skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The blocks are a neat idea, and possibly not far-fetched. Apple already has at least one "live" icon - the clock app tells the correct time down to the second.

My personal wish list:

- customizable url scheme handlers (e.g. set Google Maps the default map app)
- API for communication between apps
- API for Siri
- API for live icons
- User profiles for iPad
- Fingerprint reader for iPad (this plus profiles would be awesome!)
- Biometric API - fingerprint and/or facial features
- split-screen multitasking
> Maybe Spark doesn't like 100x growth in the size of an RDD using flatMap?

I'd be interested to hear more about your use case and the problems you encountered. It's possible that you need to do some kind of .coalesce() operation to rebalance the partitions if you have unbalanced partition sizes.
Here's the transactional key/value store API: http://godoc.org/github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/kv

And an RDBMS-like layer on top of it: http://godoc.org/github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/structured
It is design by committee, and a huge swathe of companies are no said committee. Valve could develop an extension branch (ARB prefix means approved language features, and vendor specific would be NV, INTEL, WIN, SGI, etc. So Valve could write their own plethora of extensions as VALVE_something, yeah, and pressure the review board into accepting them into the official implementation.
Bitbucket rolling out new Repository size limits
Thanks throwaway78390, would love to know more about your business, why you chose to approach Mark Cuban, etc. Sounds like an interesting story all around.
Aggregate Web Conference
We're trying to do a web conference for disruptors aimed at bringing non-higher ed people to a higher ed web conference mostly to talk about ways to stop doing things wrong. Colleges & universities are throwing lots of money after bad because it takes a lot to get them to give you contracts. If people are interested in presenting, sponsoring or working with us on this campaign, please send me a note.
Very cool solution! How easy was it to collect data for the classifier? I'm just wondering if the company had huge detailed logs or if you had to train the classifier in real time.
Amazon Granted Exclusive US Patent To Photographing Against White Background
This is absolutely amazing. Would love to see some demo code up on GitHub.
New website for sharing and finding content
http://magnumopiate.org/discover/

I'm the creator of it and I would love to get feedback :)
For some context, locality sensitive hashing is handy for quickly finding "similar" data points in high-dimensional space. This comes up a lot in collaborative filtering and recommendation problems (find similar products to hawk at your customers) and topic modeling (find similar text that is semantically getting at the same thing).
Stephen Hawking’s World Cup Study [pdf]
Maybe that's why his blog post was full of links to Mantle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibovitz_v._Paramount_Pictures... <- I had to put a %2E instead of a period so HN wouldn't eat it.
Although net neutrality is on topic here, this story seems just to be ephemeral political churn, which is off topic here.
They had data going back for years which really helped a lot. Still, coming up with all the signals was hard work and re-computing the various weights took days per run. Added complexity is that to ensure the non-absive users' privacy the system had to operate on an absolute minimum of information per user.

The resulting program does not run in real time, it basically runs every few minutes to have a good look at whoever signed up since the previous run and then assigns a probability to each of the new accounts.

This still catches the bad guys long before they can get up to any mischief (they still have to verify their account) and does not get in the way of the speed of the forms processing during sign-up.
Matthew: interesting project, thank you for releasing it.

I've always thought lisps were a natural fit for this sort of thing; the cl-typesetting project (http://www.fractalconcept.com/asp/cl-typesetting) didn't get a lot of traction but was pretty effective, are/were you aware of that one?

Any intention to tackle higher quality typesetting for hardcopy/pdf ?
Change the name. I get the joke, but it has an emotionally negative connotation that bosses will hate.
What It’s Like Getting Hit by Panda 4.0
As much as I want fierce competition in this industry, the House of representatives is elected and the FCC is not.

IMHO all US regulations that have the force of law should have to be passed by both houses of congress to be legal.
dynamic with caching (e.g. Varnish) is like static from security and response time perspective..but static has the advantage of local distributed fronts (cloudfront)... If we think, 99% of all blogs will be read less than 1000 times per day, the performance consideration does not matter.
I couldn't find anything so I gave technical tutorials a shot. I found some companies to contract me, but the time involved basically makes the work a less-than-minimum wage 'job'. I know front end development to a degree, but I'm also below the poverty line.
I can't answer your question but I can at least validate your perspective first-hand.
I would argue that iOS users also don't know that they can double tap the iphone home button twice to pull up the ability to kill an app without someone telling them that functionality exist or they accidentally find out. This widget concept would be no different.
Execution #492
http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2012-11-02/framing-the-g...

Regardless of the truth, there are a lot of open questions and this man was put to death with all these questions still not answered. This is not who we should be.
Mighty Spring backend dev here. The short answer is yes, but there are not many remote-only jobs right now (beta and what-have-you). That will hopefully soon change.

Candidate affordances let you indicate a willingness to work remotely, and a requirement for remote work only. If your skill set and desires don't overlap, we won't recommend you a remote-only job just because it is remote.
Other self-described conservatives would argue that's just what this bill is doing: preventing the FCC from unduly interfering with the ISP/content delivery market.
Where I live, along with where many people live, Comcast is pretty much indistinguishable from an 'actual monopoly'.

You think someone's going to invest tens of billions of dollars to try and lay down parallel wires to all of comcasts to compete with them? And would this be an efficient use of social resources?

You think Comcast is going to invest tens of billions of dollars into upgrading their infrastructure already, when they are already the only choice their customers have for broadband?
Riak will have strongly consistent buckets in 2.0+, which pretty much takes care of the cases in which I'd need guarantees for data in this storage model.
That's one of the funniest comments I ever read on HN. Every time I re-read it I sit here chuckling. Thanks :)
EFF to Court: There's No Doubt the Government Destroyed NSA Spying Evidence
The company I ised to work for would sometimes buy components from RS. They'd supply them in strips of 10, 50, or 100.

The pick and place machine needed blank strip of about ten components (just for lead-in on the cassete).

Transfering components from one tape to another was really annoying. And one of the bosses just did not understand that the fractions of a penny saved were obliterated by time wasted moving components over.

And until you've had to do something like that you can't really understand the benefit of $60 Swedish tweezers.
ha, just realized my typo. I re-installed KDE 4, not KDE 3. I liked KDE 3 :)
Higher ed web is a gigantic ball of suck. The space is ripe for disruption and this conference is aimed at bringing the companies & people associated with the startup space to Louisville for two days in September to talk about ways that higher ed can do the web better.

College CIOs are old, the IT people aren't the cream of the crop in a lot of cases and the ways colleges do digital is backwards because often times, it's people who drop out who know it better.

Bottom line, there's money in the space & so...this conference is really meeting the decisionmakers who are spending millions, as well as getting access to the folks who are doing things wrong and who want to hear from the people who are changing the world.

If you're interested, hit me up.
There's a middle-ground between job-hopping and unswerving company loyalty: being strategic about your career. Stay in the same place as long as you continue to have opportunities to learn & grow, supportive management, and mission-alignment with the organization. Leave when your career goals no longer align with the needs of the organization. That way you give potential employers the signal that you're interested in new challenges, added responsibility, and delivering value to the organization, but you also show that you're proactive and won't put up with bullshit.
Looks potentially interesting, but the fees seem awfully high for an automated matching service compared to standard recruitment agencies. Which is to say, ones with actual recruiters doing search, vetting and so on. Yes, there is always the advertised "standard rate" that may be something crazy like 25-40% of starting salary, but the actual negotiated rate is always much, much lower than that. 15% generally gets you a very high standard of professional recruitment services, not something that is basically monster.com without the massive candidate-base.

The pay per interview rates seem much more sensible, but that's a model that might be seen as high-risk, particularly if there is no pre-vetting of candidates. That's not something the site mentions at all in either the employer or candidate FAQ, but is a pretty important part of the recruitment agency model.

Also, I'm in the UK and the site seems pretty US-centric with no information about which regions are targeted or even supported. It should really be stated pretty clearly up-front - is the focus just on Silicon Valley, or startups anywhere in the world?
As I understand it, a lot of the failure there was Sun's total lack of interest in direct sales between what you could put on a credit card on their web site and mainframe levels of $$$ (several million). In theory various distributors or VARs and the like were supposed to handle this gap, but I can't count the number of times I read a blog posting by a startup founder who found that didn't work and bemoaned the fact that they have to buy lower quality servers from Dell simply because Dell was actually willing to sell to them.

And of course once such companies got big enough to interest Sun's direct sales people, they were adept at making do with lower quality and cheaper hardware; I'm sure Sun missed out on massive sales before they got desperate and degraded the quality of their designs and what they were shipping, at which point it was game over.
Excellent! I will definitely keep checking in. In the meantime, the interface is just gorgeous and very intuitive. Keep up the great work!
Sure, but it goes down every April 20th...
DigitalOcean have increased referral commission payments from $10 to $25
We have increased our referral commission payments from $10 to $25!

This update will affect all new referrals, and you can find out more at https://cloud.digitalocean.com/user_referrals.

Happy Coding,
DigitalOcean
Tighten up your writing style son. Extremely flabby.
Cockroaches are resilient and hard to kill.
The Rise of the $8 Ice Cube
This is the first time I've heard of nilsimsa. Looking through the docs to find the algorithm, here's how it is described, but I'm still not clear on what a "character separation" is in this context or which 3 characters are chosen:

> Nilsimsa uses eight sets of character separations (character, character, etc.) and takes the three characters and performs a computation on them: (((tran[((a)+(n))&255]^tran[(b)]*((n)+(n)+1))+tran[(c)^tran[n]])&255), where a, b, and c are the characters, n is 0-7 indicating which separation, and tran is a permutation of [0-255]. The result is a byte, and nilsimsa throws all these bytes from all eight separations into one histogram and encodes the histogram.

I've found that in practice, shingling text and then minhashing it is scary-good at finding similar documents.
You probably have a more nuanced view of the site than I do. I noticed the tendency I described very early on and more or less limited my further exposure to them, so maybe they've matured into what you're describing.
1) What could Sun have done differently to monetize Java? Or was there no opportunity?

2) Sun was one of the true pioneers of the cloud, but they couldn't capitalize and lead this next generation of computing. (They should have created AWS, for instance.) Was it due to Christensen's innovator's dilemma, or was there another reason?
CoachDB ?
Ask HN: has GitHub stopped hiring?
Looking at https://github.com/blog/category/hire ... has GitHub just stopped hiring new people or is this only a change in HR strategy and that blog section is dead now?

- 2013-05: 0
- 2013-04: 0
- 2014-03: 2
- 2014-02: 1
- 2014-01: 7
- 2013-12: 9
- 2013-11: 10
- 2013-10: 4
- 2013-09: 9
- 2013-08: 11
- 2013-07: 15
- 2013-06: 8
- 2013-05: 9
- 2013-04: 9
- 2013-03: 5
- 2013-02: 5
- 2013-01: 5
- 2012-12: 8
- 2012-11: 6
- 2012-10: 8
- 2012-09: 9
You flush a company from existence and then offer them zero help in getting their existence reinstated. This is something an asshole would do.

But this is par for the course when it comes to small businesses interacting with Google. They don't give a crap about helping. They will gladly take your ad dollars, but anything outside of paying them is seen as an offense that can result in your company being banned.

Google is evil. Let there be zero doubts.
I like how an industry that exists in its current state due to local monopoly grants and subsidized infrastructure deployment (and billions in taxpayer money for infrastructure never built) wants a "free market".

I'd love one too. I'm just wondering how you have a free market where market access requires digging up everyones front yards and roads. Almost like how "hmm, I want to start a rail / aerospace / automotive / etc) transport system of any kind. I want to build a better sewer system. Or water system. Or electrical grid. And all these industries require transports that go through private property.

And all of the other ones are considered common carrier infrastructure.

Maybe the real problem is that townships and such can dictate who can lay fiber cable. Would it be feasible for companies to run fiber to the home if they had to ask each private property holder to let them lay the lines in their yards? That doesn't happen now because townships et al would intervene and not let people do what they want with their land, even if you could dodge ever touching public property with a line deployment. I wonder how that would work.

Thing is, these assholes aren't suggesting anything like that. They just want monopoly power and extortion rights to hold back progress and innovation for generations while robbing people.
Engineering our way out of fascism
Consistency of single updates is vastly different than multi-write atomic transactions. The former precludes, for example, financial applications which require atomic updates of multiple balances.
You remembered to include your referral code, but forgot to link to a page that substantiates your claim.
Mozilla.dev.platform: Intent to land: Voice/video client ("Loop")
Indeed. Fixed!
Apparently you can do this via setting Pollen’s 'world:command-marker' value; though I don't know how to do that myself :-/

Ref for others, on OSX, its: option + shift + V

See http://mbutterick.github.io/pollen/doc/reader.html

edit: key commands now fixed for other platforms
Reinventing Code: software development as a creative process
If we get the Gov't to force ISP's to lease their copper/fiber to other ISP companies (smaller independent guys) then they wouldn't have to lay their own infrastructure and it would build a lot of competition quickly.

Telecom companies already have this regulation. (CLEC 1996)
Great article. I've struggled with this for my entire career. I get bored after finishing a major project and am left with miscellaneous tasks. But I've found consulting gigs to be elusive and companies seem reluctant to hire contractors. Even startups. So I risk being labeled a job hopper...
Ummm... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twink_(gay_slang)
Clearly shouldn't be a death penalty case!
Really interesting! He based his studies on statistical data that doesn't change with time! The physical strength and aptitudes of a certain race is time constant!
I was considering an esoteric (joke) language that would compile a blank file to print "Hello, world!", q to a quine, g to guess, and similar. I never got around to creating it though.
Thanks for the links, the two things that are really interesting to me are taking the makeup style from the example and applying it to the picture (preview the made up version of the face) and taking famous actors and morphing into something "like" them. This would be useful at creating props on screen where there are pictures from someone's "earlier" life, that could make them look much more realistic. Fascinating stuff.
Not really true, Expedition 35 definite took a couple of days to get to the ISS.(as per Commander Chris Hadfield's book.)
That if the only country on earth making things in imperial was the US, there would be a greater economic incentive for the US to switch. Since that is not the case, and many countries are producing imperial parts, a lot of the supposed benefits of switching listed in all of these articles are simply not real. If there really were high costs imposed by sticking with the imperial system, someone would be making a business case for switching over to metric as much as possible. As far as I can tell, outside of labeling and government procurement, nothing actually forces American companies to use imperial, other than their own internal cost/benefit analysis.
> IMHO all US regulations that have the force of law should have to be passed by both houses of congress to be legal.

They do. House and Senate both have to approve, then comes the possible veto by the pres.
CroachDB
We can terraform Venus and Mars, but cant deal with CO2 on Earth? Bit more fantasy please...
If municipalities would let them, I do think companies will lay down wires to pick off the high-end of the market from existing companies. Where I'm moving to in Baltimore, several high-end apartment buildings are wired with FIOS, even though the city wouldn't let Verizon wire more parts of the city. Competition like that will do a lot to encourage existing companies to upgrade their networks.

Moreover, you're taking a very narrow view of "competition" here. The average Comcast customer uses something like 2-3GB/month of data. That's easily accommodated by wireless. Demand for wireless data is exploding right now, not so much demand for wired data. That's real competition for Comcast.
Props to whoever modded the headline.
I know 2 guys who are totally qualified to work there and have interviewed. (Heck, one of them wrote some of their tooling.)

Neither of them have been hired.
> Telecom companies already have this regulation. (CLEC 1996)

And as a result phone companies basically gave up on upgrading these networks and cable killed DSL.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fsethrobertson.github....
House Republicans introduce bill to limit net neutrality
Amazon’s Illegal Drugs: Steroids, Muscle Relaxants, Prescription Antibiotics
Hey Robert, good points here, but we're actually not entirely automated. We still do some manual things (we're a small startup, after all), which keeps the quality of folks seen by our employers high.

All of this said, we hope to not be in the contingency recruiting business forever. We feel that there is a friendlier fee structure to implement (with better incentives for companies and candidates alike), which we will do as our marketplace grows.

RE: UK jobs, most of the companies who have signed up are in the Bay Area and NYC right now, but there are no strict limitations to prevent UK companies from participating. We do have candidates in the UK that have signed up, FYI.
Agreed. Take out the 'roach' part and watch its popularity skyrocket.
Correct, it would be impossible to do blit fast enough, etc, with the hardware (CPU) of that time, so you needed the video chip to be intelligent

Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS9918
You would notice it in a set of sockets or hex wrenches. You can generally fake a drill bit because the size differences are so small.
Jane ties together status reporting and Objectives in one system [video]
> How big is this dataset (what does each event consist of)?

Standard clickstream data, maybe 50-ish parameters per event.

> What sort of queries are you running?
> How is the data stored?

Depends on the use-case. For sub-second adhoc queries we go against bitmap indexes. Other queries we uses RDD.cache() after a group/cogroup and answer queries directly from that. For other queries we go hit ORC files. Spark is very memory sensitive compared to hadoop, so using a columnar store and only pulling out the data that you absolutely need goes a very long way. Minimizing cross-communication and shuffling is key to achieving sub-second. It's impossible to achieve that if you're waiting for TB of data to shuffle around =)

> How many machines / cores are running across?

Depends on the use case. Clusters are 10-30 machines, some we run virtual on open stack. We will grow our 30 node cluster in 6mo.

> Maybe Spark doesn't like 100x growth in the size of an RDD using flatMap

You may actually just need to proportionally scale the number of partitions for that particular task by the same amount. Also when possible use mapPartitions, it is very memory efficient compared to map/flatMap.

> Maybe large-scale joins don't work well

Keep in mind that what ever happens per task happens all in memory. For large joins I created a "bloom join" implementation (not currently open source =( ) that does this efficiently. It takes two passes at the data, but minimizes what is shuffled.
this reminds me of W. Latham

https://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=BE&v=AN6ngsckRZs
I did most of my benchmarking with the 10M MovieLens Dataset http://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/ consisting of 10 million movie ratings on 10,000 movies from 72,000 users. So not necessarily "big data", but big enough to warrant a distributed approach.

Spark is ideally suited for iterative, multi-stage jobs. In theory, anything that requires doing multiple operations an a working dataset (i.e. graph processing, recommender systems, gradient descent) will do well on Spark due to the in-memory data caching model. This post explains some of the applications Spark is well-suited for: http://www.quora.com/Apache-Spark/What-are-use-cases-for-spa...
What the article does not says it's that Google has already stated that information will be "removed" only within UE. So, outside UE, the information will be available. That is they are not going to remove it but just hide it.

Granted, the topic is not easy, especially for criminals, but to me it's a clear sign that Google don't really want to comply with actual privacy laws. And I am sorry but that completely taint whatever they can say about privacy.

90% of the demands would probably be reasonable but that means staffing ... customer support. Something we all know, Google want to avoid at all costs.
Mathematica has a pretty decent typesetting system, but it's not open source or free...