skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, it didn't work for me. If it is any consolation, no recommendation service usually does.

Here is the problem: recommendation engines usually try to match common variables between the movie you like and other movies - kudos to nanocrowd for doing this at a more sophisticated level than "it has the same actor in it" - but most fail to weigh heavily enough the quality of the movie (Netflix is notorious bad at this). More to the point, the movies that people really love have some personal connection with them that I am not sure is open to crowdsourcing.

I will now give you an example: I love the movie Pitch Black. Why? Yes, there's the action/horror tension, and the fabulous spaceship crash, and the charismatic lead - but the reason I love that movie is because of its kernel which is a highly moral tale about the salvation of caring for someone other than yourself, and of the powerful human need to seek redemption.

Now I am not going to reproduce this here, but go put in Pitch Black in nanocrowd and you will see the problem: it focuses on the superficial properties of the plot, and none of the movies recommended come even close.

What is the closest movie in feel that I have seen? The Station Agent. Now the day I type in "Pitch Black" in a recommendation and get back "The Station Agent" is the day I am going to sell all my wordly goods to buy stock in that company.

(That said it is safe to say most people aren't as picky as me, and I am sure you can find some success with this model especially if you harness it to something people visit a lot anyway, like IMDB or Netflix).
My wife didn't smile in hers because she had just recently chipped a tooth and had to have her braces put back in. Not sure what that proves.
MapReduce and parallel SQL implementations are perfectly comparable, as the paper itself makes clear: both are for doing large-scale data analysis. You can use RDBMSs for other things, but it is perfectly feasible to compare shared nothing massively parallel SQL implementations with MapReduce, because they are often used for similar purposes.
Boulder _is_ a good example of how to foster a tech hub. Wired had a print story about this a few months back, but I couldn't find it on their site. Though they did claim that Colorado's Front Range is an optimal site for a new SV. Given time, I agree.

I can say that there is a very open and supportive start-up culture here (Boulder & Denver metro). Tech Meetups and LUG groups are pretty active; the new-tech group based in Boulder routinely overfills 300-seat auditoriums and is expanding to handle the traffic. Most tech folks here have the mentality of wanting others to succeed, no matter if it is with our own companies or with a different one. We are happy to share knowledge.

Sorry no beachfront though, you'd have to settle for the best mountain sports anywhere.
I think by definition, introverts tend to not want to run things. Introverts tend to prefer contemplation over interaction, and interference or intervention are subsets of interaction, right? Even if that weren't true, the things one has to do to get to a position of being able to run things tend to be distasteful, in large amounts, to introverts.
That is a very interesting and lucid narrative on working remotely. I've not read his stuff before. I like it. He points out some of the obvious on office social interaction, but in an organic way (hence, the pond). To that he outlines points addressing his concerns, recognizing the necessity of remote work, but driving home the social costs and identifying his metrics for the traits someone would need to successfully work remotely.

Thanks!
Interesting article. Can't help but think about how it's no coincidence that so many technology companies have come to exist in such close physical proximity in Silicon Valley. This article speaks to managing a team, but the power of the Pond metaphor goes well beyond single companies/teams.
There really hasn't been a good movie recommendation engine since LikeMinds got sold to IBM and their MovieCritic.com site was shuttered.

One of the original brains behind their collaborative filtering technology launched a similar site a few years ago at moviepig.com, but sadly the entire thing is done in flash and the design is so awful that it eclipses the fact that it makes pretty solid movie recommendations after you rank order a couple dozen movies. Worth a try.
> solar panels generally contain fairly rare elements

I'm pretty sure the standard ones are just silicon (sand) plus trace amounts of commonly-available dopants. Nothing exotic. :)

The problem of using only renewable energy sources is not a technical one.
Very cool. I've always wondered about 'wireless' energy, as far as how it could work. I wasn't aware that radio waves carried enough power to make this feasible (and, now that I think about it, safe).

Of course this is all good, but I'm really waiting for the day when my laptop can use something similar to keep itself charged. (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/wireless-0607.html)
Thats very rarely the case on HN, either because of the HN culture as it is now, or the mods removing very subpar content.
Luring First Time Home Buyers and Investors
So you're saying we prefer less ping/ack packets and more data packets. Put that way, it appears that the primary problem when introverts communicate with extroverts is that we use incompatible protocols. I wonder if we could write a codec for this.
This seems really susceptible to noise. It makes perfect sense that people who smile a lot tend to have a happier disposition, which makes them easier to get along with, which makes them more likely to stay married. However, plenty of people are unhappy in school for reasons that have nothing to do with having a genetically cheery personality. It could be, oh, the getting beat up, and being forced to do mindless work, and listening to teachers who are dumber than you, and waking up at godawful hours.

People often change a lot when they go off to college and start working. I was just having dinner with a coworker who's one of the most talkative people I know. Apparently, she never talked for the first 18 years of her life, and only rarely for the next 4. Happiness may have a strong genetic component, but that's not saying that the environment doesn't matter at all.
Netapp's Dave Hitz Interview : How To Castrate A Bull
Blackberry Storm 2 in September This Year, with WiFi
Weird thing about this project, it is an epic feature-request magnet. Number one most requested feature: links to the discussions/comments. Absolutely not going to happen. I might put it up on GitHub, where you can fork it and do whatever the fork you want with it, but I firmly believe the lack of comments and discussion is a FEATURE.

Hacker News aims to have more civilized discussion than most sites of this nature, and that goal is very well-intentioned. Good intentions pave the road to hell. Hacker News does NOT in my opinion have a better signal-to-noise ratio than other sites of its type. The fundamental mechanism kills diversity of opinion and encourages mean-spirited nit-picking the same way it does on any other site of this type.

Consider: this community organizes around entrepreneurialism and hacking. I set up a project which challenges the status quo in this community. I did some bold, innovative, controversial, and aggressive hacking. This project reflects entrepreneurial values.

A guy who posted a list of bitchy quibbles is at the top of the comments here, with 83 points at the current time. He defends the status quo, he did no hacking, his comments are provably false and UX research probably already exists refuting them. And people upvoted his comments over mine, by a factor of 83 to 1.

It is impossible to build a community which upholds entrepreneurial values using the mechanism that drives Hacker News. I've ranted about this before, so it's not worth going into detail about. If you missed the rants, here's some links:

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/we-didnt-start-flam...

My goal isn't to rehash my point. My goal is simply to make is absolutely clear that I WILL NOT enable comment links on Hacker Newspaper. However, I do intend to put it on GitHub, and please by all means nag me about it on Twitter (@gilesgoatboy) if I forget. I will be thrilled to hear if it somebody's doing something cool with my code.
Open mic for entrepreneurs
Take a look at the source, they use an onclick to calculate the destination URL on the fly. I believe this part has been in use for quite some time.
Yea, I don't think people quite understand what the Macbook Air issue is. As a fellow MBA owner, I can vouch for this behavior. The system will become completely unusable while the 'kernel_task' takes over the system trying to cool it down.

I've experienced the exact same thing running a 24" LCD, firefox, and Entourage. Hardly an uncommon or extreme setup, but it's enough to throw the system off kilter. And when kernel_task goes into "cool this thing off NOW" mode, the system is unusable for 4-5 minutes.

The MBA is a beautiful monster.
Good piece, good advice. Since OP was generally negative on remote work, I want to put forward a counter-example of situations when remote work is an advantage: When you can get 24 hour support without anybody working nightshifts (by harnessing timezones) and even more, when you are shielding valuable people from operational hassles in order to allow them development time.

OP says: "What was a 27-second walk down the hallway to yell at Bob about his crap code is a now 30-minutes constructing an email." My response to that is (a) dude, pick up the phone, it won't take more than 27 seconds but more to the point (b) Maybe Bob would write less bad code if he didn't have people waltzing in to talk to him all the time.

I totally sympathise with the telecon complains though and I agree, it's not for everyone. I went nuts trying to work from home during family leave, I felt so out of the loop (sorry, Pond).
Strange. My first reaction is that the auto-complete was so bad that it, alone, would keep me from ever returning. I typed in "Ran" (the last film I saw), and then I had to click a tiny down-arrow about 25 times, and the down-arrow jumps around as you go. What takes "3 letters + return + click" on IMDB, took "3 letters + 25 precise clicks + return" on Nanocrowd. Autocomplete is usually an optional assist; here, it's more like a mandatory in-place search system with awkward controls.

I would have left a note about this (and other issues), but their only feedback mechanisms seem to be email or logging in to Blogger.

It may be the coolest recommendation algorithm ever, but from these first two things I tried, the interface seems fairly high-overhead. You need to hook me before I'll go for high-overhead. You need to convince me that you're more valuable than, say, simply listing other films by the same director. For "Ran", Nanocrowd recommends "Rambo" -- 'nough said. :-)
a $10k Mac Pro would be much better

or a £2k macbook pro.
Dvorak Likes Linux
Long time Microsoft supporting, Mac Hating columnist says: "The critical mass has been reached. Go download Ubuntu 8.10 and see for yourself what the fuss is about. You won't regret it."
Dinosaur at the Gate
This is a classic problem in start ups, and I would strongly recommend against doing remote if you can avoid it. I only know a few people who have ever pulled it off successfully, and they are really good. Statistical outliers.

You cannot replace having an entire team in the same spot where people can grab a white board and clearly talk about what something means. Just the energy alone is probably enough to keep everyone active on the project. It's difficult when you don't see others contributing to a project. You start to think you're putting in more work than the rest.

I've worked for two start ups. The first one didn't do remote work, and while the leadership initially was poor, the execution was actually insane. The second start up had mostly remote workers, a few PhDs in the same city, and me and another guy doing the front end and servers, and it was a little slow. I tried to recruit some people who had worked at Google and YouTube (as undergrads), and they turned the offer down simply because most of our team was remote. A lot of people join a start up because they want to meet other smart people, not just work on a cool product.
The closing tags of HTML and XML are a nuisance. In SGML (their common predecessor), named closing tags were optional (you used </>), but were deliberately made mandatory in HTML and XML, to improve readability of long documents. It was contentious at the time, and it still is. But we must at least accept the data points that both HTML and XML have been phenomenally successful, without knowing for sure whether this particular feature was for or against.

One thing about dumb, regular, symmetrical formats is that their redundancy makes them less scary and easier to understand. Perhaps, this is accessibility is crucial for adoption.

EDIT I guess indentation enables you to match up start/end tags even better than named close tags... and it's certainly become more familiar to developers since Python's success. But maybe not so good when you have many levels of indentation, and terrible if you want to insert/delete a nested element, because the indentation of the elements within it must also be changed.
I wonder what would happen if he tried to return the Kindle.
>Odd. I've been an introvert for my whole life, and this is the first time I've ever come across such a brilliant description of what's going through my mind when I'm propelled into a crowd of people and asked to endure the hot air and noise they call socializing. I'm not shy either, yet I've always lacked the compunction to talk for the sake of filling a silence. Thanks for the link. It's been mailed to all the people who've called me an anti-social bastard down the years :)

The italicized portion of this comment from elsewhere in the thread shows how some introverts feel when young. I've been told many times, in the past, that I am antisocial and have grown to resent the idea. In our society (america) antisocial is almost a pejorative. So, I remember deciding that introversion was a fine trait to have and was more desirable than the chattering extroversion of my peers. People are just reacting against the expectation of extroversion, the response is too strong at first, but then they reach a balance. That's how this sort of reaction happens.

I agree with your comment generally though. I just believe the sooner people accept that introversion is an acceptable personality trait they can lean this 'personal growth' for what it will get them instead of some misguided belief they should be acting differently. Still, I can see "oh, I'm just introverted" being a crutch for shyness and fear, I'm still getting over those. But, I'm not exactly sure how.
I hate software patents, but in this case since its being used against microsoft instead of them using it to bully linux vendors, it makes it a little easier to swallow.
I won't go into details to spare the person shame, but this happened to me recently. I hope people aren't as adept as I am at reading expressions, because they would have instantly noticed I had no idea who they were as I was shaking their hand, despite seeing them only weeks earlier.
I find Netflix's recommendations to be far superior. Participants in the Netflix Prize have found that content-based filtering (such as "nano categories") actually hurts relevancy (in RMSE terms) when working with large data sets. That is, when you have a copious amount of data, it is usually better to let the data speak for itself. Similarly, it has been noted by Google and others that the better your data, the less impressive your algorithms need to be. Most people think Google's success is mainly attributed to magic algorithms, but most of their effort of late has been in increasing the quality and breadth of their data.

http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/03/more-data-usual.h...
That is so funny: Programmers, that don't know what to do with their time, develop an api so the don't have to read documentation. Or programm a framework, or another abstraction layer on top of all the others or some meta-something to simplify the easy 80% of a job.

Sadly, creating things totaly disregarding the environment seems to have so much more sexapeal than just using what's at hand.
Their compatilbity is superb. e.g. they work on windows mobile phones (which I cared about at the time) and very few other certs do.

Also they seem to have good customer service - they called to ask if my cert installtion was successful. Didn't try to upsell, so I was impressed with that.
"If it's not adequate for the tasks it shouldn't be promoted as such."

I think there's a disconnect here. Yes, it comes with Xcode. Yes, it's advertised as being able to run a large external display. But the question is: "can it do both of these things (in the case of Xcode, most likely building some complex project) simultaneously, and persist in so doing for an extended period of time?"

It appears the answer to that question is "no", and frankly I don't find that particularly surprising. I also don't think it really contradicts the marketing materials. Consider a different example: the MacBook Air comes with a wide variety of applications preinstalled, and this is an advertised feature of the laptop. But if I attempt to launch and use them all simultaneously, the system will become unusable very quickly as it runs out of RAM and has to start swapping. Does that mean Apple is falsely advertising its capabilities by touting the applications which come preinstalled?
Whoops, you're right, I didn't read it correctly.
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Yup, the short summary is: a guy behaves like an ass and a former friend notifies the police of his illegal activities. In these days, you'd better not fuck your friends over, because they may alert the police to your stack of pirated movies.
I've always been of the belief that humans are incredibly complex, deterministic machines. It would be fascinating to see some people make some breakthroughs in understanding the inner workings of humans although it seems a ways off.
ThoughtWorks' Paul Hammant talks about AppEngine for Java
It seems everyone overlooks the fact that the warrant was also after an undefined number of pirated movies. If found, that alone can cause the suspect serious grief. I wonder if the roommate will regret his testimony later on...
To be clear:
Your quoting attributed a position to me, which I obviously didn't share. That is a misquote and non-serious arguing.

(And your argument that common things should be respected is stupid, of course.)
Is Twitter evil?
Adsense Primer for a Newbie
If you want to make money online and achieve your financial freedom, then adsense is one of the best solutions. However, you should be ready to work for it. You cannot make hundreds of dollars everyday just by opening an adsense account. If someone is promising you that and trying to sell you something, then it is best to keep away from them.First of all, to open your adsense account, you need to have a website of your own.
Hackers, using servers in China, infiltrated government systems
Markdown is for writing content. Content creators shouldn't need to write their content (blogs, news, whatever) in HTML. Markdown is for that and only that.
This isn't the case with the MBA. You have no idea how little it takes to push it over the edge.

There's a good chance that running anything on the external display is what's pushing it over the edge. If you look around, the most common complaint is that flash video (you know, non-HD youtube) is enough to kick the machine. In my case, it's Entourage.
The problem I see is that it forces the user to pick a 'nanogenre', a set of 3 arbitrary characteristics - what if I'm looking for a mix of charateristics from within the different nanogenres? It won't let me choose the exact mix of characteristics I want and instead, restricts me to the ones it displays.

I understand that recommendation engines need to work within certain predefined parameters, but that's exactly why they'll usually disappoint - you can't categorise a person's preferences into predefined parameters. Most of the time, there's no real reason why someone likes a movie and hates a logically related movie.

Personally, I prefer clerkdogs.com
"The event, which started about six weeks ago in the Los Angeles and Philadelphia regions, is an offshoot of Ideablob.com, a Web site that allows aspiring entrepreneurs to post their ideas for a chance to win a monthly $10,000 prize."

Fucking aye! that's way better than you could get from any seed fun operation for N<=2 founders.

"Sponsored by Advanta Bank in Philadelphia, the site has given out about $150,000 in prizes over the past 17 months. Approximately 80 percent of the winning business ideas have related to socially-conscious ideas."

Yeeeeeeep! sounds like a GOOD thing.

P.S. Anyone in the D.C. area who wants to hear me out, I will buy you a cup of coffee :-)
They define marriage success as not divorcing. That works only if you define marriage as a formal pact devoid of any emotional substance.
70+ Practical Cheat Sheets For Web Designers And Developers
"About half is still a very sensible statement" </quote> from the article you cited
Top 5 Online Jobs Blog
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Is this link a recursive joke?

All I got is a grey page with "Click here to skip this or wait 15 seconds.". The link does not work.

I have JavaScript disabled with NoScript FireFox extension.

Judging from the HTML code of the page it seems that the authors of linux-mag.com don't know how to use noscript or meta redirect tags.
Launch Big Or Go Home
I think you'd be surprised at just what you're allowed to omit in HTML. For example, the following document is valid HTML 4.01 Strict:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<title></title>
<p>

The 'html', 'head' and 'body' elements -- opening and closing -- are inferred at the correct points by a compliant parser, as is the closing of the lone 'p' element.

Once upon a time on my personal blog, I used minimal HTML 4.01 Strict (omitting tags and other bits of syntax whenever and wherever possible -- I had a Markdown fork that knew how to do this within the constraints of the spec); my one concession was a longer DOCTYPE declaration to deal with anything that didn't know how to resolve the public identifier. Browsers actually handled it just fine, but some other systems (in particular, OpenID autodiscovery) failed, because they weren't actually doing HTML parsing.
It either scales or it doesn't? You really underestimate the amount of effort needed to scale even the simplest website to millions of users. Even if your web app is written in OMG-uberfast x86 assembly, I can guarantee you that you'll have trouble scaling to Google-size traffic.

There are different levels of scaling. The more users you have, the harder it becomes. But it's generally not worth scaling beyond what you actually need because if you don't need it, then you've wasted tons and tons of man power that could have been invested in other areas.
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ToneMatrix (flash)