skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Encouraging international visibility, which requires English language skills, is not contrary to that.

No, it's not, and international visibility is obviously a good thing! But there is a problem if a PhD is published only in english, because then there might be French citizens who will not be able to read a work they paid for (remember, the public education system is funded by the taxpayers-citizens). Since most people yelling about the "language restriction" problem actually imply that they should be able to publish in english only, I did recall that this would be unconstitutional in France. Additionally publishing in english has never been forbidden or discouraged!

> I do sometimes feel sympathy for those that I talk to who realize this and (rightfully) blame the system for their lowered chances at international success.

This system is the application of the law. The French law is the consensus of all the French citizens on the way they want to live all together. If you, individually, don't like the law, you can militate for a change (possible since France is a democracy), or leave the country, if you really can't live with this general consensus. Dura lex sed lex.

In this specific case, you can also just go to a private school which will let you write in english or whatever. Sure, you'll have to pay there; sorry, you can't have the free public education with no duties in return in France.

Ideologically speaking, the French education system is very egalitarian and very meritocratic. Lots of people don't agree with it (the majority still does). That's why the private schools were allowed (after a violent public debate). But it's a chosen, working and interesting system. Yes, you can "rightfully blame the system", in the sense that you have the right to disagree, but otherwise it's not any more "rightful" to blame it than to blame any other working system (e.g: the US one). It's just a different conception of education and its place in the society.
Heh. During WWII, SU made 100,000 tanks, US made 100,000, Germany made 50,000. Guess who won. Germans did not even had their own iron; they pulled their supplies from Sweden.

When entering a room, look for elephants first :)
Another 18 Awesome B2B Social Media Statistics | Social Media B2B
I know I sound like a nutjob, but consider the carbon! A new currency built upon intensive coal hungry computing hardly seems like a long or even mid-term sustainable idea.
how'd you arive at $100 in electrical costs? that's rather higher than I calculated, and actually more than my home's entire monthly bill, with four computers being run sporadically, plus the central air nearly constantly, the washer, drier, water heater, refridgerator, tv, and other incedentals...
"a new version of the JCP Process document and a formalized Executive Committee Members' Guide and is expected to be completed and approved within about six months."

What an irony. It will take them half an year to only come up with a process on how to modify the language, when the creators of languages like Go, Clojure, etc can modify a substantial part of their respective language during this time frame.
This reminds me of http://uni.xkcd.com/
The whole idea is to get better performance than current JavaScript interpreters allow. Making something slower than JavaScript is the opposite of why people want a common bytecode.
Ladies Learning Rails
Sorry, I have to disagree with you.

A language whose maintainers decided that, in the fifth major release, `goto` needed to be added is not getting better. Nor is one whose maintainers rationalize the choice of backslash as a third, distinct scope resolution operator -- instance-attribute, class-attribute, and now namespace-member.

The sheer number of fails with PHP warrants the 'good language' treatment. The fact that,

08 === 0

alone is enough to make it deserving of this treatment.
Mechanics of Facebook Spamming
It is true that it would change the game dynamics, this is also true for Scrabble and Chess, which are normally played with a clock (however formally or informally applied)

That can improve the game though, while I'm not necessarily that interested in improving my Worms Skillz, correspondence chess definitely gives me a form of training that comes in handy when playing over the board
is linuxstart.bin the bootloader?
And many listed doing YC as the best funding decision they ever made.
Just look at it backwards. Even before the 1 child policy, both china and india have had a gender imbalance favouring males. After the 1 child policy in china alone, both india and china had a strong growth in gender imbalance, with china being only somewhat stronger. Your "control" without the 1 child policy also exhibited the same strong growth. A scientist would reasonably conclude that the 1 child policy seems to have little relevance to the issue, considering that another comparable country behaved in exactly the same manner without have such a policy in place.
Okay, what am I doing wrong? I have FF4, but the site says I need Firefox with support for <canvas> and Javascript. I thought FF4 had that?
MoonPlayer Takes On Pandora
Thanks for the detailed resposne!

Assuming I want to go this way - Do you find the mono development tools satisfactory (monodevelop) or do you use Microsoft's and later target iOS?
What license do you want use to publish this job???
PayS.MS an OpenSource SMS payment gateway
If you use the general aviation terminal there is no security or boarding passes. You just have to know the tail number of your airplane as a kind of password.
99.7% of Android phones leak secret account credentials
Chinese government is dominated by engineers for the same reason that US government is dominated by lawyers, Japanese government is dominated by businessmen and French government is dominated by doctors and teachers. These are the most easily accessible prestige positions in the given country.
There is a school of thought[1] that believes, that to a certain extent, this is true of natural human languages too! Some rules of grammar might just be hard-wired into the brain and not learnt as we grow up.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar
starting a new bitcoin is the best way to deflate bitcoins that I've encountered so far. What do you suspect the max price would be?
Android Updates - Honeycomb 3.1
Gauging Craziness: Why I own an iPod Classic
It is worth noting that both Twitter and Facebook have worked to turn their "relevancy" signals into what amounts to ad units. The signal available there basically represents things along the lines of either viral humor pieces, large brand ads, or both.

It is further worth noting that when HP researchers looked at viral Tweets that they generally represented an echo of content from sources which were already popular and already had strong distribution channels outside of Twitter.
http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Data-Central/HP-research-shows-...
So rather than finding new relevancy signals, it is mostly just re-highlighting/hyping/amplifying that which is already popular. Add into the pay-to-play models where the relevancy signals are basically also sold as ad units and I am not very convinced that these aid true relevancy.

Rather they might just highlight the business operations which already have plenty of relevancy signals, those doing off topic viral humor pieces, and those who have large ad budgets to blow through while trying to claim how innovative their marketing approach is.

All the above said, the ability to monetize the "relevancy" signal will cause some search engines to want to lean on it, because ultimately if they can monetize the relevancy signals that allows them to monetize the organic search results as well, while claiming the results are "organic." I don't expect Google to want to put a lot of weight on Facebook likes (doing so would subsidize a directly competing ad network) but I would expect Google to put significant weight on +1 clicks at some point.
Why on earth would you want to base votes on who has the most computing power?
Automated Not Invented Here Syndrome (ANIHS)
The sweet-spot to get me to check the app specs would be 0.59. Having now watched the video, I'd assume that you would get a referral fee from GoDaddy, at which point I'd want the app for 0.00.
Alot of good comment here, Giving and using criticism are both definite skills. I think another one is the ability to filter good criticism from the bad ones. Kinda like reading a book and picking and choosing what you want out of it.

Reminds me of something I learned as an Undergrad. TYFQO Thnk For Your Self Question Others
Usually the protection against an investor suing a startup is that no startup in the future would take his money. But of course that only works if the investor wants to invest in more startups in the future. Does he?

Incidentally, this is one (of many) reasons it's better to take money from experienced angels. They have a brand to preserve.
Regarding costs and licensing, have you heard of AppHarbor (http://appharbor.com). It's like Heroku but for .Net, free (at least right now) for small web apps and has SQL Server and MySQL database options.

Also, I've heard mention of BizSpark which kind of defers your costs but I haven't got any hard evidence that it is still a good option for startups.
interesting observation. It seems to me that the previous generation of leaders had an aspiration that the new leaders were better prepared than them. I imagine the old leaders had an admiration for science and engineering even though they were not really knowledgeable about it; they probably selected and groomed the new leaders with this in mind.
I've already started a bitcoin2 (actually it's called Bitcoin Prime).

The rules are as follows:

1. Every string of bits that is a bitcoin is also a Bitcoin Prime.

2. Currently I own all extant Bitcoins Prime, but I'm willing to sell them. Right now I am willing to sell them at a 50% discount relative to Bitcoins, so you can get twice the Bitcoins Prime for your US dollars.

You'd be an idiot to buy Bitcoin when you can buy Bitcoin Prime at half the price, right?
Positively so far. Like with removing things it's easy to go too far and I'm trying to strike a balance between what to show and what to hide. I haven't mastered it yet but I'm liking the direction it's going.
Anyone else see this as a thinly veiled advertisement for the venture capital syndicate. How could the two most important categories on the Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2011 be "Funding" and "Wisest Funding Decision?" Everyone's answer seems to be, "Yeah, the best thing we ever did was take $X MM from X venture capital."
Hiten Shah's Startup Advice: Test All Assumptions
This is basic stuff for anyone here. I'm sure you get asked for startup advice all the time. Here is something you can send to people who ask you for help. It will get them started thinking...and come back with more focused questions.
Some typos:

Original: '...interfaces design at very accesible prices. Are you a hacker? Make your self home.'

Corrected: '...interface design at very accessible prices. Are you a hacker? Make your self at home.'

Otherwise, nice idea! There's certainly a need for this, for many hackers...
Android Tablets: Hardware and OS are Getting Better, but Apps are Still MIA
That is mostly correct. Most of the traffic is coming from the CDNs. But we also use Akamai and Limelight in addition to Level3.
This guy completely misses the point. The excitement over Bitcoin is due part to the fact that it operates over a decentralized P2P network that exists independently from the creators.

Perhaps if one of the earlier forms of digital currency had been as altruistic in their engineering they would have seen as much enthusiasm from the public.

In other words, nobody is going to get excited about propping up the next big evil empire like PayPal. Bitcoin puts the powers of paying and being paid right where it belongs; directly with the people.
The big catch is that some of the signals are abstract and built on non-public data. And as Google puts more weight on things aligned with "brand" you can know that they are doing so, but that still doesn't solve the problem of needing to build brand.

IMHO we are starting to move to the point of SEO where we are moving away from knowing the data to understanding deeper marketing functions that create the relevancy signals as a side effect. If you have a higher visitor value than your competition and can afford to buy more ads than any competitor can then reinvesting those profits at some point creates a winner take most market segment where you get a lot of the relevancy signals built as a free side effect of buying tons of ads.
> the generation now values owning digital media
I think you've missed the point, it isn't about ownership at all, or even that the media is digital. Its that what we value is access to the media. We're willing to pay a nominal fee for access to it, but that's really all we care about: Having the media play when we want it to. Ownership of the media is irrelevant to our experience of the media...unless not owning it means we cannot experience it.
Yes. If you replace "programs" with "systems," I basically agree with the article.
It's also important to surround yourself with people who will engage in a conversation about the criticism they give, not just those who simply give it and walk away. I don't think anyone who is a leader or who aspires to be one takes any criticism without questioning it first.

The trick on the receiving end is to not be defensive, be open to the valuable portions of the feedback, and to call out people on ad hominem statements that have no place in a constructive relationship.

Finally all criticism should serve a business purpose, not a personal one. The person leveling the critique should be able to justify it in those terms in a clear, genial and convincing manner if they really want to effect change.
There's no upfront licensing cost due to Microsoft BizSpark.
You're absolutely right about the costs of running real iron - Windows adds $1,000 per machine. But Windows virtual machines cost the same as Linux: about $20/mo for a lowend VPS. Plus the code is compiled and tends to run more efficiently than Ruby for instance. :-)

If you are awesome and outgrow that VPS with some paying customers, then I think you can swing the $1,000 on a windows license.

I really hate being a shill for MS...
Please consider returning to slashdot
How long would that take?
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Yeah and I thought we were talking about commercial flights. I get it now

Even still I might rather get on the scheduled 6am flight and know (~90%) that I'll be in the city in time for the meeting than get an extra hour of sleep and potentially be late because there happened to be a rush that morning.

When you don't have guaranteed arrival times, like car commute, you end up leaving the house early anyway just "to beat rush hour" since you never know how long it's actually going to take. Versus guaranteed arrival times, like a commuter train, where you don't have to worry about that.
Long-term average stock market return is 5-8% depending on who you ask. So an index fund or balanced fund of funds would yield much better returns than bitcoin.
End-to-End Encryption for Credit Card Payments
It is still less time than is required for a new draft spec for C++ to come out of the language committee.
If the issue is public policy, then the goal should be public good, not individual good.

It's very possible that the best and brightest could live in greater comfort as criminals than scientists, but even if that were the case, any rational government would encourage them to be scientists since that would be better for the country.

Edit: Seriously? Care to explain your reasoning, downmodders? Why would a government encourage decisions that are destructive to society?
With Samsung and Amazon joining the market in the next few months, it could be a huge opportunity for developers to take advantage of this market since there won't be any competition. Virtually all Android tablet users will try your application.
We don't even need to make the comparison so bold. the world could consume twice(I do not have statistics) as many hours of youtube as it does netflix, but still netflix would demand higher bandwidth...

Netflix HD is 2gb/hour...what is the bandwidth taken by youtube?
The reason why democracy is a good thing is not because the general public is good at running a country, or even good at selecting people who are good at running a country.

The reason why democracy is a good thing is it forces the people in power to care about the effects their decisions have on the general public.
Author of the story here:

I know I bend the truth a bit with the "one small change part" but I did mention that it would be "one small change" from the player perspective, but probably a decent amount of work for the developers : P. All I was trying to imply was that the game is already designed to be turne-based and that doing asynchronous play wouldn't alter the gameplay very much.
Scientists in the mold of capitalists and totalitarians? Disgusting.
Countries should be led by economists, not scientists/engineers.

The Chinese economy is one giant mess. Too many imbalances, over-investments and bubbles. The spectacular 10% GDP growth rate was possible mainly because of bullying i.e., artificial depreciation of yuan giving unfair advantage to Chinese exporters.
Hi - thanks for replying, much appreciated. No, he invests in anything that can make him money (property, clothing etc). He has maybe two or three tech investments.

You're absolutely right about taking money from experienced angels, I'd add always take money from somebody who understands the sector. Seems obvious, I know.
I don't know. The breakeven point would be where others start to jump in to take advantage of the high prices.
Sounds like the people running large botnets could just farm the crap out of this.
Related: here is how to calculate the expected number of days. Though I did not add in BitCoin specific parameters. But suppose you need to have zeros in the first k bits, I suppose the probability for each lottery ticket/number is (256-k)/256 (I assume that SHA256 has 256 bits, too lazy to look it up).

http://blog.blinker.net/2011/02/08/expected-number-of-coin-t...

At the moment I generate about 5BTC/day with my dual-core ATI graphics card. Two months ago (when I started), it was twice that.
agree. It's better to build goodwill and retain me as a customer with the $0 app and you collect the referral fee, than to skim off both ends.
Amazon said to be Secret Bidder for Borders
Stephen Hawking: “Don’t be disabled in spirit”
Sounds like the start of an older Neal Stephenson novel (eg. _Snow Crash_ or _The Big U_).
As always, John Langford has one foot firmly planted in practice, and knows deeply what practitioners will care about in the next five years.
Incidentally, he is the author of Vowpal Wabbit, one of the fastest out-of-core learning implementations.
He also has a profound theoretical knowledge.

This article is a more open-ended, forward-looking version of his blog post "The Ideal Large Scale Learning Class" (http://hunch.net/?p=1729).
That blog post is required reading for anyone who wants to do large-scale learning, and understand the current state-of-the-art.

"Almost all the big impact algorithms operate in pseudo-linear or better time."

This is one of the reasons for the resurgence in neural networks. It's useful to learn a non-linear model over 1 billion examples, which is something you can't do with an SVM.

"How do we efficiently learn in settings where exploration is required?"

I've been exploring this problem recently. For example, I am designing an interface where a user can interact with search results to improve the quality. Besides ML issues, this also touches on UX questions: Is it better to force the user to give feedback on five crucial search results? Or should you show 50 results and have the user cherry pick results that are particularly good/bad?

"How can we learn to index efficiently?"

Another important question.
One particularly interesting approach is using a dense hash code to do semantic search. For example, see the approach Semantic Hashing, which I describe in this forward-looking O'Reilly Strata talk about ML: http://strataconf.com/strata2011/public/schedule/detail/1693... (YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEUw8igr1IY)
That talk overlaps a bit with Langford's post, except my Strata talk was about new developments for people in industry, not upcoming topics of interest for academics.
Leaflet - Lightweight JavaScript Library For Interactive Maps
Flashpoint - New GaTech startup accelerator
Quora Needs to Gamify the Review Dashboard, Now
>This is why so many people want to see the browser execution environment offer more complete, low-level APIs instead of high-level APIs locked to HTML/CSS and legacy browser technology.

It's called the desktop and offers all the native and low-level stuff you can possibly imagine.

And the only people that want to see it, are the ones who have forgotten about it.

Maybe there is a middle ground between desktop software and browsers, but personally I'd like to keep them apart.
Yes. Yes! Thanks for pointing that out - I hadn't noticed how brilliant the use of color is. I just understood ...

And that's the hallmark of good teaching.
Perhaps if one of the earlier forms of digital currency had been as altruistic in their engineering they would have seen as much enthusiasm from the public.

Really? It was an altruistic project? The creators of bitcoin aren't sitting on stashes of bitcoins in the (forlorn) hope that if bitcoins ever actually take off they'll be insanely wealthy?
Why would k-anonymity stay fixed? Maybe you could deanonymize the data later when better sets become available to correlate against.
I've been looking forward to this. I'm downloading the trial right now. I'll be interested to see how good the plain-language parsing is.
Yes. Amazon charges way too much. http://glennfrancismurray.com/cost-defective-mining-with-gpu...
I think a lot of people inside the field of SEO are trying to go broader so that if & when a particular search channel is a bit unreliable or unpredictable (look at how many sites were torched in Google's Panda update) they can still keep the business afloat through other channels (paid search, social stuff, email marketing, and so on).

I don't think you can ever really get rid of the fog in search completely though. If and when you disclose something publicly that reveals an algorithm weakness, ultimately what happens is people abuse the relevancy signal and then Google evolves their algorithm to place less weight on that relevancy signal. The other thing that happens is the cost of trying to influence that relevancy signal goes up. Some people have highlighted that in some instances domain names can be part of an SEO's strategy. Eventually that led to poker.org selling for a million Dollars!

Over time relevancy signals that are shared ultimately either become more expensive to create, less trusted, or both.

The other thing I would add is that you can know a good bit about what some of the signals are & it can still be a royal pain in the rear trying to create those signals. It is easy to write "build links" but search is a winner take most market & you can lose a lot of money marketing before you hit an inflection point. The same is true with brand building. And some brand building efforts are not entirely logical, but some are focused on exploiting the irrational parts of human nature.

If irrational humans create the relevancy signals you need and irrational idealistic humans write the algorithms that grade those signals, then just rationally looking at the numbers does not guarantee you will be able to compete. You can be 100% right and still be plenty unprofitable in many business ventures.