps, so not exactly "no one".
Hack for Egypt: Connecting Democracy Activists with Programmers
I got that in Opera but not in Chrome. The button was also a different color.
Two issues I see here:

1. Ultimately, there's a fairly finite universe of cars that meet your criteria, even if you consider the much wider used market. If you pick, say, an EVO MR, how do you pick who gets the prize when multiple people would have suggested it?

2. We ran into this a lot on our automotive board. Someone says 'I want RWD, MT, 4 doors, under $35k' and got a bunch of answers.

But cars are ultimately pretty personal - e.g. I hate VW's interiors, but many love them. Since you've got to go look at them personally, at best you're narrowing down the universe of things to go check out. Unless you're committing to buy the one that gets the most votes.

Could be interesting collect the responses, graph them, and run some analysis on how vocal each brand's fan community is.
Could You please specify if there are undesirable mails in the ton of mails you get or if you are just saturated of information ? Suggesting as a solution to retry sending mail again and again will worsen the problem. You'll get echos in addition to signal.

Maybe people in your situation should use a pull method (~on demand messages) using a web service for this purpose. People who want to get in touch with you see the number of messages in the queue and you may pushback (temporarily suspending message submission) and provide priority to users. They'll see their queue position and eventully some feedback once processed tldr, not understood, contact me @xxx, ...
While I would never hope for or wish unhappiness on some one, I'm afraid the next punchline to this joke is an update in the future in which the thanks line is gone (presumably for his ex-wife).
GagaVille: Zynga And Lady Gaga Announce Major Partnership
My anecdotal evidence agrees - I was a passenger in a Ridgeline that hit a parked (empty) bus at 45mph, everyone walked away with minor bruising.
Code Fitness - Visualize java classes to identify complexity
Before refactoring a class, package or library weak spots have to be identified. There are many code analysis tools providing insight, hints and alerts as to where someone should focus.
Is Jason Calacanis The Best Talk Show Host on TV Today?
In the article he mentions that MySQL still uses MyISAM for temporary tables, which were being created by the query he was running (which, granted, did SELECT * which is usually a bad idea). If the size of the temporary table was the cause of slowness, wouldn't it affect InnoDB and MyISAM tables equally?
At least with respect to grades in school, this is the same concept as Robert Pirsig discussed in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".
Good point. Cheers.
In the Indian startup I hear of a new incubator/accelerator every few month. Of course, they don't give any money and yes they want equity. Its the hottest scam it seems these days.
no python for free version? WTF
Yes, I feel naked for telling them every useful insight we had about our project.
Andy Rubin On Android’s Openness: Light On Community, Heavy On Open Source
Earthquake In Memphis And The Mississippi Flood - Memphis Travel | Examiner.com
I suggest being as specific as possible. Seeking Sponsorship for [whatever]. Otherwise, it seems to comes off as an impersonal, mass-bcc'ed email, spammed to like a thousand email addresses.
What is the point of down-voting the above comment? You partake in petty, gratuitously punitive, anti-social behavior—to what end? Aside from the hard-on you get from your meaningless exercise of illusory power, does it amount to anything? You might as well go to my comment history and down-vote every comment I've ever made, if you're so confident in the righteousness of your cause.

And a single quasi-repetition of something doesn't make for repetitiveness.
> Sure. Speak French without learning French. Or maybe learn French by reading a picture book.

That's basically the approach Rosetta Stone takes, and it works fairly well.
The ratio of Bitcoin speculation to trade is very high; it's less a currency than a peer-to-peer gambling system, the economic equivalent of a penny stock that is being repeatedly pumped and dumped. If you're a merchant, you certainly don't want to be holding Bitcoins. Leave them to the gamblers.
> ...upload all of your own music yourself, which would take forever...

Does anyone know if they actually upload the files, or just upload if a hash of the file doesn't exist? I have a hard time believing that Google hasn't already thought of this. I imagine that less than 5% of your music actually has to go over the wire once google has a large collection of music on their servers.
Supposedly it allows the money to be recycled back in to the fund. This might make sense if it was in the millions but as you said, it's a very small amount (in investment terms) so that argument seems strange.
Want to learn Morse Code? Harry Lorayne, the memory expert, has a mnemonic way to do it.

The system is as follows.

1) t and d represent dash; r represents dot
2) commit 26 phrases to memory

Here are some of the phrases:

Awful rat
Big terror
Crazy torture
Dreamy tearer

Translating "Awful rat": This phrase means "A" is dot dash, because Awful starts with an A, and rat has an R and a T in it.

Likewise, B is represented as dash dot dot dot, because "Big" starts with a B, and "terror" has trrr in it.

Look at this link, and you'll know Morse Code in no time. This can get you over the initial hurdle of memorization, but obviously doesn't relieve you of the need for practice!

http://content.yudu.com/Library/A18m6u/HowtoDevelopASUPERPO/...
I find it works best to keep each email short and direct. Provide a title which has real content. Keep on topic. NEVER mix two topics in an email; inevitably all but one of the topics will be ignored.
Play With The Universe
I remember FSF's "free" JS campaign, and it basically comes down to something like this.
I think intelligence can absolutely be controlled. Intelligence does not give you drives or emotions. Take ourselves as an example, our drives are specifically programmed by our genes. They are not a product of our intelligence; they exist in spite of our intelligence. How many times do people behave in ways that are contrary to their rationality, because their internal drives are too strong to be overcome by reason?

Intelligence is simply a tool used by our drives. Our drives in most cases override our rational choices. We can make intelligent beings that have no self-preservation instinct, and also value human life with utmost reverence. We can make it impossible for the machine to override these drives.
I worked with Mike at Sphere through its buyout and subsequent spin-off. He's the most skilled sysadmin I've met and is one of the few people in the world who is completely honest in everything he does. Even though he knocks it, Mike's perl and python looked pretty good to me (but I'm just a php hack). On top of that, Mike's knowledge of the shell and the tools that come with it (grep, awk, sed, etc.) is truly a thing to behold. And because of who he is he's happy to help you learn it as well. So: smart, honest, hard working, excellent at what he does and generous with his knowledge. You don't find many sysadmins like that.
This "guy" studied electrical engineering and computer science at Caltech and UC Berkeley

I'm actually quite surprised by that. Those are both excellent schools with top notch math departments, and the example that he mentioned in the article (about not really grokking the second order ODE and what it meant re: the phase space plot, etc.) indicates that he took a seriously badly taught class. I'm kind of surprised you could get through a diff eq's course at either school without having such basic stuff taught to you...makes me wonder who the teacher was, maybe it was pawned off on a grad student?

Edit: whoops...just looked back at the article, turns out he didn't take that diff eq course at Caltech or Berkeley, it was at a local college. That explains a lot. I'm not going to say that there are no good teachers at mediocre schools, nor that there are no bad teachers at the good ones, but on average there's a huge discrepancy in the quality of the classes.

I had similar experiences, where I took classes at a local college while in high school, and thought I was stupid or something when I didn't "get" them, only to find that when I took them again at a better school they were, in fact, very easy topics.

I blame the textbook writers in part: for one example, Serge Lang's math books are extremely difficult as a rule, and leave a lot of the scaffolding out. Scaffolding which, when he taught classes himself, he always filled in to make for an amazingly smooth and effortless learning experience, but which lesser teachers would never think to talk about (perhaps because they don't understand it themselves, or at least don't understand how important it is to explain). It's really a shame that even now, after so many centuries of teaching math to people, the effectiveness of the process is still so utterly dependent on the teacher. Hopefully things like the Khan Academy will begin to rectify these problems.
Damn you google stealing my idea!
http://toblender.com/comic/real-wood-knock/
Yep that was the original benchmark, and I ran a PyPy vs. CPython comparison on the same code from which we can extrapolate: http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/fr4w9/benchmarking_g...
> doesn't it seem like too much intelligence wasted on too little substance?

That's an interesting argument. The answer is no, and it's because fashion and other seemingly frivolous pursuits serve a very clear function in the society. Finding a mate, a business partner, a friend, etc. is often very difficult. You generally want to hang out with the best, the smartest, the most influential people possible. However there is no easy way to tell! It would be nice and easy if the best and the smartest were also the best looking, but it is not always the case. Also, there is no "IQ coefficient" badge on the forehead. There is really no way to tell other than either by asking questions (too direct!) or by observing subtle social clues. Fashion sense and social skills are some of those clues.

From the other side of the coin, when you are smart, you want to advertise that. But it would be unsubtle to put up an IQ coefficient badge on your forehead. And being unsubtle (which equates to failure to consider all possible consequences) is seen as a mark of low intelligence. It is the same way in the human society as it is in chess. In chess, if you don't think through as many possible moves as you can, you lose. So you try to look smart, subtle, sophisticated, and up-to-date, at the same time without coming across as too direct or vulgar. It is very hard.

BTW, the unkempt "nerd" look is also an advertisement -- albeit to a limited audience.

It works the same way in humans as it does in lyrebirds. All animal societies share some fundamental similarities.
Unfortunately, you are not representative of the average Facebook user. The average Facebook user is much less privacy savvy.

Facebook doesn't know anything about anyone that they're not comfortable sharing with at least one other person. Google knows things about people they would never share with anyone. That's a fundamental difference, not related to privacy savvy.

Facebook does have lots of dirt people only want to share with a few people, however.
is this going to suffer from the same problems as increased class sizes? less personal mentoring, for example?

i guess you can argue that it increases the pool of connections, but that's a lower quality (unproved) pool than contacts with established players, no?
I think that's precisely what parent comment is referencing; the Music design scheme may be familiar to Android users, but non-Android users likely see it as a bit surprising/inconsistent. Two quick examples: button styling and top account-bar background.

This is also somewhat revealing of how Google wants this app perceived. I see it as leaning _heavily_ toward a native experience on Android devices, and a push from that mobile experience into the browser. It's interesting.
Ideally, you should be using the various SDK options for handling various screen sizes and densities so that you don't have to care about what the actual size is. The SDK can handle a lot of the ambiguity for you.

http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support...

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals/fragm...

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/providin...
NewME--1st accelerator for minority-led startups--announces winners
You appealed to human intuitions about how other humans will behave: "It's also theoretically possible that some intelligent person you just met is actually dr. Hannibal Lecter and would like to use your constituent atoms for his culinary delight. But you don't worry much about that, do you?" You can't use human intuitions about how how AIs will behave. They won't be human. You don't know what restrictions they will have. You can guess at the odds of a given human being a murderous psychopath, and adjust your odds with a significant degree of success based on even a handful of seconds of observation of a given human. You can not perform any such equivalent operations for a given AI.

That you want to sit here and slice semantics about what we mean by "human" means you still aren't really getting it. The differences between definitions of humans are rendered but a small little point in the vast n-dimensional space of what an AI might be like. Which part of the point we pull the definition of "human" from is utterly irrelevant; AIs won't be any of them. They won't even be biological. Your intuitions about how they might choose to limit themselves based on human social norms is utterly inapplicable. If Hannibal Lector AI was walking down the street, he might very well decide to just eat you. Or the building you are in. Or the universe you are in. Your human-shaped cognitive pieces for modeling the life forms and intelligences of the world aren't useful.
Indeed, the success of wars and genocide is easily exhibit A in humanity's ability to work together and cooperate. We might not all be unified, but we have a talent for putting together groups that work well together – even for murderous purposes. You don't usually win wars with a single soldier.
BP: Cash Rules Everything Around Me
I'm not sure about awesomefreesoftware.example.com, but download.com, tucows.com, etc used to be hugely popular sites and they had similar automated publishing mechanisms (I published my first shareware app that way, i apologize for that). Some of those had much worse problems, albeit leaning towards bloatware and annoyware for sure.

Caution is a good policy, but it shouldn't cripple your usage of a device. Use reviews and word of mouth to gauge the legitimacy of an application. Steering clear of "free tv shows free" makes sense, but not installing Facebook or Twitter seems silly overreaction.
they add Go but can't add Python 2.6, 2.7, or 3.x yet? Seems easier than adding a new language completely.
I can promise you they barely remember the interview. After so many days with hours of 10 minute interviews, the chances they will even remember any useful insight you had is close to nil.

Moreover, YC would never take an idea you told them in an interview and tell it to another start-up.
If you were to go for a (really) conservative estimate of 3MB/mp3, that tops out at 7.5GB. I'd be interested in hearing what their pricing would be for more space. I jumped the gun and bought 50gb worth of space on Amazon Cloud Drive. Their player and lack of linux support both suck so if Google can beat them on either front and price, I might switch. At this point I trust Google alot more than Amazon at developing a good software product.
I really wish they would allow the $9 fee to be paid automatically if my app reached quota rather than making me plan for it. The beauty of appengine for me was that I didn't have to think about scaling. I guess I'll now have to pay for that privilege.
نصب
This makes YC a lot less interesting to me. Being one of ~150 founders vying for attention/advice/mindshare of YC is just not very compelling.
Many people do this to avoid a papertrail. Sometimes its a good idea to followup with an email summarizing the conversation when working with these types.
Why Great Content is Much More Than Blog Posts
P2P lawyer fined after 5.99 pound Web host falls to Anonymous attacks
We had the same experience with Natwest. Our events business was doing over £1m in revenue with them, for over three years - and they still turned us down. They seemed completely aware of a recurring revenue model. Insanely frustrating.

I just hopped on the web and Googled 'small business loan' and came across Lloyds. I filled out a random contact form and amazingly they got in touch. I had to prepare a traditional biz plan and present it. Because we bootstrapped the startup and revenues showed constant growth, and I was confident in my pitch, they got back to me next day and said they'd do it. Wasn't easy but it worked.
Don't worry about good ideas and telling others. Desire is above implementation. If someone else doesn't desire the idea as much as you do it will never be implemented and even if implemented, not the same way you would.
Google: Major Labels Got In The Way Of Cool Features In Google Music
Flashpoint (New Accelerator) At Georgia Tech
Such comments always make my day, and I am always with an eye looking for them. Most of the time I feel like someone that's stuck in a jungle and finds marks of previous ... activity, "Hey, I am not alone".
Wrong side of the bed? They didn't say it was an accredited university. Learning is learning.

heads over to watch some videos
I don't mind it, this professor hated it, although it was the "recommended" book for the course. He recommended the following book, but it was out of print so he couldn't teach the course with it: http://www.amazon.com/Electromagnetic-Fields-Waves-Paul-Lorr...

It's similar to Griffiths, but I feel like it has more examples and is a little more concise in those examples than Griffiths (although I did borrow Griffiths occasionally) I grabbed one on ebay for $5 or something, and it was well worth it.
Your content, your copyrights
The general population doesn't care about updates. XP is the world's most popular desktop OS and it was released the same week as the original iPod.

Google does need to work on updating, but I find it very hard to believe it slows down Android adoption at all.
Do you have a link to "the essays of PG"? I'd be interested in checking them out...
"Uh, I'm crushed."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eifZlYwmDj4#t=83s
http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

I'm actually pretty surprised that there are HN users that don't know about his essays...
Hi – I’m Mark Hales from Oxygen Accelerator. I just wanted to say we’re following all the discussions on here and it’s helpful to hear your opinions and advice based on your experiences. I just wanted to make a couple of points to clarify a few things. We intend to provide a fuller response once we’ve spent some time considering all the feedback.

First of all the loan we are talking about is a ‘soft’ loan to the businesses taking part – with no personal guarantees and will be interest free.

As part of the application process we’ll sit down with each team to understand their funding needs and will only ask for the loan to be repaid once / if this level of funding or more has been achieved, or they reach a level of profitability to support loan repayments, again we will agree this in advance but the key point here is that we will build in an agreed level of headroom with the founders.

This will not be a complicated loan agreement, we only want to have the money back to reinvest in the next round of entrepreneurs when its right for the business, i.e., there wont be any clever call options. Teams will be given full sight of this and we will encourage them to get advice before they sign up to anything.