skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone in the big data field on the ground (VP of Engineering). Let me give you my thoughts on it.

Your impression about the hype is correct. There are a lot of vendors offering BIG solutions, if you pay them BIGGER money. Where I used to translate the word enterprise to $$, now I translate Big Data to $$$$$$$.

When I'm hiring, I don't go looking for Big Data people, because generally they don't exist. Statistics is a really great general addition to a programmers toolkit. Machine Learning is valuable as well, although in my experience the application is more limited. What this article doesn't mention is a whole host of other skills required.

Modeling, and not just a formal mathematical model, but applying any type of model to your data to get insight. Check out the model-thinking class on coursera.

Exploratory Data Analysis, much different skill than confirmatory statistics.

Design of Experiments, specialized subfield within statistics.

Logistics, how to setup, maintain, and maximally utilize an efficient distributed cluster and build a pipeline getting your data to the cluster, cleaning it, building it into a model, and then extracting insight and delivering that end value.

Those are a couple of the skills at a high level. At a more nuts and bolts level, Hadoop is the defacto standard for Big Data. Learning how to build a data pipeline out of the Linux tool chain is very common in the data science world.

The overall value stream for Big Data is deep and wide. Most companies don't have expertise in much of these, and so at the current time you have to learn them yourself or find a company focused on building a team around it.

If you are just learning this yourself, you'll probably get an academic knowledge. If you want to make yourself valuable in the marketplace, you'll really want to get hands on experience. Knowing a z-score is one thing, building a process to gather data and compute a model against it is a whole different ball game. As the article mentions, if you have nice clean data it's easy to apply a model. If you have messy ugly data from 20 different vendors and 200 clients with various failures, anomalies, and you have to figure out what type of model is helpful, oh and you have a deadline because for 500th time someone promised something impossible to the client, then you have something closer to what Big Data is today.

* grammar edits
Well, to be fair, I think pulling out Issues is quite doable via the API right now. Like I said, I'm not after panicmongering; I just advocate a healthy dose of critical thinking. As in, did you check you could pull out Issues via the API before comitting to the service, and did you make sure the service vendor is committed to offering that API going forward? If you're actually on a paid plan, if you actually intend to make your livelyhood depend on the vendor, do you have any hard guarantees on that in the contact? And so on.

FWIW, I was involved with putting together the git hosting infrastructure used by the KDE community (which I wrote about at length here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2972107), which incidentally was done only after negotiations with Shortcut AS - then the company behind GitHub competitor Gitorious.org - fell through, since we couldn't come to an agreement acceptable to both sides. Things like data export guarantees were part of our goals back then.

And there's more data you want to be able to export than you might think, too. For example, if you actually let accounts push directly to your repository, you very likely want to have logs of what account was used to push what data for liability reasons - that's data that's not in the repo, because push != commit. Rather, it's data coming from the infrastructure that handles authentication for you.
PS http://apophenia.sourceforge.net/
I disagree. Perhaps having been broke at one point is sufficient, but even then, if you are an entrepreneur motivated by passion, then money has nothing to do with it.

Maybe we're talking about two different types of entrepreneurs here, those who are in it for the money and/or fame, or those who are in it because they can't help themselves.
JSON Sucks
That would depend on the type of CPU Linode is using. What the CPU's frequency is, the amount of cores, whether it has or does not have hyper-threading technology.

The hyper-threading technology is a pretty cheap way to add more virtual cores to your VPS's which is great. One thing is for sure and that is that Linode provides you 4 virtual cores and not 12 per VPS. But, that of course doesn't mean their CPU is better or worse. But, if you can run 6 cores at 3.8ghz, or 12 cores at 1.9ghz then I wouldn't worry too much about not having enough CPU power for your virtual private servers.
Great; now please submit this to the Sublime Text folks so they can work on creating an actual installer, if that's possible.

There's something permanently frustrating about the time involved in setting up anything other than the core software, every time I try to migrate over to Linux from Windows. And so I keep getting bounced back. Sublime Text doesn't look too bad; but multiply that by 20 and throw in a few real doozies, and I simply don't have the spare time to dedicate to setting up a Linux desktop that does what I need.
"Why kill yourself for five years on a problem or pursuit you are not 100% passionate about?"

I will kill myself for 5 years on those ideas once I've made money with a photo sharing type idea.
Your test system has 300 users? Thanks for depressing me...
Yes, I was referring to bandwidth.
> reading on an iPad literally makes me sick

Being an active light source vs a passive one like Kindle/paper, the perceptual effect is different.

Sickness could be coming from various causes, including:

- you're holding it too close to you (which makes your eyes converge/accomodate too much): try to make the font bigger and put it further away (it will also reduce the resolution issue since you will have more pixels per arc-minute)

- brightness too high: turn it down (!), use light text on dark background (hint: for e.g safari, use the iOS accessibility feature and bind it to triple home click or something to toggle it quickly), when possible choose colors with less contrast between text/background.

- light sources around you: try to change relative light position or type of bulbs (CFC bulbs give me headaches for some obscure reason, while some LEDs one are too cold/blu-ish).
I follow this simple rule when dealing with trolls online.

"Don't argue with idiots. They drag you down to their level and beat you with experience"

It's better not to engage in the first place.
I'd say the current academic research in ML is not oriented towards producing people who can use ML in real applications.

I've hovered around the periphery of a world-leading ML research group, and the first takeaway I have is that 7 years ago I thought the stuff they were working on was going to take the world by storm, but looking back, I can say it hasn't.

This group does a number of research projects on narrowly defined topics. 4 out of 5 of these projects try out some refinement of the method that doesn't really work. Maybe 1 out of 5, if that, point to a real improvement.

The big thing that's lacking are serious attempts to push the state of the art by attacking a problem holistically and "taking no prisoners" -- yet this is exactly the kind of thinking necessary to commercialize ML.

The leader of the group got tenure so he thinks everything is going OK. He won't even offer an analysis of why this technology hasn't been widely commercialized. PhD students from this group usually interview at Google, Microsoft and Facebook but these three employers are the only ones they consider as an alternative to academic employment.
That would be the case if there were any for profit startups that were actually saving lives, but most startups that are relevant to this forum are making life, at best, marginally better for the privileged class, which can conveniently be delineated by the fact that they have access to technology in the first place.
assuming that the length of a list will never be bigger than 232

Should be 2^32, of course. Though I think the real upper bound is (2^31)-1: there's a bit used for negative numbers, and there's zero.
For some reason the one that I enjoyed the most is always forgotten: Total Annihilation!

It had significantly more depth than StarCraft/WarCraft (and better graphics to boot), but the higher complexity apparently made it less accessible and hence less popular.

For anyone curious: The latest refresh is called "Supreme Commander", and last time I checked there was still an active community/player-base around the OpenSource port "TA Spring".
How to Find Potential Buyers of Your Domain Name
Congratulations, you've just described V-Discs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Disc
Most of Google apps use SPDY, but for some reason, ipv6.google.com does not.
Login - Sead2horf
Prefixes do not make sense on 2012 since any browser updates itself every few months.

Therefore it makes zero sense to not support every css property whose meaning you understand in the next three months (the lifecycle), and in the next version you can correct it if it deviates.
Should you? Indextank was a great product, but the exit was to work for the big boss again.
Women's Boots | Women's Boots
How hard is Xen to configure and maintain? I like VPSs because they're mostly hassle free, and all my projects are separate and isolated. It seems like running all my projects on one box would be a massive headache!
I agree with Paul's comment. The 250 number feels low to me, but that is applying a specific model. Typically people come with some set of favorite models, and many of them provide that vast majority of the benefit a business needs. Especially when the current model in use is slipshod and busted at best.
Yes, latest versions of Matlab use multithreading.
Companies already do pay close to $200k/year for entry level data scientists.

(what other kind of scientists are there? The tea-leaf reading kind?)

"Data scientist" refers to the guy who can set up a hadoop cluster, do statistics on TBs worth of data, derive useful conclusions and speed it up by tweaking the low level data formats or microoptimizing the calculation.

The issue is rarely paying these guys an extra $20k, it's simply finding them.

Setting up some lasers and a photonic crystal, imaging the output, making a graph in excel or matlab and drawing conclusions is a different skillset. Someone who can do the latter is a scientist who uses data, but he is not a data scientist.
earlier work using greasemonkey (no idea if it still works) - http://www.acooke.org/cute/HidingHNKa0.html
You Don't Have to Capture All the Value You Created
I see this in software dev consulting, and it's probably in many other fields as well too.

I see companies looking for one person who's a highly-skilled DBA, sysadmin, developer and who can interact affably with all levels of people in a company, including customers, at the drop of a hat. Often it's because they had one 'magical' person who did all that, though usually not very well, and the next person (or team) who comes in after on that project has to deal with a bundle of undocumented crap that never really 'worked', but worked well enough to keep some people happy.

This scenario has been surprisingly common, and I worked with a company last year who was committed enough to hire dedicated dba and sysadmin positions, vs continuing to rely on app devs to handle all that stuff. The separation of concerns has worked out pretty well, though at first there was some concern about the cost of adding 'dedicated' people. In reality, all that work was being done anyway, often in ways that weren't terribly understandable by anyone outside the project.

The time it takes to get feature X done, tested, db upgraded, rolled out, servers maintained, patches applied, etc... is going to be roughly the same. If that's going to take, say, 100 hours, it's either 3 weeks of one person, or 1 week of 3 people. It's not worked out quite that cut-and-dried, but it's coming close. And the ability for each person/team to focus on their core skills and let someone else handle the "other stuff" has meant that, generally, the quality of things is better all around.
Well, among Patrick's claims are that it's probably impossible to input all possible name even with all the power of Unicode, and that there are other limitations that prevent accurate representation of names in computer system, including human errors.

So my point is, maybe then it's better not to implicitly promise that your system has no limitations at all, but make these limitations more obvious instead. This'll help to avoid surprise errors and ensure consistent user experience by setting correct expectations.

I admit that most users today expect systems to accept their names in their language though, and that it might be an edge case depending on particular occasion, but then I can see why most payment systems apparently still accept only latin letters (cardholder's name is an example).
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I actually quite like the Karma system. I think that the way that it's implemented on Hacker News is pretty awesome - it has certainly made me be more careful in the comments I've made. I have actually made one or two snarky comments, but I immediately went back and deleted them before anyone replied. Other times it's been a misunderstanding, and being downvoted helped me understand that something wasn't quite right.

Certainly it's doing its job, which is to keep the signal to noise ratio high.

The only disturbing aspect of Hacker News is the way that valuable contributors can be hellbanned even after only a few comments. For instance, I saw an individual hell banned for commenting on a controversial story: they weren't trolling (which I assume is the purpose of the facility), only engaging in a debate. I suspect that the one who did the hellbanning did it because they didn't agree with what was being said. As there is no review mechanism, this is purely speculation on my behalf - I will never know why this was done!
Well, I come to HN for the discussion, so I want to engage. Not with the idiots obviously, but I'm finding that karma is an insidious brainhook that makes me start taking things personally. Particularly drive-by downvotes - they drive me insane.

Now I have no idea whether you're downvoting me or not (other than the position of the comment relative to others), so hopefully there will be less stress and aggravation from here on :)
How exactly is this the fault of the webkit team? Lazy developers caused this, combined with a stupid response from the browser makers.
As the world's greatest superpower shouldn't we watch formula 1 and not NASCAR? Shouldn't was try to win international sporting competitions instead of calling national championships "world" championships?

We don't like competing on level playing fields.
Apple and Samsung CEOs to meet on May 21 and 22 for settlement talks in SF court
It looks good, but I would go with the cv or the moderncv packages. They’re quite easy to use, and yet produce simple but elegant résumés.
I'd forgotten about [dead] comments. I'll add that in - thanks!
Then they should choose whatever is most applicable to their special-case. And really they're unlikely to have female problems given that while body parts are shaped into something resembling the other gender, they don't truly have functional versions of these body parts in the traditional sense. A man that becomes a woman doesn't ovulate or cannot become pregnant for instance.

Look, EVERY website is built based on some assumptions. Sometimes it's that people comprehend a certain language. Sometimes it's that they're using a browser with support for images and they're not using LYNX. The general assumption of most websites is that their user hasn't changed their gender ... and while I'm sure there's some equal-rights group that would disagree with me, I think that's a fair assumption. I'd also bet that for the vast majority of sites that request gender information, that input is unlikely to ever have an impact on the user's experience on that site.

If a user has transformed their identity, then I think they've also taken on the responsibility of figuring out how that new identity will navigate the real-world. That means a woman that identifies as a man can enter "Male" in a gender drop-down if that's how they choose to self-identify, but unless they've had a surgical procedure to change their physiology, then they're still going to need to operate their body like any other woman would. If they're in a pharmacy, that means buying feminine products to maintain their body. If they're on WebMD, that may mean declaring themselves as a woman to get relevant content. If they're on a dating site, maybe it makes sense to declare themselves as a man ... much to the potential future chagrin of their date.
Pearltrees: Collect your interests
Eh... I'm getting tired of this "x is faster than y" business. JavaScript might be fast in these examples, but that doesn't mean it's faster at everything. Comparing programming languages is fruitless. X might be faster than Y at Z, but that does not mean X is better suited than Y for all applications.

JavaScript is faster than MatLAB etc in these examples, but as mentioned already it's slower at matrix multiplication and I'm sure that's just one example.

Does JavaScript have tonnes of libs? Does it have type-checking? Does it have all those other things that I would be desperate for if I was performing important calculations? Can I distribute the computing easily? Etc, etc.

Let's stop comparing programming languages as if they're one tool to do one job. Different programming languages have different applications and are suited for different jobs.
On Apps And Applications
Tablets are read-only. People are buying this because they love consuming info on their tablet, but they can't create it. I'm typing this on my transformer prime right now and I'd be done already if i just booted up my laptop.

Still, this is just a gimmick for early adopters. I bought my mother-in-law a bluetooth keyboard for her iPad. She doesn't use it. Not because she doesnt want to or has no reason to, but because she can't get through the bluetooth sync process.

To know if there should be a keyboard for the iPad, just ask one question: Does Apple make a keyboard for the iPad?

The first time these early adopters sit down with their new monstrosity and have to reach out across the keyboard to use their fingers to select text or copy paste or browse to a different app or website, they're going to realize why this is a bad idea.

Now if Apple wanted to include a pointer in iOS that could be used with a mouse (or trackpad built into this keyboard), then this starts to make sense. Until then, ppl buying this are just trying to fit a square peg into a round hole using money as lube.
How hard can it be, though? Like taking a normal CS person and making them versatile with hadoop and so on? Could it be done for 20K$?
Not trying to nitpick, but it is very difficult to read with that layout. The entire post is wrapped in a single paragraph wrapper.
Data Science Global Hackathon live leaderboard
> it has certainly made me be more careful in the comments I've made.

Isn't this the ultimate form of groupthink?
Fastest for everything but the statistical parts. Not that someone couldn't write the bindings to C for server-side JS, but they haven't.
Doesn't this look more like a Pro than an Air?
Stress: zo overwin je stress en depressie | Leef Nu Gezonder
I actually like the ribbon, especially when working on tables, charts, and the like. My only complaint is that it takes up so much vertical screen real estate.
Sorry about that, thanks for letting me know. It should be fixed now.
In Germany the Green party and Greenpeace made so much trouble because of 10.000 migrating geese from Scandinavia, that a plan for the expansion of an airport had to be dismissed.

Every year 200.000 birds die in Germany because of windmills ..
Blog spam.

http://anewdomain.net/2012/04/26/apple-founder-inventor-stev...
Still, being able to borrow money to build a business used to be considered essential for a working economy...
that good news for sure
That's my point. We've somehow shifted from caring not about customers, but about investors. It's sad.
Not really. The purpose of this site is for news about Hackers and startups, or as the FAQ says "Anything that good hackers would find interesting". One of the issues with snark is that it doesn't foster appropriate communication - instead it makes people get defensive or react badly.

There are ways of stating disagreement without being nasty, defensive or arrogant. It's a good thing :-) As in RL, thinking before you speak is a wise way to conduct yourself on HN.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm trying to get into that business myself, and it's good to know where the remaining gaps in my knowledge are. (For me it's the "logistics" part.)
Codemap - software cartography
Play over the chess games of Peter Thiel
Obviously I was talking about browsers based on WebKit. I could have been more specific but that would have ruined the humorous effect. Oh wait, I forgot - no sense of humour on HN (it tends to happen when you are too self-important).
I wonder at what point natural selection will start taking effect?
I disagree. Fred Wilson puts it much more succinctly than I could:

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/04/can-the-crowd-be-more-patien...
If laziness got browsers into the vendor prefix mess, laziness could get them out; the way to do that is to build good developer tools.

For example, a tool could scan CSS files and compare usage of vendor prefixes against the current state of cross-browser support for "better" alternatives. Perhaps you see warnings like "property 'webkit-xyz' can be replaced by 'xyz', which has been supported by the top 4 browsers since 2006".
Gestures are keyboard shortcuts for the mouse/trackpad. The thing about Mac is that none of these gestures are actually needed for the OS. Pretty much every gesture has a corresponding Dock item to launch it as well.

Gestures are an extra. An added bonus. Think the multitasking gestures for iOS 5 on iPad
Fat Albert And The Cosby Kids: The Complete Series: Bill Cosby: Movies & TV
مدونة حماية الكمبيوتر |Computer And Internet SeCuRity
Complete series on an antiquated but archival format coming July 31. 110 episodes in all. Worth it?
In a world that has both Chrome and Firefox, there is no reason to use another browser. They are both open source and available on all PC platforms.

Opera needs to stop accusing us of being lazy, and to die. They had their attempt and they blew it. Their existens only hinders the progress of the web.
An API is still an application programming interface right? What kind of distributon / business development are we talking about here? And how can it possibly be conducted through an API?