skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not sure optimization, cache misses, and interpreter overhead would obviously impact the computational complexity.

"You're assuming that people are not aware that multiplication is not always a constant-time operation."

I made no such assumption. But I suggest people consider the case of vectorization where, all of a sudden, it may matter quite a bit.
Well, I hope that didn't come across as being diametrically opposed to you or anything. I actually quite agree that Apple is profit-driven. Its success has mainly stemmed from learning how to profit on its design.

Apple's most successful products have been those where its best to market, rather than first to market, which by means competition is good for it by definition (most especially at the beginning). Creative Nomad and (soon at least) WinMo are evidence of that (on the other hand, there's Newton, which was way too early to market).

It remains to be seen whether or not their more successful products fall into a MS Word-like malaise (see my other comment) now that they're entrenched in the media player and smart phone spaces. My guess is that the design that has driven them to success in the past will continue to be able to head off competition, but I don't want to sound like a fan boy.

So mainly, I was disagreeing that a monoculture could be in their best interest. It may in certain cases (or other companies), but I don't think it does on average.
We forked our app to give it a try. It's definitely an interesting contender, but in our case, we didn't see any significant performance gains and so it wasn't worth moving away from MySQL. It did help us simplify our MySQL schema a lot though and i wouldn't be surprised if we revisit it when it hits v1. For someone getting started with it, the google group is quite useful [http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user] and the project team was pretty responsive.
Please consider vectorization. Natively, modern processors can multiply several 16-bit integers in the time it takes to multiply one pair of 64-bit integers.
The reasoning given for the traits is probably the second hand version of an off-handed conjecture of a TA in an intro level Anthropology course.

At the same time, if the traits are found in a large part of the population (50%?) the cause for their selection could very easily be related to acquiring food.
You can't refuse to hire someone because they are from Elbonia. (Exceptions of course for citizen requirements.)

Also, they didn't reply to you (I agree, not good) but that was apparently because they hired someone, so, your advice doesn't help in this case.
I am using it to store binary data (images) instead of regular DB, it looks pretty fast so far!
> ...compressed source code size is one of the metrics...

For example -
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=spe...

FAQ http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/faq.php#gzbytes
An open letter to those about to commit EDI
Yeah, I didn't realize that the costs were that steep either. I mean $1,500+ a month is expensive in any country. Perhaps having a better connection to the web will encourage progress and activism with other issues.
Tr.im Goes Open - Bad Move or Marketing Ploy?
Don't confuse traction for value: Why iLike sold for peanuts
Just started using it 2 weeks ago after a month of reviewing various options. So far its been great. Currently, I'm writing a lightweight wrapper util for models in ruby. There is mongomapper, but its an ActiveRecord-like thing and I really want something much simpler.

My current concerns are with tiny little nits in the API. But these are minor and there seems to be a way to do everything I need.
That is very true, they think you have something to hide if you don't give in....been there sadly..
Not really. Google "the mother of all demos".
Not enough examination on monetization strategies on this site (HN) in my opinion. As much as these "get rich on the interweb" bloggers get a bad rap, they can teach us a lot; both overtly and by observation of their methods about how to create financial success.

I'd love to see more like this discussed on Hacker News, in place of a good chunk of the VC capital obsession.

This is real money, this is what startups should be looking to create.
Flash has been on Linux longer than you think:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000815054538/www.macromedia.com...

Player 8 skipped Linux because it was an interim release with a better graphics engine, and was replaced shortly by Player 9 with a faster logic engine. Unfortunately this was during the same time that YouTube first became popular. Historical notes here:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd_archive/archives/2006/08/linux_obs...

"Linux is a second-class citizen for Adobe" Nah. There's not much chance of revenue for Creative Suite porting, but tools like Flex Builder, and runtimes like AIR, all bring Linux to parity... for instance:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd_archive/archives/2008/03/what_airl...
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/05/linux_journal_readers_choi...
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd_archive/archives/2007/10/flex_buil...

The explosive thing is next year's devices -- both mobile and home wallscreens -- which use Linux operating systems in higher proportion than do laptops. Check out openscreenproject.org for context on how important Linux has become at Adobe.
Implementing vectorized hash tables is no joke, so I don't think it is silly to have merely evoked the possibility rather than implementing it. It would have taken me days of work, possibly, and even then, people could have questioned my code. I do have a day job, doing academic research and teaching Computer Science. Maybe one day I will research vectorized hash tables, but the result will not be a mere blog post.
Small size of the community? In comparison to what?
The author claims almost immediately that:
"Taleb’s style is to severely criticize experts and authorities--lots of 'morons', 'idiots', and 'fools' out there--while implying that both he and his reader or listener are exempt from their many biases."

Actually, Taleb continuously laments how amazingly difficult it is to stay objective and analytical, especially when it comes to assessing risk.

Taleb's key point however, was that existing economic models depend on using Gaussians for modeling probability distributions, but that Gaussians are only useful in SOME cases. Real world behaviorally driven events rarely fit into a neat statistical framework, so don't try and force them to, you'll just get bad results out of your model.

I would recommend reading his fooled by randomness book as well (and I may be remembering details from that one as well in this comment).
The example at the end has no relationship to the point of the study. The researchers argue that the interactions inherent on Facebook can lead to greater jealously, despite no infidelity or even modified behavior. The real-word example is one of actual infidelity which was discovered through Facebook. In that case, Facebook is incidental.
I think, maybe it was this article, unfortunately now behind a paywall.

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=E1_TTGNNP...

I think your experience is unusual in that you would have chosen easier classes left to your own devices. Usually, the debates about "tracking" center on the weaker students getting pushed out of the harder classes. What I remember seeing is that the countries with strongest schools (Finland and I think Singapore) just set a given pace for each class, and let students and parents decide what is best for them.
Amazon's affiliate program is nice because you can throw in a link to Amazon in almost any article, and readers will find it useful/relevant. I'm always surprised when I see big sites linking to Amazon, but not including a referral code. They're throwing away thousands of dollars in potential income.
Is this another startup where most of the growth comes from people sharing porn?
Common sense ftw.
did you browse the site? i didn't see any NSFW pictures there.
No-one pays for high-end commercial software like that; you find a salesman near the end of the financial year when he wants to make his numbers and he cuts you a deal on a site license.

With computation tho' time very literally is money. If you can get the job done with commercial product X in the same time with less kit than it would take to do with free product Y, the point at which it becomes worthwhile to do so - if at all - is a no-brainer.
Ask HN: Review my idea: Online transcription service with ASR
I want to make online transcription (speech to text) more accurate, faster, and cheaper at the same time. Users can upload MP3 files of interviews or podcasts or any other voice recording, using a web form or an API. Or they can call a phone number, enter their account number with the dial pad, and dictate their message after the beep.

My first step would be to cut the input into 5-minute chunks and use automatic speech recognition (ASR) to generate a rough outline for the transcription. Then each transcription chunk is posted automatically to Amazon Mechanical Turk for proofreading and editing. Turkers can earn points for good work, and this will qualify them for premium tasks which cost more.

The resulting Audio and Text can be used to improve the acoustic models for the speech recognition engine, so the automatic transcripts get better over time, and less work is required for proofreading and editing. It would be possible to train several classes of speaker-independent acoustic models, e.g. adult female speaker with German accent. Languages other than English are possible too.

This service is very similar to castingwords.com but faster and cheaper because it uses self-improving speech recognition technology.

Please let me know what you think. I'm planning to implement a simple prototype in Seattle during the next few weeks. Want to brainstorm with me over beer or coffee? We could be co-founders if we work well together.
apologies, I'm well aware of that, see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=771049

If there is one thing that I really regret from the life that I have lived so far then it is not having enough time to visit Doug Engelbarts lab at Logitech headquarters when visiting there some years ago.
Also of note: they released a winx64 distributable in the past couple weeks. Previously only linux and mac had 64 bit distributables.
I am considering vectorization.

There is always a maximum number of native values that can be operated on at one time by the processor. The maximum cycle costs are also known. Between the two of those, we have a maximum time spent on the computation, and it is a constant.

Considering the size of numbers during algorithm analysis matters when the numbers are huge - that is, when the numbers are larger than the maximum values that can be represented natively by the processor. When that happens, "numbers" become a data structure unto themselves and must be analyzed as such.
The Internet as we know it is broken. Dozens of accounts per user -- broken! Web services that can't speak to each other -- broken! Our lives and friends scattered over a hundred web sites -- broken! Our identities owned by service providers -- broken!

But be careful not to overdo it with this marketing gibberish. Some geeks can be allergic to it.
I'm sure you've seen it, but just in case you haven't:
http://research.sun.com/projects/lively/
(basically a smalltalk environment in javascript/DOM, rather than the VM in javascript). There's a good tech-talk by Dan Ingalls on it that's worth watching.
Falkenstein has a weird outlook. It seems to mostly involves seeing those things that are well-liked by wallstreet as successes and anything else as failures - Mandlebrot is thus failure since he hasn't sold his models as a product to wallstreet.

In another post on his blog, he describes the financial regulation of the market 1930-1970 as a "failure" based on the rent-extraction which the specialists derived. Never mind the stable growth of the economy during much of that time and the various financial disasters since then.
Ask PG: The right reason to take investor money
In your "Ramen Profitable" essay you wrote:

Ramen profitable means no more than the definition implies. It does not, for example, imply that you're "bootstrapping" the startup—that you're never going to take money from investors. Empirically that doesn't seem to work very well. Few startups succeed without taking investment.

So the question becomes--when is the right time, and what are the right reasons, to take invesment? In what situation is taking investment optimizing for success (for a web startup in particular)?
I wish that we discover it after we have learned to live reasonably well with each other here on Earth.
Related: 'Dilbert' and the anti-meeting spell

http://sperkins.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/dilbert200709011...
For those who don't have time to sit through the whole thing, Zach has some notes on his blog:
http://xach.livejournal.com/225634.html
I did up moderate your post but I'd mention that there are other posts in the thread that deal with the substance of the argument. I don't know if they're "savy" but if you comment on them, it might move them closer to the top.
If you're doing a true startup (meaning a company designed to grow fast, not a consulting company or a niche product company), it's usually a good idea to take investor money. The most basic reason is that it lets you grow faster. Some investors also supply expertise and connections you couldn't buy.

Some times tend to be better to raise money than others. You might not want to raise money when (a) you're in the middle of a big project, or (b) you can't get decent terms.
fucking TechCrunch and all its Twitter-related trash. Fuck you MG Siegler for not switching subjects once in a while :/
Is inheritance in Java overrated ? Needed?
One problem I've seen with people who do really really well in programming competitions is that they can ace the coding part of an interview, even if they're not very good. I've worked with two different people who did really well at programming competitions. One was a good hire, the other wrote lots and lots of code that only kinda worked.
SIGH...where to start?

You're barely contributing to the conversation here. The world isn't lovey-dovey. If you can't take the heat, get outta the kitchen.
Yes, I know that's been claimed.

Do you think that, perhaps, the massive collapse of the financial system in the past year might at least cast a bit of doubt on whether that "awareness" translates effectively to behavior?
I will never get over what a weird name "Daily Booth" is. Booth!?
Right, so doesn't that example go back to my original assertion that error rates differ between languages in reasonably intuitive ways?
Honestly, I don't know. That problem was bad enough that I didn't think further about what other bad (or good) consequences there might be of letting people make applications public.

My gut tells me it would be a bad idea. I sure wouldn't have done it as a founder, and if only lame groups did this, there would be no upside, only downside. But I could be wrong; I haven't thought more about it than what I just wrote.
I'd like to second Beautiful Code
Enjoyable vacation read.
Yeah, booth. Like a photo booth. Not like John Wilkes.
Indeed. Out of curiosity, are you an SF fan? And if so, any favs?
if you meet the founders, ask to see all of their business cards. one of the coolest things i've ever seen.
Science ponders 'zombie attack'
I like how Professor Robert Smith? actually has a question mark in his surname.
Direct link to site without the TechCrunch article: http://dailybooth.com/

In Chrome, the front page has many broken images, the live map page is blank other than a caption at the bottom-left, and viewing the site's blog via the link at the bottom produces an error about an invalid user.
What we need is a nice way for users to allow applications to their data in other applications. A common API and a common UX interaction element. Something like Facebook applications have ... you click a submit button, Facebook asks if you want to allow the application to do this or that, click "Allow" and BAM!
Oh, that would be a very strange interpretation of interpretation. I'm not sure what you mean by "reparsing code at runtime". Given that there isn't really a "compile time" in a perl-like setting, when are you proposing the parsing happens?
One of the ways that people are making money with Amazon is just by the cookies. I believe Amazon is a 7-day tracking cookie, so what this means is that if a user clicks on your affiliate link to Amazon if that user makes a purchase from Amazon in the next 7 days, you get credit. Of course the game is "who helped me last" so it's whoever planted the Amazon cookie on that user's browser most recently will get the affiliate payment.

A potential strategy for monetization if you have a lot of return visitors is to just send them to Amazon as much as possible with your tracking cookie. It doesn't even have to be something like "buy this product I just reviewed here, now". Just a "check this random page out" and some of your users will likely make a purchase within a week without having your cookie overwritten, and boom you get a nice affiliate fee.

There is obviously a broad spectrum of how to send people to Amazon, and how to ethically get credit for that. But fundamentally it just comes down to having a user click through and get that cookie set.

eBay is a similar cookie game.

I'm not sure about other affiliate programs/networks. It'll be interesting to see if Google uses a similar cookie approach with their CPA AdSense ads. One would hope.
My parents taught me to not disclose the amount of money I make, and to not trust people who do -- they have every incentive to lie, be it due to ego or simply a desire to leverage an appearance of success into actual (but usually much diminished) success.

A 'professional blogger' is blogging about how to make money blogging. What does that tell you?

It tells me that what makes this blogger his money (however much he actually makes) is leveraging page views from individuals who want to know how to make money blogging. Thus, the blogger has every incentive to inflate the numbers, or simply lie outright about the expected return.

Unsurprisingly, he sells a "31-days to build a better blog" ebook here: http://www.problogger.net/31dbbb-workbook/
You're making a point about where we take cognitive shortcuts. Short version: don't assume the classroom example assumptions always hold in the real world.
You made a typo: Please change "monitoring" to "tasering".
Great comment and speaks highly of HN for highlighting it as something worthy of note.

I think all comments, everywhere, deserve their own proper URL. Any takers?
I am currently using it in production; I love it. Highly recommended.
Depending on the nature of the startup this is not necessarily a red flag. From my first startup, of the four original employees two went to google (one joined pre-IPO and has since gone to grad school and one is still there), one started his own company, and the fourth is working for the third; it would be hard for me to lure them back to being employees at a scrappy little startup. If the founder is doing something completely different than previous ventures then past employees may also be poor matches for the technology or product.

It is worth asking for a reference or two from previous ventures, but be prepared for "I didn't realize how important getting A-level talent was back then and will not make that mistake twice" as the answer to your question.
I'm using it in production for a large bayesian filter. Amongst other things. Works great.
Seems to me its more like "Facebook exposes latent jealousy and insecurity issues that were already present in a relationship." But that's not much of a headline, is it?
How about a competition where:

Round 1) You write some core algorithm
Round 2) You write a library that uses algorithm
Round 3) You write a tool that uses the library
Round 4) You write a different tool that uses the library, but have 1/2 the time

The end tools would be tested with a million edge cases.

Round 5) Someone else on your team that has not seen the code yet gets 2 hours to fix as many edge cases as they can.

Testing design and maintainability
The downside of this was not pointed out unless one read the whole snippet:

EMPTY THE LUGGAGE OR ITEM AND PHYSICALLY SEARCH ITS CONTENTS BY A QUALIFIED SCREENER

Yeah, you got on the plane without showing ID. But if they really wanted to, they could determine who you are in other ways (DNA from hair on clothing, etc)
I think we're using different reference points.

I'm assuming that in a fixed amount of program text, the number of bugs across all languages is relatively constant. More text means more concepts and more opportunities to be wrong.

I think your point is that for a given problem, different programming languages will yield solutions with variable number of bugs. In a language that is simpler to express the solution, it's more likely to be correct.

These two points are compatible. I'm fixing the amount of program text, you're fixing the problem.
My parents taught me to learn from other people's experiences - it's a lot more scalable than only learning from my own.

But absolutely read everything with a skeptical eye. People lie, people are mistaken, and every one of us is unique so what works for others won't necessarily work for you.
where do you draw the line on niche companies in the definition of a "true startup"? seems like YC has invested in quite a few niche-specific companies.

just curious, don't mean to threadjack too badly or nitpick.
Hi Peter - you're right, it could have been a lot better.

The link on the right (Docs: fluidDB) is probably the best place for you to start http://doc.fluidinfo.com/fluidDB/

Terry
Try http://rseek.org - a Google custom search engine for R materials.
So, basically: the sort of person who loves to fling all their mental resources at a problem is, at the end of the day, a person without mental resources. And while competition is a great way to feel like you're showing up everyone else, you're still a sweaty nerd arguing with other sweaty nerds about whose hash uses less cycles.

I see. Man, I'm glad I left academic computing.
I like the fact I don't have to download and install a software to capture screencasts. I don't care much about posting it to twitter, but it is definitely useful.

The finished video isn't very good at displaying text, so it is really hard to read.
Yes, that's right. The control is centralized, but the storage and the computation are fully distributed. We spent a long time working on what we think will be a scalable architecture. The query language is deliberately simple to make everything fast (there's only B-tree lookups and set ops on object IDs) and easily parallelizable. And this is the 3rd implementation :-)
The Myth of Biological Depression
It's not a question of "normal people" versus ... well, whatever category you want to put here. It's a question of when it's painful: nobody cares about exporting all their data, until their online service loses their account. Then everybody cares.

It's a problem 99.9% of people don't have now, but could have at any time. Seatbelts are also a solution to a problem 99.9% of people don't have, but that doesn't mean I don't want one.

(Is it profitable? Maybe not -- look how few people make backups now. But that's distinct from not wanting to have had it.)
care to explain? pictures?
This article reminds me of another posted to HN about a basketball player with mediocre stats who greatly increased the effectiveness of his teammates:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481392