skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If he's taking market compensation, shouldn't he at least receive a lower equity stake vs. no equity whatsoever? Start-ups will ask you 'do you prefer more shares, or more equity". You can take "market rate, little equity" as an option.

"They're funded" is also mis-leading, as they're still in the process of getting an angel round. The guidelines and the post you've written (which are excellent, by the way) are more for "post series A, pre series B" stage rather "angel round, forming the core team by signing on the first technical person" stage.
Since when is Facebook an example of business best practices?
Why Facebook Likes Small Ads, Despite the Small Dollars
I would consider Matlab to be a DSL grown out of control. If you are working purely with matrix/vector/tensor math, as you say, you can be reasonably comfortable with the language as long as you remember to double-check the docs on nearly every function before you use it just in case there is some strange edge-case it handles awkwardly.

Unfortunately, in any real project I've ever done with Matlab you cannot survive just inside the matrix DSL and once you start touching the bolted-on bits you lose patience very quickly.

So, I suppose I agree, it's a nice DSL, but I'd also wager that the majority of people using it don't realize the limitations implicit there.
So where is all this money they are being forced to cough up going? I just bought a new monitor a couple of months ago and it was a big deal for me because I don't have too much spending money. I doubt any of this money will go to any actual victims.
Reminds me to break out my russian books ... I'm getting rusty
Freemium is certainly a better model then "we'll figure it out later", but I think it is very dependent on specific markets. The reason I say this has a lot to do with my own project.

I'm working on software that builds and maintains business websites. Sorry for being vague, but I'd rather SHOW you guys when it's up. So in this case I think the freemium model will hurt my business and my customers, here's why:

No lead qualifying -

If you are targeting a specific niche having a free product encourage anyone and everyone to sign up. This drastically reduces the conversion rate. I know the argument here is one of marketing, but if a client signs up for a pet application and does not have a pet, is he really going to be an effective marketer? How many accounts have you set for free services you just wanted to "test out". For me I'd say about 20, and I've never been back since. I'd imagine they still have my accounts though.

No client incentive -

In my specific case my clients (businesses) will use the software to create a website. If the service is free, they essentially have no incentive, no motivation, and no time limit to proactively use the system.
Consider the case where everyone had to pay the monthly fee up front, but came with a money back guarantee. "Did we not prove our product was useful? No problem, here's your money back". If a customer pays for your services, he definitely is going to spend time given it an authentic test run - his money is on the line!

Paying customers cover free versions?!

Again, depending on the product, and payment structure, your much more likely to generate more revenue from EXISTING customers, than you will be acquiring new ones.
This is a very fundamental business/marketing principle.

Low efficiency -

If your business requires any type of customer support, the price for free jumps dramatically. Resources would be better spent servicing pre-qualified leads.

Paying customers are customers that value you.
Doesn't that just sound like its a nice thing?
I know we ought to work hard for our customers, but if you ENCOURAGE people to place no value in your service, you are asking for trouble no?

--------------------------

So seeing as how my business is not launched yet, these are all just theories in need of testing. They also, as I said, may or may not apply to certain industries and products. But overall I think its worth mentioning.
I think it is implied that the average IQ is 100. But you are right there is nothing wrong having 50% below average if the average were 200.
no, clojure
More visual way of searching, huh? Reminds me of that failure that was Cuil...
plus they can not be reconciled with relativity.
What do you mean?
black holes indeed were a prediction of general relativity.
Very revealing. I believe in the conservation of value.
In the end there are losers of value and those that made off with real value. This article explains the convoluted pipes and flywheels through which the most massive theft of value in history was performed.

Now if someone (or some article) can explain what the deal is with the black hole that is AIG and why they are so special to get such huge transfusions of capital (and Lehman didn't), I would really appreciate it.
Heh, thanks. moshe at google dot com was already taken, it was my second choice...
I don't like the word "bailout", but I think letting them die at the moment is too risky.

I would consider a government-backed loan or temporary equity stake on the conditions that:
- Executives are replaced
- The UAW agrees to major contract restructuring or is disbanded altogether (see below before you crucify me)
- The companies set efficiency goals for production and sales processes (stop putting out designs earlier and changing them every year)

I also think the government could do things on the demand-side to help. Such as offering tax credits for buying a new, American car

On the UAW issue, please be aware that I'm not "anti labor". Non-union workers at US-based plants (for Toyota, Hyundai, etc.) have comparable salaries, good benefits (including pensions), and negotiating power.

Some good info on all of this at NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9694532...
I would never go with 50/50. At the very least 51/49 or any form of (50+x)/(50-x). When you have 50/50 and problems arise, you get two founder tugging the boat in opposite directions eventually going nowhere.
hah "The toggles... they do nothing"
Everybody's mad at the financial institutions for spending their bailout money on bonuses and other seemingly irresponsible things. Because these companies are not bankrupt, they're not able, as far as I know, to renegotiate much of anything they've committed themselves to contractually.

From inane Union concessions (job bank) to executive compensation and stupid parts contracts, the domestics are shackled with the cumulative damage from decades of mismanagement. Bankruptcy is the tool they need in order to actually recover from the mistakes they made.

When you start talking about dissolving large scale manufacturing enterprises, however, there are people that start asking who will build the tanks in the next large war. I don't understand the military aspect of that but I suspect if all of the plants go foreign owned they'd just be nationalized in the event of a crisis. Maybe the bailout is the nationalization and they're just thinking ahead -- I don't know.
Do you wear headphones connected to your computer? Depending on the type you wear, it's only marginally different in my not-entirely-informed opinion.

I tell you this, when there's lightning within 50 miles, I take my headphones off! I've never heard of anybody being injured or dying that way, but the mental image is not one I can tolerate.
Have you ever heard of JIT Manufacturing? or just in time manufacturing? The process was DEVELOPED by the Japanese in the 80's to compete with the American giants.

The Japanese do not produce a car, until they know it is needed. It took the American car companies decades to catch on, and even then labor unions prevent the auto industry from moving from human labor to machine labor, which can be cheaper than even a Chinese laborer.

We can produce cars cheaper than Japan, we just don't want to sacrifice millions of jobs doing it. Where the Japanese have found a way to move forwards. Labor unions have had such a grasp on the airlines, education, and the auto industry its no wonder that we need to consider bailing these industries out. They are the most socialist industries in the country.

If we need to save these industries, I do think we need to use government funds, but shouldn't they be economic development funds? Rather than cash that will be burned on failed employment standards?
I believe in the conservation of value.

You don't think it's possible to create wealth? Or do you just mean that it is conserved within the finance industry?
Second Life affair leads to real life divorce
I don't think throughput is a barrier at the moment.

The main touted benefit I've heard of Chromium's tab-threading is insulation, so if one tab crashes it doesn't bring the whole browser down.
You are right. After reading the title for this post, it occurred to me that we are at a pinnacle moment in US history. We suffer from slow innovation, excessive consumerism and financial greed, but any attempt to change these problems is quickly shot down because nobody wants to risk damaging the economy. But now, with a failing economy that fear, at least in political terms is gone. If our new President really wants to represent change then leading congress against the lobby must be the first place to start.
Direct correlation: imap use and tearing my eyes out
What has been your experience with using imap (e.g. gmail and outlook)? I gave it a shot and was trying to be smart about it (e.g. not downloading spam folder). However, I found that performance was very slow. I'm thinking of going back to pop or just using the gmail client.

Looking to understand other's experiences and maybe learn how to improve performance or other approaches to utilizing IMAP. have a good one.
Nice video.
Highlight: The pizza to hotel delivery.
Akward: The widow story.
Thanks for the pointer. I was actually just looking at ACL the other day - I have a friend here at Google who is investigating integrating it with plop as a 20% project. I'm very excited that your work combines theorem-proving with learning, kudos! Do you do anything probabilistic to decide which generalizations to try?
"He set himself up in a winter chalet with a Cobra helicopter gunship parked next to it."
I'm afraid they put this article up as part of a plot to persecute those of us who really see what is going on. I think people are delusional when they don't think the government researches mind control on civilians. All stopped when MKULTRA ended, and the mind controllers all went into advertising? No those same people kept doing the same jobs under different names.

Suppose the government was doing mind control research on civilians, and were getting sloppy. Planting stories like this in the NYT would represent an instantiation of a well established mind control technique to marginalize the group you were experimenting at controlling. Associating them with other mental illnesses in the general population, so as to induce associations when reports from your failed experiments come out is textbook mind control. It's the exact same technique your favorite store uses to market you your favorite product.

Of course, it's also true that many people first feel powerless, then become paranoid to disown responsibility for being a powerless loser. It's a fine line. Personally, I think the idea that there is a many-one relationship between mind control agents and controlled people is ridiculous. They don't need to have many agents doing mind control on one person, because TV gives a mechanism for few agents to control many people, with a higher degree of precision and less resources. Yes, your reality is likely completely programmed by institutionalized sociopathic personalities, euphimistically called corporations ("no it isn't," the reader thought, sipping the mountain dew), but it's narcissistic to think it takes many of them to control one of you. It takes a few of them to control millions of you. I think the root of this kind of paranoia is narcissism and ignorance about how easy mind control and mass manipulation are.
Now if only this could happen for the US cell phone SMS charges. Theres absolutely no reason why it costs 20 cents each way to send 140 7-byte characters.
Displaying code in your blog
Well, sort of. Genetic programming with probabilistic modeling and sampling instead of crossover/mutation (i.e. it an estimation-of-distribution algorithm), where programs are represented in reduced (normal) form and which variables to use in the probabilistic models is determined adaptively and changes as the search progresses... ;->
How about make something good enough that the ruthlessly honest dick can be the evangelist.

This seems to be Apples strategy.
I think the most important part of that is the "34.3 hours to build a vehicle vs 27.9 hours to build a vehicle". Even if their heathcare cost per hour is the same they can't compete with Toyota. GM would be better off outsourcing their entire car production to Toyota than to keep trying to build cars. Just let them die.
I was just thinking this morning that if we had 10 or 12 companies that were all competing against each other maybe a few of them would have made some different decisions about what markets to search for.

I think breaking up the company is a good idea if we bail them out. It will spread out the risk and allow the companies to focus on a core market. It will also spread out the risk.

I think it makes sense if each plant was a separate car manufacture. Let them each decide what cars they want to make and give incentives for cars that have over 50mpg, and cost less than $15k. In times like these its time to start a revolution, and the car industry is a good place to start.
The title is trollish: concurrency is not a "myth" in either Ruby or Python -- you just need to use the appropriate techniques (process-level parallelism, non-blocking I/O, etc.) to achieve it. The existence of the GIL is well-known.
Myth 1: Rails is Hard to Deploy
it is about how to sort with stop word. Tranditional tf-idf method didn't work well as it didn't contain any information about each word relative location in its context. a simple method is to index "the the", the word group instead of single "the". I guess it is what Google does now with "to be or not to be". However, the word grouping tech is a common method in CJK full text search.
That might work, but I'm just running this over my wifi network from one computer to another. It would be wasteful for my streaming video to have to go across the internet.
I'm not sure how you can talk about concurrency without talking about locks ... which I think is very ambitious for new programmers.

I agree. I don't think it should start from CS1, but you can start with the Dining Philosophers problem in CS1 to introduce the ideas of locks and starvation.
Its not built into rails transactions; you explicitly have to lock tables/rows (depends on the db/engine you're running) inside of transactions to avoid conflicts. We ran into this problem with Poll Everywhere when we had to update a counter cache column. We had something along the lines of

Poll.transaction { increment!(:results_counter) }

This worked fine with one mongrel in our dev and test environments but when we threw that out to our cluster of mongrels, we got all sorts of locking errors when a torrent of people would vote. To resolve the issue we had to add:

Poll.transaction{ lock!; increment!(:results_counter); }

If this isn't a bottleneck or leaky abstraction then I don't know what is. Locks are ugly and I consider them a hack. In our case an RDBMS probably isn't the best data store solution.
Can you envision a world where your "thin client" is powered by 25 cores clocked at a low speed like 100 MHz? Why not?

Do you really think performance doesn't need to be increased from the current status quo? The number of cores will only go up from here.
Tapaa suomalaisia sinkkuja
E-kontakti.fi on suomalainen deittisivusto, joka on avoin sinkuille kaikkialta maailmasta. Sivustossa voi flirttailla, lähettää viestejä ja paljon muuta. Luo oma kuvallinen kontakti-ilmoitus ja löydä rakkautesi, romanssi tai uusia ystäviä.
As far as I see it... In Michigan the auto companies underpin so many other industries and fields that if the big three fail we'll be looking at the current foreclosure epidemic as a vacuum cleaner relative to the black hole that will ensue. I very much doubt that anyone in the position to decide will let the auto companies fail.

In Silicon Valley it's, "Start a startup!"

In Michigan it's, "Join the union or!"
I didn't want to explicitly say Apple, but yeah. That's what I was thinking. Once your dick has nothing to say, he's an evangelist.
Well, the difficulty with this is that program induction is in fact too general to be very interesting - to create a competition you would need to publish some test problems, or describe a special distribution of "natural programs" that you especially cared about...
When a company goes bankrupt nobody needs to be fired the next day. A judge can restructure the company and toss out specific contracts such as executive bonuses, union pay, and debts. Look at Delta Air lines as an example of this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines.
Online Video: Where’s The Money?
Maybe we do: faster client-side AJAX would create a much better user experience... but how much this is needed, I don't know. Maybe it doesn't really matter?

At any rate, speed can be increased substantially without faster hardware, but with: (1) efficient implementations of javascript (Chromium); (2) faster Flash (AS3 + AIR); (3) web-friendlier Java (JavaFX); or even Sliverlight.

But the nice thing about faster hardware is you get faster apps without rewriting or learning new tech - opps, unless that faster hardware is many-core[⁎]...

Another reason to not need many-core is that desktop apps are already fast enough for the staples (word processing, spreadsheets). Hence the rise of sub-notebooks, the iPhone, and the best-selling games console being by far the least powerful (wii).

[⁎] many-core (as opposed to multi-core) technically means heaps of processors - tens or hundreds. It is a qualitatively different situation from one thread per processor.
Dell CTO Kevin Kettler to step down
I don't see how share nothing concurrency solves the "problem" of learning about locks. While locks in a share nothing concurrency architecture is not a problem, it is in other concurrency setups (you know, like threads?)
This might be one of the most threatening threats to the human beings.

"Threatening threats" is a redundant redundancy in any language.

Or how about this statement from his(?) other post:

Management is certainly a big hassle for each company.

Hilarious!
Classic essay: "Why Chinese is so Damn Hard"
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

"Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility."
JIT ftw! (it led to agile development)
I agree to an extent with what you've said. I think labor is a balance. GM had it swing too far toward labor. However, if you're an auto worker, there's likely only one employer in your town which gives that employer undue power. Ideally, there are many employers that demand the same skill set that you can get a job with. In that case, you have the choice of many firms and the firms have the choice of many workers and it works out pretty well.

Since there are only a few auto manufacturers and the likelihood that there's more than two in your commutable distance is low means that auto manufacturers have the power necessary to abuse their workers without unions.

However, unions became ultra-effective in many places demanding things like pay even when plants aren't used and benefits fit for a king. GM agreed to that because, at the time, the auto industry was really just Ford and GM and the unions were sticking it to Ford too and so it didn't matter so much. That's changed, but the UAW won't face the post-80s reality.

Having workers have no power is bad. Having companies have no power is bad. Having each group have equal power works pretty well.
That hardware will continue to expose more levels of parallelism is almost certain at this point.

That most software will consciously need to exploit that parallelism is not as clear. It's possible that some applications will be able ignore parallelism, but overall system performance can still be improved by being able to schedule multiple processes in parallel.
a) Not everyone in Google Research has a PhD, though of course there is a bit of a correlation (also, plenty of "research" takes place in general engineering)
b) You do generally have to be very familiar with one of the Big 4 to get hired (C++ in my case)
c) Plop is kind of a weird edge case insofar as it is very long-term research, and really cries out to be implemented in a language where you have the same features at compile-time and run-time, and can conveniently represent and manipulate code as data (i.e. a Lisp). For doing plop in any other language, your first task would be to implement these features, which is rather a lot of work (believe me, I've tried ;->). For most anything else one of the Big 4 would be used, for the reasons Steve Yegge outlines...
CS curriculums are woe
I read this to distract myself :/
my boss calls this being brutally honest, his business is ran this way - he always has the toughest questions but it makes you produce better things and be prepared for questions,
While I haven't done anything fancy, using IMAP with Thunderbird and Mutt has so far been a pleasant experience. I find it to be faster than POP. It also doesn't need to poll like POP.

Empty your spam folder once a week or so? Or try using Thunderbird?
The defining feature of a black hole is the event horizon, not the singularity.

Here is the current state of evidence for black holes, from http://chandra.harvard.edu/chronicle/0307/onbh/

"Yet although thousands of bursts have been observed from neutron stars, not one has been observed from a black hole candidate. The lack of X-ray bursts from black hole candidates is a strong argument against the existence of gravastars and other exotic alternatives to black holes."

What "well established theories" do black holes contradict?

Black holes are predicted by relativity. How could they not be reconciled with it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_metric
I don't understand the conversation - I hope it isn't real, how can someone say "no" so immediatley - unless they are that uber smart, that they know the ins and outs of every language.
They are only sort of a prediction, more accurately black holes are the point where the theory breaks down resulting in infinities (division by zero).

For example relativity states that time stops totally past the event horizon, on top of that you can't even reach the event horizon because time dialates so much that you can never reach it - yet stuff falls in.

Or for example because length contracts based on speed it's possible for something to look like a black hole if you are moving fast, but not be a black hole if you are moving slow. That causes all sorts of contradictions.

Basically relativity can not calculate anything about the inside of a black hole.
The best idea I've heard (can't find source right now) is for the gov't to BUY $100B worth of cars over the next 4 years, replacing their own fleet.

A big chunk of that (the $25B floated) could be handed over now in order to design a fuel efficient, safe car with appropriate eco-awareness (hybrid, flex fuel, all electric). This is similar to how military contracts are structured.

The bidding could be thrown open to any company that uses American labor to get the job done: it has to be built here. But Honda/Toyota/etc. are welcome to take part.

If GM can't build the "car of tomorrow" with $25B in startup, they should fail.