skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The grass is not always greener on the other side. Having been all over the country, FL has its pros and cons like anyplace else.

FL is not that cheap anymore. Car insurance and home insurance are a fortune, some of the highest in the country. You also have to drive everywhere. Traffic in Miami is downright brutal both weekday and weekend. Plus, you have a lot of immigrants that do not know how to drive. If you like to ride motorcycles, dont.

The work ethic in Florida is probably one of the worst in the country. In NY and Cali it would take about 10-15 interviews to find a relatively qualified candidate. In FL it is roughly 1:25-30 candidates. Mostly because of DUI felonies or drug test failures.

Miami is the gateway to South America and other 3rd world countries so if you do not like Spanish culture don't bother. As a white person, you are a minority in South FL. Crime in Miami is some of the highest in the country and having a CCW permit is the norm, not the exception. FL is still very much the wild wild west.

South FL has a great scene for artists, graphic designers and retailers but still have a very hard time attracting exceptional programmers due to the hot weather and low salaries. If you have children do not bother with the public schools, you will have to go private.

FL is a great place for a startup due to the lack of taxes and cheap labor available. However, if you are not a principal of the company go elsewhere.

Also, if you are dealing with a person or company and do not put anything in writing...RUN. In NY and CA people are very upfront and comfortable with contracts. Not so in FL. If you say the word contract they look at you like you offended them. FL has the Homestead Act and because of that you get a lot of the felons and riff raff who move to FL to start again and pump the money into their homes. Very shady environment.

Talent sticks with other talent and success leaves footprints.

There are a lot of other great places to work, live and build a business.
We will open source our CF-based recommendation engine in the next days. We use the code in production (on a site with a few hundred million views a month) with up to 80GB datasets for item<->item CF. The engine generates thousands of recommendations per second per core. HTTP round-trip-time to fetch a recommendation from localhost is well below one millisecond.

I don't have the full engine source code or benchmarks to share right now (hopefully in the next two weeks as it is approved by our legal department), but I can tell you all the hard lifting is done by a library called "libsmatrix", which implements a fast, memory-efficient sparse matrix data structure that is used at the core of the CF algo. libsmatrix is 100% threadsafe and persists to disk (this way you can also work with datasets larger than the available main memory). this library is already open sourced:

https://github.com/paulasmuth/libsmatrix

Using libsmatrix, you can build the rest of the "engine" in a matter of a hundred lines of C or so...

#include "smatrix.h"
smatrix_t* my_smatrix;

// libsmatrix example: simple CF based recommendation engine
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
my_smatrix = smatrix_open(NULL);

// one preference set = list of items in one session
// e.g. list of viewed items by the same user
// e.g. list of bought items in the same checkout
uint32_t input_ids[5] = {12,52,63,76,43};
import_preference_set(input_ids, 5);

// generate recommendations (similar items) for item #76
void neighbors_for_item(76);

smatrix_close(my_smatrix);
return 0;
}

// train / add a preference set (list of items in one session)
void import_preference_set(uint32_t* ids, uint32_t num_ids) {
uint32_t i, n;

for (n = 0; n < num_ids; n++) {
smatrix_incr(my_smatrix, ids[n], 0, 1);

for (i = 0; i < pset->len; i++) {
if (i != n) {
smatrix_incr(my_smatrix, ids[n], ids[i], 1);
}
}
}
}

// get recommendations for item with id "item_id"
void neighbors_for_item(uint32_t item_id)
uint32_t neighbors, *row, total;

total = smatrix_get(my_smatrix, item_id, 0);
neighbors = smatrix_getrow(my_smatrix, item_id, row, 8192);

for (pos = 0; pos < neighbors; pos++) {
uint32_t cur_id = row[pos * 2];

printf("found neighbor for item %u: item %u with distance %f\n",
item_id, cf_cosine(smatrix, cur_id, row[pos * 2 + 1], total));
}

free(row);
}

// calculates the cosine vector distance between two items
double cf_cosine(smatrix_t* smatrix, uint32_t b_id, uint32_t cc_count, uint32_t a_total) {
uint32_t b_total;
double num, den;

b_total = smatrix_get(smatrix, b_id, 0);

if (b_total == 0)
b_total = 1;

num = cc_count;
den = sqrt((double) a_total) * sqrt((double) b_total);

if (den == 0.0)
return 0.0;

if (num > den)
return 0.0;

return (num / den);
}
An old classic is http://aremysitesup.com/. You could use that as an alternative.
I think also the EU put in a regulation limiting idle current draw (phantom load). The linear units leak when not in use, you can feel the warmth. Switching units don't leak significantly. That forced switchers while they were still slightly more expensive.

If the switcher was $0.50 more expensive, you were getting a linear even though it would cost you an extra $2/year in electricity. Consumers demand cheap initial cost in their electronics. The EU regulation just forced the upfront cost.
The Kings Of The '90s Dot-Com Bubble
Unless it was google..

"Hey, if we make Google uglier, maybe people will use Chrome!"

"Probably, they are used to IE not working"

Not sure who had the slip-up, but evil works both ways :P
Seeing the same here. Maybe the CNAME is tripping it up.
> And once you've done a PhD, I think it's hard for us to offer them a consistent level of challenging work.

As someone who's almost gotten their PhD in (mathematical models of) medical imaging, I think you'd be surprised at what kind of work would be consistently challenging enough to interest me.

I was at a job forum a couple weeks ago, and whenever I would bring up my incoming doctorate, company reps would be like "Oh, well our stuff must be pretty boring to you, then." I really wanted to say, "If I'm talking to you, it means what you're doing is interesting to me!"

I'm sure some PhDs are driven to improve the state of the art, but there's also a perception that a PhD won't want to go back to working on problems that are already solved in principle -- and that perception scares me, because I'm going to need a job soon....
> When it comes to thinking "this time is different" and "I have an idea to refactor the world economy", your age is VERY relevant.

Its really not. If you are trying to evaluate how good of an idea someone is likely to come up with, their scope of understanding of economics and past efforts in that field is relevant, and age is an extremely poor proxy for that. (It's exactly the same problem as using age alone as a proxy for to measure programming skill would be.)

If you have an actual idea in front of you, its better to just evaluate that rather than the source.

> Everyone thinks they have a simple way to fix everything when they're 22. By the time you're 30-40 it's amazing how much smarter the rest of the world got.

That's not universally true, and to the extent it is true, its significantly about increased focus on near-term self (or immediate-circle) interests rather than increased knowledge -- there's a reason why major advancements more often come out of work people do very early in their career.
Yeah, it's great to be earning money, but I put a lot of work into it, and I feel like there's a huge opportunity cost. I don't have time to socialise. I don't mean "oh, I can't go to the SU pub every night", I mean I haven't had any time for any recreational activity in the past 7 weeks, apart from one hackathon. I don't have time to go to the gym, I barely have the opportunity to go shopping (which has led to me putting on weight because of takeaway meals and fast food).

So yeah, it is great to have an income as a student, particularly in London. I wouldn't be able to pay my rent otherwise, the student loan is totally insufficient for even rent alone, let alone other expenses on top of that. But there is a major downside as well.
I love GitS, but when I see "white blood" I think of Bishop and the other androids from the Alien series.
"For a site like Google, I see no reason why Microsoft should have put it into compatibility mode- I have to assume that Google does testing on IE and any bugs should have been addressed quickly by Google."

Unfortunately, we see otherwise during our compat testing here at Microsoft on many occasions.
Almost all those things in his post can be made about CA as well. In southern CA, not only do you get great year round weather, but if you want to go skiing it's just a couple hours drive.

We moved to CA for our family. We lived in the midwest, and there just wasn't much to do. There are endless things to do out here. I imagine Miami is about the same in that regard.

One thing I think he left out is the political standings. I came from a blood red state. My way of thinking is more in line with a blue state. It is so much nicer to be around people who think similar to you.

As for the taxes, yeah that's a pretty tasty difference. But I got to have my skiing & mountains :)
The video should remove all doubt.
That reads too much like baloney.
Google Docs doesn't have any.
Great! More analytics people (and that is what they are being used for) looking up our butts so as to to spy on inner behaviors, proffer the "correct" ads in front of our faces, figure out who should be hired and fired and telling artists what sort of art they have to produce.
I should contextualise why I feel this is a bit low - I met a 16yo iOS developer last week who was telling me how he had to turn down a £50,000 3 month contract because he wanted to focus on his A Levels.
> It seems that we agree on the effects of deflationary currency incentivizing not spending money.

I'd say a deflationary currency incentivizes less spending, not no spending at all. That's the difference.

Now, your point about Bitcoins only being good for storing money, but not for spending. I don't really understand it. Bitcoin is in no way inferior to fiat currencies if you judge it by its properties. In fact, you can spend it much easier and faster than fiat. The adoption problem is a separate problem and it has to do with government regulations to a large extent and people not understanding the technology to a lesser extent. Both problems are temporary. But let's say Bitcoin is accepted everywhere, since we are talking about the idea of a deflationary currency vs an inflationary one. What would be the incentive for me to own any USD?
Definitely looks nicer than the old design. I just wonder what the heck it's doing at the top of hn?
If the D-Wave is actually using quantum annealing for it's algorithms, how is it playing "fake it till we make it" simply by not having optimized its output to be currently faster than classical systems? I think it's pretty easy to see how the government and private institutions that are purchasing D-Wave Two's (universities and research divisions) see them as potentially great tools separate from their processing output. Business people are a separate entity and I would be surprised, and doubtful of their acumen, if any were actually purchasing any.

If they turn out to be quantum in origin, I think you are way off base in this prediction.
" their scope of understanding of economics and past efforts in that field is relevant, and age is an extremely poor proxy for that. (It's exactly the same problem as using age alone as a proxy for to measure programming skill would be.)"

That's exactly the spot where I disagree. Understanding political-economy properly requires a certain amount of cynicism that can only come from observing the world for a while. Very different from programming skill. In programming, "this time it's different" can be true sometimes, we've only got 60-odd years of programming. In political economy, after 3,000 years or so, it's almost never the case.

For what it's worth, I didn't feel that way when I was 22.
I had a Toshiba laptop once that came without any software floppies; instead at first boot you had to generate the installation floppies for windows 95 and MS Office. If I recall correctly it asked for something like 80 floppies. Nightmare.
> I still own a place in Orlando which I have only visited once in the 6 years I've been gone

Mind if I ask why you still own the place?
My general impression is that people in south Florida (in business) are looking for easy money. Not easy as in no work, but easy as in huge sums for minimal work. The homesteading act certainly attracts people from outside Florida who believe they could be sued for everything they've got. May be was a combination of the drug money in the 70s & 80s, along with the real estate boom more recently, but they don't seem very motivated.

A lot of the shadier companies I've been aware of have their offices, or at least mailing addresses, in Boca Raton. Others have agreed with me on this point. Especially in the internet advertising market you have all kinds of strange players.

I hear a lot of complaints about the ultra rich in NYC. If you have a $50 million apartment in Manhattan, when your walking down the street it doesn't matter. You enter a building, even if its an expensive one, who knows what your living in. If your being driven around in a Maybach no one cares. In South Florida, its more like LA, lots of wealth flaunting.

Before the real estate crash, these high end luxury condos were brand new and not cheap (well, still cheap compared to SF.) The boom basically created the infrastructure, subsidized by a bunch of greedy people, ironically. The reason some of these buildings still are cheap is because banks won't lend for them. (that is changing)
Not everybody missed out -- I may not have done 40 floppies of WordPerfect, but I did install my first Debian (3.0 Woody) from a boot floppy, a root floppy, 4 driver floppies, and 20 base system floppies.
http://www.debian.org/releases/woody/i386/ch-appendix.en.htm...
http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386...
http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386...
When I played on World of Warcraft Auction House the main advantage of this tactic was the fact that it placed your items before all evenly priced items. I've exploited that for a while to move large amounts of inventory.
IE is broken in Windows since Windows 98.
> And I've just noticed that the "save file" icon in word processors isn't a floppy disk as it used to be.

Maybe the one you're using. But the "Save" icon in the most popular word processor is a 3.5" floppy disk: http://i.imgur.com/WLFtT7A.png

This is the latest version -- Word 2013.
Technology and games will soon supercharge education
I doubt it.

The rise and fall of data scientists (if they ever rise) will be swift.

Thing is, it's easy to collect a huge pile of data and then retrospectively look at the data set and see patterns in it (very often, patterns that don't actually exist but some over fitted model kind of suggests exist).

It's much much harder to get anything tangibly useful from that data.

Sometimes there is no tangibly useful data. It's all just random.*

'What have you got to show the last 2 weeks of effort?' ... 'Well, we definitely proved that there's absolutely no correlation between our manager's new initiative and online sales; that small spike we saw was within seasonal variation'. How long do you think you'll have a job?

What people need is better tools to auto-classify data into data sets and perform real time analysis of their data (like Splunk, which is amazing), so everyone can look at summary information in real time, at any time, and you can respond dynamically to changes.

* - I know, I know, no data of that sort is totally random. ...but it's often so noisy that no statistically valid information is recoverable.
So nobody @ MSFT has access to Google.com before shipping off the product. Given that a typical engineer is so addicted to 'googling' all through the day, this would've been noticed.
So, less spending = less GDP, right?
Thanks, but Xfce's startup applications list (which is just a frontend for ~/.config/autostart) is already executed after the X server starts, and after .xinitrc.

(Apologies if me saying 'runs at startup' was misleading -- obviously if I had tried to do it from a script that ran on boot, before X starts (rather than on session start) it could never have worked in the first place!).

Edit: now I've started thinking about it again, I've changed the autostart script to call another which sleeps for 10s before xmodmap, which seems to have fixed the problem.
Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework
Any advice on an aspiring data scientist?

I am currently finishing my bachelors in applied math, and computer science. Started to focus on machine learning this semester and hoping to do my capstone on it.
you've got to pay the toll troll to get into the boy's hole
Played through the first levels and I really like the idea. I've been thinking about how I could get my kids started and this seems like a great way.

I also see possiblities for some really cool stuff for more experienced coders, especially in multiplayer.

Mentioned earlier: make it completely playable through keyboard. When I got the first alert that I had to use "enter" to continue I was thinking how great it was it was just keyboard and then it started mixing up.

I understand the server being hammered so errors pop up that shouldn't be there. But if I didn't have the knowledge level I have (simply being sure that the error was wrong and the code was right I might have bailed out in the first couple of lessons by not being sure what to do. So I think you should also put some thought in helping people new to coding navigate the errors also when they are not due to server error.

I will play it through as I'm curious how you'll make it more difficult, or better put, make it so that the player needs to program more instead of just putting the right commands in the right order. I can see it getting out of hand rather quickly on the development side :) But things like different classes that you can execute based on stuff happening on the screen would be great.

Good luck!
When I was clearing out a cupboard the other day, my Son found an old cassette tape, he then proceeded to ask me what it was! I'm pretty sure in 20 more years we may see the same for CD ROMS or DVDs.

This particular post makes me feel so old though and I'm only 30 in a couple of weeks.

I remember buying Doom years ago and when I got the box it jangled round from all the discs inside of it.

I also remember when the first 24x speed CD drives came out, this is when hard drives were too expensive to load a full game on to so CD speed was important so your game didn't buffer as much.

Kids these days with their solid state iPads and 3D games consoles.

Blurgh
We need more data scientists to make more infographics!
Sigh. People read the original article and think the guy is amazing. I doubt most people would even find the second.
Just wait - in another two or three years, you will suddenly not be able to be trusted with meaningful architectural decisions, you will be looked down upon as too slow, and your years of knowledge will be ignored because clearly you don't have anything to offer.
Show HN: Pigs – Lightweight server for querying and playing from Grooveshark
Anyone of you playing? Which region/league?
Sure! Hit me up on FB http://fb.me/josh.perez or through my contact info on my profile
Why is quack doctor content on HN?
If VIne and Vevo had a baby they would name it Mindie
Another slam against overconsumption of sugar and processed foods. This guy may not have the best reputation but the advice doesn't seem all that bad.
It's good mouse training and thus it is relevant to the content of the presentation.

(even more annoying on a tablet)
From what I've seen I am guessing about .01% of web designers out there could do what he did, even with ripping code off from someone else.
Because Time Warner sucks.
wow that looks insanely close to what I remember from Terminator.

Compare yourself: http://imm.io/1iQis
(Strike this, see note below)

This problem just started in the last 24 hours - Google rendered fine and was my default search engine for over a month running the 8.1 RTM, and for a few months before that running the 8.1 Preview.

This isn't MSFT's fuck up unless Google is doing feature detection and IE11 is presenting itself as not supporting some trivial HTML5 feature.

Edit: I stand corrected - it looks like something MSFT pushed out as a compatibility list update around the general availability of 8.1 is causing this.
Signup sends login credentials over HTTP and not HTTPS. Come on guys, it's 2013. A certificate isn't that expensive anymore.
Looks like DO Europe nodes are up.
Florida has some neat places if you're into nature but that was totally flipped upside down for me when I moved here.

For that extra McDonald's employee's salary I'm paying in taxes I'm getting back quality hiking, camping, rock climbing, mountain biking, road biking, surfing, and snowboarding as well as gorgeous sights of mountains, caves, waterholes, forrest, and rivers.

It's a nature lover's paradise out here in California.
Sign up process is shot. You click sign up. Nothing happens. You click again, e-mail is used.

Still have not received any e-mails.
There's a weird amount of pure quackery on HN.
It's also a good way to show that Mac users wear shoes while using Macs at all times: just visit any Starbucks, or airport or school, nobody's using Macs barefoot.

Did you happen to hear the term "selection bias" before?
I used to think that - but then I spent a summer without A/C by necessity. You really do get used to the heat within a few weeks and it's fine.
The Great British Node Conference
I guess you have no way to work with a major company like Google since you are such a small organization lacking resources.
Suprised there is not more commentary going on here, this was a great article.
I think it's nearly inevitable that the immersiveness will lead to some useful stuff. We have a lot of biological circuitry that can take advantage of the extra bandwidth of VR. Already there's some niche applications[1] that show potential improvement on 2d solutions. Voice chat with avatars in a 3d space[2] looks like it could be useful for remote collaboration.

That said, I don't know what percentage of people will want to become fully immersed in a computer world. It can be disorientating when you put on the headset and the real world gets replaced by a computer generated one. I think the majority of the world probably won't jump on board until convincing augmented reality becomes possible. I kind of see VR as a building block for AR since they share a lot of the same problems.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWGBRsV9omw

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stLYp8KnjvM&t=1m
There must be a break-even response size below which this is pointless, the server doesn't send responses byte by byte but in chunks the whole response could well be on the wire already so it would how zero impact on download footprint. The impact of TCP nagle makes this very hard to predict too so the chunk size will vary between server config and server workload at the time of the request.
Anyone that has developed an HTTP parser has experienced this. I feel like this is a problem to be solved in the server using JSON path or similar.
Simple answer. Star Trek like. NLP + AI + Data-Flow-Based Programming.

☛ "Computer make a sandwich, with extra cheese!"

• 1:Computer analyses the command, reverse-engineers the receipe on an atomar/molecular level.

• Femto-lasers a nanostructure to the replicator using computer models

• 3D Prints synthetic biomimetic chemical protein and nano-textured (for color) carbohydrates

☛ "Computer make a new sandwich, this time more piquant!"

• Computer this time tries to optimize the taste based on personal data and global taste data

• GOTO: 1

--

Most of this can be done today already
Works fine for me, although there are plenty of sites that don't.