skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're not the only person I've heard from to experience that feeling, although you are the first I've heard from to be so candid about the costs of such sacrifice. Others I've discussed these feelings with still feel an unerring duty to sacrifice themselves to their families. It seems that the prevailing wisdom of families would be that feelings of family instability are a result of not sacrificing enough, and that one ought to sacrifice more. I fear at least one may not realize what is happening until he loses what he is sacrificing himself to. I get the vaguely foreboding sense that his situation is not all that unique. Thank you for this. Although I shouldn't need such validation, it helps to hear someone else say what I've been wondering about for some time; it helps counter the rhetoric of those who suggest I will be a bad parent for wondering how much sacrifice is really healthy for the individual and the family, and not immediately answering as much as humanly possible.
but seriously you have to agree that is some cool technology... i havent kept up in image processing advances lately (say last 10 years), but this is still pretty cool ... also to be fair, he didnt create it to "live" with it or to satisfy any fantasies...
Polypage: jquery plugin for multiple-context wireframe designs
cool thought. any ideas what the solution might look like?
You have to remember that many of these researchers are funded by government money (eg, university researchers) or shareholders (eg, corporate labs) that may not be seeing any return on their investment. In some sense, Netflix is stealing cycles that may have been put to better use elsewhere. This could be seen somewhat akin to bribing a public official, only in a 'steal one penny from a million officials' kind of way.
More I think that the App Store is a tiny segment of a larger market, one in which price is what drives demand.

There are larger segments where other marketing techniques are more applicable, where nobody is playing.

So, go play there!
Knowing that someone is a dentist tells you little. They could be a good one or a bad one. They could have not practiced in a long time. It doesn't mean "dentist" is not a word. Scientist is a rather general one, but still means anyone to whom it is rightfully applied is many orders of magnitude more likely to have intelligent feedback on global warming than the general populace.
What you want is basically the compiler optimization called deforestation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_(computer_science)

It's only valid in a pure language, and in a strict language, it has the embarassing side-effect that it can sometimes make non-terminating programs terminate.
As for Netflix, it's difficult for me to believe this is really about research and not about increasing their profitability.

Are you really more concerned with the purity of their motives that the results of their actions? I would rather interact with people who can accomplish stuff for selfish reasons than people who fail hard but feel good for trying.
You need more traffic. Who has a line on people getting shipped packages? E-commerce sites.

You could develop a plugin for zencart or any of the other major shopping cart systems that lets users plug their twitter name in to get updates. That should bring you lots of traffic. Maybe you could sell that?

That's not real money though, so i'm wondering if each titter message could have a link to more info on the package? This would go to your site, where you can run ads.

Hope that's worth something.
Your point is unclear. Is it your belief that the government ought to only fund "basic needs"? If so, you must be very disappointed with its current spending. If not, I don't understand why funding expansion of access to broadband (something the FCC already does to some extent, by the way) is a bad thing, given that for pretty much everyone that has it already, it's been a good thing. Your prior argument for this seemed to be that poor people who don't deserve it would get it, but that fails for a whole host of reasons. So, I'm not really seeing the downside here.
One of the teams mentioned in the article started they own company based on the notoriety achieved, so yeah. It seems to be working pretty well for everyone.

By the way, your post was just crawled by Google, and it probably represents a couple cents into their billion dollar quarter. How do you feel helping the big guys, huh? Working for free for the man... you're disgusting, sir!
I saw "a link between two nodes in a graph." and typed "edge", and it filled in one further down the column: "a link or arc between nodes in a graph." apparently they wanted "arc" for the first one?
Tracking weight and what you eat with Twitter
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.

that kind of reasoning can get you into trouble. People pay $1k+ on PCs & $60 a month to mostly use the web, yet most will not pay anything for access to apps, tools & content.

Around 2000 the web would have been significantly enhanced as a tool with access to a few paid content sites (Britannica, etc.), but few subscribed.

It is tempting to think of price/demand curves as a cold value proposition with users clearly getting more utility from a quality app then a Starbucks coffee. But mindsets move independently of this. Once consumers get comfortable with the notion that web apps are free or that iphone apps cost $.99, it's very hard to break.

BTW, along with that graph I would like to see if there is any correlation between development costs & app price.
Friendly Artificial Intelligence...with benefits?
I'd love to win just so I could settle arguments by saying "anyone who has won a million dollar data mining competition raise your hand"
Each movie rating will be represented by a star in the sky, the constelations are the rating clusters, and on 09/20/2009 they'll align to achieve the 10% mark.

Hey, it works for astronomy!
Interesting... I just interviewed today at a startup that was very different from anything previous. It was actually good, but they asked at least 2 of the questions listed in the article.
Who said anything about the general populace?
The thing that gets me is how he still manages to put the exclamation point in yahoo!.
"... Now for lesson 2: make data collection and analysis easy. I chose Twitter as my data entry point. I use Twitter already (especially with my new phone with the QWERTY keyboard), so it wasn't a huge burden to start tweeting what I eat. I created my own Twitter bot and created my own basic language. ..."

An interesting article not so much because of it's application but method. This is pretty much what Stikkit (Rael Dornfest ~ http://www.raelity.org/blog/ ), now working for Twiiter was doing - grabbing data, parsing it and trying to make some sense of it. The key bit here is how. If you try using regex, NLP or some other novel technique that relies on understanding ... it will probably not work. Now if you have a big enough data set, machine learning techniques might be a better tack.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meteors
10 Pieces of Unsolicited, Unsophisticated Advice for Yahoo
I use both Linode and AWS, and I find both easy to administer.

I would say AWS has a mildly steeper learning curve (various AWS command line utilities to install, etc.), but nothing I found difficult.

A really nice thing about AWS is that you can pick and choose which AWS services you want to use. For example, suppose you were doing a backup app where wanted to securely store terabytes of customer data, but the server requirements were really light. You could start off with a $20/month Linode server and store the data in Amazon S3. Then later you could move to EC2 at $70 per small server per month if you needed it.

Or, on the other hand, if you knew that you were going to need lots of servers sooner or later, and you have enough money that the price differential doesn't make a difference to you, you might start off with AWS to avoid needing to do a switchover later.

I'm working on an app of my own now, and I'll be hosting it on Linode to start off with. Then, if it becomes popular, I'll be able to measure what my server requirements are, and I'll be able to easily move it to EC2 if I decide to. (Though my app though isn't doing anything cpu intensive server side, so I wouldn't be surprised if I can run if off of a single Linode server for a long time).
"I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here."

One of these quotes is not like the others! Apparently, that line is from Dickens: http://books.google.com/books?id=DRx9gUxLU3cC&pg=PA376&#...
There's only 51 of them. 46 and 47 are dupes.
Number Adjective Plural Noun for Target Audience
http://www.citypaper.com/sb/47805/perrybible1.jpg
In particular, you will have to pay an extra 7.5% in soc sec tax. That's not even talking about insurance issues, which you can (hopefully) ignore for a while if you are healthy and single and living in a state where you can legally do so.
That's not to say that that's a good thing, mind, it's neither good nor bad, but it's a fact that maybe 1 in 10 people employed in the software industry will need to know big-O, perhaps even less than that.

I don't think the ratio is that high, simply because most people who do software development aren't in the software development industry. They are members of an IT team in an organization who profits come from the sales of things other than software. Although the organization they are at might benefit from software that solves real technical problems relating to their product line, most of the time, they are just writing ETL programs that require little more than getting table names right. Of the people who work at companies that see software development as one of their core disciplines, I imagine the problems are sufficiently hard to make some knowledge of theory useful.
superfluous mark-up
I don't disagree with your comment overall, but specifically on the point of backups: backups are far and away much easier on EC2 compared to other hosting providers with now that Amazon has the new Elastic Block Store feature... need a backup? Take a snapshot, you're done.
This is a legitimate post, I don't know why you're getting so much friction from users. If you do post the project on elance, scriptlance, or hireacoder make sure you don't pick the least expensive one. Never tried the cut and dry services, but I see psd2html advertised at smashingmagazine.
> ...and a lot of the analytic skills you developed in history actually will translate pretty well to CS.

You're the first CS person I've ever spoken with who understands that!
Portland Oregon has Calagator, a unified calendar for the tech community:
http://calagator.org/

It's also a community driven open source project with multiple code-sprints per month!
I'm French and I enjoyed the article. This Loic LeMeur guy has always been a self-proclaimed ambassador of whatever he wants, but he's just blow hard. He needs the bad press so he'll disappear sooner (I hope so).

And you're right about the gratuitious French bashing, it's a cultural thing and it takes part on both sides of the Channel, there's nothing to be offended about, it's funny if you take the right stance.
The entire global car industry is screwed; this is not about detroit. There's massive global overcapacity. Companies like Honda and VW will probably lapse into financial crisis next year.

Personally, I would bet money on sub $200 bicycles before electric cars. The techno fetishists just don't get where things really are both financially and in terms of energy supply.
Gmail Enables SMS Messaging From Chat ... YESSIR
Respect the Turing Test
Because they are testing it vs a fixed data set teams can gain information about that data set based on their submissions. Which is why several teams mix and mach several different approaches. They can increase the weight of each approach over time and game the system.

Edit: I am not saying they are intentionally cheating rather it's one of the reasons that approach works.
Listen. Mars is heating at the same rate as Earth.

The explanation is really that simple.
Hmm. What could Netflix know, though? Is it even possible to quantify how hard it is to improve a recommendation algorithm by a certain amount?
What puzzles me is so confusing that I don't even know if it is on-topic or off-topic: the NFL keeps the networks from showing certain games. WTF? how do they make money keeping their product from people who want it? We're way past "scarcity" (in the Gladwell sense) here.
Mine didn't go so well. They flew me out there, then on interview day all of the managers were "busy" so I met with two guys and that was it. 12 hours of flying and two missed days of work for a two hour interview :-(
> "Tell me about a time when you..." - Sorry this is the main type of question you should b e asking. This is the opportunity to ask the question "how are you going to solve the problems that we're going to give you?"

Probably what you really want is someone who solves problems not someone who can eloquently describe problems and their solutions, under pressure, in a few minutes or less.

That question is a classic example of testing the wrong thing.

It's better for you to describe an actual problem and have them solve it or discuss how they would go out solving. Which btw is typically a needed skill (being able to reason out and weigh solutions with a team)
he also has one of them new-fangled power desks that you can change the elevation of by pressing buttons (right corner of desk)
I'm not concerned, I just said it's great that after 2 years of work, we've seen $100k come from it. That is wonderful news.
Just put it in as a giant jpeg image map. By the time you type up all those <divs> and css styles it'll be the same size anyways. Also, you can be assured your users are getting it exactly how you intended. No cross browser headaches. Almost no code! Ajax is a snap, just swap the image out with one line of javascript code, you won't even need Dojotype to do it.
this was a really, really foolish post in my opinion. you want to build your business on how users really act, not rant at them for acting differently than you expected.

besides, it just shows how bankrupt passwords are. we use the same mechanism online to protect our bank accounts and our most meaningless babble. that's just trouble waiting to happen.

building a business on that is like a building a house on the San Andreas faultline and then filling it with priceless Ming vases. it might be fun, might look nice, but it's not exactly strategic.
It's situations like his that make me wonder about the wisdom of pursuing what you love, especially when others need you. Pursuing what you love is a uniquely Western-rich-kid's luxury.
Pascal is not an exception. Do you know what language Skype is written in?
Wow. That makes me glad that for my own JVM work I stuck with Kawa Scheme: http://ourdoings.com/
The Importance of Unimportant People - Why Everyone Is Important
I agree the idea and the people are more important. After that which language you use is still pretty high up there!

You can have an intelligent language argument, and you can learn something even from an unintelligent one. One of the most telling things is, are there languages that you thought were reasonable that nobody even bothers chipping in to defend. Nobody jumps in to advocate C++ for a quick regex-heavy text file manipulation job, or quick webserver development. Nobody jumps in to advocate Python for mobile applications, or for massively parallel programming. Nobody jumps in to advocate Javascript for offline image processing.

Sure, usually the two sides of a language war talk past each other. You can still learn a lot from the talking points.
I'm not sure what you mean by "skirts," but your advice is wrong as written.
Nope, it is just a stock SVD, it wont win any awards, just get the job done and be an example. There are plenty of people who have tweaked SVD up and down so I didn't spent time doing it too.
There are 3 Karens...
I don't think that quite answers the original poster's question. You're saying that it's just the way Jerry Yang's always done it, but why did he start doing it in the first place?
Interview With A Cyborg
I'm just the opposite.

I want practical, get the job done type people.

I don't want cowboys who are more interested in clever solutions and/or impressing others with their knowledge, "obvious" intelligence, or skillz.

I certainly don't want some douche sitting in his chair theorizing from first principals when they could have googled the answer or asked team mate for help.

Finally the era when what one knows was self-contained in their heads is over. My memory and knowledge are huge and they are kept in google and wikipedia.
When we make pages that we want html people to maintain, it's been our experience that it's important that the layout pages are primarily html with the scripting added to it rather than a scripted page with the html in a bunch of concatenated echo statements. Designers really hate the latter, and may charge you more if you expect them to work with something like that.
If you take your pursuit to the degree of self-destructive obsession, it would be wise to wonder.

If you take your pursuit to the degree of self-elevating obsession, power to you.
Crowdsourcing innovation?

Neat.
Actually, Cormen's book has no mention of bubblesort so unless our friend already knows what it is, he wouldn't have the faintest idea :)
The real problem with the App Store is not that apps are 99 cents. Its not that apps are sorted by price.

It is that the customer is fundamentally APPLE'S CUSTOMER and not YOUR CUSTOMER. No matter what the exact arrangement is, only those vendors who catch a lucky break from Apple are going to do well.

This is the same lesson everyone should have learned from the casual game industry: the portals make out like bandits. A very few megahits make obscene amounts of money. Every other content producer gets shafted, because they are systematically tying themselves into a hit-driven, rapid-obsolescence, no-value-added business model.

This serves the portals great: churn and burn apps get them lots of repeated transactions and incentivize their best customers to come back every day to see whats new. This is terrible for developers because you get like a two-week period to make back your development expenses and then, boom, residual sales asymptotically approach zero.

(Its sort of like being in the music business, incidentally, except the residuals die off even faster.)

Compare the sales graph for any App Store app, I don't care what the quality is, to the sales graph for a software company with its own website. (Sorry for the self-preening but since most people don't publish them I don't know of any except my own: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month ) Don't focus on the numbers, focus on the shape of a curve.

If your curve is "Peaks in 48 hours and then falls off a cliff", you'll have no revenues to sustain a post-launch marketing campaign or ongoing improvement to the app, which are major sources of revenue. You won't get the gradual march upward, instead, you are immediately thrown back into the meatgrinder to make another churn and burn app.

An additional salutary benefit of the own-your-own-app-and-your-own-customers: you're not dependent on Apple's good graces and business fortunes to continue to make a living on their platform, and when you come out with version 2.0 or RelatedApp 1.0 you can use your existing customers as both a source of marginal revenue and a source of springboard marketing.

(Hypothetically assuming that my next app was also pitched to elementary schoolteachers, where exactly would one go about getting a list of 1,200 elementary schoolteachers with a demonstrable interest in software which helps them out? Oh, yeah... "select * from customers;". Any of you have blogs? Oh you do! How lovely.)
Have you seen how long they've been at over 9%? ;p
In addition, just think of the massive amounts of cash these researchers are stealing from the network TV execs and advertising agencies, since they may be working on this in their spare time in the evenings instead of watching TV. Despicable.
Voluntary as in they don't get paid?

Because I'm sure that every single person has no intention of receiving any of the prize money. None whatsoever, it's purely voluntary, and nobody deserves any money for making Netflix more profitable.

Wow you guys really want to bring it out of me on this thread. That's alright though, I dig everyone's energy (and I don't mind taking a bit of a karma beating over this either).

Actually, at the time of writing this, as a result of my discussion, other people have been awarded 28 karma points (where I have suffered a loss of a few). Outside discussion accounts for 35 karma points. So relative to the overall karma, I'm helping a lot of people out by being the grumpy, grouchy, mean old Mr. Scrooge in defense of the researcher. I do it for you guys! :D
Their ability to "deliver" is not necessarily contingent upon whether or not it is "all for show".
Thanks for the comments guys.
I thought about perfectionism, but I'm very laid back when it comes to my other work. I was fine with my designs when I was a designer, and I was fine with my pottery (I did a lot of that in school). It was what it was. I could make good looking pots, but they were never going to be bought by anyone. They gave me pleasure though.

With writing, its different. Its the only thing I find myself coming up with every excuse not to do it. I do have a problem with execution, I get bored, but writing I despise. When I have bursts of inspiration, its really quite good. Good writing isn't the problem for me, its getting the writing done.
So basically yet another regurgitation of the same sky is falling trap we've been hearing for months. Yes, I said trap instead of crap. It's slang for crap. The things that are getting hit hard right now are the things that were overvalued to begin with.
Ouch. That sucks. I'd think that HR would be very careful about making sure the interviewers are actually available before bringing you out. With mine, there was some concern that it might actually get pushed past Thanksgiving due to lack of interviewer availability (thankfully not, and they got it in front of the hiring committee before the break).

My experience with Google HR in general was very positive, though of course "all's well that ends well", so my perspective might be a bit biased.
Aye this has truth, looking back I pretty much wasted my university years playing games because I was not willing to sacrifice the comfort of living with parents and moving out, which would have forced me to work and given me more purpose.

As a result I learned little (of coursework anyway), my health deteriorated (played too much games), and there was tension in the family relationships because you can sense when someone is wasting their lives.

Which is the long version of:
Where there is no vision, the people perish. (Proverbs 29:18)

I wasted life even whilst knowing it was wrong, but what you have to do is give yourself a purpose, and getting that purpose is the hardest thing.
Charge money. Market it to businesses. You're never going to get money out of something like that from advertising, so you have to go the service route.

If you charged $5/user/month, you might have a nice little supplement to your income. Depends if people find it's worth paying for. If not, you're not going to make any money out of it.

Don't bother writing code, just let them paypal you by hand and enable their account by hand.