skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm finding that in the latest Chrome beta (unsure on other browsers) that the map functionality isn't that great. Moving outside the initial zoom area requires a re-search to pull up new results, and I can't seem to click on results either.
That survey link again: http://app.fluidsurveys.com/s/backend-services/
it looks like an usability nightmare
I'm well aware of horizontal gene transfer, but thanks for linking it anyways for the people who don't know.

Edit: My response was lacking, apologies. AFAIK, there's never been a horizontal gene transfer from a prokaryote/eukaryote/any other kingdom to a mammal or animal. The last time may be when we got mitocondria.
I've been very curious about the persistence of anti-capitalists attitudes on Hacker News.

For me, one of the things that changed me from a liberal into a libertarian was starting businesses. Getting out there, trying to grow, dealing with government, and recognizing that I needed to learn finance, etc, caused me to get experience with how the business world works, and to also learn economics, and that was pretty much all she wrote.

Maybe Hacker News has a lot of overlap with the /r/politics demographic due to commonality in ages?
That's more or less true, but irrelevant. From the Wikipedia article linked elsewhere in this conversation:

Schmeiser's principal defense at trial was that as he had not applied Roundup herbicide to his canola he had not used the invention. This argument was rejected; the court said that the patent granted for the invention did not specify the use of Roundup as part of the invention, and thus there was no basis for introducing the requirement that Roundup had to be used in order for the invention to be used. That is, a patent prohibits unauthorized use of an invention in any manner, not merely unauthorized use for its intended purpose.
Sorry, I definitely meant to write 'composing' not 'incoming'.

That is really the impression I got as it's not mentioned anywhere in your description. I was wondering what your monetization scheme would have been. I predict that you will open this up to unlimited texts and charge for other actions.
Oh great another ultra thin laptop with a glossy screen that will probably last 1-2 years until you buy another one that is even thinner and the screen so shiny you can use it as a shaving mirror. Give me a laptop that will last me more than 2 years and then I will give a damn.
I honestly think the real innovators, Like the listed Stanford classes below, will come from the inside.

You can treat academia like any other industry and you need someone who knows the the system very well to innovate a better means. Plus, mass online education will still have to conform to some form of the highly bureaucratic standards that give real weight to the degree.
I think you'd be right if AMD could halve their power consumption to at the very least match Intel.
This document offers no solutions at all, it's hard to follow, and it was played in the wrong forum.

1) No solutions - What exactly should Google do? What string of thought should we start with to make any sort of improvements?

2) Hard to follow - Yegge shocks you by seeming like he's insulting Amazon, he tells you some anecdotes to give himself creedence, and he starts to get to his point about accessibility and platformification a million paragraphs in.

3) Wrong forum - Why is this on the public internet? If it wasn't, Yegge wouldn't need to spend the first half of the article establishing his credibility. If he would talk to his peers, then they could discuss the meaty technical and strategic issues without meandering around in a nostalgic haze for thousands of words.

Yegge is not Bill Gates, and this is no Internet Tide Wave memo. It would be an embarrassment for Google to have this out there, if it weren't instead just an embarrassment to the author. It sounds like Yegge is more interested in stirring the pot and publishing unrefined thoughts than working on actual solutions.

Rant indeed. Get some sleep bro.
Your father and your friends are jerks. A father who cares more about his son's earning potential than his dreams is a SUPER jerk.
Akamai Stock Going Crazy on Google Deal Rumor
oh man. yeah. Right in the depth of the dot-com bust, I was in a real bad place. Deep, deep layoffs, then many people quit. So yeah, it was really stressful, and my supervisor was, uh, kinda crazy, which was exacerbated by the stress of running a company on 1/10th the usual staff. I was just a kid and I couldn't take it. I quit.

I was so messed up that I thought I didn't want to work in IT any more. I tried to get jobs in other fields; retail, even. It's harder than it sounds. Eventually my money and my credit ran out.

I got pretty lucky; I come from an I.T. family and my dad (a mid level IT manager at the university) was able to get me an interview with a guy who used to be one of his student interns who now had a fairly successful company, so I ended up working through the dot-com dump in my chosen field.

So yeah. some advice:

1. use all your contacts to their fullest extent.

Seriously, I know it feels weird to do it, but ask your family and all your friends if they know people who have the ability to hire someone with your skillset. probably 80% of the full time jobs I've gotten (oddly, only maybe 10% of the contract gigs I've gotten) came through knowing someone.

2. if you want, sure, apply to lower-skilled jobs. But don't stop applying to jobs in your field.

Unemployment in the unskilled sectors, at least in America, is ridiculously high. This is much less true of the more skilled sectors. Also, working a unskilled job, while it can get you out of the parent's house, still counts as unemployment as far as getting your next skilled job, which brings me to 3, which may be my most important point:

3. build a resume excuse for the unemployment.

It's extremely difficult to get a skilled job after a long period of unexplained unemployment. Most of the time, resumes from people who are not currently working are simply round filed. Picking good people is /hard/ and picking bad people is /expensive/ so hr people tend to behave a bit like sheep and mutual fund managers; if nobody else wants you, the reasoning goes, there is probably something wrong with you.

This is where your side business comes in.

You now work full-time for your side business. Consulting, web design, what have you. Doesn't matter if you actually pay the bills working at the piggly wiggly, as far as your resume and your on-line identity is concerned, you are running your own company.

This works best if you actually do work on your personal company. I would advise giving your services away for free, but from experience, it's actually often easier to sell your services than to give them away (don't be ashamed to accept below market pay if you can't get market pay. Of course, try to get market pay, but there is a 'shadow IT' industry that pays little more than retail... don't be ashamed to work there if you need to; it might not pay much but it does count as IT on the resume.)
"The ruling did increase the protection available to biotechnology companies in Canada, a situation which had been left open with the Harvard mouse decision, where it was determined that a "higher lifeform", such as an animal, or by extension a plant, cannot be patented. This put Canada at odds with the other G8 countries where the patent had been granted. In Monsanto vs. Schmeiser, it was determined that protection of a patented gene or cell extends to its presence in a whole plant, even while the plant itself, as a higher lifeform, cannot be patented. This majority view, based on the precedent of mechanical devices, was central to the Supreme Court's decision, and put the onus on the Canadian Parliament to make distinctions between machines and lifeforms as it saw fit."

Sure sounds like a win in comparison to the alternative.

"Schmeiser won a partial victory, where the court held that he did not have to pay Monsanto his profits from his 1998 crop, since the presence of the gene in his crops had not afforded him any advantage and he had made no profits on the crop that were attributable to the invention. The amount of profits at stake was relatively small, C$19,832, however by not having to pay damages, Schmeiser was also saved from having to pay Monsanto's legal bills, which amounted to several hundred thousand dollars and exceeded his own."
in very multi-threaded applications (like compression or encoding) the AMD CPU actually keeps pace with the 2600k

What is the difference in price between these CPUs?
Business co-founder
I remember reading a thread on Hacker News a while back about non-technical co-founders and whether they should learn to program.

As I remember it, everyone here recommended the co-founder learn coding. That made sense to me, and now having worked under leaders at a start-up who lacked even a basic technical understanding, I can fully appreciate everyones recommendations.

But coding is hard.

I've learned some HTML/CSS over the past few months through books and online tutorials, but no matter how hard I try, it really isn't for me. I'm not made to be a coder, and it's hard to push myself to learn more.

Any recommendations on books or online tutorials I should check out? How many languages should I learn?

Most importantly, what languages should I learn? I was planning on learning PHP but the guys I work with kept arguing with me about the inferiority of PHP to Ruby & Rails... I know that's a packed discussion, but for a broad-based understanding what's best?

I'm trying to get a pretty broad-based understanding of coding so I can have competent conversations about it... Though if I could get good enough to build prototypes of what I want that would be amazing

Moreover, any further pointers on what coders appreciate in a non-technical co-founder?

(All advice is much appreciated)
> And even if that weren't the case, unions have every right to fight for the interests of workers, and should do so at every available opportunity.

Doing so may come at the expense of students. For example, while it may be in the best interest of workers to prevent online learning, there are benefits to students from online learning.

Additionally, there are instances where actions that are seemingly in the workers' best short-term interest are not in their best long-term interest. For example, the prevention of online learning at a school may benefit workers in the short-term, but in the long-term may drive students to other schools that offer online learning.
Our sense is that people don't want to use speech for everything ever, they'd much rather use their hands and eyes when they're available. We're laser focused on texting while driving right now, it's the one big use case for voice commands.

We've done a lot of user testing and have found the biggest problem with voice products now is that people try them twice or three times, and when they don't work they decide to give up on using that product. No one wants to spend time learning a user interface. So we've optimized our product for the first time user experience for texting. We're offering what voice what Dropbox did for cloud storage. There's nothing novel technology wise per se, only that the product is optimized for ease-of-use.

With regards to Siri, we're interested to see how it'll perform once it gets released into the wild.
newegg only has 2 of the 5 models available (neither being the one i'm looking for) and amazon is just listing adorama's stock, which is not really available.
Russian Entrepreneurs Hoping For Silicon Valley Magic
I can see why you can't succeed: You are not tough enough. Come on, you are young, you have no family to feed. Why can't you fail a couple times?
The majority of the entrepreneurs are very young, like you. Not because you are better than us older folks. No, not even physically. But because you got nothing to lose. And you can always start fresh.

But you got to suck it up. You got to be strong mentally. Dealing with VC or the market is 10x worse than your father or friends.
"If institutions offer a quality education, people will recognize that and choose that instead of online system."

Absolutely on the dot.

As an aside, there are intangibles associated with actually going to a University, e.g. interacting with people in person (serendipitous learning), that online classes cannot undermine.

I see online classes as a excellent supplement to what's being taught in class and in cases where in-class learning is not an option for an individual (monetary, time or location based constraints). It is such an exciting time to be around; we can witness exactly how social networking and online education can interplay vis-a-vis in-person, in-class learning.
its an interesting article. Might be a little redundant for people that read hacker news. That said if it gets non techies to seriously consider password diversification and a backup strategy, kudos.
Matt Taibbi suggests five points for the Occupy WallStreet demands
Hmm, maybe instead of 2 system you can now have one 8 core system that runs virtualization and your desktop? Now you have one power supply, less fans, ...

There is nothing inherently loud or power consuming about 8-way monstrosities. Do you remember Pentium IV or even Alpha (One of those things could heat up a room plenty well in the winter).
A rising tide raises all boats. Increased hardware and database speed will not make Rails less attractive it will make it more so. Far from exposing Ruby's sluggishness (which itself will be less and less of an issue), it will expose how easy it always was to solve most (I said most) scaling issues horizontally.

The majority of the old "Rails doesn't Scale" canard was based on perception and CPU benchmarking that had little if anything to do with actual scaling issues in the real world.

If -- if! -- SSD and other hardware advances remove the classic bottleneck for performance -- the Database -- then 1) the question of performance will become less of a political issue for departments, and there will be far less incentive to look for a scapegoat ("let's get rid of Rails then, it's slow, right??") and 2) in the majority of situations where latency is a problem for a Rails (or Django, etc.) deployment, then horizontal scaling becomes the simple solution, which in fact it always was.

But the biggest reason to use a framework like Django/Rails, etc. will not go away with better hardware: time to market. Use of these frameworks has enabled a number of high-profile sites to get to market quickly recently and handle some heavy-duty traffic by any standards. Can you imagine a Groupon rolling out on top of a J2EE stack?
Just another example of teachers and schools finding ways to screw over the people they are supposedly trying to help. The schools are cutting classes making it harder for students to graduate on time, and then teachers are looking to shoot down a potential solution.

The unions in the University of California system are just ridiculous. For example, during 2008 the worker unions who tend to the schools thought it would be a good idea to protest at my graduation. Are you kidding me? Stop hurting the students. End of story.
Seeing as it's labeled Search Google Developers, I would expect it to Search Google Developers and not to Analyze my Website. Seems fairly obvious...
yeah, I am exaggerating on the port cost some, but the big advantage of hardware raid over software isn't the hardware calculation of parity. A CPU can calculate parity so much faster than you can write to a drive that it doesn't matter at all that special hardware can do so even faster still.

The advantage of the hardware raid card is the battery backed cache. If it doesn't have a BBU and a fair amount of cache, as far as I am concerned, you might as well be using MD.

Hardware RAID cards have improved quite a lot recently; some of the stuff now has reasonably sized caches, so perhaps I should revisit my assumptions in this area. Of course, I'm planning on using ZFS on my storage servers, so even if hardware raid cards are now a reasonably good deal, they won't do me a whole lot of good.
I've been loving R since college and even wrote a love letter in the form of an R package for it. But Python just grabbed my heart these days after I learned to implement web things in Django. All the data magic are just a breeze.
Bro you're a go getter and that's what matters. I've been where you've been already. I pulled myself back together and worked my way up to success. Hang in there and keep fighting!!!
Also they aren't really blocking online classes. The title is just a little fluffy. They are simply stopping implementation of online classes that would change any teacher's employment for the next 3 years. They can still create online classes and teachers can still choose to teach online and hybrid classes.

Anyway, they cited a case of laying off two developmental math teachers and replacing them with supervised computer testing. LOL. Even here in the south I don't know many dev classes that are any different. And the teachers all don't really care anyway.
"...a few minutes..."

You obviously read a hell of a lot faster than I do.
Personally, I tend to want to respond to an article or discussion with whatever thought I'm having at the moment. The HN karma (in particular, the average) reminds me to try to filter my comments based on whether I'm saying something that I think others will find useful or whether I'm just saying it because I feel like saying it. I probably censor about half of what I would otherwise post based on this guideline, and it's nearly always to the betterment of my signal/noise ratio.
The privacy revolution will not be televised
Similarly, Google Analytics apparently needs a longer TTL for their JavaScript. It was a couple of days instead of 2+ weeks.
Despite R's problems -- and they are significant -- I see very little benefit towards ditching it for Python. Python's libraries are getting better, but if you spend any time in both systems you'll quickly realize how much Python is missing. Until another domain specific language emerges and gets traction, stick to R.
The laws, written in 1988 and 2003, were not designed with modern situations in mind because, back in 1988 or even 2003, many did not foresee the vast influence of social networks. The definition of "trade secret or intellectual property" in those laws are not likely going to give a clear answer as to whether certain Facebook user data fits that definition - i.e. its going to be an ambiguity argued in court unless a settlement is negotiated beforehand (at which point, the uncertainty remains and is waiting for the next controversy).

Historically, at least in the US (and I'd assume the rest of the world), the law adapts slowly to new industries because of (i) the difficulties in deciding how to best tackle the issues in the new industry and (ii) the bureacracy involved in enacting/revising laws.

For example, take a look at the way that hedge fund managers are able to get away with a 15% capital gains tax rate on their entire income because they structure their income to fit the law. The government is still trying to play catch up on that one, years later.
> but human labor will likely still be more expensive than the servers running the applications

Unless you outsource.
I will agree with what he says about Ruby. When you think of Ruby you think of Rails, an amazing framework with amazing things that I wish was in Django. As Javascript becomes more powerful I feel like we won't need server-side frameworks anymore. Everything will shift to the clientside, only requesting the server once with other requests for the database.

This becomes especially true with the existence of frameworks like backbone and new languages like Coffeescript that make Javascript exponentially easier.
This is why large web applications written in Ruby/Rails could easily port to JRuby. In fact, we are looking at doing this for our server platform as the initial performance numbers CRUSHED passenger/Rails. Our infrastructure guys even suggested we may be able to decommission some of our servers based on initial performance numbers.
October 12, 2011: The Day SMS Began To Die
To diffuse some of this, the comparison to Siri is that it's a conversational voice interface.

We're actually surprised that people are picking up that we're optimized for texting while driving and that Siri is a personal assistant (perhaps it's more obvious in retrospect given these comments). Our first expectation was that people would think "oh, how is this different from Siri again, except worse?" and that we'd have a hard time differentiating ourselves.
I've used R a bit, but usually use Python (scipy/numpy, then iGraph for plotting/graphing). I could do whatever I wanted with scipy/numpy, so I figured why switch.
Startups don't have the resources of large companies to invest in on-campus recruiting efforts, and the CRC doesn't have the time/money to bring together a bunch of small companies. It's just easier to bring in the big players and try to employ as many students as you can.

That means it's up to you to speak up, use the tools at your disposal (linkedin, wescan) to find the people who are more than willing to help, and to make the opportunity for yourself.
I'm not alarmed because there seems to be two very distinct crowds of people who hang out on hacker news. "Startup people", like yourself, who are across the political spectrum, with probably a disproportionate number of libertarians (as compared to the broader population) and the /r/politics crowd which are very anti-capitalist, anti-innovation, pro-taxes, etc.

Some threads attract one crowd and the comments go one way, other threads attract the other crowd and the comments go the other way.

I really wish Hacker News was about startups, and if there was any debate, we were all capitalists debating it. I'm tired of the seemingly endless stream of leftist propaganda that gets promoted to the front page (e.g.: anything by Krugman, for example.) I'd hate this just as much if it were all rightest propaganda. IF it was balanced, I wouldn't like it, but it wouldn't be irritating.

When almost all the discussions are of one mindset, and posting something outside that mindset gets you down voted to oblivion, I feel like intellectual discussion is much more difficult. This isn't always the case here, obviously, but sometimes it is.

I don't really care for Amazon, but at least when Amazon is on the front page its because they did something relevant to the site. I can just ignore those threads. Amazon' announcing that they've got a new finger service in AWS doesn't add anything for me, but it doesn't detract like the political topics do.

Cloudant, a company that takes CouchDB and turns it into a dynamo style ring, has produced something significant in their platform. We should be talking about this.

Cloudant provides a very useful tool that should be very highly relevant to people who are doing startups.

The thing is, I suspect a major population of HN commenters aren't really doing startups or planning to.
Awesome work!

Do you have plans to expand the data source beyond Twitter? Maybe with filters for users to select source(s)?
Yes, I'm glad they reported it, but I still find it amusing.