skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The power of R (speaking as a very heavy user who has deployed it in multiple production environments and been using it for 5 years) is that it makes it very fast, easy, and natural to do statistics. It also has the nicest data structure I've ever seen for manipulating table data, called a data frame -- I'll elaborate, if anybody cares. In addition, it encourages people to create packages to extend the functionality. There are extant packages to do almost every analysis you can think of -- time series, kmeans, other clustering techniques, cox-box style analyses, regular maximum likelihood style GLM, hierarchical regression, HB, etc. Further, the amount of knowledge and the open source nature of the language, base, and packages encourage additional development and widespread adoption.
See:
http://cran.r-project.org/
and
http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/
^ is task views. Explore it -- it's well worth your time.

The downsides are, well, it's slow for large data sets and debugging can be difficult. But as a desktop / rapid development platform for statistics it is without peer, IMO.

ps -- unlike Matlab, which often costs thousands of dollars, and the Statistics Toolbox, more thousands, R is free. This is pretty important on its own -- instead of $5k per server and workstation and home pc, install it on any linux, Mac, or windows box you have and get to work for $0.00.
This hasn't launched yet. It's in the "sandbox," which means you can test it. I submitted a question asking if they had any sort of timetable on launching Subscriptions - nothing definitive in their response.
The problem with how opportunity assessment is taught to engineers
The Blogs That Inspire Me
OMG, shut down HN now! it uses table and doesn't validate. Who's going to save semantic web now?
They are not in Europe yet, though, or are they?
Does DRM-free mean that they don't even encode the name of the buyer into the files?
Right, so the accounts are falsified by the chairman of a company whose name means "truth".

Oh, the irony.
Is it expected to launch internationally?
Everyone's gotta start somewhere, and eventually, maybe one of those projects will take off and start generating a decent amount of profit.

A few years ago when I was a consultant, in my free time I worked on my World of Warcraft guild's website and after a year and a half, I realized it was better than the vast majority of other guild sites out there (imo), and thought, maybe I could charge for this if i made it a service. So I spent 6 months rewriting my own guild's site to make it "general purpose" allowing other guilds to create websites.

The thought was, "maybe I can score a few extra bucks on the side." I launched in May of '06 and was profitable immediately, and by January '07, business was so good that I dropped consulting altogether to focus on the guild hosting site.

So keep plugging away. I probably had 5 or 6 projects (Frozen Custard Stand CMS system anyone?) that I worked on "on the side" before this one actually turned into a profitable venture.
memcached is great for these kind of things.
You've hit the nail on the head there. A programmer looks at R (or MATLAB) and says "this sucks as a programming language". An engineer or a scientist or a statistician says "so what, I'm not a programmer, nor do I want to be one, I've got actual work to do".
Since the Freedom of Information Act has to "to disclose records requested in writing by any person" [1], this is not a 'rare peek', it can be done by anyone, at anytime anywhere in the world since 1999. People have just been lazy.

[1]http://www.usdoj.gov/oip/
Wow. May I ask, how profitable was the WoW meta-guild site?
Looks like PDL == NumPy (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363159)

There are CPAN modules to directly use R from Perl (for eg... R::* & Statistics::R).

I have a stats friend who's been singing the praises of R & PDL for donkey years.

/I3az/
Is Perpetual Motion in a Vacuum Possible?
I'm no scientist. But I have an amateurish interest in reading about perpetual motion machines.

Here is a thought I had. I am sure it won't work. But can you tell me why?

1. In a vacuum - if you push something, it'll keep on moving because of lack of friction / law of inertia - correct?

2. So can you push a rotor in a vacuum so that it always keeps on moving on its hinges and keeps on generating electrical power - which can be stored in batteries?
> Judging from his home page, he doesn't have any taste.

Go and have a look at the website for blue sky mining companies some times. Lack of neato art hardly implies bad fundamentals (in fact many of the mining pages are so bad I half suspect it's a badge of honour).
Well, welcome to 2002. Symbian/Series60 phones were doing this since then, without any dongle, using application called Psiloc Total irRemote.
Entropy will always get you baby...
If I needed a shaving mirror, I'd buy a shaving mirror. They're cheaper.
I can get a high paying job in the finance industry maintaining a Java/C++ code base.

Ho ho ho. After the ex-Bear and Lehman experienced coders find jobs, then maybe the finance industry will start hiring entry-level coders again. Maybe.

Ask yourself tho' what you want from a PhD. It's not a "higher qualification" in the sense that a MSc is, learning specialist knowledge to do a niche job. It's an apprenticeship to become an academic. Where do you see yourself post-PhD? What is the outcome you are looking to achieve here? Altho' grad students may write an awful lot of code, no-one really cares about it - its only purpose is to demonstrate theoretical ideas. Coding experience gained in industry won't count for much. Not even Open Source coding. Computer Science is as related to software development as Astronomy is to telescope manufacturing. Working in a Carl Zeiss factory on the shop floor wouldn't count for much applying for an Astronomy PhD would it?
I don't remember how profitable 2006 was (since the income was combined with consulting at the end for taxes), but for 2007 and 2008, it was something like $90k revenue each year. 2008 was on a course for a bigger year (March did $14k) and then it seemed all WoW interest dropped considerably after July (if you look at the alexa ratings for the main guild hosting services, they all took the same dive). It's nothing massive or anything, but it's a reasonable living for providing gaming service to folks who are pretty much just like me :)
Africa does not need religion, they need education.
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Could someone explain how this differs from Matlab, which is the most popular language for statistics and machine learning at my university?
Hell. Yes. Way to go.

One more: could you estimate how many total hours of work you've invested into the WoW meta-guild site?
start looking at how a global steady state economy will work

Err, except that we don't. That kind of thinking is a fallacy, that there is only economic value in tangible items. There is literally (in the sense that it is not bounded by how much stuff there is) no limit on the economic value that can be created through services and intangible assets such as information.

A microprocessor is worth more than the sand it's made from. Where did that value come from?
Metaphors are a Ponzi scheme.
EBS snapshots are stored on S3, which you can restore from if you lose the EBS
That one, I honestly couldn't estimate. Some weeks I do no coding and just answer support emails, phone calls, and forum posts. Other weeks, I'll code seemingly nonstop over 80-90 hours/week and won't do anything else (I won't even feel like gaming during those hard core weeks, all I care about, and all I dream about is coding).
"atheist" : someone making a statement as ungrounded as that of the worshippers.

"truly": content free.

"believe": wrong attitude. 'Believing' means shutting down one's analytical abilities.
Is much time lost due to burnout? E.g. periods when you don't feel like working on code, support emails, phone calls, or forum posts -- just on leveling your character. Have you developed any techniques to deal with those periods?
Really? My valid code doesn't have any problems in current browsers.
A real letter from a CEO to his employees.
I have been using wxWidgets for about 5 years now with C++. At first, it was really difficult to do everything in code, hard to change GUI when you need to, very time consuming. But still it was the best option, our project was cross platform. It was also difficult to understand how to build and link.

However, once you get the basics it's quite fast and also have threads, networking, file streaming etc, so you don't need a zillion of libraries to do every little thing. Oh, and it has a great OpenGL support (see my projects at http://www.ccsoft.com.tr for screenshots)

With the help of wxFormBuilder (a free design tool), now design and modfications are very much faster.

Besides, it's been there for about 15 years. There is a decent documentation, a book, a large community to answer your questions.

My only plan is to do a project on wxPython and polish my python knowledge and see which (C++ or Python) suits me better.
"Technical success needs technical skills; business success needs business skills."
Justifying something "because someone else does it like that" is akin to childhood playground antics. "But miss, I only kicked him because he kicked me first!"

As my mum always says: two wrongs don't make a right.
and AIR.
Wikis at github
Thanks for the comment.

Pardon my ignorance.

I read about entropy on wikipedia. But didn't get a clear picture about it.

Does it mean that because of entropy - the rotor in a vacuum will stop movement?

(What I'm curious about is: "A thing in motion keeps on moving at the same speed in a vacuum" - is that an incorrect statement?)
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"a) Government borrows $4 trillion from the Chinese at 2% annually

Either way the government has to raise $4 trillion (plus interest) in taxes, borrow it, or print it to pay it off."

Sadly there's another option. the gov decides not to pay and basically asks for a declaration of war from China...
Ian Bicking seems to consider lxml superior to BeautifulSoup:
http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/12/10/lxml-an-underappreciat...
If coding in Java is an option, I would highly recommend SWT (http://www.eclipse.org/swt/). It's the toolkit that was used to build Eclipse, and it has a very 'native' look & feel (click the link for examples).

Plus, Java itself is cross-platform. Might be just what you're looking for.
That should be obvious: cross-platform GUI toolkits are so hard that there isn't any that you like. It takes a good design or lots of people working on it full-time. So either you pay for Qt or deal with other problems. That's one reason that web programming has become so popular.

There seems to be another factor if you add OS-X to the required platforms: the way of GUI programming for Macs is conceptually different from Windows or Linux.
Detecting twitter users with JavaScript - handy or evil?
I think that Tcl and Tk have a terrible "marketing operation" and haven't done a very good job of getting the word out about things like this - it's a huge improvement.

This has some screenshots, which are a bit out of date, but show that things have improved:

http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/
I remember reading about the same trick in some Sidney Sheldon novel too. Its an old idea used by many a story tellers.
They're in the UK at least.
Can someone with a physics background explain his theory, and whether his theory has been tested experimentally yet?
A thing in motion will continue at the same speed and in the same direction until another force acts upon it.

OK - you have spotted that drag from air can quickly slow down an object here on earth and that thus an object in a vacuum will spin (or whatever) for a lot longer without air slowing it down.

But drag from air is not the only force likely to affect the motion of your theoretical object.
Oh sure, usually after a long stint of coding (several weeks), I'll take a break from coding. But regardless of what kind of week it is, I'm answering phone calls and emails and doing general support (had to do support even on my Honeymoon with satellite internet on our cruise).

I deal with them just by knowing that they have to get done. It's hard to say. A lot of what keeps me going is pride, I guess. When I don't feel like working on the guild hosting site, I just work on random other projects to keep me going.

(I'm getting tired, so my apologies if I'm rambling nonsense)
No, that was great. Thank you for your time.
I take it he is in Barbado's now?
Forgive my ignorance (and being a non-US), I could not understand who he points his finger to vote (obama or mccain). I really don't know about their tax policies.

Apart from that, I think not only in US but all around the world, these kinds of taxes should be reduced. But in only favor of the employees. I mean, an employer should have an option to pay tax or spend that amount on creating new jobs. Otherwise, rich bussinessowners spend that tax money (or save it for worse days) and also still spend their employees when their bussiness is not good.
The best validator is a browser.
According to Rene Girard there is one thing distinguishing Christianity among other religions - it is not sacrificial (that is not based on scapegoating) - or even it is anti-sacrificial by revealing the scapegoat victim is innocent. I am sure this is a too strong statement - as he could not analyze all existing religions - but the material that he did cover (myths and rituals) is very convincing for me.

Personally I am an agnostic or even an atheist - but the more I read of Girard works the more I am convinced about the grand scale of the transformation Christianity has done to our European minds and culture.
Hacker News is not about music recommendations. Read http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I've seen this letter reprinted everywhere and every time I see it, it irks the hell out of me.

He throws around a lot of gravitas and some big numbers and then goes, "Oh poor me, these taxes are crushing me." without providing any real objective proof of it.

So you paid $288k of taxes for that quarter. That was out of how much revenue? how much profit? hm?
There is some good discussion of the issues here
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=89128
http://www.crowley-crisp.com/Principals/tabid/55/Default.asp...

That's the guy and the company website.

Seems like they're still going!
he mentioned this in a later reply. he's aware of it and always has other people heavily review and revise everything official. not that i actually looked at the patent apps, so i could be off.
The great thing about side projects is that they only get better -- your code stays written, your marketing snowball gets better, age and inlinks bring your rankings higher, etc. (If your business plan does not have these features, for example if you are planning to sell iPhone applications which have a shelf-life of cut apples which have been soaked in agar[1], you may wish to reconsider.)

2006: $1k of bingo cards

2007: $10k of bingo cards

2008: $21k of bingo cards

2009: ...

[1] Don't try this at home, kiddos.
Anecdotally --- a number of my non-hacker friends have bought netbooks recently, and use them for quickly checking Facebook and their e-mail without having to sit at a desktop or carry a bigger heavier laptop across the room. So I wouldn't be at all surprised if your users are disproportionately likely to have 1024x600.
The letter is a bit too melodramatic, but he has a point: over-taxation kills businesses.

Quoting Sir Winston Churchill:

"We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."
This is a dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411054

And my comment still stands:

--
This guy is a dick. If I were working for him and got this letter, I'd hand in my resignation.

To the author: You're not the navel of the universe. I'm oh so sorry you've had to work hard for your shit. So has everyone else. In your darkest hour of disdain for the hapless employees you've hired to help expand your business, never forget: if it wasn't for all these people, you wouldn't be rich, because you wouldn't be able to hire all those people to make money for you.
--
Currently I use Paypal/Google Checkout, which don't give me the option of refunding algorithmically. I also do my stats tracking on my site. This means that when a customer asks for their money back I have to find their record in my system, click refund, then find it again in Paypal and click refund.

Am I lazy enough to spend 15 minutes once to save myself 30 seconds 30 times a year? Oh heck yes I am.
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Really? Surely you have figured out a more productive use of your time at 38. Phds are really good if:
- you're young, have found a subject you're fascinated with and are willing to live and breathe every day
or
- you are absolutely sure you want to be a professor and can do top notch research

but otherwise it'll be a long time until you're able to payback the lost opportunity costs of being in grad school (no career advancement, little pay), since other than being a professor, it's unlikely having a PhD will get you any different job than before (if you're in CS).

(I was a PhD student at a top 3 cs program and left for a startup years ago)
Land for the biggest air station
Browser is the only validator (scroll down to "Validation output")
> I've given up caring and just accept the numerous annoyances, such as the entire page having to load before seeing anything (thanks, tables!)

Hm? Both Opera and Firefox render HN's tables progressively.

My main problem with HN is the almost complete lack of comment formatting; no quotes, seemingly no links other than just pasting a full URL, and as you've demonstrated, no lists except using preformatted text.
I find it very odd that I cannot pay my Adwords bill with Google Checkout.
Glossy screens are a killer if you like working in areas with lots of natural light or sunlight.

Try wearing a white tshirt, sitting in partial sunlight, and using a glossy LCD>

Having said that, I find that smaller screens are fine with glossy - like my Acer Aspire One netbook. The bigger the screen, the more of a problem it is.
duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=421796
When reading your app, professors are trying to tell one thing:

Will this person be a good academic researcher? To figure this out, they will look at:

1. Can you already do research? If you've published at academic research conferences, they'll read your paper and judge you by it. If you have good recommendations from people they trust, or are known in their field, they will read those and rely on them heavily. Otherwise they view your application as a crapshoot (why would they want to take on a student they're not sure will succeed?)

2. grades, programming abilities, and other things are all secondary. If they pass the bar, that's good, but they're not going to get you in.

My advice: get a programming job working in a research lab, then apply to places the people you're working with have worked with before. Look at MSR (Microsoft lABS), Intel Research, and Google. Otherwise go to a startup.
So it's a matter of personal preference after all. pg doesn't have another person for graphical design of the site.
I don't know why anyone believes this is real.

It's written exactly the way most (literate) chainletters are.

And lots of those use real names / institution names to add legitimacy, too.
Unsurprising. Most people have no idea what Twitter is.

I've noticed sometimes the tech world feels like a bubble where our sense of what's important in the "real world" gets warped.
Can you elaborate on the accessibility issues and page bloat, because the link doesn't. It lists "Increase traffic" and "Happier staff" among the benefits. Do you think pg would be happier if he followed some guidelines for web design? ;)
didn't realize an alternative to akismet existed...
quick question : how come mollom says 78% of comments are spam, but akismet says 85%?
Where is the code ?
JS RGB to hex color converter
Gvke - Bruce Lee home will soon be a museum
Mr. Moore gets to punt on sharding
I've just written an article on how best to price an application:

http://blog.stormideas.com/archive/2009/01/07/pricing-your-w...

I hope it's of use to you!

Bob
Yeah it has always bothered me that GUIs are so annoyingly hard to make. I used to use Python a lot and Tk wasn't exactly a dream to work with even if something very basic was easy to get up and going.

However now I use Swing+miglayout+CLojure and making GUIs is supereasy.
Technical Details Behind iWork.com
Selling Apple and Google Today
we're all human, and twitter is very new.

We all make mistakes, doesn't seem terrible honestly.
Atlas Shrugged?
The other half of it is what he got from paying taxes.

* He could hire his employees because they were educated (paid and/or subsidized by taxes.)

* He could take on loans and other debt because the financial system is regulated to ensure investor confidence.

* Companies can get their products to customers efficiently because of roads/bridges/etc.

I'm not saying taxes are too low, or even just right, or even sensible at all, but they have to be considered in context. He pays quite a bit in taxes, but how does that relate to what he puts into the economy and what he takes from the "commons" of the economy?
Dear Employees,

That nasty black man wants to tax me more so he can tax you less. I value you so much that if this happens I will immediately fire the lot of you. That's because I'm a noble altruistic person, unlike you useless unproductive slackers whom, by the way, I value.

So, I'm not telling you how to vote, but if you vote for the guy who says he wants to help the middle classes rather than the rich then it may make you lose your job.

Fuck you^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HLove,

The boss.
This certainly isn't what you want to hear, but here is some raw feedback:

You need to seriously work on your personal pitch. It sounds like the projects you've been involved in haven't gotten off the ground, and it comes through that you don't really have valuable expertise that you bring to the table.

Either 1. become an expert at something 2. start coding or 3. get a job that most companies/startups have a need for:

- find an IT job at a startup, often these help out with engineering or writing internal applications

- Move into operations (i.e. setting up machines, systems, administering backend systems and applications) for a company that has a massive number of servers (like facebook, google, rackspace) or is in the process of scaling (twitter?, digg, etc).

Those two positions can be used as a springboard into dev jobs, but if you can get your projects to launch, you're going to learn far more from those experiences.
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Is venture capital a lonely job?
Perhaps someone should contact Michael Crowley and see whether he really wrote this thing. (Of course, he might deny it even if he did.)