skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
WebRTC seems comparatively low-level, and I'm not sure it would support the basic use case for webex, gotomeeting, etc.: i.e., conference calls with audio, screen-sharing, and (less importantly) video of participants.

We use GoToMeeting (Citrix), and find we also regularly relay on the ability to call in from a regular phone, so this has become a requirement.

Customers calling in, anyone non-technical who's having issues getting the web client working (even the technical folks sometimes have trouble with it... they have a Java applet install/launch client software), or anyone with a flaky internet connection need this (that last one seems to happen quite frequently whenever anyone is traveling...).
I completely take most of your points, but I think that pretty much all quantitative PhD's are going to be close to "data scientists". Given that stats and explaining your research are requirements, all that's left is to train them to program, which a lot of people are already doing. As a matter of fact, since I heard about this big data stuff I've been honing my skills in this area, in case the hype actually manifests.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they run it on the same host. It simply means that for some reason a lot of people have chosen Windows as their web platform (which could be as simple as familiarity). It is foolhardy to dismiss that massive platform.
1. Yes.

2. I don't think of the ones based on charity. The ones that come to mind are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and AOL (in its day).

My point was just that there are other ways to change the world. I used a poor and overdone example by work seemingly related to charity (how come no one is picking on the marine biology example), but you could very well have a world changing impact and be an author or a professor or a painter. Heck, you could be a mechanic or a stay-at-home mom. There's no reason changing the world has to be tied to profession at all.
> some people dislike the iPad on-screen keyboard enough to part with money for the option of having a real one occasionally

(emphasis mine). And it's the key. The use case of my iPad is that it's simply brilliant when there's no need for a keyboard, and for those cases where there's a need to input text but the soft keyboard is more than enough of a compromise compared to all others advantages. For those same cases my MacBook simply feels like a hack. I won't argue that there's no room for improvement in various areas on iOS because there is, but I'm sick of hearing that "iPads are useless and that's it".
Isn't that point of view also colored by ideology? Even supposing there are enough people capable of becoming that kind of "talent", what if those talents are also sought for in other kinds of jobs?

Granted, if it were really urgent, perhaps companies would start looking in the most remote places for talents, so with a population of 6 billion perhaps there really would be enough who could be trained. How many of those 6 billions are "free" in a sense, as in not needed for maintenance of human life (farming, medicine, building shelter and so on)?

But do economics really work that way? Could we extrapolate that logic to conclude that there is no problem in the world at all? All it takes is enough money to solve every problem - alas, the money doesn't seem to be there, or allocating it properly is apparently hard. (Hm, some of those talents might be able to help, for a true bootstrap solution).
That's a good point. My comment to the parent just reflects my (rather limited) use case for git - off-site storage for git repos. If you use other Github-specific features like Issues, it does indeed become more difficult to switch.
Flash is getting less fashionable, but browser support is pretty much ubiquitous.

What good is HTML5 if you're trying to set up calls with people working in large, locked-down corporations, hospitals, etc., where they don't have the choice of installing a modern browser on their work computer?

It's frustrating has hell, as a developer, but IE6 is still a painful reality for many users.
"Just feels like people with money are throwing it around"

Also, there is this quote: "One of the areas of focus for their fund is cloud computing"

So, it looks like EXACTLY that. They will probably end up with lots of "Pets.com 2.0"
And that pales in comparison to the number of birds killed by glass. Estimates of 100 million to 1 billion birds annually in the US alone. Every time I hear bird-deaths as an argument against windmills I want to scream until I die.

[1]http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4134773/ns/us_news-environment/t...
The Top of My Tod List - Paul Graham
As an engineer who's investing in developing "deep expertise in statistics and machine learning" I can only stand to benefit from it, but something about the current wave of Big Data hype makes me instinctively a bit wary.

Does this skills shortage really exist to the extent claimed? are there really enough people out there who would know what to do with a 'data scientist' if they were able to hire one? I see more talk than action, I see vendors circling around looking to flog freshly-buzzword-compliant BI tools, prognosticators trying to push nervous businesses into engaging in an arms race over data.

Of course there's real value there too, for some at least. I hope my concerns prove unfounded, but worth retaining a healthy skepticism I feel :-)
"Longcore estimated that changing the steady-burning lights on the 4,500 towers greater than 490 feet tall (about 6 percent of the total) could reduce mortality about 45 percent, or about 2.5 million birds. The study also recommended that businesses share towers to reduce their number and build more freestanding towers to reduce the need for guy wires."

edit: After I posted this I realized you may be talking about the Activism component mentioned above? Not sure.
Nice, really happy about this. Hopefully our patches will finally get to go through. If you're in Europe and working with Django have a look at our Job openings, http://djangogigs.com/gigs/1182/
This is really true. If you have money stashed away then you need to lose quite a bit for that fire to get lit undr your ass.

It's primarily got to do with getting comfortable in asking for money. And also doing whatever it takes to get that money.

This is probably the most effective startup requirement there is.
People said very similar things when video started getting released on 720p and 1080p resolutions.

I'm going to wait to judge for myself.
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There were the WWII Armed Service Editions: "Over the life of the program, over 123 million copies of 1,322 titles were printed. This makes the ASE program one of the largest wide-scale distributions of free books in history."
I wonder how many people who complain about politics even vote. Here in Brazil I see people actively trying to avoid voting (it's mandatory).
There's a following:: axis in XPath which lets you look ahead to arbitrary elements. So the processor needs to load the document into memory, which of course is not streaming.
Going further, the number of birds killed for human consumption is even greater: 8.9 billion chickens in the US per year.
Of course yes. Competition.
And it has a good foundation and solid commercial backing with big fish companies.
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In most cases? And with what accuracy?
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It's not that you can solve every problem, but supply and demand are very real. If the wage rates for Big Data get high enough more and more people will try out the field, which will generate a larger supply.

The reasons companies don't just throw out huge salaries though has to do with the demand side. The salaries companies are willing to pay is related to the marginal advantage they can gain from hiring someone with that skillset. If for example a company will gain say 200k per year in total advantage, that would place a hard cap on how much they would be willing to pay in salary.

So if the advantage is very high, companies will pay more. If the supply increases sufficiently wage rates will drop because there is over supply. If the supply doesn't increase enough, wages will increase more - however each company will drop out at it's own value point. This provides the natural limit to where most salaries cap out.
This technology will change the world more than the Internet or any other technology in human history.

You're right that adoption is very slow. I'm convinced that businesses could save trillions of dollars by applying existing weak AI to their problems. Why aren't they doing it ? For one thing there's a huge gulf between the average business person's understanding of what is possible and what actually is. On the other hand the people who understand the technology don't have domain experience in various businesses. You can't develop solutions if you don't know what the problems are and it's very hard to guess at what economically relevant problems exist in fields you've never worked in.

There are probably other barriers as well. Domain experts are unlikely to champion technologies that may, well, replace them. Bayesian networks were developed in academia 20 years ago that outperformed doctors at medical diagnosis. Why aren't they being applied ? There are probably many reasons but I suspect conscious or unconscious resistance on the part of the medical community plays a significant role.

As for a talent shortage, I don't buy it. I'm exactly the sort of person this article talks about, with a strong mathematical background, excellent implementation skills and real world experience in developing and applying machine learning algorithms that have made millions of dollars for my former employers. I have had a website and a LinkedIn profile for over a year that make this fairly clear. How many consulting inquiries have I had ? Exactly zero.
Anyone who can earn a PhD can learn to program but being good at engineering the very complex processes that are needed for effective machine learning applications is a skill that is not so easily acquired.

I've worked with quite a number of quantitative PhD level people in my career and most often the quality of their code leaves much to be desired.
7 million dead birds seems like it would be easy to video/photograph. Choosing to forego documentation that supports these claims has to be intentional.
> It allows you to separate content and form

Could you explain further what you mean by "form"?
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_delirium's post acknowledges your point but is looking for an even rarer person:

"There could be more of them in the future, but someone who is top-notch at all of statistics, programming, and data-presentation has long been less common than someone who's good at one or two of those".

Someone that can program, understands statistics and can present the data in an appealing manner without losing significant fidelity. Many people underestimate the difficulty and skill required in presenting data in a way that makes sense and also actually says something.

There is a significant gap between presenting data that is satisfactory to a research advisor and something that a business person with barely enough time to think can grasp without misconception.
I've passed through many different steps.
I've tried Inkscape, LaTeX, XeLaTeX, HTML.

Now, I've developed my own system. I write the source in markdown and I can export in HTML, PDF and online SVG exported from the PDF.

It has been some time I didn't updated it but you might find this useful:

http://resume.espozito.com/index.html

Some source code can be found here

https://github.com/yogsototh/krambook
Birds dying from glass is actually a rather simple problem to solve - eagle stickers.

Apparently if you put a sticker of an eagle's silhuette on every couple of windows most birds will stay away and won't hit the glass. I see this mostly done on our motorways though ... never seen it on a skyscraper yet.
Who the hell would use the relatively library less javascript to do analysis?

Sorry, R, Matlab, Python, Syntax, Fortran have actual libraries for this stuff, JS, no.
Surprised Ben Rooney did not mention IBM acquisition of Vivisimo the day before (Apri. 25) this article (Apr.26) http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/37491.wss "IBM Advances Big Data Analytics with Acquisition of Vivisimo"
Admittedly, artists create for the audience in the end, and many a great work exists thanks to someone's desire to be famous. However, there's probably a line between that and selling art.

But then I'm sure there are examples of people who struggled to make living from their art, and yet did not surrender to everyone's taste. It's hard to judge either way.
now i see!
thank you for your great works :)
Great resource. I generally agree and spotted that flaw in my logic as I wrote it, but it wasn't the point of the piece so I left it. There's plenty of ways to change the world, not all relating to charity. My point was that if you want to have a certain positive impact, don't tie it to a vehicle that has a 10 percent chance of success.

I might revisit the topic in another post of what it means to change the world, so I appreciate your contribution.
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> make an iPad like device that runs full MacOS

iOS is designed for touch, OSX is designed for pointer. What you describe is Windows 7/8 and I think this is a mistake.

I'd rather have iPad/iOS evolve to allow more things that we take for granted in OSX. Thinks like:

- possibility to tell what's my default web browser, mail client, whatever.
- possibility for apps to schedule time- and resource-limited tasks (e.g for Sparrow to poll IMAP without need for push+giving my credentials to a third party) and maybe ability to deny that possibility to the app (similar to location).
- a full-blown local Unix access so I can run zsh/vim/tmux/python/ssh/whatever, even if it's jailed in a sandbox/chroot.
- full keyboard navigation when a hardware keyboard is plugged in (e.g cmd-tab to work for switching apps instead of reaching for the home-button+screen is so obvious).

This gap is today filled for me by my MacBook Pro, and for others by connecting remotely to various machines via iSSH/Prompt. There's no technical reason not to do it on an iPad 3. But I'd like, say two to five years from now, to have such a shapeshifting device that I'd carry everywhere.

It looks like I would be interested in an Android tablet, but Android really is not there yet at the core (and by far, for a multitude of reasons), while iOS simply nailed it, deeply.
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Yes, quicklisp is cool. I've used it and it makes package management much easier for my tasks.

I think you are right that Clojure (and noir) is probably much newbie-friendly that Common Lisp (and hunchentoot). One aspect of the Clojure movement that I have been impressed by is that the community is open and friendly and easy to find.

I am putting more of my own time and effort into Clojure because:

1 - it runs on the JVM, so it is easier for me to sneak into my workplace than asking sys admins to install SBCL on production machines.
2 - DSLs that make me more productive (Noir, Cascalog)
3 - Books. There are several new and well-written books available on Clojure.
It's a bit too 'colory' for my taste but I like the design. Is it open source?
At a conference I attended last month, one of the keynotes estimated that there might be 250 people in the country with the skills need to build non-trivial, ontology-based data systems. Even if that is an wild exaggeration, it is at least evidence of a perceived shortage.

Also note that an ability to transfer domain experts' knowledge into working models is at least as important as the Stats+ML bits.
The "change the world" rhetoric that most of these startups use is marketing copy to get naive engineers to work for them for half market salary. At most of the hot VC startups, the rank-and-file tend to believe in "the mission" but the higher-ups don't.

It's like many religions. The peasants believe it and work dutifully, but the high priests know it's bullshit but keep it going because it works.

For the record, I think the 2009-12 "social" startup boom is Over. The economic bubble might stick around for a couple years, but we're already at the point where VCs and management have laid down their terms and figured out where to draw the lines, and going into (or trying to start) one of these "hot" companies makes no sense. You're not really better off (from a career perspective) working at a hot VC-funded company than you are taking the stable, boring job at an insurance company in the suburbs. Not anymore. If you're not rich (and 99% who got involved in that racket aren't) you missed the opportunity. Time to let it go and move on.

What I hope to see is more of a movement into Real Technology. That's where we should be doubling down. Things that might make you crack open that linear algebra or logic textbook. There are real problems worth solving, and creating the next build-to-flip IUsedThisToilet.com is not one of them.
I've always thought that this didn't seems so bad idea. We use vendor prefixes so specific vendor errors and omissions doesn't become a property of the released standard.

An alternative to vendor prefix could have been draft prefixes instead. So for example, Firefox could say that we have partial implemented `shadow-box` draft 1, so we call it `-d1-shadow-box`. If Firefox had a number of omissions they could instead call it `-ff1-shadow-box`. If an later browser supported shadow-box exactly as Firefox did with the same omisisons, they could simply adopt `-ff1-shadow-box`, which then most likely would later become the standard.
The difference is farmed poultry isn't an environmental concern (well, the waste they produce is, but not the birds themselves).
The chances of that happening are low anyway. I believe someone reported their server was running smooth for 3 years with only a single _minor_ downtime. Also, I doubt that an app that runs on a VPS is as important as one that requires a whole dedicated server. But yes, if a box happens to fail, how slim the chance may be, then your site is offline, just like Amazon EC2 that was offline for 3 days iirc even though they have multiple availability zones per region.

Also, running 3 dedicated servers for redundancy still isn't expensive when you compare it to traditional VPS/EC2. However, you do have to do everything yourself of course. Tbh I feel that people always tend to worry too much about "downtime" or "failing boxes" while the reality is that most people don't ever experience huge downtimes. If the app is really _that_ important then you're likely making some good money to justify paying for more expensive solutions and there wouldn't be a reason not to do that.
Basically a solution looking for a problem.

They are right, the complexity that big data caters for requires expertise at both technical and business level that would be costly (though may not be at infrastructure level). In the current economy, it looks even more difficult where businesses want to squeeze the maximum out of dollar investment.

IMO, its too early stage for big data solution adoption. However stage could be set for startups who can come up innovative solution that brings the cost level down together with simple and useful easy to grasp solutions.
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That should all be on one page. I don't think anyone wants to open up all of these various pages just to read your resume. If you want to keep everything split up, http://elliottcable.name/resume.xhtml is a good example of an online resume done well.
No, I think I quite understand their world changing impact, but those are two examples of the very few companies that have reached the sort of scale where they actually change the world. They represent the vast minority of successful startups, which are a vast minority of all startups.

In any case, what is changing the world if not helping people? Or, as I phrased it in the post, improving the circumstance of mankind?

There are plenty of ways to do it, and it need not be charity (marine biology or journalism, the other examples from the post, are not charity) and it need not be altogether altruistic in purpose, but to change the world in a desirable way necessarily means helping people. For example, Google helps me find information. Facebook helps me stay connected with friends and family.
> I'd be surprised if you didn't have this as well.

No, I don't. Neither the people I asked. Everyone I asked agrees there are two separate processes: thinking and translating thoughts into words.

> "thinking in words" someday and then realize you do it all the time.

No, I do not. Moreover, I don't even have to. I clearly remember myself at the age when I didn't talk, yet I was able to think and I still can do it.
GitHub Issues. Pull Requests (and their comments). And so on.

How do you migrate this data? There's ALREADY some lock-in.
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There's so much space wasted in the PDF version. It can probably all be written concisely in 2 pages.
I took a couple a few years ago, and the results roughly matched the test results from 30 years earlier. They weren't exactly the same tests, so the raw score numbers weren't the same, but the percentile number hadn't budged a bit one way or the other.

One of the tests had a lot of memorization - given a list of 9 numbers, repeat them backwards. Or 9 letters. Or a combination. Getting read "q9dh73b1wm6" and then having someone expect to hear you say back "6mw1b37hd9q" was quite nerve-wracking. Another test was "say as many names as you can in 30 seconds" (or something like that). Some of the tests appeared really odd, but the test-giver explained the thinking behind some of the questions later, and it was interesting.
Slightly off-topic, but your website breaks after visiting the RDMS page, as all the other links seem to be relative, so they attempt to go to pages such as /products/people.html
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What about straight C??? There are many great stats libraries in C (e.g. Apophenia). C is not a hipster language but maybe (like polaroid filters in Instagram) it's time for it to make a "retro" comeback. C kicks ass for speed. Obviously.