skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ugh. This is exactly what drives up the cost of medicine. People hear crap like this, and then come in demanding that 'everything be done' for their 95 yo grandmother in a coma in the ICU. Sadly technology can keep this type of person 'alive' for a very long time. Expensive, wasteful, selfish.

Medicine needs to send truthful messages about what can and can't be done.
I've never heard that perspective on Brainfuck before and have thusly avoided it as it seems, well, really hard & impractical.

Thinking of it as an abstracted turing machine is intriguing though. Do you know any resources on tackling the subject?
The premise is interesting, but why compare results running on general-purpose CPUs when the goal is to run on a GPU? At this level of optimization, comparing two vastly different architectures and compilers would make any results pretty irrelevant.
No, the main problem is that he needs a license to practise US law. The most you can get him to do is review or draft documents.
Thanks. See the comment above.
Headlines are written for brevity and to get you to read the article. However, you'll note the corrections made to the article indicate the original version said that Samsung violated other Apple patents and that the ban was immediate. Only once the Dutch was properly translated did the corrections render the headline a bit off.
Absolutely. They are, however, both in the food business, which is what the quote said to be in. As seen by the farmers of the time, the fact that people need to eat doesn't mean that you will survive hard times.
From what I can tell you could do that - but it seems like the point is that they are willing to go to free to get the exposure, so your 500 friends clicking wouldn't be a bad thing. Making it realtime would help, I guess.
Humans are often worse than algorithms. But human mistakes (e.g. in medical practice) are socially acceptable, machine mistakes are not.
Who are you talking to? Me? Did you read the comment thread? I'm not sure who you're arguing with, or why you picked me for this reply.
Your Questions About Relationship Quizzes
Like anything these days, if you are attractive enough to abuse, you are attractive...
By the way - I should probably disclose that I know the founder, Naysawn.
I went to one of those schools. Course quality in the CS department can be very hit or miss. You are right in that the instructors often have no actual programming experience. In this situation, the opposite of what you are thinking is true: automata theory is probably a better class than databases, because you don't need to be a good programmer to teach automata theory. A database class taught by a guy who doesn't program databases all the time is going to be lightweight at best and wrong at worst.

Advice is hard because it's very situation dependent. Do the courses use good books? Are the assignments worthwhile? For example of what I mean: At my school there was a prof who invented a cheap weather radar expansion board for PCs back when weather radar systems were standalone and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The hardware course and networking course taught by him were great. There was another guy who came back to teach after working in industry for 15 years. His courses were programming intensive and were also pretty good. In contrast the intro courses taught by the guys who went straight from grad school to teaching were weak sauce and a waste of time. HOWEVER, the automata theory class taught by one of those guys was good and was actually one of my favorite classes. Ultimately, I had a couple too many dud CS classes so switched over to a math major.

Thus, you'll have to examine the course offerings closely to see if you can piece together a reasonable major. If not it may be a better use of your time to just get a minor and take good classes from other departments. I have never regretted strengthening my math skills in lieu of taking half-assed CS courses. It was pretty easy to develop half-assed CS skills on my own.
>How DO I "establish warmth" if I'm naturally inwards-looking person that likes listening more than talking?

The best salespeople always listen much more than they talk, so you are fine there. Of course, you actually have to listen, rather than tune out. If you really listen well, that is a major advantage in sales.
Zite: How mobile makes news easier to find, consume and digest
You're right, thanks, I updated the headline.
Linux is only free if your time has no value.

Americans average 2.7 hours of TV per day now (1). Exactly what monetary value do you assign to that time that makes it worth more than the same time spent cooking?

1. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm
Technical people struggle in sales most likely because technical training is not sales training. Sales is a learned and highly skilled occupation.

Read a good book on sales, like one by Zig Ziglar. Effective sales is not at all about lying to customers. The best sales professionals rely on repeat sales, and you don't get repeat sales by lying to your customers.

I have a technical degree, and it includes zero sales training. Even born salesmen need practice and training.

BTW, when Boeing sells airplanes it sends out its top engineers. Engineers with sales training make darn good salesmen for highly technical products, and there's no way in hail you're going to sell an airplane to an airline by lying to them.
Bright Shadow Hands-On Preview (ever want a pokemon MMO?)
If your into pokemon, this MMO seems pretty close to it ;) looks pretty cool.
Maybe a small percent of software is written for life-critical systems. That's because software is a huge market. But a growing percent of life-critical systems rely on software. How many adverse outcomes (even death) are you willing to accept caused by programming failures?

You know, a big part of the prosecution's evidence in the Casey Anthony trial turned out to be false; it was due to faulty software. She could have been imprisoned due to a software bug! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Anthony#Evidence

Now consider that anybody can call themselves a software engineer without even picking up a book. Next time your life hangs on the proper functioning of some computer system, think about that.
I remember attending a presentation by Elon Musk on SpaceX a few years back (late 2007, I believe). At that point, SpaceX's future was very uncertain with their two launches failing.

I recall him describing the Proton as the most reliable vehicle ever engineered by humans.

I think that SpaceX is great, but, is there really a gap to fill, in this case? Where does this gap begin?
In percentages, sure. In the raw number of people, I imagine the numbers are a lot closer than you imagine.

As for the remaining percentage of people, we may not deal with their physical health, but our work can impact their financial or family's well being fairly easily. Some of the code I have written has touched billions of financial transactions that have decided the future of whether people will be able to buy a house, or a car, or any other line of credit.

Not trivial.
I think probabilistic learning (or machine learning) should have its own section. Recommder systems, sentiment analysis, and graphical models do not really fall into the traditional understanding of AI. It is more stats than CS and logic.
dunno what you're talking about. Portland is not filthy and dilapidated.
My problem with howtos on sales/marketing is that they fall into two categories:

1. The author is not a good salesperson, so you should ignore the advice.

2. The author is a very good salesperson, and will sell you on the article.

The problem with 2 is that the author's interests are not the same as yours - they want pageviews, while you want effective advice. So my advice when reading a particularly pithy sales or marketing HOWTO is to ignore the content and concentrate on how it's written.

So by my own logic, ignore this comment if you found it persuasive.
Being salesy is what bad, incompetent salesmen do.
Facebook Hits 1 Trillion Pageviews
Cute. I can see how it makes sense from a publisher perspective.

But it seems like an audience of the sort of people who would rather jump through hoops than pay a few bucks would not be very desirable to advertisers.
Cisco looks to cultivate an 'on the go' router
Beautiful. Please read everything this man has ever written. I don't care what you think about Lisp - buy yourself a copy of the Paradigms Of Artificial Intelligence Programming and work through it. It's one of the greatest books on the practice of problem solving ever.
You are right and the article misses the obvious. There is a wave of outsourcing every few years, it ends up not being the bill or goods it was sold as, it comes back and they end up paying 3X the cost because in the mean time people leave the development industry to find greener pastures. I fear we are doomed to repeat this cycle until accounting can account for non-tangible value. Every day we as US citizens are inundated with cultural knowledge stuff that we just take for granted about our culture. This stuff has profound impact on everything we do, even development things that we do will seem backwards to another culture and as such will be missed in creative processes that reflect systems within our culture. Until someone figures out how to convey that to other developers offshore project will carry with them a higher risk of failure.
Ask HN: How to recruit beta users?
We are working on an web application for virtual system administrators to showcase their profiles and people to hire them through the application. I was wondering if there are some tips the community has to recruit good beta users for the application.

The application is on http://belongs2root.com/

I can be reached on aditya dot naik at rhsmith dot umd dot edu if you need to get in touch with me.
The iStockPhoto revenue looks amazingly good.
I took a look at your photos and they're pretty well done (not too abstract, good model, very grounded).

Makes me wonder if this is an arena where we can all make some extra money?
Codepad doesn't have Java.
"Marketing" in the pure academic sense is the entire collection of activities that create value, give that value to customers, and extract some of that value in return. By this definition, sales is a subset of marketing.
Here's the accompanying source code: http://norvig.com/sciam/checkers.py

There are four parts to this program:
(1) Strachey's checkers program in CPL:
OriginalCPLprogram is the original program, verbatim
ModifiedCPLprogram fixes a typo and two small conceptual problems
(2) A parser for the CPL language. This is encoded in the external
file 'cpl.g', which is then processed by yapps2.py to produce cpl.py,
which we then import, allowing us to use cpl.parse on ModifiedCPLprogram.
(3) Functions described but not implemented by Strachey (such as Null and Shift).
(4) Variable definitions and functions not listed by Strachey.
(5) Test cases.
Your Questions About Relationship Advice For Men
Cosby: A background image generator
Probably worth putting who you are in your profile, at least one of your other answers has been killed, possibly because it wasn't obvious you were answering for the company and it's a one worder:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2921563
Napkin Labs Lets Brands Better Understand Their Customers
He theorizes that pirates actually might promote the game. My Flurry numbers beg to differ.

My "unlocked" version of the game was pirated on July 15. Almost 2000 new users ran it that day, and all but about 10 of them were pirated copies.

So did I see my sales jump? I sold about 10 units that day, and 5 the next day. I don't think I've seen the numbers top 20 sales per day. If there are moral pirates out there, they didn't show up in sufficient numbers to make up for the devastation that followed.

How about downloads of the free version? Over the next two days, it crashed from consistently getting 750-900 downloads a day to about 350 downloads a day. And because of that drop, it fell off the charts and continued to crash down to 100-200 downloads a day.

So as nice as the theory is -- and as much as it might work for music, where the numbers are MUCH larger and there is some data supporting the theory -- it simply doesn't work for games.

In fact, it pretty much killed my game, because of the way the market rankings work -- the crash in downloads meant it lost position, which meant even fewer downloads, and a death spiral ensued.

So don't give me "piracy is actually good for your game!" when it killed mine. And it's still rated 4.5 stars, with tons of "Awesome game!" reviews, so don't tell me people don't like it.
There's no limit to food "hacks", easy, general combinations that generally work. They're usually filling and healthy, but also boring and unsatisfactory.

My "recipe", YMMV:

1: Get someone to eat with. It an anti-climax to think "I really nailed this dish" and then eat it alone in front of the TV. Do a "food-club" with a friend or something, it doesn't have to be every day.

2: Make room in your freezer/get a freezer/get a larger freezer. A LOT of very nice food freezes brilliantly. Full freezer = zero effort fast food.

3: Figure out what you want to cook and then go for it. It might be childhood comfort foods, it might be a killer burger, it might be something you got at a restaurant. Research. Google for recipes and read different variations, try to get a feel for where they differ. Be vary of user generated contents. A "great" recipe can be anything from "OMG I can make (something that vaguely resembles) Burritos in my own kitchen" to "give my first-born". Read different variations, try to get a feel for where they differ. Finally, remember, a recipe is only half way there (if even that far), which brings us to:

4: Iterate. Taste, critique, try again with something a little different. Obviously not every day, but keep coming back to it. Explore the differences in recipes from step three. Randomly switch out ingredients, get a feeling for what can substitute for what. Your goal is not to cook a dish so it comes out exactly as the person who wrote the recipe imagined (because that's really hard to find out), it's to cook a dish you really like. Ask. You probably have someone who's a food-geek around who'll be happy to help you figure out why something doesn't come out as you wanted.
It didn't even register as a chart related to the story for me. I thought it was an add for MdDonald's (key of the article content) and ignored it.
What was, not long ago, a multi-million-dollar supercomputer now crammed into a postage stamp for cheaper than a frying pan, yes.
Just downrate the unfair comparison and move on.

There is no way to positively spin a comparison to Duke Nukem Forever. Don't even try.
... Because it was multiple patents. And because a ban was indeed made (with a fairly standard delay enabling them to change the product).
Remember people's names, remember the names of their children and their spouses. Ask how they are doing, in general most people care far more about that then whatever their company does.

Smile more often (you don't have to be grinning ear to ear, just any facial expression that has a modicum of happiness).

Touch base with people whenever possible.

If you're a naturally inwards looking person that likes listening more than talking you've got half your problems solved, all you need to do is start asking questions and be sincerely interested in what they have to say. The only thing people love more than talking about themselves is having someone to listen to it.
It is cool that you snow-shoveled at 12 and held a "real" job in a pizza parlor at 14. However, this is simply not the experience of the vast majority of non-Americans, especially people from India, China & the like. The OP got an engg PhD and is trying to land a gig that matches up to his narrowly defined skillset, not just any random job. I could very much empathize with what he's going through. I got my very first job at 29, and my wife got her first job at 35, my best friend got his first gig at 42! So what did we all do for 30/40 years ? Well, we just studied our asses off. That handicaps us majorly - I don't know how to shovel snow or bake a pizza or any other random skill that most American kids would automatically know because this country prizes working, selling, marketing, labor, work ethic about all else. However, there are other countries where this is not the case. Most of my close friends and classmates are 30-40 year olds working on their vanilla-PhDs, MD-PhDs, MBA-PhDs and other combinatorial degree seeking parasites putting off work until the very last leg of their lives :) We do that because, well, its just the norm in our peer group. If you look at any immigrant graduate student pool especially in Uni towns, you'll find several 30-40 year old fuddy-duddies who have never held a job in their life and wouldn't want to either, until they've obtained every terminal degree possible and exhausted all other academic options!
I was a hacker edged into the biz/sales role (we had 2 other, stronger tech guys on the team). So this is my perspective from watching (and building pieces of) the tech over 3ish years.

Code quality matters. We did enterprise sales across several products, and it got to the point where making minor tweaks to the older products to close a sale was a complete nightmare.

You probably don't need to rewrite it. In most cases I've seen, re-writing (e.g. switching technologies) is some sort of pathological denial about delaying the admission that nobody wants the product.

The importance of scalability depends on your channel. We spent a lot of time building in scalability, which was important for an advertising company (we couldn't close sales w/out scale guarantees), but might not be important for a word-of-mouth app.

Build an admin dashboard. A good one. You're losing countless weeks if the CTO is a bottleneck for deploys and minor database tweaks.

I wish we'd used a modern web framework. I didn't write any of the server side code, but our development felt particularly sluggish there.

Check for plugins and tools before writing it. Some of the stuff we wrote from scratch was 2x commenting systems, 2x moderation systems, 3x analytics & charting systems, and a widget sharing wrapper. Writing some of those in-house was correct, but we did it somewhat compulsively.

Think long-term. We wrote some widgets in Flash, then switched to Flex because development was slow. But for our ultimate vision, we needed <10kb widget sizes, so we had to switch back to Flash a year later. Since the core of our product was in that widget's UI, it was a non-trivial rewrite.

Write a stupid version of the UI first. A major UI overhaul delayed the rest of a key deploy for ~3 months. Starting with a quick v1 UI which copied twitter would have allowed the UI/UX guys to do things properly without the server team screaming at them every day.

Shipping makes people happy. If you have an API, get people writing (& launching) little apps which use it. Have them own those apps personally and keep them on their personal githubs/portfolios. If you are playing in an industry, encourage people to make 1-2 day apps, separate from your product but wthin the same space. You'll stumble across some gold.
I'm sorry, why the downvote? This is about Samsung creating a product that's not a copy of Apple right?

The Home, Back and Menu actions are required by Google and who suggests manufacturers make them hardware inputs. They're not "differentiating their product from Apple", they're complying with the specified requirements to run the OS they chose. They could have innovated by making them gestures or a touchpad or something, but they didn't.

Switching applications with home buttons and other OS behaviors are not Samsung's ideas, they're part of the stock Android OS.

For Samsung's actual contributions to the product, compare their first Android device, the I7500, to their Galaxy II line. Which direction did the design travel?

I7500: http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2009/04/i7500_...

iPhone: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/06/iphone...

Galaxy II: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/04/11z428...
You're just trolling right ? Portland is a great place. And its good even though Oregon (in general) has had an unemployment problem for longer than most other states.
I wasn't entirely clear from the link — Are Lion servers not being picky about passwords, or are Lion clients not being picky about LDAP authentication failing (hence not being able to mount the user's home folder)?

If the latter, the impact is bad, but not as bad (you'll be able to get access to the machine you're sitting at, but not to any server-side resources).
I see where you're coming from, but what if there is someone else who also needs emergency medical care and has a higher chance of survival? End-of-life care is among the most expensive kinds of medical treatment because often doctors are staving off the inevitable, and that sucks up resources that could be used to treat other people.

This seems like a very grim economic calculus, but following a disaster or disease epidemic doctors must make such decisions many times a day, sometimes with only minutes to evaluate patients. Likewise, those who run hospitals (especially public hospitals) have to balance the probability of a successful outcome against the cost of leaving other patients untreated.
I certainly appreciate the analysis and the effort (and I am a grid-based design advocate), but nevertheless find the "old" more appealing. Certainly, we could chalk this up to familiarity, but alas, I do not own an iPhone. I believe the last item in the playlist being cut off is my main hesitation with the re-design.
> If Samsung's Android phones have differentiated user experiences that aren't evident from the home screen, then I applaud them. That doesn't, in my opinion, negate the fact that their home screen and phone design looks entirely too similar to the iPhone.

why would you expect these two products to be differentiated on every feature? do you actually expect two touch screen phones to be different in every way? is it ridiculous that iphone's voice calling feature (where you can talk, and someone on the other side can hear you) is a "carbon copy" of old dumb phones?
Has anyone here read Chris' Make Money on Android ebook? There are quite a few ebooks about "make money fast on Android". I'm curious how Chris' ebook compares.
Twitter rolling out photo User Galleries
https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169409
Facebook Stands at the Mercy of Zynga
Well, that says at most Skinner has tried those things in order to become independent (inelastic) of the 'economy' (whatever that means). There's no analysis to back that up. The last line of the paragraph you quoted is

Last year average per-store sales jumped to $2.4 million, from $1.6 million in 2004.

That just says McDonald's is doing relatively well - nothing about why. This could simply reflect McDonald's recent strategy of improving existing locations rather than expanding.

The average could also be raised by closing less profitable stores though I haven't been able to find any data on the number, location, and profitability of McDonald's restaurants over time.