skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't mind it too much actually :) partly because it throws people...

I think it is part of a wider skill set I have; that of retaining detailed information over time. I have great recall, for example, of minutiae that happened a long while back (the limit is probably 5 years at the moment - but it also seems to expand slowly). Not for everything but I recall a lot larger amount of detail comparative to what I see others remember (this is all subjective so I might be over egging the skill).

Anyway the point is that can be quite useful :)
I think your comment is a little short sighted, in the case of obtaining bank funding some form of business plan may be required. Similarly, when applying for some franchises. You have to remember that tech entrepreneurs are a subset of all entrepreneurs - and all businesses can't be boot strapped (e.g city center food outlet on leased premises).
At my previous company, we had a great (and horrible) knowledge base. We could search all bug reports, knowledge base articles and previous calls to tech support. Even with all the great content, it takes more than a search to solve the issues. It takes knowledge of the product which is assumed in the notes. It also takes the ability to listen to an issue from a customer, figure out from their problem which is the key factor, what to search for, and how to figure out which search result helps this issue.

I have heard Bill Gates was a very hands on manager, especially back the, so I assume he knew the products reasonably well. And I know he is very intelligent, so I assume he would be decent at troubleshooting. But as another noted above, he didn't actually solve the issue for the customer.

The application sucked, was IE6 only, search was horrendous, but the content was good.
Setting an industry back has no relation to when it started.
Node uses libev: http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/libev.html
So? "WSJ readers" might say that they'd prefer "Civilisation" (or space exploration, universities, development of the Internet, etc.) be supported on a voluntary basis rather than by forced participation. That hardly precludes them from enjoying the result.

May a grocery-store-meat-consumer, who is aware of the cruel treatment of livestock, not be opposed to the methods by which his sustenance originated? Would you criticize him (as a hypocrite?) for advocating change so that in the future, hopefully, good things will have more ethical origins rather than having "the ends justify the means"?
I don't think that's what the Germans are worried about (though it's what most commenters on Techcrunch think they are worried about). I think it's about Google having access to this data, and being able to link visits and search terms - not the users of Google Analytics.
what he means is that Google puts together all the data from Google Analytics enabled sites, to put together a huge picture.

it's not the sites gaining the info, it's Google
Botnet's have plenty of computational power on tap.
MySQL Upgrade Testing
If Microsoft ran the Butterball Turkey Talk-line
I'd think it's not really a cookie being available for use on another site at issue. It's that site visit data is collected in a central location (Google) and is potentially available for data mining.
A comprehensive mixin library for .NET (C#)
I think the simplest solution is adding your phone number and have the website call you back with the first password. Granted it's not anonymous for the user and not free for the website. You would still need to ban accounts that generated spam, but that now becomes a useful tool.

PS: Runs to the patent office...
Tell HN: Creating a new advertising marketplace
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo dominate majority of the online advertising market. My question is why?

Looking at the very basic model, an advertiser wants to pay $X to a publisher to place ads. Therefore, publisher should get $x - overhead cost. But instead most of the profits are going to the Big 3.

Therefore, we should have a non-profit system that provides a marketplace for transactions and only charge overhead costs.

Therefore, maximizing profits for the publishers and advertisers.

Since, there is a big community of developers in HN, you guys should lead the charge.
Humanising data: introducing “Chernoff Schools”
Ask HN: Comments on and help on improving our recommendation engine for news
Hi all,

A friend of mine and I built this news ranking service of sorts based on a ranking algorithm I came up while I was in grad school for CS. Recently I also developed a recommendation engine based on a modified Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm. Why modified? Well, as most of you know SVM are really binary classifiers and need to classes of training data - i.e. good/bad. interesting/boring, etc. So in the case of news, you have to ask the user to select both interesting articles and not interesting articles. There have been a number of studies done on the subject how asking the user to do both is soometimes too much of a burden. Ideally, the user should tracked implicitly and the model should account for the uncertainty that arises from lack of explicit ratings. So here is how it works. I created an account and seeded the system with some articles that seem to have been popular on HN and the results are available. Just go to http://www.euraeka.com and click login on the top right. The user name is hackers (at) are (dot) us, and you can email me at haidut (at) gmail (dot) com for the password. Since the system already generated recommendations, you will see them right when you login. If a user likes an article they just click on it and the system records that. There is also a "remove" button next to each article in case the user knows up front they don't like that article and want it removed from view and recorded as uninteresting. The purpose of the remove option is also if you clicked on an article that you thought you will like but it turned out to be not interesting, so you have the option of reversing your initial decision and telling the system that the article was not good. Like I said above, "removing" an article is optional. The system can work if the user only clicks on articles that he/she likes and ignores the rest.
Note: Obviously, I couldn't seed the system with every article that has been on HN. I just picked some that I liked before from topics such as science, entrepreneurship, health, etc. Feel free to seed the system even more. How to do that? Basically, once you are logged in either use the search box at the top to search for keywords of interest, or use the topics section at the right of the screen to find more specific news. If you find anything you like just click on the article.
Note: Obviously, if you create your own account you will be able to test your own set of recommendations. Recommendations are generated every 24 hours using ALL the news collected in the last 24 hours.
If any of you have used the Google News or Digg recommendaton engines, I'd very interested to hear how this stacks up against those to services, given the fact that they are both based on user-to-user recommendation techniques (i.e. articles are recommended to you based on similarity to other users) rather than content-based recommendations (which is what Euraeka is).

Thanks in advance.
Server search engine
I've heard meditation helps. Haven't tried yet.

Your wife sounds understanding. Be glad for that.

Ah, your anecdote reminds of this:

There is an old mondo in Zen that best describes this state: A novice keeps nagging his master about the time required to experience enlightenment. The master says, "When you came to my rooms last night, on which side of the door did you leave your slippers?" The novice cannot recall. The master says, "When you can tell me which side of the door you left your slippers, you'll attain enlightenment."

http://zatma.org/Dharma/zbohy/Literature/AssaultSummit/dhara...
Seems like you the dataflow paradigm is exactly what you'd need. With dataflow, trying to read a variable that doesn't know its value yet blocks until the value becomes known.
oops - asking. Just fixed the title.
Instead of 'tricks' they should have used 'causes' or 'results in', or some other phrase that does not imply a negative intention in the design. It's just bad design.
Funny story (and by funny I mean terrifying).

My graduate advisor did some consulting for one of the major airplane manufacturers. He said looking at their systems code put him off flying for six months.
depends on what kind of code we're talking about.

are we talking about my code for a video sharing and live streaming website? nope.

are we talking about my code on a microcontroller whose only purpose is to physically monitor and calculate a small number of things? probably, yes.

there's a huge difference between the two, both in the processes behind them and the end result of the development cycle. the code on important things where lives are on the line, like a space shuttle, is simple stuff that has been tested and combed over a lot.

bridges are very singular in purpose and only need to not fail at what they're supposed to do. most software needs to not fail at what its not supposed to do, as well as what it is supposed to do.
MIT Linear Algebra, Lecture 1: The Geometry of Linear Equations
Paragraph breaks, please.
Waze: Crowd sourced traffic alerts
Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. I often fall into the trap of visualizing "entrepreneurs" as the stereotypical lone wolf, jack of all trades type.

I remind myself that it's the "entrepreneurial spirit" that is more important, and can be used to conceptualize people, projects, and yes, cities.
Ask HN: How would you describe yourself/your achievements in two sentences?
I'm working on my online resume and having trouble with the personal statement.

There's a part where you have to sum yourself up in two sentences.

I guess this is supposed to be where you show your creativity but I can't help feeling that any two-sentence summary of myself is going to fall short in some way.

I'm wondering if anyone here could suggest an approach.
var resultp = add(do_x(), do_y();
do_z(resultp);
do_foo();

You're code will block on add. This code only blocks on unrealized promises, that is do_foo gets to execute. This is _more_ concurrent.
Shodan Computer Search Engine
(Disclaimer: I work for the Blue Brain Project. What I say is my own opinion.)

It's not just an ANN like you may have learned in school. They refer to their model as "single-compartment phenomenological spiking neurons, learning synapses with spike-timing dependent plasticity, and axonal delays" in their The cat is out of the bag article.

In simpler language, it's a spike-based model (when someone says "artificial neural network" they usually mean a rate-based model) where they adjust synaptic weights based on the correlations of spikes (Google: spike-timing dependent plasticity), and add a transmission delay before a spike arrives at the post-synaptic cell.

It sounds very much like the model described in Hebbian learning and spiking neurons (Gerstner et al., 1999).

This is a more sophisticated model than most neural network models, but it's still very much abstracted from biology. For starters, it doesn't sound like they model a diversity of neuron structures, nor even ion channels or dendrites.

This is where this "Blue Matter" project differs from the Blue Brain Project, which is attempting to model the biology is as fine detail as the science (and the computing hardware!) allows.

EDIT (forgot to get to the point):

Is it a scam? That's open to interpretation, but I agree with Dr. Markram that they are making fantastic claims and glossing over the fact that they are not modelling anything resembling a cat's brain except in neuron count.
That's pretty much exactly what happened with the Sims.
not sure I agree with this article, sure all those big companies started out small, but it was a whole other market back then.

The game has changed, you now need that huge feature list, you now need that top notch design etc. Why would someone use your product with all the features missing, when they can use another free product that already has those features?
So I have to ask then (and this is really in the spirit of discussion not trolling) - is it that software cannot currently be engineered, or is it that software can never be engineered?

I ask because I feel like there are examples of "bridge-worthy" software, mostly examples out of NASA where the code tightly fits the hardware and the number of bugs per line of code is something like 1-to-1million.
"I was wrong about Web apps being able to replace native apps right now"

Strange, as I'm fairly certain he didn't say that.

He said the lower end could be replaced with web apps right now and if Apple opened up more API's to web apps then many more apps could too. Which is true.

Also, Apple's "App Store" for Web Apps:

http://www.apple.com/webapps/
Just a point on form. Why did you not blog this (or post an article on your web site) and then post a link to same on HN?

You would then have been able to format your text in a manner more suited to the content - and also made it more straightforward to edit your "content" in part in response to feedback from HN and elsewhere.

Good luck with the project though.
Vote me down, but RoR and solid Product don't go hand in hand for me.
Interesting. A table of contents and an index in the book would have helped though.
The main criticisms are that GA collect users' data without consent, without telling them what they collect and without giving them a simple way to get their data reliably deleted,
all of which are forbidden according to german law. And before people start complaining that GA doens't collect personal information: there seems to be an emerging legal consensus in germany that an IP address is in fact a personally identifiable information. Nobody has ever been taken to court for running an apache with the default logging configuration, but there are people who think that that is an offence worth a fine of up to €50.000,-- too, just like running GA.

For those who can read german, here is a better text:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Bundesdatenschutzbeaf...
The way I understand it, saving any personal data without consent (or warning? Not sure.) is illegal in Germany. And, far as I can tell, IP adresses are considered - like telephone numbers or email adresses - personal data.

Now, as far as I can tell, there has never been a court case about Google Analytics or similar solutions. I know that already, some providers of analytics solutions are anonymizing the saved IP adresses. Google Analytics (and many others) don't do that. So the German government might just have a case.
Btw, I started using twitter today! If you enjoy my catonmat blog, you should follow me on twitter here: http://twitter.com/pkrumins
"Introverts tend to think about what they want to say before they say it. If it’s already been said by someone else, we don’t feel the need to say it again."

Does this imply that extroverts don't? Did I sleep through this lecture in False Dichotomies 101?
Key quote: "An abundance of small, independent firms is, along with January temperature and share of the population with college degrees, one of the best predictors of urban growth." References cited:

Abundance of small firms: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/glaeser/files/Clust...

Jan temp: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/pub/hier/2007/HIER2135.pdf

College Degrees: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/pub/hier/2003/HIER2025.pdf
I wonder--how much of what you can't say is necessarily all that cynical? I think there might be a lot of things you can't say which are actually positive and uplifting, but only incite outrage because they question the way most people live their lives or the restrictions they place upon themselves.

15, 18, 21, 22, 23, and maybe 27 are the only items on the list which will actually shock people, and 18 and 22 will only shock liberal people. I can think of a lot of claims that are more shocking.
And soon this will be the way the whole EU works. And then the advertising market will collapse there and maybe they'll decide to come up with privacy laws that make sense...
Why do you care that this introductory course is taught at MIT?

For a course at that level, the professor's teaching skills matter more than his/her research skills. A professor from a lower-ranked institution that focuses more on teaching might do a better job for such a course.

I guess the real reason there is interest in the MIT course is because it is presented to top students and hence is more likely to be advanced and rigorous.
New language features in Java 7
>To attack someone for not believing that we landed on the moon, or in the Holocaust, is actually selfish. If you are so concerned, the correct recourse is to present convincing evidence.

People who deny the Holocaust aren't likely to be persuaded by convincing evidence, or they wouldn't be denying it in the first place.
I don't see what this has to do with introverts in specific. The general advice applies to any kind of person. When building a brand name you should control what you say. On the internet you have an unparalleled ability to control exactly what is thought of you, based on the limited amounts of information you choose to reveal. If you were to only post CSS tips on Twitter, people who know you through Twitter will think of you as a CSS buff. This is intuitive.
MIT's does happen to be available on the internet...
Yeah, and then in the comment section the author starts to talk about his love of Myers-Briggs, which illustrates exactly my beef with Myers-Briggs. It creates four false dichotomies between personality "types".
Policy, portfolios and the investor lawmaker
Zappos starts rolling out engagement pages for brands powered by Overlay.tv
I'm not disputing the design of the package but I'm wondering how this is happening to so many people? When I got the droid the Verizon employee took it out of the box, activated it, configured it, and a few other things. They also handed me the phone. Is it possible to do this by mail?
It's not the only one.
I've watched some of the lectures, and Strang's teaching skills are outstanding.
Teaching skills are not what make a professor successful at a top research university.

So it's hit and miss in that regard.
In a way, this is why the EU's recent discussion on requiring permission to set cookies actually makes sense.

Aside from login, the vast majority of cookies on the web don't significantly benefit the user. The only reason I don't use a browser that ignores or prompts for cookies is that so many websites use them inappropriately these days, and the web would be unbrowsable without them.
If the scope is very narrow, software can be engineered to be correct. However, I think it is better to work towards organic, self-healing software systems like Google (where they leave failed cluster nodes in place, not bothering to find or remove them).

Another reason software cannot be engineered in a cost-effective manner is most engineering is based on inviolable physical rules (the constant g (gravity) - this allows software (irony, yes) to be developed that helps engineers correctly (there is always a "factor of safety") engineer (FEA software like ANSYS). My hat is off to the legends like Thomas Roebling who designed the Brooklyn Bridge before computer aid.

The pain and cost of engineering software to structural engineering standards (ISO 9000 is a joke, NASA has its own internal standards) usually exceeds the lifetime benefit of correctly engineering that software. A good rule of thumb is will someone's life be jeopardized if the software fails (dialysis, automobile vehicle systems, nuclear thermal rod control, 747s, space ships (makes me wonder, actually, how "correct" Burt Rutan's X Prize spaceship software may be)).
Yeah, quality speaks for itself, and people are generally good at identifying quality when they see it. The trick to promoting your product isn't to try and convince people of its high quality, but just to get people to look at the product and judge the quality for themselves.

Saying "I wrote an awesome program recently" when you've only written a decent program makes people think you are dishonest. Better is just to say "I wrote a program recently".
Some of the comments indicated that some salespeople are actually dropping the phones due to the same packaging flaw.
Free guide: Make Your Website Work
I don't know why I care. MIT just sounds impressive.

I wouldn't say that research skills are not important. For example, the algorithms course at MIT included a very modern topic on "cache oblivious algorithms", which was developed there just a few years ago by the same professor who taught the course. It would take some years for the other better educators to learn how to teach it.

Same with linear algebra, here in Latvia we had a great professor who taught it, but he never mentioned even jpeg compression or any other modern stuff that Gilbert Strang does. We got taught the regular stuff that has been around in linear algebra for 100 years.
Assume for a moment, that there is no difference in error rates for software & bridge engineering. In the case of most software engineering, there is no recall, no liability, and often no admission of liability as a consequence of software failures.

In the case of 'real' engineering, the opposite is true.

If a software vendor wrote a product that deleted my data because of a bug (Apple, for example) were to assume liability, refund my purchase price, and compensate me for my data and recovery costs........
Why everything you think about User Centred Design is wrong
Silicon Valley's new sport: extreme bootstrapping
That's it - too many podcasts to keep straight. Thanks!
Jack Welch on Company Size and Success
The article seems to answer the question:

I had already had two terms of linear algebra when I studied physics back in 2004. But it was not enough for a curious mind like mine. I wanted to see how it was taught at the world’s best university.

...and...

The course is taught by no other than Gilbert Strang. He’s the world’s leading expert in linear algebra and its applications and has helped the development of Matlab mathematics software.
It's a great read, but you kind of cringe knowing in hindsight that the Apple ][ market was drying up and there was Mechner, working on screen plays and taking months at a time away from development of the game.

It does have a happy ending that the PC market started to kick in, but man.
Apparently all of the software on my Mac is really just a bunch of popsicle houses. Too bad that I've sunk a couple grand into it.
Being a Extrovert/Introvert is not an absolute value, but rather a scale. Notice that he says tend to think.

So, yes, somebody that happens to be a "total extrovert" speaks before thinking. Not that they are dumb, or don't think. It's just that their do their reasoning externally, "out loud".
Well, my point is that all the big products have grown to where they are.

Apple launched a phone that couldn't MMS, couldn't have applications on it, couldn't copy and paste.

Even take Mint.com, they started out with just a pie chart and one bank - it was only afterwards they got ever so clever.

If you pick pretty much any big success story and chart the different between them when they got big and where they are now, there are massive differences.

Often a lot of the features only make sense when you're big and popular, and I think many start ups design for them prematurely.

That was my point.
50 Essential Free Open Courseware Classes for Web Designers
Web design has become an increasingly important aspect of media and business.
YYYY-MM-DD would be even better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
I'm sure it's a great service, but it's overkill.

Still looking for something as simple as a shared webhosting (mail and webserver work "out of the box", easy control panel) but with better performance.

There's a business idea here for someone.
Marketing for microISVSs - embracing the 'dark side'?