skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a strong algorithm may surprise you.

I remember reading about the Netflix contest and how one of the algorithms categorizes movies into it's own statistically relevant categories*.

Once a comparative algorithm is used and the dataset gets large enough, I have no doubt the recommendations will start to get real good real fast.

http://devlicio.us/blogs/billy_mccafferty/archive/2007/01/02...
I should have also added that it is a really cool page, aside from the one bug I pointed out.
Post author here. Google is on the other end of the spectrum ( or used to be). Elsewhere in this thread, someone made a good point of trying to find a balance.
Huh... i couldn't make sense of it, but that's not saying much, given my knowledge of physics is limited to pop. sci. books. can somebody with more physics/math knowledge answer this please?
Execution is one thing, good ideas another.
Why is dedupe so important?

I have to imagine this mostly helps with OS files that are standard across man machines. Can't we ship a list of hashed client-side?
What does "good" really mean here ?
Not related to iteratees, can you describe the use of Haskell at Tsuru Capital? Disantagens, advantages, etc.
Here I live people look weird if they suggest Haskell(including myself), so great is .net and java monopolium.
it's important to note that this is not strong against knowledge of the plaintext. that's kind-of obvious, when you think about how it supports de-duplication, but perhaps an example will clarify why you might be concerned.

say you want to backup some data. and that data includes music or video... and the riaa or mpaa decide that bitcasa are facilitating pirating and should be shut down... so they reach a deal where all the data are checked against known songs or videos. and if they find a match then your identity will be provided for prosecution...

of course, if you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear. this can only identify known data. but even so, it is an interesting issue: "encryption" here doesn't have all the guarantees you might expect.

(there are more disturbing scenarios too. for example, perhaps a certain text is not illegal in the copyright sense, but is unacceptable politically.)

[disclaimer - this is from skimming the paper; i should say that i am no expert on this, so don't take my word as gospel]
Additionally, let me clarify a few things.

Starting Point: Where people start their search (to buy something or find something).

Decision Engine: Where people make a decision.

Buying Point: Where people actually buy.

What are all the reviews at Amazon for?

Amazon is both a decision engine and a buying engine. They are trying to wean off starting engines like Google and that is why they first tried A9 and now are trying devices in customers' hands.

If you step out of your attempt to defend the poster of the first article you'll realize that her article (not her, just the article) is very short-sighted.

The Internet is destroying entire industries - yet she thinks fashion internet startups should instead compete in the real world.

That makes no sense. We should all play to our strenghts. While she's trying to do backend stuff and help existing Fashion companies, some 'only 3 to 8%' earning Internet startup is going to disrupt the entire industry.

A hacker, in my opinion, is not meant to figure out how to solve the problems the existing industry power players created or want solved.

A hacker, again in my opinion, should solve the most elegant things and solve things for actual people.
TL;DR: AES_key = SHA-256(file)

This does introduce new avenues for attacks, however. You don't have to be able to decrypt to show that certain people have certain files.

Also, for files that contain just one piece of sensitive information and a the rest is predictable (i.e, the secret key file for a website back-end), you've effectively given up a hash of the secret which can then be brute-forced.
Startups are about giving back
> The pointy-haired boss is a manager who doesn't program. So > the surest way to avoid becoming him is to stay a programmer.

I agree. One of the absolute worst pieces of advice I got over and over again was "don't go into programming. It's all being outsourced overseas anyway. Just learn how to manage programmers." Luckily for some reason I finally decided to ignore that advice and strive to become a great programmer myself. One of the, if not the, best decisions in my entire life.

Even now, although I certainly could become more of a "manager", I choose to stay in the pit coding. Although I now do tasks that can be called "managing" such as helping out other coders with their bugs and problems, mentoring, communicating with people outside of engineering, recruiting and interviewing, the biggest chunk of my time is spent programming and working on my skills.

It's worked for PG. It's worked for Paul Farmer(replace "programming" with "doctoring"). I'd bet it's worked for nearly every master of their field. I think it's an essential rule to follow.
I can only think of a couple: Common Lisp, Closure, Scheme, Smalltalk. There are others that are happy-fun languages but not necessarily I love you languages that few startups are using: Scala, server side CoffeeScript, Io, F#.

That's Clojure (http://clojure.org/), not Closure, unless you're referring to Google's JavaScript compiler (http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/).

And I wouldn't call Scala a 'happy-fun language but not necessarily an I love you language' (what's the difference b/t the two?). Twitter is using it to replace the non-scalable parts of Rails, and FourSquare and BankSimple are built on it from the get-go.

Also, anything based on the JVM, especially Scala and Clojure, have tons of 'webby' libraries and frameworks out there. Start with the Lift and Play web frameworks, respectively, and the Netty async server, among other things.
I guess the biggest problem I have trying to figure out Enumeratees is that I want them to transform Enumerators into other Enumerators, but they seem to do something different, and I'm not exactly sure what. Enumeratees are actually Iteratees, but they have a strange "b" that's actually a Step. It boggles my mind somehow, probably because I'm trying to work out how that's equivalent to an Enumerator converter.

After wrestling with this since thursday, I wrote a function that's something like (wrapEnum :: Enumerator ai m b -> IO (Enumerator ao m b)), so I can convert an enumerator of one type into an enumerator of another type (I'm not looking at the code right now; that signature is obviously lacking, but it's the idea, anyhow). I think that's probably horribly wrong, but I just can't wrap my head around the type and behaviour of Enumeratees, even after reading the really pretty and simple ones that come with the snap-core package.

I think the idea is awesome, and I'm very happy about being able to use other people's Enumeratees like the various compression ones and ideas that I can express as a map or a fold, but I'm definitely missing something.
There's a part I'm not sure I'm clear on. Is this process completely automated? Or does it still require a human in the loop to iterate the grammar? I'm assuming it's the latter.

If it's completely automated, how does it choose what the subsequent rule to further refine the parsing is?
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0605064
> I agree. Windows, as far as I can see it, is the worst of both worlds. You have to do a lot of work (make a lot of decisions) to get a half-decent experience but if you want to control it at a low level, the way you can with Linux, you can't.

I have a slightly different take on this. While I agree that Windows is an example of how trying to be all things to all men leads to a confusing mess, at least in Windows 7 it's still a fairly decent default experience. It probably does punish the true tinkerer for all its complex layers of the registry, local and group policies, magic folders (eg startup), etc.

But Linux on the desktop just goes to prove time and again just how bad a user experience it is to give true "freedom". I don't want to figure out what the best way of playing video or audio files is and choosing between N (where N is typically a fairly large number) options.

This is something that Canonical (for one) is trying to address but at this stage it almost requires a complete rethink of the Linux desktop (which may be what Wayland and others hope to achieve).

> I remember that scene (in Mad Men) quite well and I think it's insightful. It reminds me of On Killing, an excellent book on the psychological effects of war.

I could probably rhapsodize about the insights of Mad Men all day.

That's certainly an interesting take on war. I think it's more than that though. In modern warfare we (as a society) have become incredibly good at training soldiers to do their job reflexively. In a combat situation the training kicks in and the modern soldier will, generally speaking, shoot an enemy (as one example) almost completely instinctively.

It's only after that happens when the soldier has time to process what they've done that they run into trouble. I saw a documentary on this and it was talking about how there's a real disconnect between the how of a soldier's actions and the why with the increasingly effective training.
one shouldn´t take this too literal and see the diversity of this term.
Especially in political context a pirate is someone whos challenging the status quo.
Pirates/Buccaneers also established some kind of grass roots pre-democratic system while everyone else at that time still praised their god-given leaders
To quote another article on the homepage, what I'm saying is: don't be so f*&^ing strategic.
The What Noise?: Insight vs. Foresight
Well, OK, but that data can also be convergently encrypted, so you only have to transfer the hash, not the whole list. But your point is well taken. If you can get your data from a different machine with nothing but a user name and password, that's probably a security hole.
Replace affiliate by middleman and you get a lot of examples.

Obviously it's difficult - because everyone's trying to do it and it gives you so much power.

Look at what Amazon is trying to do with books and music.

What Apple is doing.

What Google is trying to do.

What Facebook is doing.

they are all doing the same thing. Become a middle-man and then try to take up power and start producing stuff themselves.

It's why Google is buying content companies. It's why Facebook is a walled web - they want to replace the Internet.

Don't focus on her post. Because her post (not her, just her post) is very short-sighted.

You don't want to read it and catch the disease of not realizing the real prize.

The real prize is not becoming a small service company for the incumbents. The real prize is to take over a part of the supply chain or customer to product pipeline. Then collate all power.

It's how Google and the Internet has made most content worthless.

That's what all the fashion startups have as their end goal. She can't see it because she's caught in her concept of what fashion should be/could be. As opposed to the real underlying dynamics.

In sports terms - she's focused on a particular pitcher vs batter when the real game has a lot more than just how one batter does against one pitcher.
Nothing new here. Same technique has been used by Wuala for years now.
Huge fan of what you guys are doing. It speaks volumes that Carmen choose you as one of her first investments post Net-A-Porter. The products are really well-curated and it is one of the few sites I have seen that might actually have a shot at closing the 4-6 month production gap and reducing remnant inventory.

As anyone in the apparel business knows, you have two businesses: one full-price business and one remnant inventory business. The key to success is keeping your remnant inventory business as small as possible by closely matching production with demand, this balance can be difficult for an emerging designer with no experience, so I applaud you for trying to fix this problem and make it easier for a new designer to start a business. Good luck with everything!
Leaked photo shows white 'iPhone 4s' entry in AT&T inventory system
Part of Turkey is in "geographical Europe" - including Istanbul (or at least parts of the city).
This reads like it was written by an exploratory text generator. For example, at the end of one of the paragraphs we find the sentence "Is happy to read the whole file."
Are you saying that Google is anything other than one of the world's most wildly successful companies of the last decade?
Why Twitter doesn’t care what your real name is — Tech News and Analysis
generally, the absentee voters in germany do not affect the outcomes pretty much
South Korea NIS admits to "packet tapping" Gmail
"How to Design Programs" (http://htdp.org/) is aimed at beginners. I haven't read it, but the people behind it are top quality.
In addition to Wuala, Spideroak does this as well.

A problem remains "with full security" in that you have no idea what's going on in the binary client program. Reveal or open-source the client program and allow customers who need this end-to-end security to compile the program themselves.
It's not their children policy it's the government's: Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA): http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/coppafaqs.shtm
Online IDs?
Have you looked at the movies available to Prime members? It's like a roster of rejects from USA Up All Night.

Had an extra Sony BDP-S580 on hand this weekend so checked it out. After contemplating a Jenny McCarthy straight to video versus Clan of the Cave Bear, I had to switch to TV. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is great TV, but by itself doesn't make Amazon Instant Video a Netflix competitor.

Nice deck for $120 though, one of the few offering Hulu+.
Regarding usenet: there's no reliable way to profile people on it due to its architecture.

Fun fact, I used to work an ISP years and years ago as a tech support peon, but I remember a couple cases of police visiting us working child porn cases with subpoenas for a copy of our access logs for dial-in lines and our Usenet server. Both times the suspect was successfully prosecuted because we and the two other usenet servers he used logged activity, so we could demonstrate what posts he had made, when and from which IP.

Many Usenet servers, especially these days, require a user/pass to gain access, which is probably logged (like we did back in the day).

Also, since your profile contains minimal information the weight of your accidental bestiality hit is magnified. So for a lack of other things to show you, they show you ads for local donkey shows. Fill your profile up with more legitimate activity and that will become a rounding error.

Plus, it's associated your IP address, or some other aspect of your profile, not you personally. Which is the thrust of the rest of my response. The activity is associated with your clothes not the person.

Finally, your lack of profilable activity is in and of itself more profilable. "Oh, he's the guy that doesn't want to be profiled." Is more notable than "He's the guy that uses the Internet just like everybody else."

Weird usage patterns are one of the first things network analysts look to establish when tracking people. You for example, would be great to advertise to about security and identity protection products.
nor as eich's work on javascript, until it was released.
This is missing all of the Google+ news that is shared through Google+, or the output of all of their Twitter accounts.

Thanks for collecting all of the RSS feeds, though!
can anybody explains this in english ?
Both examples apply to Turkey also, sports and Eurovision. The problem is when we talk about EU membership. Turkey has some countries which are usually against them entering.
No, he is saying operating by consensus doesn't scale.
anytime you need o adjust or add a wire you need to cut and tie. its time consuming and wasteful.
How to build your email marketing lists for free
8 Current Technologies That Will Shape Our Future
New Samsung Series 9 notebooks
Eric Ries might say that all startups are experiments, but when he does so, he's quoting Steve Blank. It's probably nit-picking, but it seems silly to attribute that line of thought to Ries (as much as I respect him as an authority on Lean Startup). The author should give credit where it's due.
we'll be adding them soon.
HBO GO already started to do own streaming service.

Next came Cinemax with www.maxgo.com

Then came TNT for iPad http://www.tnt.tv/mobileapp.jsp

And I'm sure the rest of the cable channels will soon have their own service.

I can't imagine anyone of them wanting to give Netflix anything but the finger.
Post author here. This is very true.

This post was me trying to figure out where the 'right way' to do things lie.

Here's the problem. On one hand, you have the lessons from Google being too random and them winding up at 'more wood, fewer arrows'

On the other hand, I've seen first hand the effects of a bunch of very smart people focused on one strategy - which happens to be the wrong one. If you look at Microsoft in the early 2000s, their strategy around how to deal with the web and recognizing the threat it posed to Windows is out of the book. I've seen some very smart people articulate why it's the right thing to ignore search and ads in 2004/2005. And obviously, it was horribly wrong.

As someone who wants to run a company, I find it fascinating to study how companies deal with these situations and how you can design your culture to avoid it( and without the fix being 'be as talented as Steve Jobs'). I hope the post doesn't come across as bashing MSFT as it isn't about that - MSFT is a good reference model for myself personally since I saw how internal decision making worked there.
The extra complexity is for dealing with extra data. Say you're mapping ByteString->Text. The iteratee reads one char, then says it's done. What do you do with the extra bytes and text?

Making them return a Step allows both types of extra input to be stored, and possibly consumed later by other iteratees.

You can use (=$) or ($=) to modify how extra input is handled (by discarding it at certain points). Your wrapEnum is probably a special case of ($=).
3 Fashion Photography Hints For Outstanding Fashion Photos
I love vivid metaphors as much as the next girl, but I can't stand false dichotomies.

Nowhere in this (vivid and useful) empire/keg/movement theory is there room for scrappy businesses that start small, profit, and grow large.

You know - the type of business that "business" used to mean.

Almost without exception, businesses that are "empires" today had humble beginnings. They started with one product, or a handful, or a single location, and profited, and invested, and branched out, and grew. From IBM to McDonald's, from Trader Joe's to Apple Computer, Inc.

Amazon is a rare bird.

And as I teach my students: if you want to be rich, don't try to learn from lottery winners, or people who were born into wealth, or people who happened to be "discovered" or make the exact right connection at the exact right time. Study people who were in similar circumstances as you are now, and figure out how THEY made it happen.

Amazon is not a posterchild for a model. They are a posterchild for overcoming a model.
Declassified US spy satellites reveal rare look at Cold War space program
For those interested in strict zero-knowledge and cross account deduplication we at SpiderOak wrote a post on the issue a while back;

https://spideroak.com/blog/20100827150530-why-spideroak-does...
HTML 5 - audio codecs, h.264 licensing issues - Part 2
I hope Dart proves this out.

Things like lack of machine types and operator overloading make Javascript unusable for the data analysis and statistical computing work I'm doing. While these may be feasible Javascript extensions, I can't see how that would come about in the <10 year time frame. And I doubt it would ever happen without some counter example VM.

The typical response is that data analysis and statistical computing are server-side tasks. But that is not entirely true. Almost all the scientific applications I have worked on have major front-end needs where the web could help tremendously.

On a broader note, one thing I don't quite understand is the complaint about lack of resources. The web browser is one of the most fundamental pieces of technology that exists today. They are also reasonably profitable. From my understanding Google gives Mozilla $60 million a year for the search bar. If browser vendors cannot dedicate new teams of 2-10 programmers on some feature -- like a Dart VM or NaCL clone -- I'm inclined to say the industry should consolidate. New VMs for Javascript are created by hobbyist coders all the time, as part time projects. Why is implementing a new VM and language so much work for Mozilla?
Actually, it's the other way around. Strategy isn't some dirty word that people in suits like to toss around - it is just about deciding what you're going to do.

Large companies can afford to dink around with unsuccessful, random projects. Startups have such few resources that you absolutely need to focus and hope you're down the right path. Constantly re-evaluating and 'pivoting' can absolutely be part of your strategy too.
The left foot doesn't know what the left foot is doing.
It's understandable that several places don't have data (NaN), but I found it curious that Burma/Myanmar is missing from the map [1], much like the "Poland Sea" in a Microsoft Date/Time screen from yesteryear [2].

Did you create this map data or get it from somewhere else? Is this some kind of joke?

[1] http://i.imgur.com/m8Wce.png

[2] https://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/10/27/8804...
"Satan's Guide To Blog Comments" - think you know tricks that ain't listed?
No really... it took me pretty much time to find all the tips and compile them into a single guide. If you know a few extra - please share!
Yahoo appoints SnoopDogg Snoop Dogg as their CEO
Why the iframe? If I bookmark the home page and keep browsing, the cookies (or whatever mechanism "remembers" the last tab) bring me back to last page instead of what I bookmarked. You lose the behavior most web users have been trained with. What do you gain?
مسجات حب
Airfare to Bern, Switzerland
As long as you don't need to decrypt with user defined key to compare data, it is NOT zero-knowledge. Plain and simple.
Wouldn't this be to ensure that one degree of latitude is always approximately the same distance? (i.e. one mile)
Lighting fast, zero-downtime deployments with git, capistrano, nginx and Unicorn
My biggest issue (beside the initial TC article being a complete shocker) was the claim of 60% saving on de-duplication and that each user only had 25GB of unique data.

This research paper from Microsoft on Farsite[2] claims 'up to 50%' saving on de-dupe with a convergent file system - but that was tested against 500 computers in a corporate environment and it was done back in 2002.

Users now store a lot more photos, a lot more of their own video, and any content that is DRM'd is also unique. You can save on operating system and application files, but it isn't 60%.

There is nothing 'finally' about this additional information. The discussion and criticism of the claims on Twitter was knowing this information about convergent encryption and the key being derived from the content. There is a lot more that is still unanswered - such as how an 'intelligent cache' allows 'unlimited' storage to be available offline.

I really wish these guys would release a research paper with their results, or include more information on their website before they make such bold claims in public.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=6995...