skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Supporting numerous devices is a great point I hadn't considered, thanks for bringing it up.
How Kickstarter Can Help With Shipping
Using Social Media to Promote Your Mobile App
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1ushn7/ibms_wats...

Comment 1 - Most likely it's not a full "Watson" but rather a network appliance that slots into a rack. Watson is powered by 2,880 8-core IBM POWER7 processors, which AFAIK haven't received a core bump or a die shrink since their introduction in 2011.

Comment 2 - POWER7 (which came out in 2009) was replaced by POWER7+ in 2012. IBM shrunk the lithography but kept the die size the same, so they used the extra space for more cache, a crypto accelerator, a compression/decompression accelerator, and some other goodies. There were able to bump up the clock speed as well.
Core for core, POWER7+ is about a 20% improvement, but you're right, no more cores per socket so there is no way they would see the kind of shrink described in the article if they kept the same amount of compute power.
IBM did come out with a new blade design (Flex Systems) with denser packaging, but that combined with the faster CPU will still only get them about 2/3rd of the way there (still impressive).
Opt-out should be default for this to be even relatively meaningful.
If you shard per customer, how would you handle, say, Google signing up for your service and tracking events on their search result pages?
These types of posts are popping up more and more these days. I like to call them "JavaScript luddite" posts: posts that worship single-digit kb apps with zero dependencies as universally good ideas.

This type of thinking is going to hold back frontend web development as a whole unless we address it. Disclaimer: I am on the React team.

"API first" -- just layer your API on top of whatever you're using to implement it. Abstraction is an important part of what we do as SW engineers. This post describes a particularly leaky abstraction, which is easily fixed.

"Small size" -- cry me a river. Yes, byte size is important but it's not more important than code reuse and all the benefits that come with it (security, dev speed, support etc). By the way, the Retina image on the blog post was 46kb over the wire which is bigger than all the JS in his app. The lesson to be learned here is that if add a single image you've pretty much blown away any JS savings you would have had.

Another thing: usually multiple server round-trips matter more than bytes down the wire.

"Full control" -- this is a legit reason. Some of the bullet points are indicative of the state of client-side JS tooling though which are fixable.

"Special needs" -- moot's engineering challenges were not unique, they just didn't like the trendy frameworks. This is totally OK, but not a good reason to tell everyone that code reuse is bad.

"Technology lock-in" -- somewhat of a legit reason, but more of a commentary on monolithic architectures than anything else.
And mine too !
Better become a software engineer, I guess...
I'm not even claiming it's not a proper test. I'm claiming I can't evaluate whether or not it's a proper test because I don't know enough about it.
Yep, having everything built-in is a double-edge sword.

I myself love Django, though I find some parts of it a bit over-engineered (in the Java style). That is changing for the better in recent releases though. I'm thinking the render_to_response stuff and management commands, etc.
We think maybe! We actually filed a provisional patent app (just did it ourselves on the cheap) covering the technology. We haven't talked with a patent lawyer yet about whether the tech is actually patentable though.
This is funny. Chuck Peddle had designed the first microcomputer design around the MOS 6502 - that's the MOS Technology KIM-1 (1975), which was a reference board and was sold as a kit. The Apple I was mostly inspired by that - which is normal, considering that it was the reference board. I seriously doubt that Peddle needed much inspiration from Apple for the PET.
$60 is for 2.5gb (500mb + additional 2gb)
Not on Android. As far as I can tell, I never provided my number to Snapchat, aside from installing the app.
And this is why I would love to have systematic way to remove bias triggers (such as names) from considering resumes. I would love to just be able to compare "Candidate 427" and "Candidate 430" and not even know their names until I'm committed to interview them.
Anecdotal evidence isn't that useful, but we all live anecdotal lives.
Its functional. Looking at the way bioinformaticians code, that will make it too complicated for many of them. SQL seems too much for many of them.
Already submitted and killed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7031684

Top comment makes it pretty clear. This is clear infringement and rookie mistake from the company, not news.
No, but I would also take a whitehat explaining a problem very seriously.
Headline should be, "How not being familiar with the law as it pertains to your business model can cost you $3000 plus lawyer's fees", but that's much less sexy.
LLCs were actually quite controversial when they were introduced, because they offer the limited liability of a corporation without a lot of the procedural protections to the public of the corporate form. A corporation is "less dangerous" because those procedural formalities create greater separation between corporations and their owners, reducing the risk that they will be used to simply limit liability that should rightfully be borne by the proprietor.
BTW: http://storify.com/joliss/what-happens-when-our-software-has...
We're planning to charge per core for usage. Each core will be a true physical core, with 5.5 ECU. The container will get 3.75GB of RAM and a slice of the host's bandwidth per core. We'll also have very inexpensive micro tier, and eventually some kind of long-lived services tier, as Tristan mentioned in another comment.
> That said, the approach and subsequent utility might not live up to the hype that IBM is pumping out. It's one thing to search very quickly. Being able to discover patterns that lead to new levels of understanding and predictable relationships is another thing entirely.

I don't get this, Watson might not be able to provide new levels of understanding but it still does a much better job than current search engines, so why do you think it cannot live up to the hype? Why do you think that it is not a significant improvement? What makes you think the approach is wrong? I need some clarifications :)
PHP Weekly for 9th January
Programming is just the implementation of an algorithm. An algorithm, per se, is meaningless outside of a particular domain.

For example, I have implemented standard signal processing and acoustig echo cancellation algorithms, in both C++ and Java. I happen to have a MS in EE and a BS in CpE. Now, take someone with a CS degree (not CpE.) They may be amazing programmers, but they will have a very tough time understanding the math behind these algorithms--It's all about the domain!
Agreed. I have to confess I trim mine regularly.
Well, 'Free Software' is the quite restricted GNU license model ('Free as in Stallman'), 'free' is free in the common sense.
I would expect that Watson is used as a discovery, not a decision tool - something to point out the symptoms as matching an uncommon disease that the doctor had not otherwise considered.

There are around 500 000 biology and medical research papers published per year (http://www.stm-assoc.org/2012_12_11_STM_Report_2012.pdf), and it's completely impossible for a doctor to keep up with all of the latest knowledge. A search engine can help a lot in discovering otherwise unnoticed connections.

I'm not sure how insurance companies are going to approach this - but "the computer agrees with my decision" seems to be a good defense argument in a malpractice case. And if the end result is statistically better, then insurance companies will adjust their prices.
Some kind of machine/human integrated medical system is a common goal of current research. Where many AI people think the lack of uptake is coming from, besides just general resistance to AI diagnosis, is that current systems don't have great real-world usability.

A few issues: There is a lot of information available to the doctor in a typical diagnostic setting that is not currently codified in machine-readable form, and asking the doctor to do custom data entry per patient is not likely to improve uptake. Ideally the systems should integrate with other patient-information-management systems, and such patient-information systems might need to be augmented with new or differently coded data collection. Perhaps equally or more importantly, if the AI system is going to be a component of the diagnosis rather than handed over full trust to make the diagnosis, it should ideally produce "white-box" diagnoses with justification for its reasoning and human-readable explanation of what it thinks the situation is, not just black-box predictions.
With great computing power comes great surveillance
It'd be interesting to replicate the experiment using lany people of different ages and in different countires.

I know that I'd suck at this.
nit pick: LLCs are formed, or organized, not incorporated. only corporations can be incorporated.
Are you dying? Talk to your kids about death today Dying or Not
This could be a lucrative business model. Take a lot of photos, get them indexed on Google Images and set up some mechanism to detect when the image is used without your permission. Sue, settle, profit!
it all comes down to load times. because users will leave if a page takes a long time to load, the less code you have to transfer over the wire, the better. it is different from server side code because it must be transferred and executed by the user.

also, this applies heavily to mobile. not everyone has high-speed internet connections or wifi on their phones, so the less data transfer you have, the faster your page will load, and the less likely your user will leave before it's done loading.
Sorry, didn't check back to see if anyone replied to me until today. Source, My self. Unfortunately I don't think I can recreate my proof.

Around July 2013 the company I work for was looking for a new front desk person to handle payroll/AP/answer phones. Well the main boss was googling the top 4 people. One popped up as a criminal like 4 or 5 links down on google. He went around poking fun of her and her arrest recorded. At first I laughed. The next day I was thinking how did he get this info. I asked him and he said a simple google search.

I did the same search sure enough there she was. (mind you we have no idea how she is spouse to look) He dismissed her based on this alone. What really sucks. Something seemed off so I looked into. I was able to get the exact same picture to show up on several names and several charges. Started playing around with it and got pretty good at predicting the results. I know for 100% fact it was dynamically creating pages. I got pretty bored fairly quick. So I didn't note anything down as its not my main interest.

Why I think I can't recreate what I was seeing. It seems they have been getting in a lot of trouble as of late.

General article talking about it: http://www.project-disco.org/competition/101113-mugshot-mess...

Why Google should change search Algorithm:
http://searchengineland.com/opinion-why-google-should-crack-...

Google changes search algorithm: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-mugshot-algorithm-17526.h...

Some articles talking about the ohio case: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/business/mugged-by-a-mug-s...

Its a removal service but links to all the sites: I'm sure one of them is the one I was talking about. If you want to spend time i'm sure you can reverse some of the sites algorithms and find something similar to what I was talking about. http://www.internetreputation.com/information/delete-your-mu...

and 19hours ago they WON! YAY!: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2014/01/07/Plaintiffs-win-set...

I realize am just some random dude on the Internet so I understand you can't just take my word for it, but there it is. Hopefully, its enough information to make you think I am not some kind of lair ;)
At the very least, they have to do security fixes.
I would love for the Appalachian culture to apply for the .app TLD.
User's had to opt-in to give Snapchat their phone number. I think this let's you opt-out, even if you had previously opted-in.
Awesome socks delivered to your door monthly
It's SO much effort to spend a weekend studying a code base and playing with it. Get over yourself.
At a minimum you chose an odd target for your satire. There isn't really any adjective that can be used in that location that will add much information to the text (it is just expressing enthusiasm).

An experiment: Next time you reach for some euphemism for mental illness, consider a couple of alternative phrasings (that do not use the euphemism). Decide if the alternatives are clearer or more precise. I don't run around taking issue with word choices, but if I run that experiment, I usually choose one of the alternative phrasings.
Let's Google "trolling". Definition of the informal use of the word:

"submit a deliberately provocative posting to an online message board with the aim of inciting an angry response."

Message board? Check! Deliberately provocative? Check! Angry responses? Check! Must be trolling.
(there are no such grids larger than 18x18)

Sounds like a challenge :-) Seriously though, I am not a mathematician, did the SAT solution to the 17 x 17 show there were no solutions past 18 x 18? I ask because on the original challenge site was an update [1] which I was trying to parse. It talks about OBS4 but I was trying to parse if that was the class of problem or the particular challenge problem.

[1] "UPDATE: THE RESULTS ABOUT OBS4 HAVE CHANGED SINCE THE ORIGINAL POST SINCE BRAD LARSON EMAILED ME A 4-COL OF 21x10 and 21x11. UPDATE: BRAD LARSON EMAILED ME A 4-COL OF 22x10. " -- http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2009/11/17x17-challe...
Are any of the systems you refer to general purpose?

For example software outperforming experts at xray interpretation seems pretty easy to imagine.

However outperforming a general practitioner by asking questions of a patient seems more difficult because the problem space diverges so much...
Don't let an opinion piece posted to Hacker News do much to influence your choice of languages. Everyone has opinions and most of them are equally valid (or invalid).

If you want to write mobile apps, you're pretty much stuck writing in those languages or using a framework that does the cross-platform shenanigans for you. Or writing web apps exclusively that have mobile browser support.

Regardless, neither Java nor Obj-C is going away anytime soon, so it would not be a mistake to learn either or both.
Did you guys considering selling it on other platforms besides eBay? (I don't know of any; I'm asking out of curiosity of whether there's any competitors for hosting an auction like this)

P.S. I looked at your site -- I took 252r this semester and loved it, though the topic was different this year.
I've built apps with Backbone, Marionette, Angular, and React. All very interesting and innovative. But for me none of them beats the productivity of a 'component' system built from simple jQuery plugins.
Comparing images and javascript in terms of payload size is apples and oranges. Images do not block the rendering of a page, are trivial to decode and display, and do not have long execution paths for the duration of their life.
I saw a post on Perl loosing ground to Python based on Stack Overflow posts. Then I remembered, Perl Monks is far better than Stack Overflow for Perl. I would far rather see the discussions that are encouraged there, than the "closed as not constructive" crap on Stack Overflow. (Though to be fair I do see Python getting used more and more, and hear less of Perl).
Bad crypto doesn't kill, people/organizations with a fucked up agenda do.

I thought this past year taught us that no information is safe. To expect that any system is entirely secure and ever will be is pure egotism.
Some where around 1998?
I forgot to mention storage. We're planning on about 1GB of disk per project. Because we live on AWS, we get quick access to all of Amazon's storage services as well.
I would have bought it in a heart beat for $2k-$5k. But 50k is really out of my league. Have you considered selling licenses instead. I don't care if I am the only one who owns the code. You might get more sales as well that way.
Coinbase Partners With BitMonet to Offer In-App Bitcoin Payments
I agree. However the people paying me would rather I spent my time solving their problems.
Who said anything about writing a whole language? Just know the language you're writing in well enough that you can build something better without a framework than you can with.
Some really interesting articles in here this week. Enjoy :)
I think this is a wonderful idea --- companies selling in-house tech they no longer need or use. I work in corporate IT ( finance) and we have mountains of internal apps that we built and deprecated over the years. I wish some forward thinking CIO's would realize the value of stuff we throw away !
Is the idea that i have an appointment, and the doctor / AI come to a diagnosis?

Or that an AI runs through a doctor surgery's collection of patient medical records and highlights patients that probably would benefit from an intervention?
We didn't consider anything else really, we just copied what Justin Kan did.

(Also yeah, Greg Morrisett is awesome, I got a lot out of that class as well.)
It was initially 10 NES games, and they followed it up with 10 GBA games a couple months later. Nothing in black and white, but I think the oldest was Super Mario Bros, which was admittedly about 25 years old at that point.
So that includes people who have me in their circles or the ones I have in my circle?
Coinbase Android SDK - Accept Bitcoin In Your Android Apps
dupe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7032253

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7032219
You should coin a new "law". Something to do with beard and tech. Give the law a cool name too.

Also, I ALWAYS comment on peoples beards. They love it.
India's election regulator drops plan to partner Google after spying fears
Yeah, I considered it. We even had an offer. We just can't afford the support/maintenance burden, it's too big of a distraction from what we want to do with our lives.

(Any entrepreneur with the cash is, of course, welcome to purchase it and resell the licenses yourself! You'll need to be quite tech savvy to maintain it though. I'd spend my integration week however you want, including teaching you everything about how the code works.)
XSLT gets a bad rap, I guess because it is verbose and rather special-purpose. I do wish that version 2 were more widely deployed.

But hey, XSLT 1.0 runs in like, every browser in the world, and is practically designed for emitting DOM. I wonder why it's not used more often.
The Income Inequality Implications of Job Automation
> There’s no app store for your browser-based client with anything like the scale and size and polish of those for mobile apps.

I think google (or other search engines) are the open webs equivalent of an "app store"
Here is a case, I left Poland when I was four. Went back in my twenties and met an old neighbor kid now all grown-up. There I saw a wall and I told him how I remembered I had eaten a bug there and grossed-out a bunch of the kids. He was astonished that I remembered it, he remembered it too cause he was in grade school at the time and it was really gross to him what I had done. I asked my family later and they had no idea I had done that.
what are you doing to make remittance easy? As an immigrant (Sierra Leone), my family regularly sends remittance and for years have felt scammed by Western union. Are you going to make it significantly cheaper? Paying $20 to send $100 is a scam. Is this possible without significant fund raising?
I'm curious if you guys did consider SignalR. Did you? If yes, yeah not use it?
python is a deliberately-straightforward language. i don't see how anyone couldn't become highly proficient in it after writing one or two scripts
This is where investors find their news
Then I'm a racist. Sue me.
And that particular style of 'fun driving' should be disallowed. It's not even allowed on race tracks; but there are other kinds of fun driving that I don't think should be stopped.

You're associating the two more closely than I am. Then again, I have a lot of fun driving many of the roads that I drive on and the fun that I have doesn't include the things I mentioned in my negatives list.
> Before we started coding, we needed to estimate an upper-bound on our AWS costs with order-of-magnitude accuracy. Basically: “Is there a sustainable business model behind this idea?”

this makes no sense to me. why is amazon the only place you can host this stuff?

on aws you can hit $50-100k/month VERY easily, for infrastructure that would cost $10-20k/month somewhere else.

in other words - that's the difference between a viable business or not. straight into amazon's pockets.
If you take a look at the screenshot, you can see that it's tunable: http://cdn1.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2014/01/...

"Anyone on Google+", "Extended Circles", "Circles", and "No One".
I don't understand the forum thread. Can someone please explain it in layman terms?
Actually, the study guide is pretty much the right length for the book.

They are all useful points, but the book itself beats the horse until it is very thoroughly dead.
Maybe this will help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ACountry_code_top-level_d...

Summarizing, we might not have qualified for a two-letter domain because we are not an independent country.
Contact me privately, it's a distraction from this thread, but I'm happy to talk about it.
How We Estimated Our AWS Costs Before Shipping Any Code
What if owners of a company don't live or work in the same state as each other? What if they don't even live in the US?
Another thing that lowers course completion rates, unmentioned yet, is that most of Udacity's classes are on the challenging side of college courses. They are mostly STEM classes and many equivalent to upper division courses as well. So it isn't surprising the NPR article reports only the most studious SJSU students benefited. The vast majority of SJSU students, and students from other colleges as well, would find these courses challenging also, with or without in-person support.

I don't think that's an insurmountable problem, with the course notes being better designed and readily available (as compared to a disinterested professor + textbook). On the other side, many students don't bother talking to their professors and TAs anyway.
Sorry, I got Xamarin confused with Titanium, which was a pretty bad experience for me for the week that I tried it. If I tried to do anything fancy, it was completely useless.

Also any time you are using 3rd party tools like Titanium / Xamarin to develop these apps it comes with gotchas / limitations that may not even be worth it in the end (it seems like Xamarin has less gotchas). The main issue is that you still have to do UI twice in the end (iOS & Android), and one more time for web.
IT’S ALIVE ARTIFICIAL-LIFE WORM WIGGLES ON ITS OWN
As someone who has been writing an ebook for over a year, I've found that people are pretty appreciative when you say "Hey, I need some time off due to burnout on this book."

I don't sell through LeanPub, though.
On top of that, their new knowledge of said framework is not transferrable to their next job.

If someone works on a popular framework, it makes it easier to get the next job.
The decline of r/programming with regard to quality of links and discussions was probably inevitable.