skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've missed the party on this discussion, but I'm always fascinated when people make the argument you just made. Why should software be treated differently from hardware? Take the example of an old car engine. The spark plugs are fired by a rotating commutator switch in the distributor cap. The design of the commutator is patentable. But if I was going to implement that system today, I'd simply program a simple microcontroller to fire the spark plugs in sequence. The physical system has been replaced directly by a software system, but one is patentable, and the other isn't?

In short, I would answer your question with a question. Why can hardware violate a patent and software not?
That interactive thing looks useful. It might be possible to build a music composer (website) using collective intelligence, i.e., producing music by taking people's response into consideration?
WORLD WAR ON OLD
Yeah, we had a refresh in February and got quite a lot of good feedback on it. I think the style that we have on the site it good but the elements and content we showcase needs more looking at.
My rule of thumb these days is that the smaller and more obscure the hedge fund, the more likely it is that they're using an unusual set of languages. The more PhDs they have, the more likely they're using something weird like K!
Yes. You do basic SEO on a blog for the same reason you might run your HTML through a validator -- it's just good content creation manners.
Some very interesting maps I found in the pdf report which are forcing me to read this.

Potential environmental and economic impact of climate change http://imgur.com/31j2I

Key observed and projected climate change and impacts for the main regions in Europe http://imgur.com/r4Qj0

Projections of extreme high temperatures http://imgur.com/d8FVh

Projected changes in the tourism climatic index for all seasons http://imgur.com/sv1Nu

I guess Spain will suffer a lot...
Google won because they were able to provide much more meaningful results then its competitors, thanks to the PageRank algorithm[1].

When you have the most efficient SE, it is easy to 'monetize' without risking losing your users.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
The idea of "liking" and "disliking" is to:
1. Get a collection of 'best' tracks that sort-of advertises the successful parts of the algorithm
2. To let me analyze which intermediate decisions in the generation process are good and which not, so that I can make the good ones happen more often.
The poker analogy is an interesting one - I believe that it's been said that advertising is the only differentiation among products (or services) of equal value. Paradise Poker had a better interface and a wider variety of poker variations, but Party Poker (along with Ultimate Bet and Poker Stars soon thereafter) became the household names due to advertising.
> it is easy to 'monetize' without risking loosing your users.

http://www.ericpinder.com/html/lose.html
perhaps you could torrent it?
Well, if nobody had used their search engine they wouldn't be able to sell those little ads—part of how they "figured it out" (which seems awfully hand-wavy of an explanation coming from a VC) was by having the best search engine. And also, as the post pointed out, other people had seen it. They just couldn't make it work as well as Google did.

About leaving school for a while to work: can't you go back if you have to? This isn't like sports, where going pro costs you your college sports eligibility. I took a couple of semesters off for a far less impressive reason, and there weren't any repercussions.
Maybe people will stop buying music from the MAFIAA
There is almost certainly a hell of a lot of Fortran and COBOL floating around as well. Most of it is likely at retail banks where things centre around end-of-day processing runs and batch processing.
Crafting a Penrose Tiling
I don't have any problem with eating meat, but I do think everyone who does so should hunt at least once. It's too easy to get divorced from the reality of eating meat if you just buy it packaged from the store.
The blocking in node.js happens at the C++ level. Your JavaScript thread is still free to process other requests while your initial request waits for a response from the database.

However, without a memcache or redis layer in front of postgres I suspect the database machine will run out of resources way before the web server machine does.
Actually, I don't know about his stance being 'unwavering'. The iconic story of why he got into the whole free software things to start with was because he wanted to modify the source code of a laser printer, which is surely not a general purpose computing device. He appears to have stepped away from arguing that he should have access to firmware... Either that or he thinks that firmware should be patentable, but that you should be allowed to freely modify and distribute it anyway, which kind of defeats the purpose of patenting it.
Now that I think about it, rplnt is right it was late 2003 I got an athlon64, so 9 years.
I thought of YouTube, but the 15 minute barrier stopped me. So now I'm uploading to Veoh.com (at 45% as we speak) - it should be done shortly, I'll post the link once it's done. Hopefully they don't want to re-encode it. In that case, I'll upload to depositfiles.com...
That would be best. Share the magnet link and we will all help.

Ok. I used Burnbit to create a torrent

http://burnbit.com/torrent/227565/201211_musk_mp4
I'm not trying but be harsh but I've never really understood the need for this project. I mean, Rails just boils down to a collection of gems right? So wouldn't you be best just cherry-picking your own gems? Or using something barebones to begin with, like sinatra/padrino?
Would love to, but am at a university network and will go home in less than 20 minutes. If the Veoh doesn't work, I'll upload to depositfiles.com, so you could grab it from there and then torrent it? I agree that it's probably is the best solution.
Sea levels haven't risen all that much - 8 inches in the last 150 years says one reference. There are other options which are more probable. If it was a volcanic island then the top could be easily eroded. Consider the island of Ferdinandea, off the coast of Italy. "At its maximum (in July and August 1831), it was 4,800 m (15,700 ft) in circumference and 63 m (207 ft) in height." while by January 1832 it had eroded to below sea level. Surtsey is another example, this off the coast of Iceland, and Kavachi is a third, this in the Solomon Islands.

If this were the case then depth soundings would easily identify a submerged volcano, even if it were 100m below the surface. A simple visual fly-by wouldn't.
for rvm

`rvm install ruby-1.9.3-p286 --patch falcon -n falcon`
> And while we as a species can use our brains to resist eating animals, we can't resist eating both fauna and flora.

I don't know what that means. You contradicted yourself. Vegetarians exist, and many of them are not tempted to eat meat; many are disgusted by the thought of eating meat (more psychologically than because of taste).
Yeah, you're absolutely right. For a lot of people, big data means Hadoop. For others, it means NoSQL. What I really think it means is just having all of your data in one live, accessible and analytics-ready place. That means logs, customer info, geographic info, demographic data, weather patterns, and just about anything you could ever think of.

I like to think that big data is more about aggregating the information available in multiple datasets, and then figuring out how you can read those entrails, as it were.

Honestly, big data today is mostly about a potential replacement for data warehouses. The real revolution around big data is that we now have a place to put it for analysis. That was a big hole that Hadoop filled. Now, the next 10 years will be spent actually figuring out how to analyze these big pools of data effectively. Frankly, that's the harder task, I think.

We now have the ability to ask questions of ALL the data. Too bad we have no clue what the questions should be.
In some places, Kansas City for example, cost of living may make up for that 15k.
Where the hell is the world going?
From what I can tell, Bryan mostly works in Python and C at Facebook.
Rails loads ton of stuff you don't need if dealing with a simples REST API, for example... So yes, you could only start with sinatra/padrino and add the things you want, or do like these guys and start with rails and remove everything you do not need.
Good point. Going further, a big advantage of an electric plane is that it can fly at much higher altitudes since it doesn't burn atmospheric oxygen like normal jets.

At high altitudes, it may be more efficient to beam the power from orbit then from the ground or flying tankers.

EDIT: replaced "the biggest" with "a big", point well taken.
While there were a couple of interesting ideas mentioned... the article mostly sounded like the author was arguing with himself. It's pretty easy to let your favourite side win in that case.
If you're in the mood to hand-roll your own stack and figure out, on your own, how to integrate the pieces, you are not the target market for this project.

This project aims to provide the integrated development experience of Rails targeted at an API or JavaScript-heavy use-case.

I personally use Rails extensively for these use-cases, which was my driving force behind creating the active_model_serializers gem with José Valim. José and I also worked together on a project at Strobe that used a stripped-down, more API-focused version of the runtime stack.

Since Rails 3, Rails has been flexible enough for anyone to do this sort of thing, but Rails is all about having good defaults and leveraging conventions. This project is an attempt to see whether a relentless focus on the API use-case will yield some conventions that benefit those of us who are not using Rails primarily to generate HTML.
A Chinese Education, for a Price
The lottery of life: Where to be born in 2013
It's good to see that you guys are going down with grace and ironically, lots of charm, and not flailing around like angry children when people question your motives and competency.

Good to know you couldn't master the most popular Linux distro though! Hope the VCs can read this.
Anecdotally (n=1, of course) I have seen and heard tremendous resistance to clisp in the industry I work in 5 years ago. Now, clojure and Scala are being adopted and recommended by even conservative PMs and architects.

The choices are way more today (Almost a tautology given old choices don't really vanish into thin air) and on more reliable platforms with tried and tested libraries.

anyway the spirit with which i meant that statement was that it is far easier to convince "senior management" and others with power to let stuff be done in clojure / Scala than it was to convince them about ml or clisp five years ago.

And I am not even talking about "ivory tower Haskell" (which i love using).

(Don't know enough about erlang / f# to comment).
The OSX binary segfaults on a 64bit Lion. Can anybody confirm this?
Meetings are Poisonous
It's a pretty inspiring place to be, watching these young gals tackle big problems and feel confident and proud of what they are building. Thanks for the link to the Ben Horowitz talk!
The point of discounts, coupons, etc. isn't to get you to buy, it's to build very comprehensive data on the demand elasticity curves of each good they sell.

If you've taken an introductory microeconomics course, you'll remember that almost all the models of a "rational" firm involve maximizing profit by picking a price point where people still buy yet will pay a maximum price per unit. How firms determine that demand curve is left as an exercise - it's assumed that firms who get it right will survive while firms that don't will go out of business, leaving only firms who get it right. This is cold comfort if you're a business owner and want your firm to get it right.

So what do the big retailers do? They A/B test. They divide customers into two groups (say, those who have a Safeway card and those who don't) and offer a different price to each. Then they measure how much of each good people will buy at each price, and presumably do some statistical corrections for demographics, the "sale" effect (where people buy whatever's on sale regardless of price), folks who won't use coupons no matter how cheap, etc. They end the sale, and then pick a different price next month. Over time, they build up extensive data about just how high they can raise their prices before people stop buying entirely.

So when you ignore the discount, that's Mission Fucking Accomplished for the store. It's telling them that the discount doesn't matter, and you'll buy regardless, and so they should try raising the price instead. They don't care about the sale, they care about the data, so that they can make more money from all their other customers.
It's probably more the police mentality of "they're suspects, they must be guilty, we know if we can't prove it in court they'll get off, so let's do everything in our power to make their lives as crappy as possible."

Including tying up stuff they know the family needs as "evidence" as long as they think can get away with, returning it in as poor a state as they think they can get away with...and the guy's already admitted EUR 600 will put him out of Christmas, they know there's no way he can afford to sue the police, all his money will be spent on his legal troubles with the MAFIAA...
Have you checked the Catalyst program from Softlayer?[1] It provides enough value in server stuff to run your service for free in quite a decent way and will let you put the money in other things like lawyers, registering, etc.

[1] http://www.softlayer.com/partners/catalyst
You might want to stick to the word "illegal". Wrong is far too overloaded as a word.
I think sometimes there's too much emphasis on finding the problem, but that's not why companies like Google or Microsoft were successful.

The reason Google won at search was that they had the best results. They probably still would have won if they started a couple of years earlier or later. Maybe eventually it would have been harder to enter the market against bigger players, but the hard part if figuring out the best solution, not figuring out the problem.
We are a democratic country they said. We believe in fundamental rights they said.
Two reasons that come to mind:

(a) So that you do, in fact, buy them—turning that "hmmm maybe I should get this thing" into "yes, I will get this thing, especially since I can save money on it!"

(b) So that you buy them from me instead of from someone else who didn't give you a coupon. (And while you're here, you're probably going to decide to pick up some other stuff on your grocery list...)

If you raise the price too much I'm going to find myself a different store.
The real deal :
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/oct/06-brain-like-chip-may-...
True that about the growing market. And true that few of these products/companies are really anything novel. But you have to do things better than the rest (I've discussed that more extensively here http://web.bozho.net/?p=125)
Organize your CSS Code
Mirror: http://78.47.91.45/201211_musk.mp4
It's on the list.
Ok, fuck - it uploaded but now it's recoding the file. Sigh. It'll be at http://www.veoh.com/watch/v40542469qRZG8NMn once that's done. I'll now proceed to upload at DepositFiles.com, using the university's not-as-fast-as-I-thought network.

(edit: nevermind. Use the other mirror (^^up there) instead.)

(and when did universities stop having ridiculously overdimensioned internet connections?)
The Art of Starting Smart in 2013
> the biggest advantage of an electric plane is that it can fly at much higher altitudes since it doesn't burn atmospheric oxygen

The biggest? Not sure about that. Eliminating most of the fuel tankage is pretty huge.

> more efficient to beam the power from orbit than from the ground

That would be vital for over water flights. This might even be a way to jump start orbital solar power satellites.

> flying tankers.

By "electric tankers" I meant using beamed electric power to haul jet fuel to altitude, as a first step. Airplanes purpose built for this use case would have range or efficiency advantages.
Where have you been? Many individuals like me have been actively avoiding RIAA and MPAA products as much as possible.
http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/riaa-revenue-reaches-new-...
But, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

Since we are omnivorous and not carnivorous, this has become a moral issue.
Torrent here http://burnbit.com/torrent/227565/201211_musk_mp4
Interesting, I guess I put returns but it didn't go through. Anyhow:
1) This Week in Startups
2) This Week in Venture Capital
3) Foundation
4) Mixergy
There's been buzz on HN about Stripe, Dwolla, and Bitcoin.

Of course, you shouldn't take my word for it; check them out yourself.
Obama Issues Another Secret Memo in Fight Against Insiders
Redis 2.6.5 released
While k is extremely terse, a lot of investment banks these days are using systems which utilise q and it's associated kdb+ database. q is basically a wrapper around k which makes it a lot easier to read and code in and which allows for sql-esque select statements from databases. This combination makes it far more flexible and useful for dealing with financial databases than straight k.
I found it interesting that they compare the ouput to a man with a pocket calculator when the people these devices replaced were overwhelmingly female. I can remember reading respected mathematicians approximating the problem-solving power of early computing machines in “girl-years” and describing machine labor in “kilo-girl” units.
True, but I assume it will use a fan or prop design, which loses efficiency as air density decreases (like swimming in air vs. water). And you will still need to pressurize the cabin.
No, no, no...

Step 1 - receive cash from customers

Debit Cash Account [Asset]
Credit Prepayment / Deferred Revenue Account [Asset]

Cool - everything balances.

Step 2 - you render services.

Debit Prepayment / Deferred Revenue Account [Asset]
Credit Revenue Account [P&L]
> got the idea for Pay Per Click advertising from Overture and Adsense from Applied Semantics

Going on pedantic streak here, but Overture's and Google's implementations differ substantially with Google implementing the second auction model and ranking ad's CTR, while Overture did a simple price-based ranking. Google's innovation was generating more revenue on ads that paid less but were clicked more.

On Applied Semantics - deciding the desired path of development, and then either buying the product or building it in-house is part of "figuring stuff out". They didn't randomly buy Applied Semantics, and then discovered those guys had some AdSense-like technology, Applied Semantics was acquired precisely because of that.
Omega 3 vetzuren helpen tegen endometriose | Leef Nu Gezonder | Leef Nu Gezonder
What Sinofsky’s Departure Suggests about Microsoft
"Some high level stats since I put Google analytics on my blog on February 28th, 2011. I never spent money on SEO, I did do an experiment for a month- buying twitter ads."

It seems like he's associating SEO with running (Google-)ads, which is simply wrong and therefore this blog post is pretty much nonsense.
That would be because both are lifted from Python.

And it is not the exact same syntax (Harmony uses `for (e0 of e1)` paralleling its for-of iteration syntax and semantics), and more importantly the semantics are completely different. Finally, the syntactic similarity would already be covered by the array comprehension mention.

Thus, there's nothing even remotely close to generator expressions in coffeescript at this point, as far as I know.
The module syntax and local relabeling reminds me of module syntax in PLT/Racket a couple years back. Given JavaScript's heavy scheme influence to begin with, it seems like a good thing to me.
I wish the OLPC would have succeeded with a machine that was Python "all the way down." Maybe PyPy is a means to this end?
Here I was thinking it'd explain why you walked away from a million dollars.

TLDR: I didn't want a million dollars to sell my company, now here's all the information about my company.
India has defended her 2nd position consistently. Wonder what percentage of it was demanded by political parties (especially the ruling ones) out of their vested interests.
Since you need money quickly, this is what I suggest:
1) Sell your stuff on Ebay or Craigslist or similar.
2) Find temporary work for a company that pays decent money (Lyft, Uber, TaskRabbit, Mechanical Turk, etc).
3) My favorite: call a good friend, tell them that you need 2k within a few weeks, and offer a written payback promise. This way your friend will not feel in a too awkward situation, and you'll be able to give him his money back. Ask for a 4-month deadline payment, and offer interest (let's say 60 dollars?). If he's a friend, he'll help.
If your friend is able/willing to give you only 1k, accept it. And find another friend who will lend the other 1k. It's doable, and there's nothing to be ashamed of.
Then find some meaningful ways to repay that debt.

Good luck. Hope it goes well.
> Wasn't that the reason Java was created in the first place?

Set top boxes.
ITunes 11
Although the examples used in PG's article can be framed in a lot of different ways, I thought the general advice was pretty useful and echos much of what's been said about product development in the last 5-10 years: don't sit around trying to come up with ideas--get out there and talk to people in other industries about their problems and solutions will naturally present themselves.

I also thought the concept of the "sitcom idea" was really clever and dead on--I hadn't heard that one before.

Re: next big markets--retail is an interesting one and it occurred to me that Walmart is going to have a RIM like crisis of its own over the next decade. E-commerce growth probably will continue as consumers grow increasingly comfortable with it, and the economics make so much more sense than building walmart's everywhere. I suppose they will start getting rid of their stores and moving to online, finding themselves looking like Amazon at the end of it, or out of business.

AIs--or approximations of them--are going to be a big thing. Self driving cars--google won't be the only company that makes that software. Big data--data is important for these types of applications, someone will find that it might make sense to standardize this data and simply sell it to the various AI/something-like-it makers rather than try to do all of it. Meanwhile, AI/something-like-it startups will not want to build a fleet of vans to drive around taking pictures of everything. This is going to be a really interesting industry over the next ten years and people won't remember what they were doing before.
> there will be a disincentive for artists to sign up with records who indulge in such nonsense

Why would a creative person who's primary method of feeding the family are checks from publishers not want their publisher to diligently protect the revenue model?
Simple Pupil Tracking in OpenCV
In 1995 Douglas Hofstadter wrote a short essay that describes his amazement with a piece of music composed by a program. Interesting reading: http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse403/03su/m...
Economies of numbers
Did you miss all the little notes about various features being already implemented in browsers?