urlwolf

I'd love to see this answered. Unfortunately, it'd need a different answer for every country (I'm in Germany).

If you use RDF stores/graph databases, this python ORM is worth watching: http://code.google.com/p/surfrdf/ . Like activeRDF in the ruby world, but with the advantage of having solid RDF libs (RDFlibs for python is 3-4 years old now) compared to the buzzing mess of new RDF libs for ruby, most of them still very preliminary.

I think LyX is a good alternative here. Good converters to html, pdf, text... great outliner (much needed for a long piece such a book). Has track changes, and it's plain text so you could use a vcs with it.

This is straight scary. I've lived in Spain, UK and Germany (after being in the US for 4 years) and the contrast is ... astounding. Most young people here do want to be civil servants.

only three things. I draw a line on a calendar and try not to break the line. 1- what I eat. Have I eaten at least 1 meal raw? 2- writing. Have I written for at least 2 hrs? 3- additional item. Last month it was learning colemak (done). Doing 2hrs of company promotion was another month's goal. This month, it's learning scipy well (2hr day)

For those who like leo/literate programming, have a look at code-browser:

http://tibleiz.net/code-browser/

More powerful overall. It implements elastic tabstops too! Little unknown gem. good for outlining a book/paper also.

really like it, but it's not compatible with another chrome extension I like, better gmail.

I work on semantic web search and the issues he mentions are still mostly relevant.

Well, the android link was broken when I visited. Maybe they are being techcrunched?

actually, onenote 2010 support formulas. And the support is quite good, on par with word.

It makes me sad, because I live on linux and notetaking apps there are mediocre. The best I could find is keepnote.

Onenote is years ahead of everything else, but I don't want the vendor lock-in and the binary files that it produces.

Evernote moved to .NET 3.5 so no wine support. Bah!

It has very good support for sparse matrices (package Matrix) and also for serializing big data structures and loading parts in memory sequentially (like SAS). See packages bigMemory, and ff.

Actually, this view is probably the best entry point: http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing...

Where it's not so strong, of course, is in terms of web frameworks. Nothing that I could find, and, considering the scope of the language, it's allmost unreasonable to expect it.

Actually, MS releasing open source stuff is a good thing. If all the kids do it (google, MS), then Apple would look even more closed if it doesn't. Any releasing open source at all is good news. Why? because I can imagine how this can culminate on a world where the PR/marketing depts see it as a powerful way to woo audiences (remember devs's standing ovation -and raising their laptops- to the Wave presentation?).

The sooner this 'clicks' on any marketing high-up at Apple, the better.

for anyone interested in getting the best keyboard possible, check http//:geekhack.org. Nowhere on the net will you find more keyboard knowledge.

I have + ~5 keyboards. Using a kinesis contour now.

Somewhere now, S. jobs is having thoughts of approaching this mouse and pop out all buttons but one with a keyring :)

Anyone knows a reference for this bimodality Of 1-5 Ratings? This is not what I see in amazon. Votes are not normally distributed, sure, but they tend to cluster on the upper end of the scale. The mean for amazon votes (note that since the distribution is not normal, the mean is meaningless) is something like 3.4.

actually, Intellij IDEA v.9 does just that. see: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/ And it has been open-sourced...

I've used R since 1.4 ~ (2001). Compared to other dynamic languages, I think it's harder than most. Why? Because there's a lot more semantics. There might be R one order of magnitude more keywords for R than for Perl, Ruby or Python (PHP doesn't count :) ). There are two object systems, none of them very intuitive. You need to learn functional programming. 1600 packages and counting means more functions and deep concepts to understand. And last, you need to understand the math of whatvever it is you are using. Forget doing point-and-click, black-box analyses on SPSS.

Downsides include poor programming tools/debugger and pass-by-value. Still, it's one of my favorite languages.

Sorry to say, but after reading this thread, my gut feeling is 'run away as fast as possible'. I think others are trying to communicate the same more politely.

One important thing that you are missing: you would not want to startup with someone you don't know from before, and have complete, blind trust in. And you cannot 'hire' a cofounder. You hire workers, but a cofounder doesn't work for you, by definition.

Also, this means one less search API available. Yahoo BOSS with unlimited searches was a godsent, but first the capped it, and now MS will eventually make it disappear.

It may not be good news, but it's news and something people here should know. How it gets to the top of the front page with 2 votes... no idea. Slow day?

Same here. I had great times at CMU, and after living in many different cities around the world (currently Berlin) I think Pittsburgh is a dormant giant for startup work.

I'm in Berlin too. How do we set up the meeting time and place? Watching this thread is far from optimal. How about a doodle?

http://doodle.com/rb4dsfn6e2ip5xv4

My life online made me find people with the same interests as me, no matter how rare. Chances of finding another person interested in say, synthesizers or ocaml letting 'fleshspace' serendipity do the work are negligible.

One other thing: Having an active social life can be costly, both online and offline. It's just that offline more people actually do it.

The equivalent of following hundreds of people on twitter and facebook in 'fleshspace' is to live in a house with guests (and flatmates) changing constantly. There are other situations in which one is forced to be hypersocial (maybe working at a bar? but that doesn't lead to intimacy), but this one I know first-hand. As anyone who has done the house thing can attest, it can be draining. You spread your attention to others very thin. And even so, the chances of meeting people you really like are not very high.

I can't believe this post got no comments yet. This is a long article but one of the best write-ups of the year. Summary follows.

The web learns. Not only by humans adding data consciously, but also by sensors. This is the hidden treasure on the mobile web. They call it the sensor revolution. Quote: "Today’s smartphones contain microphones, cameras, motion sensors, proximity sensors, and location sensors (GPS, cell-tower triangulation, and even in some cases, a compass)"

Data is capital, and sensors are the new way of getting data. Best quote: "Think of sensor-based applications as giving you superpowers"

There's a huge opportunity building structured data from unstructured data. Best quote: "It’s also possible to give structure to what appears to be unstructured data by teaching an application how to recognize the connection between the two."

Another big theme is connecting real life with the searchable web. Best quote: People talk about "the Internet of Things" assume that what will get us there is the combination of ultra-cheap RFID and IP addresses for everyday objects (…). Instead, we can make do with bar codes, tags on photos, and other "hacks" that are simply ways of brute-forcing identity out of reality.

Winning applications are designed to get better the more people use them

As a side note, I would encourage anyone here to learn R (www.r-project.org). Data analysis is flourishing in a world where new, interesting data is so easy to collect. Quote: "Data analysis, visualization, and other techniques for seeing patterns in data are going to be an increasingly valuable skillset. Employers take notice."

Real-time is huge. We need machine learning to be applied here to make sense of streams of data.

Quote: "The Web is no longer an industry unto itself – the Web is now the world." We need to solve real problems in the real world.

The article concludes with some examples: Government 2.0 (Obama champaign), crowdsourcing for personalized medicine.

this is why I need to read the comments in hn :)

I like redmine.

@safetrick: good point about mac prices for a mac pro! The office one, work would pay, but then sooner or latter I'd have to convert at home too, which is no joke. Now, how is Mac OSX for VNC/remote desktop stuff? And how hard it is to do a hackintosh?

I think this is a brilliant move. Use up people's time, and give them an activity that benefits both your company and themselves. I see a big oportunity here for startups too!

I can comment on this, since I did my PhD work with Landauer and Kintsch and was the webmaster of lsa.colorado.edu for a while.

The current scene of statistical semantics is very active right now. I'm not sure that the SVD is easier to implement than the probabilistic versions (LDA, topics model). The svd code LSA uses required sparse matrices, and the code runs using the Lanczos algorithm; it also needs to place the entire matrix in memory at some point. This limits the scale of the corpus you can deal with. The probabilistic versions are iterative, and while they may take more CPU and time, they are not memory bounded.

it eats quite a lot of CPU :)

I'm using R for largish datasets. When compiled on a 64-bit linux, it can address plenty of memory. The windows version is limited to 1.5 Gb, even in 64-bit windows. This is bound to change as Revolution computing have a 64-bit windows R that works (and adds some Parallel libraries). But that is not free, and it's still in beta. We are getting one. I think 64-bit R + resolver one (no limits for spreadsheet size) can get a lot done in a very visual way. I just happen to catch bugs faster when I color-code cells, but this is impossible to do in straight R (fix() and edit() suck!) or in excel because of spreadsheet limits. The combo I propose (don't have it yet) will be expensive but worth it I think.