skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But at least the drug testing is about you as an employee. Some of the data that might be revealed in viewing a Facebook profile is illegal for interviewers to ask about (for example, religious affiliation and marital status).
It's hard to meet women when they don't exist.

Um, girls in SF say the same thing about a lack of guys.
Finnish president Tarja Halonen has welcomed as "long overdue" the Dutch proposal to tax Internet users to subsidise struggling print newspapers. He says this is a perfect model for how the EU can do more to protect traditional markets and trade.

This is what scares me. Why should "traditional markets" be protected. Actually, I don't care. How can my life be considered a traditional market? I'm an upper middle class white male who has traditionally had it pretty well off, can we tax people to make sure I don't have to work hard or be smart in the future as others get better rights? It's both comedic and chilling at the same time.

"By giving people free software, open source vendors are violating their right to choose more expensive software made by European companies," says Roche. "Paid-for software is clearly superior, as any student of economics will tell you. So depriving users of the opportunity to pay amounts to exploitative business practice."

One can still choose. If I start selling cars for $1M per car, you can still buy my cars. You just probably wouldn't because they aren't likely to be worth $1M.

--

Microsoft's anti-competitive bundling was different. The theory behind Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior was that if they got a lock on the market, they could make it proprietary and wield that power to their own profitable ends - for example, like disallowing a flash plugin unless Adobe paid them lots of money.

Open source is different. No matter how big something might get, there's little power to be wielded. If Mozilla decided to try and pull something, it could just be forked. In fact, when Mozilla took the small step of not wanting their brands applied to versions that had non-approved patches, IceWeasel (now IceCat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat) was formed. Open source, because of the freedoms the licenses generally allow, doesn't pose the same anti-competitive, bait-and-switch threat where one can corner the market. At worst, you just fork.
Indeed, but it does match what the general belief is for both. Remember, reality is only so relevant.
You're right, I tried to update the headline but it wouldn't take -- sorry about that
Those are underlying problems that are unrelated to social media. Everywhere I've worked, it doesn't matter why you don't come to work, vacation and sick days come from the same "bank". So there would never be a reason to lie if you just wanted to stay home and watch TV all day.

As for reflecting badly on an organization... this is something society needs to get over. Why would you judge an entire organization based on the actions of one person? And, where do you draw the line? Is it OK to discriminate against someone who blogs frequently? (Their poor grammar and tired ideas makes your organization look bad.) Is it OK to discriminate against someone who likes to hang out in the pub with friends. (Those pictures make your employees look like a bunch of lazy drunks.) Is it OK to discriminate against gay people? ("God says being gay is wrong," so that's got to make your organization look bad.)

My point is, everything makes your organization look bad. But when you hire someone, you are trading money for work, you aren't purchasing a slave. So anything that an employee does that's not on behalf of the company should not reflect on the company in any way (negatively OR positively). It should only reflect on that individual.
Agreed. PragmaticTheory team deserves a special commendation since last month they developed an enhancement that was included into the winner's submission and pushed it into the #1 position. Read about PT on Wired: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/1-million-netflix-pri...
Except it seems like they're telling us moderation will kill you faster.
Are you sure you're going to the right bars? I'd recommend against the ones in the Castro if you're looking to meet women :)
For some more practical advice, this is the point of using crumbs, kids.

If you pass a unique verifiable value with your request you can avoid this sort of thing. This is also true of any GET request that can change user data (which you shouldn't be doing anyway).

A typical way to do this is to hash some secret for the user with a salt and a timestamp. The timestamp and the secret are passed with the request and can be used to verify the secret.
Or, if you start pushing around powerful people: they push back.
Hulu has been doing a pretty terrible job with ads, at least in my personal experience. Quite often there will only be one (or maybe two) unique ads that play during an episode - the same ad over and over, 2-6 times.

Also, one suspects they must not be selling much of their ad time - the above plus the fact that 50%+ of the ads I see are "public service announcements", which I would expect they run only when they have nothing else they can run.
Just pick up a day job again if you can or find some other revenue streams. You launched it full-time 3 months ago. If you maybe made that move prematurely then just go back into that for another 3,6,12 months. Don't quit your day job until you have enough to live on.

However if you are having the feeling of quitting, you need to decide if you want to throw away the last couple years as a try and try again another way. Sometimes ideas and failure make you better the next time. But also it always gets harder before it gets easier.
simply said, the Babylonian, first inventer has a base-60 and then will work with multiple of 60. In our era we have base 10, so we find it more easier to work with multiple of 10.
Very cool. For a long while, 10% improvement seemed like an asymptote.

Has Netflix announced any follow-up challenges?
this comment reminded me of this:
http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
'PreFart'
I wonder one thing: How Babylonian and Egyptian exchanged those informations and they use different languages and have different culture... This is more powerful than the Internet :D
The graph with the Ice core probes are of course correct. Thanks for that.

"No. The predictions aren't "maybe" wrong. I'm not hypothesizing. I'm looking out the window. (Metaphorically, that is, I'm looking at real observations.) The predictions are wrong. Right now."

Who says that the cycle of change which we can actually see due to a slow response is not based on a window of 5, 10 or 15 years? Right now is an exception to the current trend?
How can we verify this? Wait and do nothing?

"This is terrible science. You're asking me to believe in global warming, because burning gasoline is bad. Why not... explain why burning gasoline is bad, then act on that, instead? Why not talk about ocean pollution or overfishing and act on them directly, instead? While climatologists are distracting us with computer-modeled chimeras, real problems are being neglected."

Sure, but just because I want to state that Global warming is true or not I have to eliminate all the other bad factors which are actually happening?

Give me one environmental benefit why Coal/Oil/Gas burning is good? I am curious. Even if global warming is false, at least helps us to switch to renewable energy which will be better in the long run.

Lets suppose we find out global warming is false. What is the damage done by following ideas to limit CO2 and pushing environmental awareness?

"Start with the truth. Work out from there. That's science."

Good point. Did you see the reasoning of Rahmstorf in the Video? Do you think his reasoning is flawed?
Waterproof Lithium-Air Batteries
Could there be a more self-defeating way to make this argument? This is the kind of thing that makes people write psychoanalytical essays about Lisp programmers.
"Doesn't suck" has something nicely understated about it. It doesn't sound like something the "marketroids" would ever really exploit. Insanely great just sounds stupid. Do they give you electroshock therapy for making one too many insanely great products?
I agree that you can discuss the archetype without being racist, but I think such a discussion is likely to reveal the degree of someone's racism. Why is that something you'd prefer to find out after hiring them rather than before?
good point so have it only apply if the topic itself has more than 15-25 points?
I know little of your market; I target SysAdmins. But I went 4 years (and one Ross Perot) before my company became profitable. I supported it and myself through part-time consulting.

The big thing is to present a decisive face to the world. My 'Ross Perot' cost me another two years or so, I think.

As for 'stay or quit,' well, when you are small, it doesn't take much to make a huge difference. That article about me on hn and reddit the other month? that took me from 'breaking even if my time is free' to the point where prgmr.com revenue is greater than my contracting revenue.

Me, I stayed in it for so long in spite of my losses because this is what I like doing, and what I'm good at.
Perhaps more importantly, I believe I have a chance of holding my own against the competition.

Uh, but yeah, if you do decide to stick with it, you might want to think about a part-time contracting gig.
It seems that most of the highly voted comments are about how something/someone is bad/wrong, but there are some positive ones in there too, like those by ktharavaad, lutorm, kirse, patio11 (x3), jbr, plinkplonk, chriseppstein. Actually, 11 out of 30 isn't bad! I tend to forget that Hacknews is a public forum on the internet.

I think I just need to focus on the worthwhile comments, and ignore the negative ones (but it's hard: http://xkcd.com/386/). If everyone did this, the problem wouldn't exist.

BTW: On the homepage (not this one), see the "lists" link at the very bottom, on the left. It's: http://news.ycombinator.com/lists The 3rd one, "bestcomments" is what been submitted here, but with an argument "?newsToMe" appended (presumably to avoid hitting the last story about it, 544 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=93526)
Many customers will do this, and no, it is not a sign to walk away. But neither does is mean anything.
Pretend that they are saying, "Hi, I had rice krispies for breakfast."

Smile and nod, and know in your heart that what they said has no bearing on your business.
I'd love to see if their work stands up to all the new ratings data generated by netflix since the prize was announced.

Is it possible that there is over-fitting going on?
Name an emerging movement
are you from wefollow or twibes?
I think the problem here is "startup", not "Bay Area". I also worked at startups for 4 years, and there were a grand total of 5 women in them (only one of whom was unmarried, and she was the founder's niece). But that was in Boston.

Both teams I've been on at Google have been about 40% female (one was 42%; the other was 40%). My cubicle is 3 women and 4 men. Most of the social outings have been fairly well-balanced; a few have even been majority female. I lived with 2 girls in my old apartment, and I see mostly women around at my new apartment. This is all South Bay, not San Francisco.
-- “The reason people are paying such a high premium for these ads on the Internet is they do have a captive audience,” Poltrack said. “You know you have eyes on the screen.”

Yes... watch... I certainly don't have another tab open that I read for the duration of the commercial... though I will concede I at least hear the ad which is indeed more attention than any other ad delivery gets from me right now.

However, for how long will this last? How long before they start sticking two ads in, then, shortly after that, a race to get right back to where we are today, only this time without the DVR? When first you see two ads in a single Hulu break, you'll know the end is near.
I'm not sure it's still the case (and the website is down), but the rules used to state that once someone hit 10%, they would wait a month before awarding the prize, to see if anyone else could beat their solution.

In any case, I'd love to see Netflix start another challenge round. A million dollars isn't a whole lot of money for them, it brings in a lot of publicity, and provides a 'fun' way to get some research done in the data-mining field.
I seriously doubt that will happen. People have stopped buying $30 software for their computer, why would they buy it for their phone?

Do you have statistics on that? My wife just bought Balsamiq for her computer without blinking, and that was $79.

Anecdotally, I know quite a few indie and larger commercial developers paying their salary and more on $30+ desktop software. I know that Balsamiq sure isn't hurting.

It's primarily the webset that can afford to subsidize free product on the back of VC.

The iPhone is a platform for cheap apps, mostly entertainment related and games.

Games (even small ones) take a surprising amount of resources to create, from art assets to developer time. Unless your game is a lucky iPhone hit, you just can't cover development costs.

If you want to make a go at an iPhone business, you optimize around that fact. You don't try to drag your existing business model to the iPhone and hope that the market drastically changes.

If your existing business model is "pay the rent", much less "cover payroll", then yes, you're quite right -- you can't drag your existing business model to the iPhone.

We do bespoke development for iPhone customers. They lose money, we make payroll, and we wait for the market to mature. Until it does, the iPhone is a total wash, and don't be surprised when the smaller shops that can't eat the loss start dropping out. It's a gold rush.

$1.99 is less than the cost of a movie rental, but movies have massive leverage across an incredibly large market. This idea that software should only cost $1.99 is remarkably poisonous, but fortunately, the market will correct that.
This article is from 2005 and interestingly, it doesn't appear that the product ever launched.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zubbles
Sure, just as the universal goal of companies is making money. However, sometimes it's smarter to take losses in the short term if it encourages long-term growth and sustainabiltiy. Back in programming terms, sometimes you have to constrain the things a language can make, so development will focus on using and combining the right primitives rather than tacking on new and unneccessary ones that will burden the language's future development path. Especially for mega-scale projects, considering the future usability of the language can be more important than considering the present usabiltiy.
AT&T confirms their accomplishment here:
http://www.research.att.com/~volinsky/netflix/bpc.html

This starts a 30 day period during which all the teams can submit their final versions. After that, I believe Netflix will run the algorithms against the unreleased set of movie rating data.
clickable link:
http://www.excycle.com/recipes
What we really need is the ability to choose camera angles. Not really critical for baseball, as baseball is really about the pitcher vs. batter duel--though being able to watch a stellar base-runner lead-off and time the pitcher for a steal would be awesome. Basketball, hockey, football, soccer would all benefit from different angles. The side field view is no where near as compelling as an up and down (video game style) or a "blimp" view for understanding the complexity and beauty that is professional sports at the highest level.
Stay that way, unless you are prepared to go to extremes to maintain separate identities (physical, temporal, financial). Anything casual will crumble under pressure, so it's best not to have the false sense of security.
Enjoying what you do? I could go out tonight, but slaving away at my project strangely sounds more appealing...
That Torvalds guy is clearly a bad hire as he apparently spends most of his energy on some useless pet project.
Did we meet last night at lolapps? :)

You, of course, realize that hard skills vs. soft skills has really little to do with it. I mean, it's not like factory workers are being snapped up right now. Or, you know, Ada programmers or something. It's really more about supply & demand (hah!).

I think there are different ways to approach thinking about an MBA degree. While it's true that MBA (often, but actually not always) doesn't give you hard skills (quants & opresearch guys would disagree!), it doesn't make the 'soft skills' useless. For me, the most valuable aspect of my program (granted, there are schools & there are, well, worthless schools, I'm quite biased) was learning about different aspects of business, hearing about problems other people/classmates have encountered & arguing heatedly, reflecting on my years of work & seeing additional angles & solutions, addressing practical problems with practical solutions (not all real problems can be solved with code, you know, although we can all wish :)

Of course, I think that the best MBAs are the ones who've actually been working on something real before they apply to the business school, and to be fair, that's what many business schools in fact encourage. Well, I can go on and on, maybe we can chat more about it when we meet. I won't convince you that MBA is a must, I don't believe that myself duh, but, just like Java, there are circumstances, independent of economy, in which it is warranted. :)

In fact, even if it is true that "the economy is turning more into skill-based economy" (let's see what it's going to be like in 10 years), it doesn't mean you don't need (granted, fewer) "soft-skillers". It's kind of like saying that because Internet allows disintermediation of content, you no longer need any mediators (although, of course, there are people who believe that, too).
Eldarion
I believe you are correct:

http://www.netflixprize.com//rules

To qualify for the Grand Prize the RMSE of a Participant’s submitted predictions on the test subset must be less than or equal to 90% of 0.9525, or 0.8572 (the "qualifying RMSE"). After three (3) months have elapsed from the start of the Contest, when the RMSE of a submitted prediction set on the quiz subset improves beyond the qualifying RMSE an electronic announcement will inform all registered Participants that they have thirty (30) days to submit additional candidate prediction sets to be considered for judging.
what startup?
A more charitable interpretation is that he wants to avoid getting stuck in a worse-is-better local maximum.
_why is pretty awesome.

Even if you don't program in Ruby his book, Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is beneficial to read to get a feel for his natural, visual approach to programming (one example is the chute for Ruby block variable |a, b|) and it's plain entertaining and fun as well.
If this is not pathetic then I don't know what is. Lisp in like communism - great in theory, disaster in practice.

Re-invent wheel every-time you want to write Hello World because genius lispers were too lazy to put together a common library to be used across the board... and they had 50 years for that. Go back to your cave Man!
Technically completing 10% gives you 30 days to submit another algorithm to do better than this algorithm.
Nice. I loaded it into an image editor to make sure, and, yes, they are the same color.
If you really care, use a real standards-comformant address parser, most languages have at least one -- Java does. Otherwise you're just wasting your time, and the time of any users you hose with your amateur-hour validation.
I hope someone will take the time to code an open source version of the published algorithm, or something close to it!
I know this post is about the "best" comments, but that doesn't necessarily indicate quality. I'm not sure what might be a good algorithm to judge quality, but popularity is most certainly not it. To all you natural language processing nerds out there...maybe there is a way of looking at word choice, with weights also given to amount of karma but relative to the other karma distributed to other comments.
Sprint hurls what little it has left against the iPhone
I agree. I have worked in Infosys after my graduation for 1.8 years before I quit and started my own firm.
All these organisations are big thing in India, but what they do is nothing more than run big sweat-shops.
Its unfortunate to see huge number of talented young Indians getting sucked into these firms. After 4 to 5 years working here, and they are useless to work anywhere else.
I never said that was all that folks who write Open Source software want. I didn't really see any reason to argue BSD vs. GPL in this context, but if you really want to...

When a developer chooses GPL, they have multiple motives. One of those motives is to insure that everybody that ever uses the software have access to the source. Another is that they want anyone that modifies and distributes the software to be obliged to give their changes back to the community. One can desire these two things, while still wanting people to use the software.

As the creators of the software the developers have the right to want all of these things. They have the right to choose this license, just like you have the right to choose a more liberal license if you don't have the same desires for your software.

We develop software under the BSD license, and it has millions of users worldwide, many of whom are commercial and don't contribute changes back and don't disclose the source to their users. We're fine with that.

We also have software licensed under the GPL. We have different motivations for the BSD vs. GPL projects...we'd like one to be a platform, used by as many people as possible. We'd like the other to have some additional obligations for anyone that makes changes and distributes them, because we're building a business directly on that software.

In the ScummVM case, the developers clearly feel like part of their mission in life is to bring Free Software to people that may not have been exposed to it. That's a worthy mission. So, merely having a lot of users would not satisfy the mission. The only positive outcome here would have been if the code continued to be used by all those new people, and in a GPL compliant fashion. If mere use would have satisfied them, they could have simply ignored the licensing issue.
Hackers: Out of shape, little time to work out? Try this.
(disclaimer: I work on the cinematch team)

it's rather important to us that the solutions aren't over fit so we've worked very hard to make it hard if not impossible to do.