skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Note that the HBase numbers are so good because the client wasn't actually hitting the database: http://brianoneill.blogspot.com/2012/10/solid-nosql-benchmar...
The post addresses that Twilio (from the author's perspective/research) is losing money, talent, increasing signs of desperation. How does this apply to that?
There competing and making money, but they are still a tiny player so I don't know if you can say there winning. The space industry is much like the healthcare industry in that once your a large player you can't really grow much and there are a lot of perverse incentives to be less efficient.
Thanks. If you read the comments on the page that you linked to, you will see a couple of Leaf customers complaining that their battery capacity is already down 15%. Hopefully the new batteries technology addresses this.
"Twiliots" Really?

Voxeo Prophecy is really nice (except for configuration which can be a bit of a quagmire) and their service is good but Twilio is very, very easy to use. This piece reminds me that I need to look at Twilio for more than SMS.
Based on these benchmarks, it looks like Chrome on Android is 2X slower than Chrome on ChromeOS.
The gist of the post is that Twilio is losing money, losing talent, and getting desperate. I don't see why the author couldn't have just said that instead of picking a sexist blog post title -- he didn't even use the girlfriend metaphor beyond the headline.

Edit: They've changed the title. Cool!
This is a nitpick really, but I'm just the messenger here:

According to the International Telecommunications Union
(ITU) networks using "beyond 3G technologies" with a path
to LTE-Advanced can be classified as 4G technology.

Therefore, HSDPA+, especially the dual-cell variants, are officially "4G" -- just not LTE.

Considering the peak speed of the dual-cell variant is 42Mbps, that seems a reasonable claim. Real world speeds can hit 22Mbps+ which is ~4x as fast as many older 3G technologies.

The real downside to not having LTE is that upload speeds are better than older 3G technologies, but nowhere near as good, and the latency is also not as low.

But with the right carrier, it's more than workable, and if you're using an older phone (like I am) it will be much faster.

Anandtech and various other sites have started posting reviews:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6425/google-nexus-4-and-nexus-10-review
To help with me with starting small, I also have started a small habit and not to add new one until a few weeks later. Now I have habits in walking 10K steps a day, writing 500 words a day, as well habits that help me measure my well being in various ways such as BP, weight, pulse rate, blood sugar level, and so on.
Take a look at event sourcing. This is a good introduction. http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html
Top Things That Prove You're a Company and Not a Startup
How does someone contact you? Would you consider pivoting into another YC startup or elsewhere? Would you be open to posting a pic of yourself on blogHeard or have pic elsewhere (linkedin, fb, etc.)?
Why can't they use GPLv3? The FreeBSD license is compatible with GPLv3. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD

Apple doesn't want to use GPLv3 because of the patent clause.
A list of articles and opinions on Project Impala for Hadoop users
Their original app allowed you to paste the link of an article or any text and they'd summarise it. It didn't really work and this is trying to find a use for it. I'l be interested to see where they take it.

From a company angle they seem to be outsourcing a lot of development based on their about page. I'm not sure how scalable this is for a startup. If this second iteration doesn't work will they be able to pivot?
Google Voice can forward one number to multiple phones.
That's where I think we're headed. Just looking at Apple's product line alone for simplicity, take a look at how much the new iMac looks like an iPad on a stand:

http://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/2949/as-images.apple....

From the iPod Nano to iPhone 4S to iPhone 5 to iPad Mini to iPad to 11" Air to 13" Air to 21" iMac to 27" iMac, doesn't it seem like we're headed to a world where a computer is a thin display panel of arbitrary size with some electronics hidden behind it? And it won't make sense to think of them all as fundamentally different products any more than we think of, say, small pads of paper and large pads of paper as fundamentally different products.
They most likely sued iFone on the basis of the "i" prefix branding. iMac was released in 1998, iPod and iTunes in 2001.

They sued in 2009, but it was only in 2010 that an Australian tribunal ruled that the "i" prefix could not be an Apple trademark. And that only applies in Australia.

Now, did iFone choose their name based on the positive connotations associated with Apple? I doubt it. And looking at their website, it's about as far removed from Apple as possible.
I think this notion varies depending on whether one is discussing B2C or B2B.

I would love for some smart folks to "steal" my idea, and build a real marketplace for spot-freight, but nobody with talent seems interested. I believe this has to do with a lack of knowledge about the specific industry. As a result, I've been building a solution myself, slowly but surely.
Amen.

And, I'm not enough of a historian of science to know, but it seems to me that the basic results Chomsky proved on Regular Languages and CFGs paved the way for the Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) that have been so effective in language understanding. Basically, the HMMs are the natural probabilistic extension of Regular Languages.

I'm not sure if Viterbi and the other developers of the basic HMM toolkit were directly influenced by Chomsky, or if state machines were just in the air. Certainly Chomsky's basic work in the late 1950s predated Viterbi's work in the 1960s.
I think every alternative is going to have its limitations, especially when dealing with alien file formats, but I think they are closer to an inexpensive alternative then the original submission.
Is that a counterexample? Suppose they hadn't taken the meeting. What would have prevented Marcelo from starting Care.com?

As far as I can tell, nothing. Sittercity had been operating for 5 years in public view. Obvious idea, proven market, easy to find Sittercity users to interview.

(However, bringing an EIR to an investment meeting strikes me as incredibly dubious.)
Interesting (if painful) space. I've played with the Twilio API and for what we wanted (SMS to any phone, ability to dial/talk to a phone and take a response) it seems to be fine.

That my 'phone' service doesn't offer this as part of the package is what I find actually broken. For years and years the answer the question "How can I use my phone?" was "Pick it up, dial, talk." which was fine when it was a person to person communication device. But when it become a 'computer to person' communication device it needed a computer friendly API. Had the phone companies provided that, folks like Voxeo and Twilio and eFax wouldn't exist.
I want to save this response for future instances where people ignorantly claim that these lawsuits are "good for lawyers, bad for everyone else."
I use this script to automatically update to the latest stable (test-green) Chromium build: https://gist.github.com/2049083

It actually just downloads and unpacks the latest version and keeps a backup of the previous release, but I found it quite handy. Be sure to adjust the path, though, if you want to use it.
Apologies, WSJ is bad about this. The link originally was done through Google and did work. It is fairly common practice with WSJ/OJ to highlight the title of the story and search google which can, not always, a full story.
While elephants already chat while miles apart using subsonics, they're smart and I'll bet neat things would happen if you gave a bunch of them mobile phones that they could work. I'll chip in if anyone does a kickstarter.

(I'm not really arguing, ideas have value, I'm just rather tickled by that idea.)
I guess the conclusion pretty much sums it up. Every db solution has its own advantages and disadvantages. I find many people jump on latest bandwagon and later regret the choice followed by a "Why we moved away from xyz database" post on their blog. Please make sure to analyze your application and future strategy fully before choosing one.
> Callbacks are different than gotos in that they are aren't even remotely close to gotos.

Well, continuations are the functional equivalent of GOTOs, and callbacks and continuations are closely related, so I don't know how you can make that statement.

Even if you want to argue that they avoid some of the pitfalls of GOTOs (which I'd still contest), you still can't say that they're "not even remotely close to gotos".
This reminds me of the pain of dealing with python's twisted library, albeit before inline callbacks were implemented.

Inline callbacks as implemented in python can make asynchronous code a lot easier to read:
http://hackedbellini.org/development/writing-asynchronous-py...
Thanks for sticking with this conversation.

This is very good code.

One difference I see between our styles that may explain the differences in behavior we see is that you're quite meticulous about importing only the parts of modules you need, and you make heavy use of qualified imports. My style has been to import everything in case I need it later and only use qualified imports when absolutely necessary, and it must be creating the unnecessary ambiguity that I have to deal with. I will try to adopt your style and see if it cleans up my error messages, and I'll encourage my friends to do the same.
More accurately, the database was configured to buffer all writes until flush() was called, so durability was not guaranteed like it was on the other database instances. Still an unfair comparison, of course - I was just curious what you meant by 'not actually hitting the database', so I shared the tl;dr.
Two Rails apps you can build in 72 hours at HackerYou
Sorry but don't believe you about google toolbar. I had a private page with no links in or out and yet it appeared in google search. It was not guessable and there was no chance for a referrer link. The page was never shared with friends nor accessed outside my own computers.

I only found out when a friend searched for his name and the page appeared as it was my phone list
Preview of the new features in Ruby 2.0.0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&feature=yout...
Dog Comes Back to life from the Dead
In the town of Charlesville-Mezieres, France, a town 125 miles (200 kilometers) northeast of Paris, a miracle resurrection took place that recently shook up the Pet World!
Someone should do the same with quantum mechanics by increasing the Plank constant.
Well if you read my comments on the dribbble shot, this was simply done as part of a Windows8 demo app in collaboration with MS for the Build conference. Our CEO demo'd an app we created just to show off the ease of which you can build apps with HTML, CSS and JS for the Windows8 app store.

Just thought it would be fun to slightly re-imagine the Hacker News logo, esp since it doesn't really have it's own. It just uses the Y-Combinator logo.

Also, as a creative, taking on projects for fun often is a terrific "creative release" where you can do whatever you want in the realm of creativity because there are not actual client requirements.

And FTR, I do plenty of my own stuff. Just check out my other dribbble shots, or my site (http://joelglovier.com).
Google Nexus 10 review
How did they think they could win this? Does any lawyer have a theory on what they were going for?
Don't accuse me of something I didn't do. I very clearly marked the iPad as broken in its title. It was also categorized as such. I tried it out: When you search for iPads you have to explicitly mark a checkbox to even make broken iPads (including mine) appear in the search.

I'm still somewhat mystified how someone looking for a intact iPad could even have stumbled across my iPad. You have to be pretty explicit about wanting to see broken stuff on eBay.

(Resolving that issue, by the way, was actually a bit annoying. The mistaken buyer wrote me an e-mail, pleading me to not give her a negative review and asking for cancelling the sale. At that point you have to ask them to tell eBay that they mistakenly bought the product, otherwise you won't get your fees back. Offering the product to a lower bidder, however, is very painless and it did all work out in the end.)
Mainly because I don't agree with the premise that ideas are worthless - something that is echoed around all the time.

Really? If there's anything the current IP litigious climate signals to me, it's that people are far overvaluing ideas. Sure, ideas aren't worthless - but they are useless without hard work and luck (what some people like to call "execution"). Ideas are a dime a dozen; good ideas are probably worth about $1.50. But ideas + execution? Now there's the real value proposition.
I believe "compatible with GPL" on this page means that it can be included in a GPL distribution, not the other way around.
I think if you don't go under the white arch, you can stay indefinitely in Lorentz transformations mode. At least, I stayed that way for several seconds if I avoided that arch.
Hey, it's not my call.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/49906/why-is-freebsd...
You don't know it's a proven market until you sit down with a potential fundee and talk financials.
No. As our phones become more and more capable, phone functionality becomes less and less relevant.

I use my phone as a phone about once a week (I just checked by call log - I try to avoid giving people my number). If I'm making an outgoing call, it'll be via Skype, unless I'm away from home. Even for coordinating meeting up when out and about, I'll use Glympse rather than call.
I love Canary, although if you plan to use it be prepared for it to be more error prone than Chrome stable. I use it extensively while working in Windows.
Serious question, what's wrong with doughnut charts?
From the article, "Android has a new champion. The Nexus 4 ... is the best overall Android handset currently available, and it’s one of the best phones to be released this year."

And, "It’s as close to perfect as I’ve seen any Android smartphone get. But the Nexus 4 falls just short of perfection due to one major omission: It’s not compatible with any LTE networks. The Nexus 4 will run on just about any other cellular network outside of LTE (GSM, UMTS, Edge, GPRS, 3G and HSPA+)"

It doesn't work on Verizon or Sprint. So at least in the US, half of the cellular networks actually don't work with the Nexus 4. And it can't use AT&T's ever expanding LTE network. But according to the author, it is the new Android champion? The 42 Mbps HSPA+ only works on T-Mobile. The best you get is half that for AT&T with this phone. So mediocre speeds on AT&T. Nothing on Verizon or Sprint but decent on T-Mobile. Sounds like a niche to me. Only "buy it now" if you are planning on going with T-Mobile. For any other carrier, nearly any other current smartphone is better.

Can you imagine the reaction if Apple introduced a new iPhone at the end of 2012 that only worked on AT&T and T-Mobile without LTE? I'm pretty sure Wired wouldn't call it "nearly flawless".
From my experience with having T-Mobile for my personal phone, and Verizon for my work phone, and living on the peninsula, I get far better data connection speeds from my Nexus S (which doesn't even support the full 42mbps HSPA+) than I get from my Galaxy Nexus on LTE. Getting a signal indoors can be flakey for each phone in various locations, but overall they seem to be pretty comparable on coverage.

I still prefer T-Mobile in end though, especially since I'm only paying $50/mo for unlimited everything...
I think I'll use this solely as another browser to segregate cookies from oft visited sites (i.e. Facebook). Safari in 10.8 is practically unbearable these days
First of all, one cannot 'steal' your idea. You still have it...

Actually I have taken an idea from the company I was working at. They kicked me out and I started my own company developing a very similar software, but I believe it is more successful, not because of technical superiority or so, but more due to customer empathy. Most people love to work with me, because I deliver quality and on time, in contrast to my former company. So I have a slightly bad feeling, but a) hey, they kicked me out and b) I treat customers much better than they did.
>Women still make 77 cents to the male dollar

False. Women get paid equally for the same work and the same hours. Averaging all women vs all men is dishonest. http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20...

>Women have much higher incidences of anxiety and depression disorder

Women have higher incidences of being diagnosed with depression. Men have much higher incidences of suicide. What does that tell you?

>Women are substantially more likely to be the victims of domestic violence

False. Repeated studies have indicated that domestic violence is equally likely to be perpetrated by men and women, and equally likely to happen to men and women: http://brainblogger.com/2008/06/08/woman-comparable-to-men-i...

>1 in 5 are raped

False. This statistic is often repeated (and varies from 1 in 3 to 1 in 6 depending on who is repeating it) but is based on deliberately misrepresenting the findings of studies on the subject. http://aspiringeconomist.com/index.php/2009/09/11/rape-stati...

>you know that men and women are treated differently in our society

And those differences manifest as both benefits and drawbacks, for both men and women. Characterizing that as "women have things harder" is absurd, and is only ever done by people deliberately picking and choosing the downsides and benefits they want to use to push their agenda.
The author points out something about these Machine Learning contests and Machine Learning in general that I've noticed for a while - feature selection tends to dominate learning algorithm selection. It's good to see that there are modern academic methods for feature discovery that seem to be on par with (or better than) a domain expert manually selecting features.
Seconding this. :) Definitely an excellent advice piece. I think we all overestimate the skill and time a project or an idea will take.
As a point of reference, here's the agenda for the most recent AGI conference:

http://agi-conf.org/2011/conference-schedule/

And, just for comparison, here's the agenda for the most recent ICML conference:

http://icml.cc/2012/schedule/

To me, the AGI conference seems to have a much higher ratio of "speculative ideas"/"technical results" talks. Also to me, this pretty much justifies the "all talk - no walk" assessment.
First off I am not an accountant but (as usual) the downside is overstated to gee up the audience.

Yes there would be a VAT (Sales tax to those outside the EU) liability where goods or services were supplied - and that would need to be taken into account when setting values.

Ignoring VAT - yes the sum "invested" by participants would have to be entered into the accounts as income received but corporation tax would only be payable on any net profits for the business at the end of the company financial year. There is no tax on income - only profit.
The Skirmish That Could Threaten Google News
Cool idea. Too bad rap sounds like dreadful noise to me.
Oddly enough it runs great on my late 2010 MBA.
Report: Hotels.com Domain Name Originally Bought for $11 Million
So essentially, everything about node.js is wrong? Hmm. Didn't see that coming!
but... what about the component of fear described in this article? http://paulgraham.com/growth.html
Growth Hacking: Great to-the-point presentation
Anyone else find the use of "the Cupertino guys" just odd?

What's he trying to achieve by not mentioning Apple? It's not as if anyone interested in the article wouldn't know exactly who he's referring to.

That said when discussing tablets not sure whether the Seattle guys are Microsoft or Amazon...

Otherwise interesting piece - in tone the price pitch feels a lot like Amazon when they talk tablets.
Basically, if you don't have a business plan your condemning yourself to chase your own tail. Have an idea, get a business plan made, start working. That's great advice in almost any field.

Looking forward to the following posts.
Upvoted, but I cry at the thought of all that extra typing.
Thanks for the link. I hadn't investigated for several years and it's nice to know they've jumped on the GPO bandwagon. All the more reason to get your enterprise off IE.
It's time to stand up for good science
The number of languages that compile to JavaScript is starting to become disconcerting.

How long until we get tired of adding epicycles and just specify a VM and bytecode standard that all the browsers can implement and all the client-side languages can compile to?
Completely agree here, this is not a counter example of 'stealing' an idea but one of 'executing' on an idea.

And not surprisingly this is what folks worry about, that someone with more resources than them will hear about their idea and be able to execute on it before they get off the ground. That would be true, if the person who had the resources didn't have anything else to do, but as a rule that is very rare, people with the ability to execute and resources do.

The care.com example is an example of an entirely different situation. That situation is that a business concept is proven out but doesn't have the capital to scale and the owners aren't doing the scaling. There are a number of folks who look for this type of business and build it in a different market. There was even a story linked here about a German company that did this. Much less risk since the idea is already 'proven'.

But if nobody is doing your idea, many people will think it won't work because if it did then someone else would already be doing it, so they won't 'steal' it because obviously its not a viable idea :-)
The Nexus S is quite sluggish with Jelly Bean.
@mpolun - It appears your account has been hell-banned. You need to create a new account so I can upvote your comments:

mpolun> I agree that raw callbacks can get out of hand, but the typical solution in js is to use an event emitter (http://nodejs.org/api/events.html) or promises (like https://github.com/kriskowal/q), the latter of which seems to be pretty close to what this article is talking about. Is there a fundamental difference, or are promises an example of functional reactive programming in a language without direct support for it?
I think you're being a bit hyperbolic. Musk built a small aerospace company. He's not exactly crushing Boeing.
I am not buying your idea valuation logic. "Worthless" means lacking significant positive value.

If business ideas had significant value, you'd see people buying them. They don't, though. They might by a proven opportunity, or they might buy knowledge. But ideas on their own? As unsaleable as used chewing gum.

I really don't believe people should worry about business ideas being stolen. If your idea is so simple that J. Random Hustler can steal it from a description, a) the idea's probably too simple to matter, and b) many other people will have thought of it.

To successfully execute on a startup idea, you need solid knowledge of the domain, and the ability to keep having great ideas. There is a ton of iteration before product/market fit, and I think copycats just don't have the depth to successfully iterate there.
Betrayals at Twitter cut deeper than junior high
Tell HN: PicDigest launched yesterday! How'd it go?
Permission to Suck
but it's not really pushing anything, it's just a huge waste of money that would be better spent on developing technologies for extra-solar system travel. People living on a dead planet serves no purpose, it doesn't even increase the species potential for surviving cataclysmic events, because without an earth bases resupply any martian colony will be soon dead. Build spaceships that people can live on and head out of the solar system, not set up camp on the doorstep.