skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I so wish this were the top comment.

That's really the issue for me. Most of the analogies with Apple/Microsoft/Chevy/etc. are flawed because anyone can buy those products. In this case, Cloudant not only accepted a partnership with Monsanto (and thus, obviously had communication with them for some time) but touted it as as the greatest thing since sliced bread.

And I can understand their enthusiasm since it's a big deal with regards to their business.

But, Monsanto's track record within the last forty years is deplorable. Read their Wikipedia page, about Bovine somatotropin, or watch documentaries about them. Goodness, it's hard to like them.
You are a commenter on HN, so you have a distorted view about how willing the average person is to start a company.
I have a deep interest in politics. I've watched and read much on Monsanto. I upvoted because I like to think if given the chance I would refuse to partner with a Monsanto no matter how much $$$. I'm comfortable with you thinking I'm dumb based on an upvote.
If I search for 'clojure' none of the links have Clojure in them. Does it only search for location or can you search for keywords?
Sounds like in the last year after the first code release they all did a bunch of LSD and turned their product into a open source hippy community.
Did you read past that point? If yes, than you answered your own question. If not then you cannot properly add value to the conversation.
Mac Trojan Flashback.B Checks for Virtual Machines
Dude's blog is driving me nuts overall. No commenting, and the article about why iPhone is 3.5 inches the other day because "Galaxy S II" is too big to reach whole screen with your thumb... Yeah maybe for a child or small-bodied (non-American) woman, but I actually borrowed a friends to CHECK, and I can easily reach beyond every bit of the screen with one hand.
i've seen companies do a lot more with a lot less. I don't care if its NY, SF, or LA. I wouldn't donate based on what they produced with the original 200k
Matt: This is a lie. I have seen you talk about quality at SMX and it is laughable. These quality guidelines you speak of might pertain to others, but they do not pertain to Google's own content.

1. When I search for a restaurant, 99% of the time Google places shows up before Yelp. So you are telling me that Google places always has better content than Yelp? Look at these reviews for Gary Danko - http://maps.google.com/maps/place?num=100&hl=en&biw=...

"love it" and "our favorite restaurant" Does Google Places have much better quality content 99% of the time?

2. Look at http://www.seobook.com/images/google-google-google-google-go.... A. Look at all of Google's sites in the results. B. What are those Youtube videos doing in these results? Every other result in this set has the words hollywood and cauldron right together(except the leaky-cauldron domain result), but since Youtube is a Google property it shows up. It's funny. Do this search on your own and you will see that the top 40 results have "Hollywood Cauldron" in its title, but the ones in Youtube do not.

So your results are all about quality unless it comes down to your own content. Then, it doesn't matter.

By the way, I can't wait for Google Plus to start hogging space in your results too. We all know how important "social" is to you guys. Even more important than "local." So we shall assume the results will be even more crowded google content. If we are lucky, maybe Robert Scoble will mention the words hollywood and cauldron in one of his wordy posts and we will see at the top of the results! And by the way, no one buys that don't be evil thing any more... long gone.
Not from what I've seen. There are tons of Java jobs. There's good reason for that. I can run Java apps on any OS. That's pretty important. It runs fast these days. Eclipse totally rocks and most if not all of what you need is totally free in the Eclipse world.
First, power. Second, the old K7's are not as fast as you remember.
I feel like asking for donations with nothing really to show for it is stooping quite low.
I think the lack of delivered milestones and need for more money indicates that this team with the current vision will likely always need more money to deliver "the vision".

I think of the group that got pissed off at the Twitter client announcement months back and went out and built http://rstat.us in a weekend (a very rough deployed prototype).

Since then they have been hacking on it making it nicer and nicer to use. It is actually a really compelling replacement for Twitter; just without your social circles yet.

A project like Diaspora, with the charter that it has "take on Facebook" is too big to try and fund without a benevolent dictator at the helm, executing a singular vision.

That project either needs to be driven by the community as an open source project (again, with a singular dictator driving it) or it needs to be rolled up into a tight company vision with a first round of funding to get a deployment up and running with a wall, photos and messages and then move on from there.

I was annoyed to see the lack of updates on their product page and so many annoyed/angry donatees pissed off with the lack of updates.

More money isn't going to fix this. I am almost certain I could give them $500k and in a year and a half be here again with a rewritten back end and a request for "just a little more funding".
Phone calls allow me to:

- make sure that I have your attention until my problem is solved
You are absolutely right. Having known my comment was going to be so popular, I would've offered a more civil and productive opening to the discussion. Realistically though, I saw my comment being downvoted into oblivion. I was ok with that. And I'm still ok with my comment, because "fuck you" is probably how I'd start any discussion with a member of Monsanto. I don't think that makes me insane (or dumb according to PG).

Its unfortunate though that my comments distracted from the real issue.

But then again, perhaps all of this discussion wouldn't have happened without my comments. Controversy can be fickle.
House Prepares to Move STEM Immigration Reform
Former Millionaire Bloggers Calls Occupy Protests Noise
Criticker might be a better option, since the recommendations backend is already in place.

(Note, I'm not affiliated, just a happy user)
I think your original function was pure in the mathematical sense, but since you were operating on a data structure that is specifically 2 or 3 elements long, then you don't need to be that generic.

Just think of a vector of 3 elements as being one entity, and therefore it still obeys the 0, 1, Inf rule mentioned elsewhere in the comments.
Maybe it's just me, but reimplementing NumPy on the PyPy platform in 6 months with an estimated 1000 hours of work seems extraordinarily ambitious. I don't mean to pooh-pooh this effort (which I would like to see happen), but the general feeling I've gotten from folks in the scientific Python community is that introducing a JIT is not going to be a magical solution for our performance problems, especially considering that many scientific Python programmers are already programming very close to the metal with Cython (or wrapping Fortran 90 with f2py). I didn't come up with this-- I'm just rehashing conversations I had at PyCodeConf last week. Other members of the SciPy community have some fairly different ideas about building a new architecture for array computing (http://conference.scipy.org/scipy2011/slides/wang_metagraph....), i.e. building a dynamic fusing compiler ("stream fusion") for array expressions.

However, having a numpy-lite in PyPy would enable a lot of people to switch to PyPy who are currently being well-served by the current version of NumPy and thus benefit from the rest of their Python code being a lot faster.

A lot of people have asked me recently if PyPy would help me with my library, pandas. My answer so far has been "even if NumPy worked on PyPy, probably not all that much". It'd be cool if I am proved wrong :)
Did the original Siri also do stuff like this?

I think it’s a great move on the creators’ part. Building silly stuff like that into Siri creates massive amounts of goodwill. That will make it much harder to really hate Siri when it – inevitably – screws up sometimes.
Is it powered by Steorn?
There are a lot of 10 line perl scripts on sourceforge.
Agreed.

Those who think that Monsanto represents "apolitical business" are not my definition of smart.

Than again, apparantly I'm one of the dumb ones.
Wow, thanks @vnorby! That was my team. We started out in the beginning of 2007 with myself and 2 other devs and we were just the "API Team". Our goal was to simplify and standardize data access for all front-end features. At that time, this was a monumental task as most features lacked common code besides the infamous MaintenanceConfig. There was basic SQL call wrappers for querying data and some core handling of the large number of federated profile/mail DBs, but besides that, features tended to be built ad hoc.

This posed a problem to scaling the massive web traffic load on these databases. It also left open dangerous patterns of duplicate data calls where each control on a page was making its own calls for the data it would bind to.

Man... I could go on for days about the path we took from the wild wild west of code slinging up to the nice accessible, maintainable, freakin' BEAUTIFUL Server Slayer platform. Instead, let me just leave you with the logo we designed for this internal platform: http://imgur.com/Pvpy7

\m/
-- robbie
API Development Mgr.
MySpace 2/2007 - 3/2010
The ever-marching progression of fire-breathing monstrosities brings you lower-performance chips that do more and more for less and less power. If you are interested in low power, I find you are best served by eyeing the low-mid end of the previous generation.
>> but if we happen to be out to lunch next to a shoe store that's having a 40% off sale and our phone lets us know, is it really that bad?

For me, yes, because it interrupts what I'm doing and breaks my focus. If I really need shoes, then show me the best deal on shoes when I've expressed intent and I'm not otherwise occupied. Otherwise, I don't want to hear about it. That's why Google's ads are great, and I hate the rest - it's a high bar, and most companies just don't care about you enough to hold back from imposing their ads at times when it doesn't make sense.
Most students seem to benefit from having an expert on hand to answer their questions and evaluate their work.
Mr. Graham, wow, this is rather disappointing to hear. You wish to frame a discussion through ad hominem instead of on the merits. For what it's worth I am apolitical, and have little interest in provoking controversy, but that doesn't mean I wish to see the promotion of a company which pushes injustice across the world.

Previously, I had looked up to you as a bit of a hero, now my opinion of you has dived quite low. I would not have minded if you disagreed with the merits of what Monsanto and Monsanto's customers choose to do. However, referring to people as dumb, for upvoting what is essentially a very well held and defensible position is a very weak thing to do. There are lots of arguments to be made against Monsanto, not the least of which is its Superfund environmental disaster sites.

The point is, I am informed, I know exactly what I am against, and have every reason to be outraged at the injustice perpetrated by Monsanto. This is furthered by needing to make the same arguments against Monsanto at my own company. If we've gotten to the point where we can't be outraged against injustice, then we may as well be heartless automatons.

To summarily dismiss them in this way and at the same time attack the intelligence of your readers is, well, reprehensible. Call me dumb if you will, I won't make arguments to the level of my own intelligence, but know that you have invalidated every reason to see you as a role model.
I think sometimes tone is important. Both jubilantly celebrating a massive association with an incredibly awful company, and condescending to users by calling them stupid, don't really seem to serve anyone.

The problem isn't that they aren't spinning right, the problem is that it's pretty obvious that Cloudant doesn't care about working with evil companies, and that you're feeling somewhat disdainful of a lot of your users.

Both are unbecoming, and I think that's all people are trying to reflect (even if they are somewhat confused in how they frame their statements). People want to believe that you all aren't just smart, that you're good guys, so to speak, ie. that all the talk about "being good" isn't opportunistic, or that you aren't mean and reactive. I don't think either of those things matter particularly, and maybe they aren't germane to the kinds of conversations you'd hoped to be having, but I understand the impulse.
Sadly, the "spirit of community" is begging for money.
Last I read, the tri-gate IvyBridge is almost entirely focused on power consumption, with a very small incremental boost in performance.
Thanks for the advice! I definitely want to work with startups and small teams, so this seems quite applicable.

I am pretty active on Stack Overflow and Github, so I think I'll put those on my resume as well.
Wonder if he felt like this guy. LOL You just hit reply all!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9xGw-SWej8
do you give google money? if not, you're not a customer and have probably never experienced their customer service or a "customer perspective".
how very un-apple, the original voice commands wouldn't even tell you the time
hm. I think the problem is mostly the profit margin. cheap 3tb drives are what $130 each? and you need 333 or so of those to get 1000gb. If you go with, say, 12 disk zraid2 sets, that'd be around 400 disks. Of course, these are 'seagate petabytes' I'm counting, but that's only $52000 for the disk; then, say 10 of the supermicro chassis;

I think you could do it, I mean, at scale where labor costs are mostly amortized out, if you were willing to accept really low margins, or if someone would design and test it for free.

But that's the thing, someone like me? even a cut-rate dedicated server/VPS provider is used to charging around 1/4th to 1/6th the cost of the hardware /every month/ - obviously, this results in margins that are pretty nice by the standards of companies that sell goods with significant marginal costs, at least if you have enough scale that you don't blow it all on labor.

Really, the "big fee up front" model is interesting and warrants a discussion all it's own.
Great job jude. u the man.
So few upvotes... On HN, this man is worth 500 times less than Steeve Jobs.
Google has always wanted to make web faster. See http://code.google.com/speed/articles/ . And I'm sure you know about various Google tools (including Chrome) that try to speed up web.

They rely very heavily on web, and it's absolutely important for them to speed up web for people to keep moving away from native.
Well, good on you for saying so. I don't think your opinions are insane - I don't fully share them but certainly understand your reasons for disliking Monsanto. I'm just not a fan of the shouting match as a conversational style.
This is when most people realize that the U.S. is a third-world country.

If not that, it's when they go to the doctor in France and ask about billing and get a funny stare.
Thanks for the writeup. I've been using bundler for about 6 months (and even have the same 'be' alias!) and understand it, I'm just confused when it seems to magically forget about my installed bundle.
Maybe. But in his own words:

"The reason this comment thread is a worrying sign for HN is that you didn't use to have to think like a PR person here."
I'm sorry, I didn't catch that, I was (driving|reading a website|talking with a co-worker|playing a game|watching a video|doodling|handing the phone to my baby).
I don't think Cloudant's move was even particularly bad PR. Cloudant doesn't sell to the 99%, they sell to businesses. Businesses are going to be impressed that a large multinational corporation trusts Cloudant with their data, and probably won't care too much about Monsanto's ethical infractions.
Can you rephrase that to include the words "disproportionate effort" so it gives the illusion of being relevant?
Boredom drives me. At most jobs I've had, I feel bored. Sometimes I also feel stressed, but I rarely feel interested.
The other thing that drives me is ambition.
This is the reason why I could never understand why Google seemed intent on promoting Wave as a fancier version of email or why they focused so much on the tech demo UI.

Under the hood, Wave was a federated XMPP network with privacy controls and the ability to move arbitrary data around. It had all the underpinnings not of an email killer, but of a distributed social network.

I was really excited about the potential of the project at the time, and came to be incredibly disheartened by the way nobody seemed to realize that the fancy placeholder UI wasn't where the actual interesting technology was.

ETA:

OneSocialWeb was another project predating Diaspora that was a distributed social network built on top of XMPP:

http://onesocialweb.org/developers-xmpp.html
This acquisition just doesn't make sense for Google, especially for the (likely) $5+ billion price tag. It'd make much more sense for a company like Apple or Facebook - i.e. one that didn't just finish building its own CDN.
What Happens to You When You Are Totally Honest
I've found that if provided with a phone number, the people you'd least like to call you, do.
Guess What? Kik is on BlackBerry Again
Suggestions to find a business opportunity in a developing country
I'd like to know what is your suggestions to find a business opportunity in a developing country, more precisely in Brazil.

I've been looking out to find problems that I could solve for small business. I confess that as a graduate student I'm having a hard time discovering possible niches to work on.
I feel like i'm on a desert, I can't come up with my own ideas but I don't know what small businesses need as I've been doing mostly distributed systems research, except for some time that I worked as a programmer on a legal firm developing internal systems. Entrepeneurship looks like some secret cult here.

Most discussions here on hacker news seems to be focused on consumer services; it seems hard to apply the advice given on those situations in an economic environment like Brazil, where legal requirements are complex, taxes are high, and there is lack of venture capital for funding.

Self-funded businesses targeting small business clients seem to have a greater chance of surviving. Sure it won't be the next twitter or facebook, but I'm more interested in having creative freedom and enough money to have a regular life (i.e. I don't need to own yatch).

With this context in mind, what would you suggest as a good approach to find business opportunities?
We charge for non incentivized installs of games. We have some of the biggest game developers in the world as customers paying us right now. If you are interested please get in touch.
Tempted to start calling HN "Hater News"...
Would also love to read it.

If you're looking for some notes or even a proof read just let me know.
Good article: Motivates me to hire a programmer for some little jobs, instead of doing everything myself.
Signed up too. Love the idea
OccupyR.com launches a social-network for the Occupy Movement
For whatever its worth, there is a position class called "Lecturer with Security of Employment" that allows essentially a tenure system for select lecturers. Typically, a lecturer must have at least a PhD to be considered for something like this, it's for people who want to focus on teaching but don't want any research duties.
http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0060/6102/products/book_buy...
Point of order: he didn't "rave and swear at people".

He raved and sweared at a gigantic corporation. Let's not get sloppy.
>nobody's really believed they had a shot since that code release a year ago that showed they had no real technical skills to back up the project.

I really have no idea why people thought the project had a serious shot in the first place. From the get go they were talking up hugely ambitious features like video-chat while never explaining how they intended to deal with the core architecture of the project.

Simple fact of the matter is that they happened to announce when being pissed at Facebook was a common sentiment, and people expressed their anger by throwing money at these kids. It really didn't take more than a cursory look to see that the chances of something worthwhile being built, let alone taking off, were minimal.
These are far too entertaining to be Apple's decision. Either they were pre-existing, or a dev hid an easter egg.

Regardless, I hope they stay.
Yeah, you could probably conjure up a problem with any positioning, e.g bottom-speaker is pretty easy to accidentally cover when holding the phone sideways.
Web Start-Ups Hit Cash Crunch
The author mentions a specific problem.

We don’t know whether Apple considered that problem but it’s a problem nonetheless.
CVE-2011-3230 - Launch any file path from web page (Safari/OS X)
Siri phones home
Any new platform API's to go with this?
Is Mount Everest the Best Place for Solar Power?
I really really really get bored of journalists reporting things they heard from anonymous sources. When I read something that cites an anonymous source, i just assume the journalist was bored and decided to make some shit up.

Both this article and the article it refers to have done this and its getting extremely tedious.

I'd like to see Journalists get a degree and a license just like a lawyer or a doctor, then maybe we'll get some integrity out of an industry that is filled to the brim of fear mongering bullshit artists.
Does the choice of being unable to call 911 seem strange to anyone else? I think the risk of occasional accidental calls [1] is nothing compared to emergency situations where the user is too panicked to operate the touchscreen, or blind, or [insert your own edge case here]. Or is this solely a legal restriction on emergency services?

[1] I once somehow butt-dialed 911 on my old dumbphone, which was embarrassing and terrifying. I awkwardly apologized and hung up, and there were no repercussions.