skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree completely with ghshepard. Presuming it's not some sort of consumer play, if one of the founders is not good at sales, you'd sure as hell better (1) learn to sell and/or (2) bring in sales talent. Preferably #1 before #2. The absolute worst mistake you can make is focusing on a fancy technology without bringing in dollars.

Look at the way a typical company runs. They spend huge sums of money on third-rate products, many of which have a superior alternative available. Why didn't they buy the better product? Why do vendors with clearly inferior products get the sales dollars that a vendor with a better product doesn't? It's because the vendor with a good sales team gets the product to the customer, and the fact is that a mind-blowing offering will not get bought unless there's some guy getting that customer to buy that product. If you can combine a fantastic product with a great sales team, watch out. But if you've got a great product but aren't selling early, don't look for a technical solution out of a business problem.
Hate to be a pedant, but the important thing is not intelligence that exceeds humans, but intelligence that can scale arbitrarily.
Wow! This is a fantastic service. I can't believe it's free. The 15GB alone should cost me at least 5$ a month. I hope they keep it free and look for more distribution deals ala the Opera browser model. They can make a ton of money. They're well financed (Benchmark Capital) so they actually have a chance to pull this off.
What’s The Deadly Mistake To Avoid When You Start A Internet Business?
So, you are planning to start a internet business? Really, you just need to be wary of few common mistakes that most people make. Once these mistakes are avoided, your chances of succeeding are greatly multiplied for your online homebased business… What’s the number one motivation crushing mistake when you start a web business?
"Although I think he goes a bit overboard in some cases (robotic actors?)"

Not at all overboard - there are numerous successful animated movies. Granted they still use humans to provide the voices but I find it plausible that artificial speech could be constructed.
yeah..

some more details (if you want to know):

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aSDx...
Font in your face
good overview/background around the @font-face debates
You totally miss the biggest problem lionhearted pointed out: through no fault of the father, if the mother decides she wants a divorce the legal system will pretty much by default strip the father of his children and hand them over to the mother. Regardless of any other circumstances.

That's the main reason why men should not get married and have kids in the USA.
Good overview/background around the @font-face debates.
The opposite problem of the one he had in high school.
Artificial Addition
The Entrepreneur
This is a documentary about serial entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin, who introduced the Subaru and the Yugo the US.
Wow, the second team will be gutted!
sure you can, just register as Gill Bates
I, for one, do not start a company these days without a sales person onboard, and it better be a great one. Sale of product rarely happens by itself, you need someone who is passionate about getting those deals set up.

The hard part is finding a sales person who also truly believes in your product and gels with the team. I have worked with some awful sales people, who even when they sell can be terrible for your company (often selling the wrong thing). The first sales person in your organisation, I believe, should not be paid commission, but be paid just like the rest of the founders and have a long term interest in the company.
Is there any rolling-extension each time a new top submission arrives -- like in some auctions -- or is the deadline firm at X days after the first +10% entry?
Follow on from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=709664
> The more serious problem may be that the sun doesn't shine 24 hours a day.

Can someone in the Eastern hemisphere confirm this? ;-)
How do these compare to the MARDAN and Apollo Guidance Computers?
Well, you're right about it being formal sounding because almost no one uses anything but the common name, 英國. And even in your example, the Eng part of England is still in there and not in the English. So that's my point--in English, the trend has been to use UK, a neutral term that does not contain anything about England or Britain, which there are groups of people that feel very strongly against. But in Chinese, there is this linguistic lag (maybe forever), and England is still a part of the common name for the UK.

In Taiwan, there's a (I find) humorous translation of 蔣中正 as Chiang Kai-shek. It's as if they knew they'd be laughed at if they tried to translate the Generalissimo's name as Fair and Upright Jiang.

Also the competing translations of Tibet as 西藏 (a Qing term that locates Tibet as the West, or in other words, in relation to its location relative to China) and the newer term 圖博, which is much closer to Tibetan (and the English).

Anyways, not even really disagreeing with your original point to call Peking Beijing, but linguistic lag is actually a quite common phenomenon, and while you notice it in this case, there are many cases where things aren't really consistent, but you may not have noticed.
you should follow me on Plurk then (is that better?) hehehe (hey it's a new cognitive hack!)
There is salvation. It is called Customer Development. It is a methodology described in this book: http://www.cafepress.com/kandsranch

It will save your startup. And no, I don't get a dime from your click but yes, I am going to buy 10 copies right now so I can have 3 in my bag to sell at cost to anyone that asks, wherever I go.
no. it's over tomorrow morning at ~11:30am PST... there are a few complications that could cause an extension, but they're not likely.
Most startups fail because they fail to connect with a market for their product. If you don't need salespeople to connect with your market - good for you!
Now all they have to do is monetize before they become "the next myspace."
If anyone finds an unpatched flaw and uses it to exploit some servers, then it doesn't matter who takes care of the servers. It doesn't matter if it's ptacek or a random admin. It's a new, unknown problem (if the claim about a 0day is real).

matasano isn't a firewall or antivirus company, their main business is code auditing and penetration testing. they are paid to find bugs in their customers' code before the "bad guys" do to minimize the risk of 0-day vulnerabilities.

i know it's not practical for them to audit every line of code in every piece of software that their web server runs, but this type of attack looks much worse for this type of company than it probably would for any other.

They didn't get to any sensitive information (or didn't publish it). They also didn't get into any personal system, so I doubt there was any real harm done.

in the output posted on the site, one user has a bunch of zip files in his home directory with "playbook" in the name (playbook is their firewall revision control product). some "real harm" could come from this attacker distributing the source code to their product, if that is indeed what was in those files.
Do remember that Reuters is in the information dissemination business. They do have multiple sources of revenue, and don't have to rely on direct revenues from the news business.

http://thomsonreuters.com/about/

A good example is ThomsonReuters have some excellent trading platforms that are actually market leaders in their respective asset classes.
Here's the employee list: http://www.linkedin.com/search?search=&company=Mozilla+C...

Lots of managers, QA people, marketing people, etc.
I think the author of the original article was trying to gauge the effectiveness of a call to action over an assumption to action.

No, we don't want to put the "click here" links at the end of everything, but that MAY just be what people need when it comes to Twitter.

"Click here" is familiar, it means there's more to see and do, and something isn't just going to start happening magically.

Saying "follow my twitter" to a general audience sounds absolutely creepy. What the hell does that even mean? I had a lady once ask what "following my twitter" meant, because she wasn't sure what my "twitter" was. Seriously, 10 years ago, had you asked a random woman to follow your Twitter around, you'd get slapped first, and there would be no asking questions later.

NOTE: I ALWAYS say "follow me on twitter" or "follow me on twitter.com" now - geezers like it when you add .com because it reminds them of the only 3 years of their life they actually made money in the stock market.

Long story short, don't get bent over backwards because you think this person is a follower-whore. This is Hacker News, and the author of the original post was hacking his twitter tag-line to see what pulled in the most subscribers through that single medium.

It's all for science my friend.
What Keeps Google Up At Night
That's not too surprising. Bihar is India's token redneck state and can be very dangerous, particularly if you find yourself at odds with the highly corrupt bureaucracy.
Great site! I learnt a bit about using the shell in linux about 7 months back (http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/series?name=pQZLHo5Df). The site seems to have gone through a redesign since then.
I am now going through this series: http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/video?name=3160030&fr...
Let me rephrase that for you: "Just use a new workflow that you're not used to--mount your Pre as a USB drive and drag your MP3s on--even though you like and are invested in iTunes."
I am playing conversion optimization whack-a-mole today after getting inspired by a post by Aaron Wall, and have twelve things on the list. If you guys are interested I'll blog them later with before & after shots.

Its mostly meat and potatoes stuff. (Which I somehow managed to ever avoid doing in three years. Amazing what a fresh look helps you discover.)
I was able to set this up on my Windows Vista laptop, I got it to work pretty well. But I can type faster than voice recognition can understand me so I stopped it.
Larry and Sergey, from the very beginning, were convinced that advertising was something very complementary to search and the right way to monetize it.

This surprises me. I had the impression that it took them quite a while to come to this conclusion.
Don't forget Santa Claus, but does this have to do with anything?
I'm in the middle of this still, but it's a pretty interesting look at Malcolm Bricklin, who brought the Subaru and the Yugo to the USA. He's at retirement age, working on his latest venture.
This was actually a good watch. It teaches entrepreneurs a few important lessons:

1- Don't waste time trying to raise capital unless the money is crucial to your survival.

2- Persistence is almost the single most important quality of successful entrepreneurs.

3- A deal is never truly a deal even if it is on paper. Sometimes the guys across the table will make it so difficult you wish you never signed a deal with them.

4- If a partner cannot make his mind in x days, move forward and when they come back, respectfully turned them down.

5- (Repeating 2) Never ever quit. "Be water" and adapt to the market.
Prof. Ben Polak's game theory course at Yale:

http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/game-theory

Prof. Asu Ozdaglar's MIT course on game theory with engineering applications:

http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/sp08/6.254

Game theory for managers (MIT course for MBA's so it's light ;-)

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/15-040S...
Can you describe what's unique to this "Customer Development" method that isn't discussed and taught in the rest of the business literature?
So I'm guessing you mail hard drives around, rather than use the net 'cause somebody might have cracked sshd or OpenSSL? Wait, you don't? Gee.
How to decide how much to reveal about yourself
So basically this will be like a LISP machine, execpt a haskell machine? Because that would be awesome. ...also this entire topic is completely over my head.
Back in the era of the urban blight (which some of you may be old enough to remember), there were (and still are) schools like this in NYC and SF that have served as a beacon to the poor kids there. It's not as if we can't do that here, and it's not as if no small amount of good comes from them.

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

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_High_School_(San_Francis...

Seven Nobel Prize winning alumni for Joel's alma mater. Stuyvesant has two graduates in Obama's cabinet.

Now just imagine what we could do with one of these schools in every major city.
My somewhat limited experience with selling to enterprises leads me to this conclusion:

Sell either to the people at the very top for a high price, or sell to the actual users inside the enterprise for a price (and using a deployment model) they don't need approval for.
Am I the only programmer who chooses color codes by just typing in hex values with the help of a bit of intuition and some trial and error?
I whole-heartedly agree with the last phrase - "Schools don't teach the way children learn." It's amazing how much more learning happens outside of the classroom than in it, especially when you look at how much time you had to spend in the classroom to begin with. Hopefully some educators will take the practical advice in the article, and if the education leaders don't heed it, they might be watching some of this research.

With people exploring different ways to improve education, there are some interesting tidbits in an article published in Science last week that talked about how scientists are creating a new foundation for education by understanding learning's three principles, "learning is computational, social, and supported by brain circuits linking perception and action that connect people to one another."

One of the things they found - "Apparently babies need other people to learn. They take in more information by looking at another person face to face than by looking at that person on a big plasma TV screen."

The Press Release on ScienceDaily.com:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090716141134.ht...
http://www.g.ho.st/home/Screenshots.jsp

The article makes it sound like Dropbox, but from what I can tell, it's more like YouOS, the defunct Y Combinator startup:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouOS
The Science Daily article is extremely inaccurate. Not only are the studies they describe not new, they don't even summarize them correctly.
I like Foursquare - it's fun. But I see problems. For one, I can't see how it'll break out of its niche crowd. One of Twitter's is that it's simple and universally accessible, on the web or on the go with any device. Most of the folks I know outside tech circles wouldn't bother with a game. This presents a chicken/egg problem as the less of my friends are on there, the less inclined I feel to keep using it.

I like the direction they're taking it with getting local businesses involved. There's value in a frequent flyer points system for restaurants, etc. But simply 'checking in' without express ties to transactions probably won't cut it. Further, trying to extract fees from small restaurants and businesses is an expensive feat.

Hope they prove me wrong!
Yeah, surprised me too. The conventional story about Google's founding was that they were going to sell search appliances or license their tech and only got into advertising when nobody would buy. Though I guess I shouldn't be too surprised, since Ron Garrett's blog describes working on AdWords when he joined in early 2000.

Also...w00t, demo days is public now. I participated in that, worked with lacker (also a HackerNews reader). Was a lot of fun.
35 High-Quality Free Fonts For Your Designs
Discussing PHP Frameworks: What, When, Why and Which?
Imagine if all teachers were even 10% as invested in their students as Mr. Kumar - "He coached them for free and paid for their lodging. His mother cooked all their meals. For months, he stoically toiled with their books till 2am every night. On the big day, he dropped them at their test centre, and waited."

Also, this next quote applies to pretty much everyone. The second someone has the confidence that they can do anything and feel empowered, they will do amazing things, which is exactly what you pointed out, Squirrelman.
“Basically, all poor lack confidence even if they have the brains,” Mr Kumar said. “You instil confidence in them, and the world is their oyster.”
You're looking at my comment in the wrong context. Here is what I was responding to:

"Are they though? Openiness would be making their own open platform and letting anyone play. They're fighting for the ability to wedge themselves into a proprietary platform."

That is also "a new workflow that you're not used to." I'm saying that the Pre offers both options.
One thing's for sure: BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos is going to get shitfaced tonight.
CLiki : Benchmarks
This isn't a Haskell machine, but the Reduceron is: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/reduceron/

Fleet is more like a higher-level FPGA machine -- instead of mapping async-default logic designs onto a huge array of look-up-tables, Fleet executes async-default program code on a huge array of 'ships'.

People are routinely baffled trying to use FPGAs because HDLs are NOT CODE -- there's no clean abstraction between the text you write and electricity+wires. Verilog + VHDL are more like CAD tools than they are like programming languages, despite appearances.

Fleet may be a deeply weird computer architecture, but it's a lot more palatable than using FPGAs for software guys.
Trying to hit the Ballmer Peak.
BK/PC submitted their last RMSE 2009-07-25 15:53:34, three hours before The Ensemble. If they can hit the Ballmer Peak or otherwise beat the Ensemble RMSE before tomorrow morning, it should be very interesting.
Methods and Classes, the same?
If BPC didnt expect this to happen they deserve to lose. They should have expected a last minute submission and have one for themselves also.
But you've ignored decades of economists explaining how to do social programs in an efficient way. For example, Milton Friedman's Negative Income Tax would take the place minimum wages and food stamps with none of the administrative overhead or perverse incentives (i.e. the "welfare trap," where earning an extra dollar per day results in losing more than a dollar per day in benefits, thus discouraging career advancement).

And wrt sulpur dioxide, economists since Pigou have been arguing not for cap-and-trade, but for pollution taxes to right externalities. And if you go beyond Pigou, you don't find cap-and-trade, but Coase, who argues that if you structure the system properly, you don't even need intervention to right externalities, the actors will find an efficient arrangement on their own. Even beside this, Libertarians have no principled opposition to righting negative externalities: it's one of the few proper roles of government.

In the end, cap-and-trade is preferred not because it's the most effective, but because it's the most politically expedient. Pollution/Source fuels taxes are cheaper to administer, have better incentives for bureacrats to be faithful, and achieve the same ends. They're better and economists will tell you so. The only reason cap-and-trade is the solution-du-jour is because it doesn't include the word "tax" in it. This is why conservatives are identifying it (correctly) as "Tax-and-trade."

You're not arguing against libertarians, you're arguing against the decades of economists you (I'm sorry to say) don't seem to know.
The name "Designer Decimal" gave me a fun idea for a quick frolic with perl's Math::BigFloat.

Take my username, rwolf, for example. Using a leading 1., ASCII characters padded to 3 digits, and a terminating character of 004 (EOT), it could be written as the fraction 1.114119111108102004.

The fun part is finding a fraction approximate of this number, or a "Designer Fraction". Some silly perl coding (http://pastebin.com/m1d0dcd39) later, I find 663486451 / 595525599 = 1.114119111108102004...

Now how to fit this fraction onto my business cards...
That's a very interesting set of postings, be sure to check out the rest.
Anyone know why blending seems to work so well?
the list he gives is very very short, here is a longer one:

http://www.phpframeworks.com/
The Ensemble is actually a meta-team of most of the teams that didn't participate in BPC, and I'm hearing that BPC had lately tried to get some other teams to join, so they were kinda expecting that (but I don't think they will be able to fire back).
Bottom line, I think that the most massive open data set out there (next to a competition) has really helped the research to move on, but I don't see the point in 5 or 10 teams joining forces to improve the results for a tiny percentage and win the prize.
On the other hand, maybe this is actually the right thing, for all these teams that have struggled for two years to be in the top-15 to receive the prize...
It's a standard ml technique that's been shown to work well, although no ones shown a proof of this. This is related to the observation "more data beats better models." This does seem to have it's limits - at some point you do need better features before you can expect your data to pay off.
Great movie. It is so sad to watch the old man bumble with the Chinese, though. He is incredibly clueless about how they do business. The Chinese take their time, and even a successful deal with the Chinese rarely results in a signed contract.

I haven't finished it yet, but the only thing that could possibly save him with the Chinese is his age.
Only because each individual algorithm is slightly overfit. Blending it all together keeps the good predictive part and reduces the overfit noise.
I think bubbles are bad news all around.

Lots of money gets thrown at projects that are doomed to fail. They give the industry a bad name.

They are a typical example of the pendulum in action, it never stops in the middle, it always swings through to one side or the other. Either everybody and their dog seems to be able to get funding or nobody. There is never a long time when investors seem to have a cool head and a steady hand.
I'm up to part 6, and this documentary is awesome. The only problem I have with it is that any of the North Korean citizens depicted have probably been sent to "re-education" camps for letting this filming happen. The makers of the film have essentially killed anybody they interacted with them.
my thoughts gruseom. I remember writing about the morris worm in more detail than this back about 8months ago ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350477 One point I did find interesting that may explain why rtm wasn't interviewed:

Reading through these articles with the quaint descriptions of legal authority you sense the outrage and hysteria of a single user disrupting 6000 computers seemingly at will.

Significantly, the Morris case may represent a
turning point in how society views its computer
wizards. Until the early 1980's, those who broke
into computer systems were widely admired, at
least if movies and novels are any indication,
for their combination of daring and technical
skill. Markoff, NYT, From Hacker to Symbol,
January 24, 1990.

Reading the John Markoff article, 'From Hacker to Symbol', writing at the time of sentencing, I found one legacy that I didn't previously know of - the point in time where term "hacker" became demonised in the press.
I'm all for reason #4, the rest of them can be fixed, especially if you are funded to some extent.

But timing really is everything and if your timing is off the rest does not matter.
Any links for those outside of the US?
Shouldn't a new result above 10 pct reset the clock with a new one month period ?
Care to elaborate? They didn't cite a bunch of studies in Science Daily (but I'd assume in the article published in Science they would), and the article is taken directly from the University of Washington's press release.

http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=50883