skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft Labs Launches New Bookmarking Service
'Indeed. Summon the meteors'
Obama's pick to solve the energy crisis
Good way to distill it.

I think the App Store is mostly about distribution, with the only marketing benefit being the usual ones that come with being a distributor, i.e., it's in the interests of the distributor to promote the products its distributing.

But in that framework everyone prices their apps according to the distributor's whims. In this case that means all prices tend to zero.

The only way to break out of this cycle, as I see it, is to take the marketing portion into your own hands and draw in people from outside the App Store.
I find this post to be both insulting and slightly pointless. First of all, "sites like elance.com" have a horde of semi-educated people who might offer half of a decent service, but they sure are not "ready to take your money."
Social Media ABC's - Z is for Zombie
2 years in and they still haven't given out the prize money. How's that crowd sourcing working out for you NetFlix?
Not anymore, what with the economy how it is the bonuses are barely anything!
It may be simply mathematically impossible to get to 10 percent given the observable variables. Maybe netflix knows this and just gets synthesized research on the cheap.
A 9% improvement represents a substantial increase in quality of recommendations. If I remember correctly, a 10% improvement meant the difference between a complete star rating, on average. (There was a fairly substantial write-up about what the 10% meant last year.) I'd say for the people-hours put in to the project, they've gotten more than their money's worth.
It's working great. In fact, I'd say it's fucking awesome. The recommendation algorithm has improved greatly, and contributions to the science of statistics have been made because of this corporation.

Your comment strikes me as obnoxious. You try to gibe NetFlix, but the truth of the matter is that there is a market. The considerable prize sum is enough to interest a competent individual.
I'd guess the machine learning guys by this point understand the data set at least as well as Netflix does.
My Startup Diary - Day 14 - So much it won’t fit in the title
I guess a lot of developers believe that software patents such as these don't pass the "non-obvious" test, and therefore filing one is seen as wrong. I know that when I read some software patents (I haven't read this one, so not sure about this case), I think that if I had the same problem, I could solve it without too much trouble. Does this make the patent obvious? We have copyright law to protect the implementation - shouldn't that be enough. We're often told that idea's are worth less (worthless?), it's how they're executed. But this puts the power (and the money) in the hands of someone who had an idea and a general specification on how to implement it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(mythology) ;-)
These quote lists are the oldest SEO trick in the linkbait playbook. No work required and people LOVE them. To get what I mean by SEO, check out the sweet "payday loan" links in the footer.
I say go AWS and don't look back. It's the best thing in hosting since sliced bread. You can spawn, copy, and kill servers as often as you like, so no more worries about not having a server when you need one, about annoying sysadmins, server crashes, performance, lack of continuous integration/demo/etc. boxes, and everything else people without AWS have to worry about.

Rightscale has good interface for AWS to get you started.
Better yet, just become a social media consultant and charge $300 an hour to overhype Twitter!
Last Call For Those Crunchies Nominations
Cisco’s Grand Video Plan
Data is available (good links below, thanks) -- I don't agree that people "can't handle it". We are told a fair amount about the mechanics of coffee metabolization, stem cell theory of cancer, etc on CNN.

But climatology in the press tends to be arguing over credentials and motives and scientist counts. That's not science.

I get the sense that there are lots of strange and alarming things happening but no solid theory of causation... we're still at the "preponderance of evidence" stage. That's fine with me, that how it goes, but it's taboo to say so, which is not fine with me at all.
Well I am not going to do everything for you, but here is something to start with:

http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2006/10/netflix-prize-con...

It is a little framework I put together to play with the netflix prize framework. I implemented SVD as one of the examples.

On a side note I did think about the idea of putting together a small company that would sell recommendation systems to companies for their website. The value would not be in the algorithm, but in the ability to integrate with their software.
http://xhtmlized.com/ has done good work for me
It's a childish affectation that he never bothered to jettison. Rather like the people who do little smilies instead of dotting their i's
Fair enough. That's what I get for vaguely referencing Kids In The Hall :]
I've actually been thinking about upping them a bit, so yes they are probably a bit too low...
Upmodded for this splendid morsel of malicious British wit:

That's right — LeWeb was entirely without the web. Which I suppose makes it simply "Le".
That's the ultimate way of dismissing anything, just attack the very concept of credibility. It's downright idiotic to say there's no such thing as a scientist. That's like saying there's no such thing as a dentist.

Sure, there's some semantic considerations, and the word means different things to different people and may sometimes be used incorrectly, but there is a such thing as a scientist.
Don't worry kid, the mail always goes through
Very nice, I saw many Netflix Prize derived frameworks but I somehow missed this one.

Did you test RMSE of your SVD on Netflix Dataset?
SICP is The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman. It's really hard. You can get it online for free from MIT here:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
Inside DCSNet, the FBI's Nationwide Eavesdropping Network
>I and many others like me, have a great drive, but not for our own self-gratification, but for the betterment of many and I think that's a far greater thing than wanting to create the next IBM or Wells Fargo or whatever the hell.

Drive rooted in self-interest and self-gratification isn't a universal evil. The problem really is the broken philosophy that screwing over the other guy is the only high odds way to gain. It only works until all the potential gains from what we've already created are realized. At that point, supply and/or demand dry up, and we end up in big trouble economically. People who push for this describe economics as a zero-sum game. They say fuck their neighbor because the only way to acquire wealth is to steal some of his/hers. They neglect to account for the decay term caused by the decrease value in what has already been made; they assume scarcity is a constant, or attempt to make it artificially so. They also neglect to account for the growth term, which is new things being introduced into the market, adding to the overall wealth of what we've created. Someone driven by self-interest would do better to increase this growth term, but that tends to be hard work and the short-term payoff, if that's what they need to stay motivated, is rarely there.
Nothing is stopping a losing team from taking their product to the market, Think of it as an added incentive to do it now rather than later.

Speaking in terms of time-value...
We have a cost now, and a benefit in the future. If C> B/((1+r)^n) then a team will not try to design and create this product
/* C = Cost, B = Expected Benefit, r is discount rate, n is number of years*/
Now, if we add a prize = P, it is possible that C<= (B+P)/((1+r)^n). Over the spread of many teams, this means that we are subsidizing additional competition to enter into the market by making available this prize.

Speaking less pedantically, if we make the prize high enough in addition to whatever rewards a team will get in the open market, then we give the team an incentive to take the gamble. Who knows, maybe you'll just win.
Google publishes Browser Security Handbook
I'm cracking up laughing here. Here's some perspective for my fellows 'mericans who haven't been to this part of the world. English people love to pan everything French for any reason whatsoever. Most English folk will openly say, "I hate the French" - they don't actually hate the French. It's just that they really, really get off on having a laugh at anything and everything French.

I was cracking up laughing when I saw the headline - and then saw it was from the Guardian. The article's probably all correct, but the really gratuitous tone the author takes, like he's glad the conference was a mess because it made him able to write this article hardcore "taking the piss" out of the conference? Yup, it's an England thing :) I love it, and mind you, I'm a quarter French and a quarter English so I'm pretty neutral in the whole affair.
That was the best conference write up I've ever seen.
What do you mean? I'm talking about paying them in return for work.
A little before my time (the group formed the year I was born) but I'll have to check it out!
Experimental physicist is to dentist as "scientist" is to ...?

"Scientist" is a meaningless word. Knowing that someone is called a scientist tells you absolutely nothing about their qualifications.
Hey, it is not easy to develop a better recommendation engine. They have problems like the "Napoleon Dynamic" which is still remained unsolved right now.

Computer can only predict human behavior which is unchanging and static. But, this is always not the case.
Physics Nobel Prize Winner Steven Chu Nominated to be Secretary of Energy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_Artificial_Intelligenc...

Shame on me.
Sorry, you'll have to excuse that I'm not immediately a huge fan of corporations who give small amounts of money for significant amounts of research that ultimately go back to benefit the corporation.

Apparently, they're going to give all of the code out, which is good to hear. I'm proud of the machine learning community for that. As for Netflix, it's difficult for me to believe this is really about research and not about increasing their profitability.

I could be way off. Maybe $1 million over the course of 2+ years is a heck of a lot of money for a team of developers (selected from 35,000 teams), which will be used to generate more profit for NetFlix. Who knows. I'm glad that so far over 2 years, $100k was given out. That's good to see.
I keep hoping someone will swoop down with a crazy solution and snatch the prize from the people trying to solve it conventionally. So much more romantic than this slog!
When someone makes a swooping statement on what men/women/people/animals/whatever should be like, just add "for me" add at the end of it if you don't want to be offended.

Take the following statements that would offend people:

She doesn’t need holidays, food or rest and she will work almost 24-hours a day. She is the perfect woman... for me.

Christianity is the only correct religion for me.

Homosexuality is wrong for me.

Having a job is stupid for me.

There is no God for me.

Etc, etc. It's an easy way to cut down on how often you're offended by at least 80%. Because let's face it, being offended means being less happy. The magical for me greatly adds to your happiness levels.
Employees Suck
Terrible! We so badly want to give away a million dollars, and yet all these people will do is give us a massive improvement on recommendations without taking our money! We are pissed

- Netflix
Co-work at iList for free (downtown SF)
don't really know the upside for them (recruiting? ideas? meeting new people?), but sounded like a good opp
I share the sentiment. Some time ago I was investigating some nasties that were spreading via web (Firefox plugins exploits) and I had to switch off the antivirus just to be able to view the content of the text file.
I didn't say it was easy, I'm not sure where you're drawing that assumption from.

I did essentially say that over 2 years, I'm glad that the collective research efforts of 35,000 teams, one of the teams has seen $100k from a corporation who will ultimately profit off their research.
Legal Suicide for Web start-ups: A beginner's guide
IronPython 2.0 final is released
As for making your living by doing your calling, you either have to make some sacrifices or be very fortunate and have your calling happen to be something that's lucrative. Unless you work for a job that is minimally demanding, you most likely will only become very successful if you truly have some calling for it. Otherwise you'll probably tread water and have to find fulfillment in other parts of your life.

From the perspective of someone who's been on and seen both sides, is it worth making the sacrifices to live by one's calling if the work isn't very lucrative? Or is it more worthwhile to make sacrifices in what one does for a living to make it easier to find fulfillment elsewhere? Has your opinion on this changed between starting as an IB and where you are now as a software developer?

I ask because your thoughts above reminded me the number of different conversations I've had with people about comfort and fulfillment, and how much one can realistically hope to find either in what they do for a living. Some have even go so far as to suggest not doing one's calling for fulfillment, as they will likely have their passions crushed by some nameless corporate structure.

For perspective, my stance recently has been that aligning both is a worthwhile experiment, and that those who sacrifice other things in doing so will likely find those sacrifices aren't so painful in hindsight (excepting sacrificing things like food, clothing, shelter, etc). Just from the people I've known, those who have worked by their calling seem overall more fulfilled than those who looked elsewhere after-hours. But I'll admit my data set is pretty small, and am curious what others experiences have been.
White House Opposes FCC Free Wireless Internet Plan
Yeah, just read up on the Marketing Mix, and that clarifies things.

When I say "marketing" I mean "pricing and promotion." Really, I mean any activity designed to increase demand, either by moving up the demand curve (pricing) or by shifting it to the right (promotion).

Distribution does not increase demand -- it matches demand with product (at least in my mental model).

So, yeah, "marketing vs. distribution" was not the best dichotomy since most people take distribution to be a subset of marketing.

Anyhow, details aside, I agree that the App Store is a market, but it's a market in the same way that Borders is a market. There are rules for increasing demand intra-Borders, but it's necessarily constrained.

I can't believe the iPhone app marketplace as such is purely price driven. People dropped around $400 on these devices and pay between $70-$100/month for the right to use them.

It's only the confluence of factors within the App Store itself that is driving down prices.
You could look into Liquid templates:

- http://www.liquidmarkup.org/
- http://code.google.com/p/php-liquid/
Buying a tuxedo on http://hiscatalog.com
Oh I bet they have. Have you calculated the number of hours the 35,000 teams put in relative to the amount of pay they received?

I bet they've gotten more than their money's worth.
Also, the promotional activity isn't the primary benefit of the App Store, anyhow.

Rather, they take care of those distribution problems like installing the software, taking payments, etc. That part is seamless and very good.

The promotional aspects are much less solid and necessarily limiting.
well the analogy is a bit off, I do not agree with the bailing out in general, I think it's akin to curing the symptom as opposed to the real desease

But electric cars are still cars, they ride on roads, mechanical etc ...

It's shell, exxonmobile and Saudi Arabia who might need to worry. Electricity is a real substitute product to theirs

Many companies cut RnD costs by following the principal of "don't innovate imitate" cars were invented in USA but this "innovation" found it's way to europe and Asia

Detroits problem is not innovation, it's implementation. Which sort of explain how the bailout might actually be sane
Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize lecture
Logging and Learning
Don’t let your “features” become the master.
Yeah, odesk.com, priyanka at smartbuzz has done some work for me.

pretty straightforward.

There's lots of other contractors there too that will bid on your project.

It is a little weird to use these contracting websites the first time, but only the first time :)
Digitally Assisted Billiards - Embedded OS + Webcam + Projector
Four ideas:

1. Are you getting their e-mail addresses? You could send out some kind of e-mail once a month with a summary of their packages and some ads and/or affiliate offers.

2. Since you are sending them direct messages, they must be following you. Use Magpie or some other service to just post advertisment tweets (not direct messages) to your public timeline. You get paid on a CPM basis.

3. After every nth package, send them a DM asking for a donation if they appreciated the service.

4. License your app to be the official Twitter bot of any of the package tracker services. So if someone tries to track a package on any of their sites it gives them the option to add to your twitterbot. (This one would be the hardest/most work, obviously.)
You reached these Keeeeds!
Ask HN: How to compose two mapping functions into a third?
I'd like a good way to do the following, where "good" means some balance of simple and efficient.

I have a bunch of mapping functions. Each takes an integer interval [START,END] and a function FN to call once for each integer N in the interval, passing two arguments: N and some value computed from N.

For example, say MAP1 works this way, passing N and N+10 to the function provided:

(defun map1 (fn start end)
(loop for n from start to end do
(funcall fn n (+ n 10))))

...so if you gave MAP1 a function that printed out its arguments, you'd get this:

(map1 (lambda (n val) (format t "~a ~a~%" n val)) 1 3) =>
1 11
2 12
3 13

Now say MAP2 does the same, only instead of N+10 it passes N^2:

(defun map2 (fn start end)
(loop for n from start to end do
(funcall fn n (expt n 2))))

(map2 (lambda (n val) (format t "~a ~a~%" n val)) 1 3) =>
1 1
2 4
3 9

What I want is a way to make a new mapping function MAP3 that works the same way but composes the computations in MAP1 and MAP2. For simplicity, say I just want to add the values computed by MAP1 and MAP2. Then MAP3 should do this:

(map3 (lambda (n val) (format t "~a ~a~%" n val)) 1 3) =>
1 12
2 16
3 22

Any nice solutions? The rules are: (1) it's ok to modify the definition of "mapping function", as long as it's simple, and (2) I don't want to have to make a local copy of everything one of these functions does (because the intervals can be large).

Edit: A solution in Common Lisp would be nice, but I'm interested in good approaches to this in general. Perhaps coroutines?
A certain part of me always hopes that people "get" my seemingly random headers. Bonus points if you tell me where the last one is from.
They're over 9% already. Sheesh.
wow obama is really standing up to increase the tech-ness of his team... wondering if it is all for show or will they actually deliver...
Wouldn't argue with that, but they may have run up against a bound, multiplied it by a constant, and said to themselves "highly unlikely that anyone can beat this, so lets put it out there and see if someone out there can beat it."

So far no one has and they have gotten a ton of research on the cheap, like the current team's for 50 k USD. Smart.
Rural Inventor Wu Yulu
It's funny how few people realize you can change the release date of your app, right on the pricing page. You can't make it later than the actual release, of course.

And, each time you release an update, you can do the same, once it's approved.
At what rate should we value their hours? Do you charge more or less for doing something you like?

Have you considered that voluntary trade is not zero sum?
The machine learning guys have only a subset of the full dataset to work with. They have to send their algorithms to Netflix for testing on the full dataset. So it may be possible Netflix knows something they don't. It does seem quite strange how close and yet how far that 10% mark has been.
Well, the grad students come cheap (at least a lot cheaper than a robot), and they often don't have many choices of who to work for.

Mostly they are expected to work 24/7 without complaining for very little pay... It's very fun :)
well technically at the core of it, human companionship and sexual stimulation both trigger conducive chemicals in the brain...

so the base reasoning is the same in both cases. So what is the problem?

Whether this guy is sad and needs to see a shrink is a totally different matter.
I think is important to look at the macro question: If you are looking at the market as a whole (all the apps that get bought) will most of the discovery/purchase decision have taken place within the confines of the app store (where Apple rules) or outside of it (from word of mouth to TV ads).

I think you might agree that most (or at least a significant portion) of apps will get most of their 'promotion' within the confines of the app store. This is both because of the distribution monopoly & because of the market mindset. Consumers are often buying 'apps' not 'app X' or even 'app that does X.' There will continue to be a big number of App store browsers making decisions based only on the things they encounter in this environment. Therefore, the app store is the no. 1 promotional channel as well as the only distribution channel.

Since Apple is the main influence on this, the letter makes sense. If you think that this environment is problematic on the whole, Dear Steve is your answer.

I guess I agree with you from an individual perspective. I do not know enough about this market to have a real opinion. But it seems rational to say to developers: "Do not go after the main part of the market (let's keep calling it the ringtone app market). The way Apple has set up the market, there is a tendency towards the ringtone apps. If you do not want to sell them, you still have other options. Base your strategy on those option."

But I guess my point is that the advice you are giving is 'be unconventional' which is not something you can expect everyone to do. It's like telling online merchants not to base their e-commerce strategy on Adwords/SEO or telling a supermarket not to go after middle income families. That might be good advice, but it's niche advice.
Wow. Did anybody here attend the anniversary? If so, tell us about it.
Successfully giving out the money--especially if there is (for example) the romantic, swooping in ending that staunch stated that he wanted (in his post above)--will generate a lot more positive PR for Netflix than the remaining 0.44% improvement will help them at this point. Regardless of whether you think of this as a genuine research prize, or simply a corporate ploy, you have to admit that Netflix is probably genuinely unhappy that no one has managed to complete the competition yet.