skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks good to me, the only "problem" is that not everyone will have this as fast as developers might like, so we'll have to keep working on old phone compatibility for the foreseeable future.
Not to snipe at anyone, but skills like this seem pretty essential in solving problems in general. Little tricks from linear algebra like magnitude (what this post concerns) and projections show up in interesting and useful places.

Additionally, while they /are/ harder to access, reading and understanding various proofs in Math can be an even more beautiful and enlightening experience than just seeing the practical result.

Maybe it's the difference between realizing that setf can be using on all the generalized variables and actually reading the source and seeing why. Math is full of clever hacks.
It doesn't really rain that much compared to a lot of east coast cities. What it does is drizzle a little bit, on and off, with what sometimes seems like never-ending grayness.

The bus system is pretty good though, so I used to ride my bike to work, and simply take the bus back if it was raining too much.
Yeah, Ron Paul is a symptom, not the root cause.
I think the article is silly. One, there's nothing close to a scientific method used -- and this from NewScientist (how embarrassing). He should try to correlate "work" with "results". I'm assuming he started to, realized there was no correlation, and wrote the article anyway. Eating food and breathing are also necessary but not sufficient. Actually those at least correlate. All geniuses did do those two things. I'm not sure all of them worked that hard.

About Mozart, I only used him to try to show that "work" sometimes isn't work. Rimbaud is yet another contradictory example. He started writing in his late teens and finished abruptly at 20. In those few years he produced works of genius.

No, I think another commenter was right. The author is clearly someone on the outside looking in and who is making attempts -- in vain -- to understand.
Olin also likes karaoke
GPhone Announced, Morons
Interestingly Moron/Morons are not allowed on article submission, but if I edit the title it lets them through. Or maybe i just misunderstood why it was failing submission earlier.
Hacker: Jack of All Trades or Master of Some / None
Have any of you developers struggled with determining whether you'd rather be a well-rounded developer, or one that focuses on a few areas but becomes an expert on those areas?

I'd like to pose this question in the context of entrepreneurship and freelancing, since we know specialized developers would fit in a corporate system.

As a programmer with an entrepreneur mind, this is something I question while trying to self improve my skills. I consider myself in the category of "jack of all trades" and am currently picking up new areas of development.

I figured a jack of all trades developer would be more appropriate for startups bootstrapping, a really small team, freelancing, and getting version 1 up of a product without much dependency.

As for the specialized coder, with an entrepreneur mind, I see the specialized skills fitting perfectly with a team of other very specialized developers.

I sometimes get that feeling of "spreading myself too thin" when trying to pick up many new languages / frameworks in a short amount of time.

Currently I've picked up Rails for the past year, but have been wondering if its worth honing my front-end skills, or instead, contract it out, etc.
Hmmm...I think my friends and I will be spending a lot of time on Draftmix.

Great concept, guys, and best of luck!
I can't comment on the startup scene. I like the phd model: Become an expert in something. You'll find that on your way to expertise, you'll pick up a diverse set of skills.

Why is the phd model better than something else? Don't know. Intuitively seems to make sense. Makes me nervous to hear that people are picking new frame works left-and-right.
The Crunchies: The Startup Awards Show
Any nominees/catagories?
Well, things have sucked so bad so far, knowing they will suck less at some point is certainly a relief.

I swear the handset makers and telcos couldn't get laid in a whorehouse. It took apple to wade in and do it themselves to shake it up. Now google have gone "sod it, this is how you should do it - no go and make useful internet devices you children".
I.e. Draftmix is a DOS attack against your own startup?
pasig
I am excited by the idea of what they're doing, and I think they're likely to do something very cool, but I'll wait to pronounce judgment until there are a lot of devices being released from different manufacturers, over the course of several years, and several upgrades in the underlying platform. Only then will we have a good idea of how things have been managed.
Programming Language Popularity Statistics
This is my latest weekend project, updating some work I did a while ago.
There are lots of generalists, but very few specialists in any particular area. On the other hand, most problems don't need a specialist in most areas.

Which approach is best depends largely on how much freedom you have to pick your area of work. If you're creating your own startup, being a specialist is great because you can make sure the problem you're working on is in your area of specialization -- myself, I'm working on online encrypted backups, and the areas of expertise needed (cryptography, security, data compression, concurrency) are precisely the areas which I'm most expert at. On the other hand, if you're joining your best friend from university to work on the startup idea which he picked, odds are that it's going to play to his areas of expertise, not yours, and you'd be better of being a generalist who can fill in the gaps after someone else does the heavy lifting of solving the "hard" problems.
The use of the color distance measure turns out to be important in spam filtering because of the 'Camouflage' trick used by some spammers where similar, but not identical colors are used to mask chunks of 'good' text inserted to try to fool spam filters.

From http://www.jgc.org/tsc/

Camouflage (GWI!Camouflage!HTML)
What: Like Invisible Ink, but instead of using identical colors (e.g. white on white) use very similar colors.
Date added: June 2, 2003
Example from the wild:
The colors 1133333, 123939, and 423939 are chosen to be very similar without being the same)

<table bgcolor="#113333"><tr><td><font color="#123939">those rearing lands</font><br>
<table><tr><td><br><font color="yellow" size=5><b>Plasticine sex-cartoons.</b></font><br>
<font color="#423939">eel harness highest</font><br>
<font color="white" size=3>Absolutely new category of adu1t sites.
</td></tr></table>
<font color="#123939">nobody jets held<br>Northumbria- diamond sleep</font></td></tr></table>
Seems like the sort of thing that could take off on Facebook. My Wildfire app is 'similar' in that it uses the social graph to spread news

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2399397752

John.
Why Startups Have Fewer Dilbertian, Pointy-Haired Bosses
Amazon S3 European Storage Cloud Announced
What should I send investors? Part 2: Deck.
I think ideally the founding team should have all the necessary skills to create whatever product the business is building, without relying on anyone external. For a web app company that means at first you're DBA, SysAdmin, Programmer, Designer, Customer Support, Sales, etc. As you grow you hand those roles off to others. Web design is the only thing I'd risk letting someone external handle, but even that can become a bottleneck if they're unavailable and you need to make changes quickly.

I also think you should work to become really good at something. If for no other reason then it's hard to build respect from others if everything you do is only mediocre.
Making Rails Wicked Fast: Pagecaching Highly Personalized Web Pages
What is the Largest Known Star ? (Animated PIC)
"If it were possible for a human to walk on the surface of "Canis Majoris", at 3 miles an hour for 8 hours a day, it would take him 650,000 years to walk the entire circumference (compared with 2 years 11 months to complete the same task on the Earth)."
Be a specialist in one area, and learn enough about the other areas to allow you to judge the quality of the cofounders you join or the contractors you hire.
What problems? Maybe fashion stuff?
Perhaps your spelling-sense was off? (required)
Great work. Over time, some graphs to visualize popularity trends would be nice too. A good supplement to the TIOBE index: http://www.tiobe.com/index.htm?tiobe_index
VC Fund Performance - Some History
set a meetup. Then evrybody can suggest alternative dates/location or confirm your suggested date/location. An agenda would help to firm up everything.
Yep, trends are planned, but I need the data first:-) I'll add a trends graph in a month or two.
"He definitely has a lot of legitimate supporters. They're still a minority though and yet they dominate Reddit as if no one else existed. That's a flaw in the system."

So Reddit should be representative of the tastes of someone who got 1,000 on the SAT, makes 29,000 a year, has 2.1 kids, and is morbidly obese?
Pythagoras theorem only holds in Euclidean geometry (or so, Wikipedia says). The computer world has no notion of space, so there's no a priori reason for choosing Pythagoras over other norms%. Has anyone here experimented with alternatives?

%See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance
It's the opposite of grassroots democracy. Grassroots = spontaneous and decentralized. That would not naturally produce the tidily regular stream of Ron Paul stories we see on reddit. This seems to be an organized campaign. This is not a groundswell of support; it's an attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities of social news sites in order to give the appearance of one.
If you're in a startup, you're going to have to wear a lot of hats. Even the hats you aren't wearing, you're responsible for finding somebody else to wear. So to some degree, you're going to have to be a generalist.

But do it smart. Use mentors for stuff at the fringes that you don't think you're going to keep doing over and over again, like hiring a lawyer or finding a PR firm. Specialize, but only lightly, in a few areas that have important correlations to the field your in. For programming, that would be knowing a couple of OOP languages, a couple of Functional languages, a couple of relational databases, and a couple of large datastore systems. You don't need a PhD, but you do need some practical experience in various ways of doing those things you're going to be doing a lot of. Once you learn 2 or 3 ways of doing the same thing, you'll have enough of the pattern to keep you going for a good while. Then there's just being honest with yourself. For instance, I suck at UI. So either somebody else would have to do it, or I would have to farm it out.

In the technology field, approximately 80% of working knowledge changes every few years. That means that it's not a question of being a specialist or generalist, it's a question of constantly relearning. What are you relearning? Making that choice is the key to your future survival as a company. There are two types of innovation -- the knd that happens as part of being a super specialist at the forefront of some small subset of knowledge. And then there's the kind that happens when you mix various fields in an unpredictable manner. Guess which one is a better model for the types of startups we talk about on this board. Specialization is a great place to start, but you have to move from there to somewhere else to run a startup.
It's not organized - it's enthusiasm. I speak as one who has been known to post a Ron Paul story or two, although not in the big leagues. The number of big posters is small, although I suspect a "long tail", but the number of voters is large. If all the votes came from sock puppets, the Reddit staff would be fighting back. They aren't. I think the answer is that Reddit is small enough to be 100% saturated and consequently 100% polarized into love, hate, and don't want to hear about it. The RP lovers are simply a slightly larger group than the sum of the other two, and as such they dominate the front page.
Very nice. Great work, and very comprehensive. And I agree (please forgive me for repeating this) but seeing trends would be great.

Have you considered other sources, say, Technorati for similar data mining? That may prove to be another way to measure how much people are talking about a language...
Small groups of true believers are common in social movements. This is neither new nor sinister. The founders of the USA were an influential small group.
Yes, getting stats from people's online journals is a good idea for keeping track of people's discussions. Technorati looks like it has a good API, too, so thanks for the suggestion!
YC voting arrows
Are they really needed? Why not just count clicks on links and ditch the arrows completely?
Why Is Google Afraid of Facebook?
You can't apply this stuff mindlessly. Consider this suggestion from the article: "Differences between people: (Height, Weight, Age)". If you use the formula, you end up with inch^2 + pound^2 + year^2. Mixing units is bad enough. Now imagine how the results will change if you switch to the metric system.
There's an interesting question about how social networks actually work, as opposed to how we all think they should work. In reality, your real, live social network probably includes people who are really excited about things that bore or annoy the heck out of you, yet both of you self-censor to keep the network alive.

There's no self-censoring on the net. People post and write just whatever they feel like.
Aka: The more I'm away from you, the more I like being with you.

I wouldn't focus on explaining what makes you happy if you want this conversation to end well.
Alibaba doubles in Hong Kong debut
Public sector innovation will take you by surprise
Apple Tablet "confirmed" by Asus
I just have to say that I think the idea of a spouse supporting you in such a non-glamorous, anti-social activity and making you perform better than you otherwise would is a myth. A romantic myth, but still, no more.
LiMo (Linux for Mobiles) is Ready to Go Prime Time
NY Times Headline Says It All: "More Readers Trading Newspapers for Web Sites"
8 Steps to running your business on (mostly) free apps
I've used the 1-norm, aka "Manhattan", distance (with weights of course) for visual image search. I think the 1-norm is always a better choice than the Euclidean distance unless there is some clear geometric context.
Coming Soon? The Crunchies - Startup Awards
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
More on the difference between the coasts: chatting to alums from the Farm
NewEgg mistakenly ships out five Eee PCs for the price of one
Just adding tagging plus tag filtering would do a lot.

John.
The thing that's wrong with most of these statistics is that it doesn't measure popularity. In my mind, popularity is "What is most new development being done in RIGHT NOW." These are more a measure of "What is the sum total of all development for the past 10 years" (About the time that things started showing up on the Internet, and the minimum threshold for most programming books, etc).

Things like Internet search results and job listings are always going to be lagging indicators of programming language popularity. Job search results are lagging because even if most new development is being done in, say, Ruby, it'll take years for the active codebase (that needs to be maintained) to catch up to C or Java. Internet search results are similar- even if 10x more new articles are being written about Ruby, it'll take an incredibly long amount of time to catch up to the massive total that Java has accumulated over time.

What I'd be more interested in is the deltas between each of these statistics on a monthly basis.
BTW, I read the comments both here and on programming.reddit.com... So I guess I'll just link to my answer there:

http://programming.reddit.com/info/5zxpv/comments/c02e6ye
I've coded some J2ME applications. It's horrible.

Android, I welcome thee with open arms.
Visuword - free visual dictionary/thesaurus
I wasn't pushing Stackless, just saying that others have mentioned it and its ancestory has something in common with what I'm trying to sell; channels as a synchronisation method. See the references I gave for more details.
I know 8 out of the top 10 languages. Not bad.

Of course, I'm also learning the language that's on the bottom of the list. Go Ocaml!

Nice work. It was especially interesting to was Haskell jump out of the back of the pack to #2 when moving to a more academic crowd.

I'm not sure the data has any meaning at all in the real world. In a similar vein, if you did this same exercise for presidential candidates Ron Paul is likely to look a lot better than his poll numbers show. There is a difference between what people talk about and what people do. You can only take implicit data so far. But it certainly makes for some nice graphs to add to a powerpoint deck, and I'd love to see trend information.
If nothing else, it's a good way to test how healthy your relationship is. I already knew the answer before I joined a startup. We were watching Devil Wears Prada and she quipped how whiney the main character's boyfriend was about her career. Relationships really are better when you're doing what you both enjoy. She may not have enjoyed her job, but it set her on the path to the job she wanted.

Now excuse me while I punch myself in the nuts for knowing so much about a chick flick.
Occam is yet another thing with its roots in Hoare's CSP. See my posts elsewhere on this story.
Google "hugely dangerous" and coming after local press next
Android could transform any cell phone into a computer or game device
His running mate's name will be "vi4gr4 ci4li5".
PurpleYogi, the 1999 personalization company, finally hits pay dirt
I'm not talking about people merely voting up what they like. What I suspect is that a group of Ron Paul supporters (maybe organized by the campaign, maybe not) got together and said: reddit has 100k (or whatever) readers, but all it takes is 500 votes to get a story to the stop of the frontpage. So all we have to do is get 500 of us to sign up for reddit accounts, and we own reddit.

As far as I know, no one thinks voting rings should be a component of "how social networks actually work." And in fact, reddit has software for neutralizing them. It's just not good enough.
Because sometimes stories are made to sound a lot more interesting than they are. Vallewag specializes in this.
Ranking by clicks would encourage every submitter to
do it.
> Did you feel like you could have been more productive if you had be more solitary?

Yes.
I just got through reading an academic paper on fixing social systems. The entire paper was written along the lines of "how do we stop attacks?" In other words, if the system is broken, it must be because somebody is purposely breaking it in some way.

Whether it's 500 RP supporters purposely joining reddit or 500 of the existing reddit users who happen to be rabid Paul supporters, it's a distinction without a difference. The rest of us have to put up with the behavior of reddit simply because it has the attribute "all it takes is 500 votes to get a story to the top of the frontpage"

For a long time I was convinced RP supporters were purposely gaming the system. I've changed my mind in the last few months, though, after meeting and talking to some of these folks. They just are really excited, that's all, and they're already reddit, or digg, or whatever users.

Another way to look at it is thus: while it's true that a small number of users constantly "run" large social sites, that's because only a small number of users give a hoot about ranking or rating articles. The rest are just apathetic. But for certain topics, like Ron Paul, or LISP, or Mac vs PC, or tax policy, or weasel juggling, a _new_ set of small users suddenly becomes very energized. The system works as long as everybody is fairly complacent. Once anything starts really motivating people, you get these swings out of whack. That's my view, for what it's worth. Perhaps "voting ring" is one way to characterize them, but I'm not sure it does justice to the situation that's really occurring.
Google Introduces Simplified AdSense Management
French wine experts can't tell a grand cru from an ordinary table wine
OpenSocial Hacked Again
Ten reasons to rethink your career as a developer (or why to just stop being an employee)
There is something to this.

It also explains why software written in Java sucks so much compared to software written in Lisp or C. Any idiot can get a Java program "working", but an idiot writing C code will never get anything more than "Segmentation Fault".
CakeMail: Ready for Resale
Heinlein had it right. Specialization is for insects.
Very interesting work. Could results on 'C++' or 'C#' also appear as results for 'C' though? Or is the search strict enough for that not to happen?
Marc Andreessen has talked about this and mentions a quote from Scott Adams (http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/the-pmarca-guid.html):

"If you want an average successful life, it doesn't take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

Become the best at one specific thing.

Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don't recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I'm hardly an artist. And I'm not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I'm funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It's the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it."

This is general advice though and doesn't necessarily apply to the question of "what should I work on now that would help my start-up the most?"
This link didn't work for me, but I was able to find the Article at
http://www.startupnorth.ca/2007/11/05/cakemail-%e2%80%93-rea...
I think the missing element is this: you need to establish that the domain that you are trying to measure is a metric space before trying to measure distance using this formula.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_space

edit: read the second section on how to establish something is a metric space. (in the wiki article)
From the press release it looks like you're still going to be programming in Java, just hopefully not J2ME.
"The very best funds of every vintage generally pay out at least 5x and sometimes more than 10x.

Like all asset classes, venture is all about manager selection and timing."

The very best craps players can earn 2x, 4x, 8x, even 16x invested capital in one afternoon riding the pass line.

Like all games of chance, craps is all about dice selection and timing ;)

Of course venture investing is more than just dumb luck. However, even if you could do an amazing job identifying future 10x'ers ex ante, chances are so can the other funds, bidding your 10x down to 3x. What's left is probably compensation for the high variance of returns, which the graph nicely displays.