skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think for technical non-fiction, the recommendations of the OP and the article he links to are worth consideration. They may be the way to go, they may not. Chances are your audience is highly specialized, and you may be able to use that to draw them into your website and sell them the book while they're there.

I think for fiction, Amazon and the other major sellers are a must. That's just where e-book buyers go for fiction.
Anyone know when a video of the talk will be online? I missed the livestream.
I'm sorry you feel that way, I hadn't thought I had ever expressed a "very strong political view" on HN. I flagged this article as "Not HN" because it doesn't really talk about startups, investing, coding, or anything really related to this forum, and apparently others agreed because it disappeared from the home page minutes later.

But I feel I'm probably feeding a troll.
Please write a blog post. I saw some Michigan hackers at hackNY as well and would love to hear more about the Michigan hackathon tour and where it's taking you guys.
Personally I use Steve Jobs' definition. And yes some may "think" they are.
So as it turns out, this is wrong. Several folks have mentioned that in that the original Google interview question is 'sort the numbers' / 'remove duplicates' and the solution is to create a bitmap in a disk file to do a single pass sort. This question mixes that up a bit and my particular bitmap solution fails to meet the criteria of staying under a MB of memory.

With all the discussion I decided to code up a quick version in perl. The code is pretty straight forward, start with the tuple (99999999,0) and on each number do one of three actions:

1) Break the number representing a string of zeros into two segments.

2) Extend the length of an existing region of one bits.

3) Collapse two regions of one bits separated by a single zero bit.

Now the two key to the reasons it doesn't work are that one, it takes two 32 bit numbers to identify non-adjacent numbers, and two, for a uniform distribution random number generator the ratio of a million numbers to a space of 100 million means that most of the numbers won't be adjacent. So each 1 bit will cost 8 bytes to store. A million numbers * 8 bytes is 8 million bytes (7.6MB if you use 2^20th as 1MB). Its fun watching the algorithm because it gets slower and slower (its doing a linear search of segments to insert 'bits' and memory goes up and up, until you have about 50M uniques and then it starts getting faster and faster again as it collapses more and more segments.

Storing it on disk with an uncompressed bitmap, runs in O(n) time, and of course you 12,500,000 bytes, just about 12MB (to count multiples you need to multiply that by the number of bits you want to reserve per-number) but doing it in memory only requires a better compression algorithm than simple run-length encoding.
Couldn't agree more with everything said in this article. Well done.

I want to reiterate on the fact that multi-tier demoing just does not work. While the prizes and judging are important pieces of every hackathon, they really are not the main focus. These events are about enabling hackers to show off their skills and experiment in a fun, safe enviornment. When you start grouping hacks into "the best" and "the rest", you end up with the focus being on the product rather than the people. And that fundamentally sucks.
Ask HN: Looking for a certain kind of music recommendation engine.
If I type a single artist as a favorite, the results list should be comprised of other artists most closely correlated with that one on other favorites lists (this would probably just amount to a genre list).

If I type two artists, the list should be comprised of artists most frequently found on lists where both of those artists also appear.

My problem is that most methods of searching based on existing preferences seem to just give me recommendations associated with each artist individually or based on genre or musical genome or something.

What I'd love is to be able to type some dozens of unrelated artists and be given a list of artists that are most strongly correlated according to artists on other lists of favorites where the most of those occur. Even better if there's some strength or rank order consideration.

I may not be articulating this very well. This isn't an area where I've done much reading or have much experience. Thanks for any thoughts in advance.
Image fusion software exists that does this, allowing you to mere images and emphasis areas of difference (usually used for allowing comparison of different imaging modalities such as CT and PET, rather than same modality over time. The trouble is, people are never, ever in the same position (different breath hold, mobile organs move, people lie in different positions, get taller, shorter, more bent etc) , and, more importantly, are the changes seen problematic or normal?
In the case were a big mass has appeared, its easy. But that is easy to spot without software help. If a software technique is to emphasis small malignant changes early on, it's going to have to be very clever and be better than (or help improve the abilities of) some very clever people.
Edit: sorry, I do realize that this doesn't quite address what you said. Your suggestion would be very hard to implement I suspect, but is better than what I discussed.
I don't know cryptography in any depth, but I'd think a good password encryption scheme uses a slow function. A good disk encryption scheme needs to be fast to be usable, thus the security becomes much more dependent on choice of passphrase.
Because the UK can't arbitrarily change laws easily in the majority of cases any more due to being a member of the European Union.

What would they be taxing anyway? If they're like many of the other companies similar stories have risen up about, they're paying a subsidiary in another EU country for rights to the brand. So we'd either need to outlaw free trade between EU states (which the EU won't allow) or somehow tax businesses not on profit but on turnover which would be grossly unfair.
I wish this guy had been my physics professor
The whole "Enhance" trope is still completely stupid.

http://youtu.be/Vxq9yj2pVWk

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EnhanceButton

>But the Enhance Button simply ignores the fact that the big blocky pixels you get when you zoom in too close on a picture are the only information that the picture actually contains, and attempting to extract more detail than this is fundamentally impossible. No matter what you do or how you do it, you're merely guessing, if not making stuff up outright.
What living like a nomad really is:

One of the reasons I quit being a pilot was because of that lifestyle: my life consisted of 2 bags and hotel rooms. If you don't stay at least in a couple of places, you will have no friends. You will be alone, always. You will never develop true connections to another human being. Being alone will affect your personality and judgement. Co-workers do not count, just as you diablo 3 friends. When you talk to me on IRC you create a distorted version of me, based upon your life experience. Specially in poor languages like english. Understanding others is way harder than it seems. It envolves much more than just conversations.

My father was a pilot for 37 years, he currently does not have one single friend except me. Not because he can't make friends, but I think people realize that his feelings against others are superficial. He wont care because having friends never changed his life, he is just fine, but: He experienced very little fulfilling moments in all that period of his life.

Life is not simple. Throwing away stuff will not make life better, or worse.

TLDR, How the hell are you going to solve human problems if you don't develop deep human relations?
Correct, but you may be assuming the BBC is writing for a financially literate audience. They are not. They want to perk up a non-story by conjoining two disconnected facts.
Yahoo CEO's comeback plan homes in on technology, not media
Windows 8 has a share charm, which is the preferred way of sharing content not items in the app bar.
Startup School 2012 Talk Oct 20 - Ron Conway
Iterations: The Harsh Realities Of iOS App Distribution
The share functionality is built into the OS now so you don't need to dedicate a portion of your screen real estate for it. If you load the charm bar on the right of the screen share has a fairly prominent placement there.
The code for this thing needs a work:

https://github.com/michalkow/cssConsole/blob/master/cssConso...
Good questions. My thoughts:

- Are you asking about recovery of information that was intentionally blurred? If so, there have been some exciting results in this area in recent years. For example, it turns out that given reasonable priors on the underlying glyphs, it's possible to reconstruct even heavily blurred text. (e.g., http://dheera.net/projects/blur.php ) That doesn't involve deblurring per se, since the goal is simply to find the glyphs (and combinations thereof) with maximum likelihood given the blurred text. Still, it's interesting, and similar techniques have been applied to super-resolution problems lately, where the approach is often called "hallucination."

- Blind deconvolutions often are used by experts. However, it's possible to help things along if a glint exhibiting the blur of interest is visible in the photo. That is: if a bright dot of light is visible in the photo, it will be blurred too, and so in the blurred photo the point of light will look like the point spread function (the blur kernel), and that can then be extracted and used with a non-blind deconvolution approach to recover the latent sharp image.

- Blind deconvolution and super-resolution are related problems, so advances in one might certainly help in the other. The research you cited makes use of image hallucination (mentioned above) as a key part of its super-resolution algorithm.
For good or bad, I can't express how much of changed person I'm due to Hacker News. It has taught me to question dogma wherever I can, that has given me a better understanding of how the world works, in other words, getting the birds eye view seat of the world.

So, at my current standing, procrastination is good.

Or quite simply, as they say "too much of everything is bad" applies to procrastination and everything in general.
You can take good phone pictures if you are outside in the daytime or are shooting stationary subjects. Any motion combined with less than daylight guarantees blurry pictures or that lovely cell-phone-flash look.

That being said: The big jump is from cell-phone to DSLR (even an inexpensive one). The jump from $400 DSLR to $4000 is less noticeable.
Updated Ubuntu to 12.10. It booted up with grub rescue. What a pile of shit. Avoid the pain of Ubuntu. Never mind complaining about Windows until Ubuntu gets its own act straight. Can't waste any more time with this crap.
To your first paragraph, certainly. Also, I think a lot of technical buyers have had bad experiences with programming books having horrifically formatted source code and diagrams on the Kindle, so it's a harder sell.

I certainly didn't want to imply the OP is wrong, just that, as a marketplace, Amazon does require special care to give special results.
Promoted posts are far more useful for businesses, I think, than people. As much as there are some things that I want my friends to know, they aren't generally worth paying to get the word out. Businesses are used to advertising (and often need to) so they are probably much more likely to pay for promoted posts.
37signals four day work week comes to mind, and a load of other writing. Development is a creative work. Sometimes it's not about the hours put into it.

Some people have bursts of real productivity, for a few hours tops.

If you don't have kids in your life, what else are you doing? Most are browsing the internet.

if you're in the position to do so. Recognize those bursts and use them to code. Then the time where you're looking at pictures of your cats, use that time for the kids.
The general case of a Future/Promise is that you can design a nicer (sometimes) API. Instead of forcing the caller to provide their own callback functions immediately when they call your function, you can return a Future instead and the client can ask for the data on that whenever. e.g.:

function read_key(key, cb) {
database.getItem(domain, key, cb);
}
..
read_key(key, function(err, res) { ... });
VS.
function read_key(key) {
var future = Future();
database.getItem(domain, key, future.fulfill);
return future;
}
...
var reader = read_key(key);
...
reader.when(function(err, res) { .. } );

As others have noted, you can make a generalization into Sequences that eliminates nested-callback-hell. In Node especially there are a lot of asynchronous calls (and especially especially if you are managing outside data) so they come in handy. I like this library: https://github.com/coolaj86/futures Instead of sequence-members having to return promises themselves, though, they can just call the next() function or not. As an example, you might define your program to do this:

var obj; // shared data
var seq = Futures.sequence();
seq.then(function(next) { ...dosetupstuff... next(obj); })
.then(fetchMetadataFromDB)
.then(validateFile)
.then(createFileInDB)
.then(copyToOtherDB);

And you might go on. Each function relies on the previous function having completed successfully and calling next(), otherwise the sequence is broken. You can more easily create standardized error handling mechanisms as well. Of course if all your functions are synchronous this doesn't really matter, but getting at an external DB might look something like this:

function fetchMetadataFromDB(next, obj) {
db.fetch(query, function(result) { // success
obj.stuff = result.whatever;
next(obj);
},
function(err) { // error
..
});
}

A lot of libraries follow that pattern. Without a sequence, your code might start looking like this:

..setup stuff;
function fetchMetadata(obj, cb) { .. }
fetchMetadata(obj, function (metadata) {
// validate file:
validate(metadata, function(file) { // success
// create file:
db.create(file, function() { // success
// copy to other db
otherdb.copy(file, function() { // success
...
}, function(err) { // copy failed
...
});
}, function(err) { // create failed
...
}, function(err) { // validate failed
...
});
});

You could used named functions but that means a given named function must know the name of its successive named function, and that can make your program hard to follow and change. With the sequence approach, you have the whole sequential structure laid out at the top and can inspect functions themselves if you want to, and if a new async part enters the flow you can just insert it in the sequence. With a non-sequence named function approach, you have to jump around all the functions to get a sense of the sequence, and if a new async part enters the flow you have to change the function before to call the new function. You could define all your functions inline, which helps keep the order of execution straight and easy to follow, but adding a new async operation means adding a new level of indentation, so it's called nested-callback-hell.
Thanks for all the support and suggestions. This is just something we coded in a little over a month a will be iterating quickly. And, yes, an android version and awesome demo video for the splash page are in the works.
It's not brainwashing. $50 up front makes a significant difference for most Americans. I bought my last two phones (Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S) at sticker price and got a cheaper T-Mobile plan. That's not an option for everyone.

Even accounting for inflation, having money today is more valuable than having it in two years. Any calculation that doesn't account for that is invalid.
When he talked about the IPO, I really tought that the value per share had dropped to 7$.
Really wish I had friends that used Path :/
I would favor universal system if I saw convincing evidence that people would not overclaim (ie seek treatment for minor ailments)

What a strange position to take: "Don't use healthcare unless it's really serious". Good healthcare is about a high quality of life.

it is just that money spend of such thing can not be put to a better use.

Such as? There are few things better than "being healthy".
Tutorial: Easy realistic stainless steel ring in Photoshop
I'm curious if Facebook displays "sponsored" text or a banner of any sort for personally promoted posts? Does anyone know?
Where is this $40 plan? If you're referring to the new "mobile share" plan, you also have to pay a $45 per month device fee, making it $85.
Regarding #1, if you don't buy subsidized, you are also able to get a phone that works all over the world (i.e. unlocked), and one that the carrier can't exercise over the software so you can tether/root/get software updates. The latter is at least that's true with Android (Galaxy Nexus specifically).

Another plus is that in the US the wireless coverage providers MANDATE buying data if you use a smartphone on their network, subsidized or not (which is BS, but the FCC is bought and paid for). If you don't want your wireless provider to know you have a smartphone, you have to buy it unsubsidized.
There's also the added benefit of being able to support users without JavaScript, which includes a large portion of iOS/Android users. http://stephanierieger.com/a-plea-for-progressive-enhancemen...
I've actually used this a couple times recently, to drive views to press coverage we've received. I've had awesome results both times, with friends/friends-of-friends re-connecting with relevant partnerships and opportunities.

Contrast that to Facebook Ads, which i've had nothing but poor experiences with.
The image in the article says "Sponsored"
Yes, it does makes sense what you said. Thanks for sharing.
Having finally (almost) finished the article...

It looks like in many places, dogma and internal turf wars are behind the decisions. Some things however seem quite reasonable, like having one comprehensive API available to both .NET and native applications and scripting languages - but then only Win Store apps can use most of them... sigh

Oh, and no threads for you, and all I/O is dogmatically asynchronous. Ryah (of node.js) would be proud.

More hilarity: "As is this case with most of WinRT, contracts aren't usable in desktop applications. This means that, for example, a desktop e-mail client such as Outlook can't be used as a share target."
astroturfing & paid reviews.
If we know the "algorithm" for your password choice (all lowercase, english words, space delimited, at least two words) that greatly reduces the time needed to guess the password. I wonder how much time that would take to crack on modern hardware...
RubyGems Bundler Dependency API is down
BitTorrent is OK for files whose content remains static over time, like a video. But if you had a web page that needed to be updated over time, wouldn't having multiple, distributed copies of it make it difficult to ensure that everyone had the most recent version? Who would have the right to make updates? And what if there were conflicting updates?
Then where did the growth pains that necessitated Cassandra come from? I'm trying to build up a mental genealogy of the engineering decisions made so that the knowledge isn't lost to future programmers. Most of you OG peeps have moved onto greener pastures.
Sending a Weather Balloon to Space
Alt-F4 from the desktop in Win 8 still works, as well. Being that I'm in the desktop a majority of the time on Win 8 and have always used Alt-F4 if actually needed to turn off my machine for some reason (who does this anymore?), so not much change for me.
Agreed, having used Vista from release to Win 7 release, I never seemed to see the stability issues that so many seemed to be reporting. It made me wonder if people were just trying to work with ridiculously outdated hardware and software.
I agree with your point of view and respect your choice, what I was suggesting is that point of view in article is really skewed toward kind of not healthy and obsessive.

Ipad is wonderful educational device, I am amazed with what my kids are doing with it. And I am all for simpler life in my life as well, within reason of course. And kids :).
It was nice to see the analytics FB provided on the number of views. I definitely understand the author's reasoning that most people like him will probably have no desire to spend $7 to promote a random status update, photo, or post. I imagine though that this feature is more targeted towards FB pages like businesses, bands, groups, etc.

I for one will be using it personally to promote my brother's clothing brand and its current Kickstarter campaign (shameless plug: http://goo.gl/QTzn5). For a small business, $7 for some extra exposure is well worth it if you have a few thousand followers.
What are you talking about? I posted a link with their support options and your response is "No, you can't get support". Clearly, you can - I linked to it. If I go there with my free apps account it's crystal clear, in big letters: "Email and phone support: Not available for the free edition of Google Apps. Find out about upgrading to Google Apps for Business."
As I remember it, most of the downtime and hairpulling from mid-2009 to mid-2011 was due to EBS issues, wasn't it?

Now, maybe that was Amazon's fault for selling a flaky storage solution, or maybe it was our fault for not getting our databases the hell off of it, but yeah, it definitely wasn't Postgres's fault.

I'm gonna go page ketralnis, since he got his hands a lot dirtier than I did with respect to reddit's storage technologies.
FYI, the images are substantially larger than the thumbnails on the page. Right click "open image in new tab" or "view image" (or drag it into your address bar, or do whatever other browser-specific thing required to see a full-page image).
It would be helpful if you also post in what engines you have tried as well. Last.fm? Grooveshark? Indieshuffle?
>> a desktop e-mail client such as Outlook can't be used as a share target

So basically Metro apps can only share with Metro apps? So a Metro Outlook can be shared with.
You're right - if you cancel before the end of your contract you're up for the entire remainder of your contract. The poster didn't actually mention canceling the contract (he was doing the sums over the life of the contract).

The best value in Australia is actually to buy the phone from a grey importer (though this works best with Android phones as iPhones aren't discounted much - a GS3 an be had for ~$530, iPhone 5 for ~$770), and going with a VMNO such as LiveConnected (http://www.liveconnected.com.au/mobile-plans) - a plan with ~600 minutes and 2GB of data only sets you back $17 a month, and you're not on a contract.
> For the Hacker News Guidelines - "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

They also say: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

The phrase you quoted from the guidelines probably causes more confusion than it prevents, because IMHO it means anything that would gratify a hacker's curiosity, but it isn't worded that way.

I always obey the writer's rule -- before posting something, for a while I read what others post about, to find out what's really topical.
I blame Verizon for my not having a WP7 phone. I refuse to switch over to AT&T and Sprint coverage is hit or miss in my area, but I still hold a grudge over Verizon for not offering a better WP7 device than the HTC Trophy.
I'll cover that in the talk, since I'm sure others would like to hear the answer as well. Thanks for the suggestion! If I don't cover it sufficiently, you can hit me up for more info.
$50 up front makes a significant difference for most Americans

If that's the case, then most Americans should devote much more effort toward lowering their monthly bills relative to getting cheaper phones.

I bought my last two phones (Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S) at sticker price and got a cheaper T-Mobile plan. That's not an option for everyone.

It is for the large majority. Even if you have to put the phone on a credit card at 20% interest, you probably still come out ahead.