skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually in my experience, a lot of the best people in marketing are very much "idea guys".

Right, marketers can (and probably should) be "idea guys", but not all "idea guys" are marketers. Most "idea guys" (in my experience) don't know much about anything at all. It's that distinction that I think real, professional, talented marketing people should try to make... otherwise they risk getting lumped in with the chumps.

Some of them along the HN-hated template of "well just get some coder to knock it up" (being good at marketing doesn't automatically mean you understand anything about what technical people do..)

So this is where my opinion may be biased by my technical background, and where I may go against the grain a bit... but I think really good marketers (of technical products, that is) should have at least a modicum of technical knowledge, and should understand exactly what their product does (if not the deep details of how it does it), and should be able to articulate - in some detail - how their product addresses a customer problem. To my mind, not being able to do that, as a marketer, is shooting yourself in the foot.
We considered it, and I mentioned that as an alternative in my original post:

MySQL Partitioning: this was the most similar to our existing set up, since MySQL internally stores the data into different tables. We decided against it because it seemed likely that it wouldn’t be much faster than our current solution (although MySQL can internally do some optimizations to make sure you only look at tables that could possibly have data you want). And it’s still the same complexity we were looking to reduce (and would further be the only database set up in our system using partitioning).
Humor: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love IPv6
We can simulate approximations of intelligence now, and those will continue to get better all the time, however, like raytracing, we simply don't have the technology to do real AI at the human scale right now.
Hint: If you want to brag about your uptime ("100%") then you should monitor that with a HTTP-request and not an ICMP Ping.

The latter is rather deceptive because it's not actually testing service availability.
Octane: Google's JS benchmark suite
Increases and Decreases like some T-Shirt Market.
Where do you hail (actually there's another one!) from?

To me, (UK) bing is self evidently the noise one hears when getting an answer right in a gameshow, or hitting a crystal wineglass with a fingernail.
If one is starting to learn on their own in their 2nd or 3rd year in college, I think Python is definitely a good place to start. You will have more doors still open to you as a college student as far as internships go.

I also think people who are still in college might as well take the intro classes so they can take the more advanced data structures and algorithms classes, in addition to extra maths.

It's also good to be around other people who are studying CS while in university. The networking benefits shouldn't be underestimated. And making friends with people who are also passionate about the topic is great for many other reasons.
It's in the terms of service.

But seriously, Stack Exchange thrives because of its focus (which is maintained in large part by its culture of moderation, though only a small part of that is done by actual "moderators"; the community self-polices pretty well).

This contest is aimed at catching posts that would be closed before they're posted. Ideally we'll get a classifier that lets us give guidance to the askers. Better education of new/confused/troublesome users, leading to better posts, and fewer closed questions overall.

(Disclaimer: SE Inc. employee, yadda yadda yadda)
I can actually attempt an answer at that as I launched the e-mail newsletter off the back of the most popular Ruby blog which I also run.

I grew the blog to 25,000 RSS subscribers (as measured by FeedBurner) between 2006 and 2010 but the engagement and what those readers actually do pales in comparison to my 15,000 e-mail subscribers who click more and open more in vastly greater levels. I now believe, like many, that the numbers FeedBurner give out are mostly BS and don't give any hint of engagement at all.

Separate to this I've built a 30k strong JavaScript e-mail newsletter without any blog. This is a larger regular subscription base than most other JavaScript related sites I know of.. with the exception of Ajaxian which is now half dead.

So I can't say for sure because maybe I could make a blog work better, but in terms of engagement, how much money I can earn, etc, e-mail has been a huge win over blogging.
Yeah, it looks like a lot of fun! I actually just got my Arduino Uno and can't wait to start playing with it. Def. bookmarking this tutorial :)
This seems like a non-answer to me. There is still the problem that "For startups, having large numbers of investors is bad, and having inexperienced investors is bad." Even in the FC model of being a mutual fund, there are still lots of investors, and they are still inexperienced.

A much more satisfying answer would be along the lines of: "I don't want the startups I fund to be croud funded because I believe they wont get the support they need, however I have no problem personally funding a company which manages the crowd-funding movement because that could be profitable"
Ask HN: A platform to pitch your ideas
Would it be a nice idea to have a web application where wanna be entrepreneur pitch their idea (Idea, Brief Description, Team, Current Stat, Challenges, Quick Survey). Investors, potential customers can validate the idea by improving the ideas or support by mentoring and soon. Let me know your thoughts on this idea.
PLANET X
Very interesting. What are the real differences between HN and /r/programming? Seems the users from one site despise those from the other.
If you're someone who's interested in ML/datamining but haven't had a chance to put your ideas to any hard/interesting problems I strongly recommend a kaggle contest. It's one thing to plug some data into a random forest and go "oh cool, I guess that did okay" and entirely another to see how other competitors are comparing.

one of the biggest challenges I've found in implementing ML projects is I don't have a great sense of when I've really gotten the most info out of the data. I'm not particularly competitive but the contest format is great for this. When you see that a solution you'd normally be happy with ranks in the lower half of the answer you're really pushed to improve your solution.

This is leads you to learn your tools and algorithms better. For a couple of contests I took seriously I ended up learning tons about R, spent most of my nights reading academic papers on various newer techniques, and also read through a few books. On top of all that you really should spend time reading up on how past winner have won which gives a bunch of practical insight into approaching different ML problems.

In one contest I tried the hardest in I actually placed terribly after the final results were calculated, but looking over what went wrong I was amazed to see that I actually did progress really far with my understanding of ml. I'd say a month of seriously competing is easily worth a semester long grad class.
(I'm a coworker of the OP) We discussed using MySQL partitions but decided we would rather avoid them if possible. That may have been in part an over-reaction to the pain of dealing with our application-level partitioning, but it was also in part because we don't have a dedicated DBA, which means one of us developer types has to re-learn the quirks of MySQL every time we touch it.
Often there is a culture of one-upmanship, which is subtly different.
Modern cars often have around 100mb of executable binary in them. It's pretty terrifying.

http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf
The claim that "the other team tore down the portal to use in their castle" is ridiculous. No veteran minecrafter would destroy a nether portal just to use it in their castle wall. If anything, they would just make the portal into the castle wall.
I'm learning a lot from this exchange. I think your statement is a combination of truth as well as simply misreading what I was trying to say.

Sometimes, I have a tendency to create my own dialect in which only I understand the context (self note: stop doing that). I am of course open to suggestion and you are spot on-- it does sound like i'm trying to sound smart (cringe) Def going to re-word that to express myself in a more straightforward manner.

This isn't a blog to enviously rebel against those that have worked and deserve the position they are in, but rather a blog to alleviate the organic ramifications that are out of their control. This isn't a blog to cover startups or ideas that aren't getting covered-- theres likely a reason why they aren't. I am not hating on people that write about technology-- this is their job and many are very good at it. But, the reality is they are working for a company that desires to increase their bottom line just like any other business-- as they should. My point is because of this, the ecosystem is click driven. Which means a much greater frequency of startups will be covered. Which means even if a startup is doing nothing new and the technology is rather unimpressive, the brand attached to it means clicks ($$) so it gets coverage.

When this is done at such a frequency, the greater the likelihood the companies that are doing dynamic things fall through the cracks-- creating a lower standard that isn't producing optimal results of what the space is capable of.

Many of the startups I cover probably will be startups i've read about else where and never even submitted anything. So, in essence this is just a filter to differentiate from startups written for clicks due to brand equity and startups that are doing dynamic things-- built upon a culture that emphatically acknowledges this standpoint. That doesn't mean A16Z startups won't get covered. That doesn't mean Y Combinator companies won't get covered. This does mean not all their portfolio startups are doing dynamic things that legitimately deserve acknowledgement.

And the only way to fully keep intact the integrity of this blog without question is to not monetize. This is a hobby for me. Startups are my passion and I like to write. I love giving product deep thought-- where are they headed with this and what can this ultimately become and what sort of impact can potentially proceed and how this will affect the ecosystem? I want to read about startups that force my mind to think about these things, kind of like your response has forced me to think deeper about this blog. And then cover them from this perspective with the intent to set a higher standard for everyone to aspire to.

That's really all i'm trying to do-- and maybe your standpoint of cynicism is a result of me not initially expressing myself properly (aka the first paragraph).
"I was quite surprised that Mountain Lion was a fee upgrade"

My knowledge of American anti-competition laws is lacking, but I remember back when they were able to release iOS-upgrades for the iPhone, but not the iPod Touch for free. At the time, there was supposedly something on the legal side of things which they were afraid to run afoul with by releasing free iPod Touch updates.

I suppose, if they were to release new versions of OS X for free, they may risk being sued for trying to push competitors out of the market by giving away a product that others are trying to sell.

No, it doesn't seem right to me, but sometimes laws are outdated or simply abused.
I will, I might be prejudiced.

I had tried SUSE Linux as a replacement, and had to go back to Windows, but the latest versions of Ubuntu sound like they are very good.

However, the cost of additional trips to my parents', grandparents', or uncle's houses for maintenance or unfamiliarity is still too much for me, so I'm still reluctant to recommend it to them (especially since their computers already came with Windows preinstalled).

I will try it out for business use as well if I finally start my own company (hopefully next year).

Edit: thank you for contributing to Linux and I hope you will be rewarded for it.

Edit2: I have great faith that the newer generations will be much more likely to try out and like Ubuntu, since they've been given the OLPC computers :) . While I'm reluctant to suggest my older family members to switch, the younger ones have a chance.
Honestly not that hard, especially if you live in a shared apartment. Plus if you look at his benefits, it looks like they cover some living, food, internet, and gym expenses. I grew up with friends who lived in NYC earning less than 35k a year with no such benefits. Now THAT was tough.
I believe you don't need an iPhone and you can call them to set up an account if you don't have one.
I thought HN may like this. Burners can print a schedule so they aren't trying to work a phone in a dust storm. You can also check out what events other peeps are going to by clicking their avatars. The feed is dynamic and events move into 'live' and 'past' as they come and go in time. Thanks for any feedback.
"The computer market is not a conspiracy of manufacturers that get together and decide to screw customers."

I agree, but for the record, there have been a variety of customer-screwing conspiracies within the computer market. If memory serves correctly, price-fixing arrangements have occurred in at least RAM and LCDs. Not to mention various anti-trust issues.
I'm not very colorblind, but the "warning" color used for the progress bars is far too similar to the "success" color. Please consider a brighter yellow.
There are quite a lot of people working on this 'problem' of AGI; amateurs, academics and commercial. The 'only way' this would be possible currently is like a Watson; some way of approximating intelligence / learning while not emulating it directly with neurons. While AGI amateurs think we are actually close to that right now, there is not much else pointing in that direction.

So let's see what they come up with :) Anyone has more information?

Edit: searching for "Recursive Cortical Network" is a good start.
If you can afford 10Gbps to the internet, $22k is probably chump change.
Tech Confessional: The Googler Who Looked At The Worst Of The Internet
Magnify the Universe
Ragel for dummies: How to handle quotes
Amusing side note: I clicked on their job ad, apparently they score 10/12 on the "Joel Test", which according to the link indicates "serious problems".
From what I've gathered, you can fork cdnjs, add it, and do a pull request.
Gulf Seasfood Deformities Raise Questions Among Scientists and Fisherman
We've used various partitioning schemes at Causes (I'm a coworker of the OP) but for this particular use case the monthly tables weren't a good fit.

(Your comment about automatic/transparent makes me think you're probably thinking of merge tables. We've used those too for other models, but we're not big fans of them because they require you to use the MyISAM storage engine, which doesn't offer the same consistency guarantees that InnoDB does.)

In this particular instance, a single large table with the right indices gives better performance and, importantly for us, speeds up developers by removing unnecessary complexity.
Lots of these kinds of push templates have existed, none of them seem to have legs. I think they seem elegant, but mixing logic and HTML is actually just a great way to do things. When you want to change something you see in the HTML – be it dynamic or static – then you always know where to look. And when you come back to some code 6 months later you'll really appreciate the simplicity.

Even in Javascript traditional templates have seen a surge in popularity, even though push-style templates have always been the more natural way to operate (in the case of Javascript, modifying the DOM directly).
When it comes to marketing technical stuff, I'm on the fence. As someone who works in marketing, and whose inner geek loves tech stuff, I agree with you in principle - however my experience has shown me plenty of people who really know little about what they're selling and yet do a fantastic job. Possibly the reverse of this experience is that maybe they're better at short-term sales, worse at actually giving customers what they want and therefore worse at keeping customers, I suspect this is the case.

But anyway, when I was talking about good marketers who don't understand tech stuff, I didn't mean people who are marketing the same tech products (such as Twilio). For example I was speaking to a client this morning, a fairly important guy in a company that makes certain types of consumer PC components. Ask him about several areas, such as PSUs, and he knows everything, in so much detail. But my conversation this morning was helping him work out who in his company he needed to speak to about creating a small landing page, and how to get the subdomain he wants. He doesn't know the meaning of any of the following: "DNS", "IP", "sub-domain". Great at marketing, great at understanding the products he markets, but if he had an idea that involved any coding, he wouldn't have a clue.
I'm interested to see if other people think this may be over blown or not. In any case it is interesting.
Or torn out a single segment and them opened another portal, thereby creating two portals in the Nether and another whole portal worth of obsidian... that's just my experience with portals from many many months ago, though.
In a fit of awesomeness, the luminescent paint used by a 50's refrigerator designer would be radioactive - now preserving your food for even longer...
>play was only allowed to continue when all players were online at the same time.

I can't get the same 5 people together to continue a game of Civilization V. 30 people is ridiculous.

>“The loss of a resource such as clay was a small warning most players missed,” WordWorks notes. Within a week, trees were in short supply. Wood is essential for tool building in Minecraft, and so tensions began to mount.

Now, I know they're joking. How would anyone even know if all clay was gone (I never even use it)? Trees, by the way, are a renewable resource.

Funny, but very likely this never happened.
They'll still be called FreshBooks. The page has been updated since the email was sent to make that clearer.
With regard to your first link, I really have to take issue with code like the following as a measure of Java and Python's relative verbosity:

class Artist:
def __init__(self, name):
self.name = name

def __str__(self):
return self.name

There may be an argument to, as you say, "Never, never, never use String in Java" (or other statically typed languages), but a class like this in a duck-typed language such as Python is nonsensical.

I'm not even arguing that Python's dynamically typed approach is necessarily better overall than Java, but if you're going to evaluate the two in terms of verbosity then you really have to compare idiomatic code in both languages. Whereas if you continue writing Java in Python, of course you'll only see a 2x improvement.
Where is number theory used in the rest of mathematics?
B is just a bit more cleanly organized. Somewhat like the difference between code that uses sensible indentation and code that uses deceptive indentation — they both look statistically similar, but the organization helps us read it.
I received my invite 1 week ago, and I completely agree that the 'safe to spend' meter becomes the new normal. It is a simple concept that really shifts your thinking - much for the better. I would love to hear the story on how they hit on that.
actually it used to say "Freshbooks painless billing". So it seems like they got bullied by someone (intuit??) to remove the word "billing'? or is it just a company decision. But whatever it is, I love freshbooks for what they do. brilliant design and execution of a critical pain point.
BTW, if you're one of the people waiting for .Net 4.5 on Azure, upvote it here to get Microsoft's focus on it: http://www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com/forums/34192-windows-...
Former Keynote Address Producer Sues Apple Over Promised Lifetime Position
Blizzard extends Diablo III endgame with 100 new character levels
No, but it's particularly apposite on this post, as SE is asking for a machine learning algorithm is to assist in moderating questions:

an algorithm that predicts whether (and for what reason) a question will be closed.

which raises all sorts of questions as to what the reasons are for which questions [should][1] be closed - this is a grey area, and there is much argument on SE itself over what sort of questions are considered acceptable, to the extent that they have started retroactively disabling lots of content which doesn't fit with an arbitrary set of rules about what a Q&A site should have on it. Without some moderation obviously the site would descend into chaos, but with very heavy handed and arbitrary moderation it will atrophy and the very people creating the quality content they want will leave, leaving them with moderators (robot or not), new users and trolls, and not much else.

Personally I think it's a huge mistake for SE to start banning questions on the basis of them being not constructive. All their other categories of problem questions make sense, but trying to ban questions that are too controversial or involve opinions is IMHO unwise - that's exactly the sort of question which leads to engaging content on SO, even if some of it verges on a troll. This has been the problematic area for them and has lead to them marking lots of useful posts as not constructive even though they clearly are constructive and informative, just because they fall on the wrong side of a line decided retrospectively to declare certain questions unquestions, and others valuable.

It will be very interesting to see if any of their robot moderators are useful in delineating this more problematic area of questions which are controversial or involve opinions - potentially that is every question/answer set more complex than 'what is 2 + 2?', and that line can vary dramatically depending on the moderator, and their opinions.

So I think this raises an interesting (though perennial) question about how heavy handed community moderation should be; in some ways related to those questions raised recently about quality and moderation on HN.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/faq#close
Agreed. Even more difficult when your bolts and screws are only accessible via a POST request.
"If I remember rightly previously joe public were allowed to buy the OEM version"

I've historically tried to use official/supported/legal versions of all of my applications. Windows was one of those and I actually read parts of the OEM EULA at one point.

The following link sums up the use of an OEM license well:

http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/licensing/sblicensing/Pages/...

The most important part is here:

OEM System Builder:
Must be preinstalled on a PC and sold to another unrelated party. vs

Full Packaged Retail Product:
Is intended to be re-sold separately from a PC for installation by the end user.

Disclosure: Microsoft Employee. I had the obsession to have properly licensed software on my machine long before that.
This is really cool! But also kind of complex for a task that could be performed in a much simpler way.

Using a GSM module such as the Telit GM862 [1], you will be able to receive text messages directly on the Arduino without the need of any web services. This would be much faster and cheaper. This particular module even includes a GPS.

[1] http://tinkerlog.com/2009/05/15/interfacing-arduino-with-a-t...