skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's not like Apple is a threat to Microsoft in the operating system market.

Apple's the primary threat to Microsoft in the operating systems department. Nothing else comes close.
The model is parallel SIMD, so in other words, multiple banks of cores, within each bank all the cores are doing the same thing at the same time.

A GPU won't help with our current programming model, maybe there is room for a new model then ?

That won't happen overnight, but one thing is for sure, if you want to get more performance than what your applications are giving you today then you'd better learn how to code for massively parallel systems.
Unfortunately, I have tried to learn to sing (twice) and failed. Thus I am limited to writing song lyrics. One day I will fulfill my life long dream of writing the lyrics for a country music hit song.

If you enjoyed that, you might enjoy this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156905
Twitter is Down
Twitter is down and is having a major outage. May be Ruby finally failed to scale .. even Scala couldnt help it take a few more breadths ? ..!
Well, lately I have been working on a "next-gen" social news website. I have done a lot of research over the last year or so into what is wrong with social news and what can be done about it.

I started out saying to myself "I wish Reddit had this, or I wish Digg could do this... I wish, I wish, I wish" until I decided that I would fix it myself.
"Digg is like so last year"

If there are two things I can't live without in my life it's my RSS reader and my social news sites (Reddit primarily, but only because it uses direct links in Google Reader.I used to love the community as well but it seems to have gone down hill lately (IMHO), I rarely ever visit the actual site anymore.)

So, like I said I started doing research, reading what other thought about social news and its strengths and weaknesses and I set out to try and fix it as well as implementing a lot of my own unique ideas as well. I'm still working on it it's a constant work in progress I always getting new ideas.

Since I'm not a programmer, and i'm pretty good with Photoshop I decided to do a pretty detailed mockup of what I want my site to look like, how I want it to behave and what features I want in hopes that I can find a hacker or someone with some skills that would be willing help me take my ideas further. One of my biggest problems is I don't have someone to chat with to improve on my ideas or to offer their own to make a good idea really kick ass.

Anyhow, if anyone is interested in this kinda thing send me an email and maybe we can get these YC guys to give us some loot! :D
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I'm not sure about that. I think thinks like the WSJ will suffer greatly but his big audience, the Fox News crowd, will pay to get that slop they call news. The Fox News/Noecon relationship is a lifestyle now, not just a political idea. I can see a lot of those people paying for the one news source that they have based their reality on.
Fractal Explorer in Javascript
yep. You can register here:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_opencl.html

I think that's just their way of making sure they don't lose track of where their possibly still very buggy software goes so that they can get the feedback and tell their users when it's time to upgrade.

The differences with CUDA are so small though that it is fine to develop for CUDA now and upgrade to OpenCL when they release it publicly.
Houston, We Don’t Have A Problem
Maybe it's just me, but I sometimes wonder why web advertising isn't better at supporting services. Print advertising is really lame. It just sits there on the page - no way to interact, no way for it to have animation or video, no way for it to be targeted toward the user's preferences. And yet those dumb ads have done well. Heck, web ads give the user an instant way to click through and act on the ad! Is it just that marketing people are slow on the uptake? Maybe (since there are no metrics) they believe that print ads are more effective than they are.

The problem with charging for news is that people on the web aren't going to be single source like they would with newspapers. It's unlikely that someone is going to say "I'm content with only one news website" and get a subscription to that single site. Rather, they want to pick and choose the articles they like from many sites. And so subscription pricing doesn't really work because if you charge $5/mo, news might be worth that to me, but I'm not going to pay that multiple times to multiple sites that I want to pick and choose from.

And if you decide to charge per article, well, how am I supposed to know if an article is any good before reading it? And once I've read it, I won't want to pay for it because I already have the information. That contrasts to a song heard on the radio that I might want to listen to many times.

And the web makes it easy for anyone to publish and to a wide audience. I doubt that you're going to get all your competitors to charge alongside you.

I think that the big issue is probably that radio/tv/print ads have been overestimated in their effectiveness or that marketing people don't understand the effectiveness of web ads. With metrics on how many clicks an ad got, one could simply surmise that only that number of people were affected by the ad. But those other ads effectively have a click rate of 0 since clicking isn't possible and yet it's assumed that they're effective. And with that miscalculation, they're only willing to pay small amounts for the ads.
Thanks envitar, I had to update it some (I should read my own older blog posts more often). My friend and likely future business partner Vladimir pointed out a vital missing component, a Venture Fund Manager. Updating the post now.
I remember Microsoft being given rights to use many of Apple's software innovations in this exchange: Quicktime on Windows, Apple True Type fonts for Windows, and the ability to span the display across multiple monitors was introduced in Windows 98.
TechCrunch now 10%+ of TechMeme Stories..
Actually, I think the opposite is true. People reading the WSJ find the news contained there within valuable enough to pay for it. People reading Fox News just need something to make them angry, of which there are hundreds if not thousands of acceptable sites ready and willing to to provide sufficient rage material for free.
Will Twitter go out again after service is restored from everyone complaining about the downtime?
its going to be a productive afternoon without twitter.
1) Nokia cell phone is up for bids. Winning bid will be 1000 points.

2) I want to buy it. You don't.

3) The Nokia cell phone is worth $90 to me. It's worth $60 to you.

4) You have 1000 credits, from selling random stuff.

5) I could either buy $100 of credits and receive 1000 points, or I could give you $60 and receive 1000 points, making your life more convenient (you don't have to buy the phone, and then ebay it (credits->item->ebay->dollars ==> credits->dollars)

6) The best way to get 1000 points off of you is to have me PayPal you $60, and then for me to create an auction for some obscure useless good, and have you bid 1000 points for it. This strategy would require you to have a confederate to bid 999 points, although this is trivial if a black market is already established.

7) Alternatively, Listia could price its currency near to its sell price. This makes it unappealing to execute laundering schemes for small margins.
The Secret History of Silicon Valley Part VIII: The Rise of Entrepreneurship
Using Video Backgrounds To Create An Inexpensive Video Production
Something about sketch pads, what I use as well, doesn't the thick coarse pages just make a world of difference.
The only issue I see is the cost of the tablet...
I believe thats it - upload and share data.

I think the smarts comes in comparing multiple data sets, over time.
God, that brings back memories of administrating Solaris boxes in high school. Once you reboot a primary web server twice, you never do it again.
My main source of user generated feeds/bookmarks is this page right here.
Medical Journal
Link? Not that it couldn't be true, but I suspect you sell a lot more at $10 than $40 even if its not a discount.
I'm intimately familiar with the programming model that GPUs use. The difficulty is that only a limited subset of our problems are amenable to it. I think we need something a little less special-purpose than a GPU to be more widely applicable.

Certainly, the computing world is going parallel. My personal belief is that what we end up with will be a heterogeneous chip with some parts good at massively parallel computations, and some good at sequential computations.

But I think GPUs themselves represent a stop-gap; the communication cost of transferring data off the motherboard to the card is just too high for fine-grained parallelism. Once we have that sort of architecture on-chip the game changes. Intel's Larabee and AMD's Fusion promise to do this. The Cell was close, but making the vector processors completely divorced from the normal memory hierarchy makes programming for them much more difficult. (Although it does give me many research opportunities.)
On a system with multiple administrators sudo provides an audit trail.
Thanks, that does put it in perspective. I liked this part:

How would we remember the war if we had been invaded and suffered the equivalent of one 9/11 per day, every day on average, from 1941 to 1945? This is what happened to our Asian Allies.
Why does one side have to "win"? I think it was quite obviously mutually beneficial.

Microsoft got out of some potentially costly lawsuits extremely cheaply and got some additional defence for the then-upcoming antitrust litigation. Apple got the immediate investment they desperately needed on favourable terms, they were able to stop spending money on expensive litigation, and they got guarantees over the software they wanted. Both sides also got each others patents, which was probably favourable for both companies as it allowed to resolve any potential remaining patent issues and allow interoperability.
Apple demonstrates the need for Net neutrality -- now
New Design Blogs
identi.ca is up
Firebombing doesn't carry with it the "fear of the unknown" factor that nukes do.

I can build myself a firebomb if I want to, what's scary about that? But nukes, that requires, like, science and einstein and stuff.

Similarly, no one fears "natural" agriculture ("fertilize with cow shit? No way that could spread disease or cause pollution") but everyone is afraid of GMO and chemical agriculture.
After all, I highly doubt the privacy watchdogs would agree to bestbuy passing that information (especially the cc data) up the chain to the supplier.

Why not? Doesn't seem to be any different than buying and activating an iPhone at an Apple store. AT&T gets all of your billing information from Apple. If anything, it seems likely that Best Buy could do much tighter integration without anyone getting concerned.
The app store whining is limited to a very small online bubble of developer websites.

People crowding the Apple stores to buy the latest iPhone/iPod/etc don't know or care. I'd be absolutely amazed if any of the constant appstore whining has any effect on sales.
> "What are you doing now?"

We don't need to know this. We (this social media culture/generation) spend more time finding out what other people are doing than actually doing anything. It doesn't matter what your friends or your brother or your aunt did today or last night or last month even.
A comparison of features & code sample as well as some basic benchmarks would have been more helpful.
Not if I keep checking it every two minutes to see if it's back up.

(I don't have a problem - I can quit any time I want!)
Oh, I'm sure it was mutually beneficial at the time (otherwise the deal wouldn't have gone through), it's just that it seemed to me that Apple was not in a position to dictate terms. GGP makes an excellent point by showing how strong Apples negotiation position really was.
Exactly. The last audience you want to target with a for-pay news site is the Fox News audience.
Some papers from a security class at my school, varying levels of difficulty, but they all start from pretty low assumed knowledge if you're careful:

http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~rob/teaching/cse509-sp09/beyondsma...
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~rob/teaching/cse509-sp09/formatstr...
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~rob/teaching/cse509-sp09/asrandom....
WSJ charges for articles, seems to be working ok for them. Same with the New Yorker and IIRC Financial Times(?). I wouldn't be quick to dismiss this option.

As for the Google Times option, I think it'll bring about more problems than solutions. You don't build a quality newspaper by "hiring a bunch of reporters". There's a lot of accumulated knowledge in places like the NYT or WSJ. What we see from the web - from leading "reporters" investing in the field they're supposedly covering to opinion pieces by Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey - is far from encouraging.
http://identi.ca/figital
What I Don't Get About Google Wave
DARPA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR): Topics
Open Source: many advantages beyond price
Is there a statistic on how many people use identi.ca? I wonder if it's reliability is due to better design or simply having less users.
Web citizens trying to kill Internet Explorer 6
Follow Friday should be followed by Scalpel Saturday. Cut away all the people whose updates you really don't care about and never read. Make it a 1-1 thing: Don't follow anyone new without purging someone. It really makes Twitter much more enjoyable and useful.
There's a lot of value in being a central storehouse for a LOT of data, in my opinion. Combine that with tools to easily do the comparisons (correlations, regressions, etc.) between different sets of data then adds a huge amount of value to a lot of people. Business/financial types in particular...

I admit to being biased, though; I know the founders and they're all really great and wicked smart guys. :)
It sounds like you have an interesting work environment.

I agree that GPUs are a stopgap, but they're a pretty interesting one.

I've had all kinds of co processors over the years, small clusters, DSP daughter boards, transputers and so on. Nothing to date comes even close to the power of the GPU boards that you can buy right now.

The comms cost is indeed where the problems lie, but that can go two ways:

1) a more formalized form of high speed interconnect (such as infiniband directly on the GPU card)

2) a port of a general purpose OS to a GPU.

Some people are already working on (2), (1) is probably not in the cards unless somebody orders a very large number of boards.

There are motherboards that will hold 4 or even 6 PCI express cards too.

I don't have any experience with the cell architecture, I'll go do some reading, it sounded interesting enough when it was released but I never got around to study it. More reading to do I guess :)
I'm not sure its fear of the unknown as much as fear of the ease. A split second decision can result in the death of humanity.
nope, he set his account so that whenever someone follows him, he follows them too.

that's how he got so much spam. bots started following him.
Twitter traffic levels as a sawtooth function generator. Hm. Wonder what kind of news it would take to produce a sine-wave ?
What would be cool is if you could give them a link to a data set online and they would take care of tracking it's changes over time. They could poll the data every day or hour and take care of the data storage and overhead involved with all that. Might add more value to the time-series graphs.
>People reading the WSJ find the news contained there within valuable enough to pay for it.

I would disagree. I think that the people who would pay for the WSJ are already paying for it. I don't see why people who aren't paying for it now would start paying for it when there are so many other free news sites out there. Maybe they could hook up some subscribers with devices like Kindle, but I think the people who are currently browsing it for free will not see the value in paying for it. Just a thought.

>People reading Fox News just need something to make them angry, of which there are hundreds if not thousands of acceptable sites ready and willing to to provide sufficient rage material for free.

Good point. I don't know the level of dedication to Fox people like this have. Maybe they won't pay for it, maybe they'll go to who ever screams about gays and socialism the loudest.

Back to my original point, is there really that much information the WSJ has that other organizations don't? Couldn't your second argument apply to directly to counter your first?
Soon it will be down because of all the twitter whining inside identi.ca
What news do I pay for? I subscribe to the Economist, New Scientist and The Guardian Weekly. All are weekly niche magazines (one in a newspaper format) and two of them give access to all their archives when you have a paper subscription (Economist and New Scientist).

What news will I pay for in the future? If every newspaper website became a walled garden (unlikely), then I would probably go to the BBC for the headlines and make do with the weekly news I get from what I mentioned earlier, as well as specialist "news" sites, such as Hacker News, Slashdot etc. There is actually very little news which I am interested in "as it happens". Most of it I want with an accompanying analysis, which is why I subscribe to the weeklies.

What do I think the future will look like? Lots of specialist outfits like Hacker News, Arstechnica, profitable walled guardens like the Economist and New Scientist and free public sites: BBC, NPR and a ton of "free" (advertising powered) sites with marginal to no journalist staff. Maybe. There is most likely a business model or two in there somewhere which we haven't figured out yet which will surprise us all.

Paying for anything which Murdoch supplies? Hardly likely (unless he owns one of the above :). I didn't do before and I am not doing it now. Of course, I am not Joe Public.
no one uses that
From the Wikipedia article[1]:

"...the only person deserving credit for saving Kyoto from destruction is Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War at the time, who had known and admired Kyoto ever since his honeymoon there several decades earlier."

As you can see these people were playing games, its sad, a humanity failure.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_an...
Downvoting is pointless. It encourages mass retribution against unpopular but valid topics.

As someone else said, if a topic is broken -- spam, stupid or otherwise useless -- it should be flagged appropriately. My two cents, or probably about six cents worth 1 cent in 1987 values.
Whoa, the fonts on that blog make my head asplode.
I think that there are lots of unanswered questions about 9/11. 9/11 was used to start war. And so it is described, Hiroshima was used to end war. Mayhaps, in 55 years the pictures of 9/11 will be different. Besides seeing the destruction on the ground, the real perspective for me is seeing Japanese people with the burns from the A-bomb, and in 2001 seeing New Yorkers looking for lost friends and family. Anyways, I feel grief.
And disable root login from ssh.
Things are changing extremely rapidly.

Researchers (especially in parallel computing) are already figuring out how to port all sorts of algorithms over to the GPU -- and not just scientific or graphics code -- we're talking general purpose algorithms like sorting, ranking, cryptography, networking, database operations, etc:

http://gpgpu.org/2009/04/13/efficient-acceleration-of-asymme...

http://gpgpu.org/2009/04/28/fast-and-scalable-list-ranking-o...

http://gpgpu.org/2008/12/11/wait-free-programming-for-genera...

http://gpgpu.org/2008/10/26/gnort-high-performance-network-i...

http://gpgpu.org/2008/05/25/a-fast-similarity-join-algorithm...

The biggest obstacle to preventing widespread adoption of GPGPU techniques today is that things are still in so much flux that mature, stable APIs have not yet emerged. There is fierce competition between Intel (Larrabee), Apple/AMD (Grand Central/OpenCL), and NVIDIA (CUDA) to get their respective APIs to be the dominant ones, and no one's yet come up with a mature wrapper API that can target any of them.

This is in large part because the hardware itself is still in flux, morphing away from the graphics-specific pipeline of 10 years ago and into a general purpose SIMD architecture. This has meant a change in the kinds of operations allowed on the GPU. For example, branches used to be a big no-no in graphics hardware: the performance hit caused by a branch was disastrous on a massively-multicore system. However, all hardware makers are now adding supporting for branches, because it's almost impossible to port a lot of CPU algorithms without them.

In any case, I'm confident that within a year or two, things will have settled down somewhat, at which point there's going to be a mad dash by developers to start using GPUs (probably systems- and library-level developers rather than application-programmers).
"Directed Edge truly believes that we’re about to see a shift on the web away from search and towards recommendations."

The difference is somewhat arbitrary when you think about it. When I Google, I'm asking it to recommend me stuff related to what I'm looking for. Google is nothing but the world's best recommendation engine.

There are about 1,000 sites that could use good recommendation technology to enhance their profits though, so I like this company's monetization chances. Easy elevator pitch too: recommendations as a service.
Gotta love the T-shirt...
Are there any objective measurement of the quality of recommendations across various recommendation systems?
It's very easy to quit, I already quit hundreds of times before
So what's happening with Hiroshima today? Is it completely livable? If so why can people live there and not near Chernobyl? I'm very confused about radiation effects.
Sorry that was spam (although joke spam). I've been clicking around on identi.ca for 10 minutes ... the navigation is really clunky ... I'd think delicious could handle the traffic and keep users if twitter went down (it's almost the same thing but with more features).
Great point. However, as a musician, there seems to be some catch 22 here. There are a lot of drug addicts in the world, but there was only one John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, etc... so clearly doing drugs isn't a passport to creativity. However, it is undeniable that really creative people seem to flock to drugs and use them as a tool. So you can't say the drugs are responsible but you can't say they aren't responsible either.
Knowing vi means that on any machine you have the ability to edit text... not a bad trade-off, if you ask me. It's also a nice break if you're tired of a Macintosh or Vista UAC asking you every ten seconds if you really want to do what you just tried to do.
Why wouldn't they? I don't think Microsoft could have ever hoped for a better long term outcome. Microsoft made about $60B in revenues last year. Apple made a little more than half that and, for the most part, is still hardly a threat to Microsoft. Sure, they get their asses kicked in the portable music player and song download markets, but it's not really their core business. I think Microsoft's entries there are more about establishing fence posts than taking over a market.
FTA (David Lee Roth): I went into full Shakespearean "What is this before me?" . . . you know, with the skull in one hand . . .

"What is this before me?" is from Macbeth ("dagger of the mind"). The "skull in one hand" is from Hamlet, in the "alas, poor Yorick" scene. Good scenes each, but they don't fit together.

I bet Roth knows that and just uses that sentence to see if anyone is paying attention ...