skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a good overview, although I have some critiques.

1) The author doesn't really emphasize how complicated these algorithms are. Most people look at ML and think it can solve their problems (ie predict the future). In practical applications though (other than "toy" perfect gaussian data), you have to understand what the hell the algorithm is actually doing to your data. A lot of the questions that I encounter when doing ML research include: a) am I sure I implemented the algorithm correctly? b) is the algorithm doing what its supposed to be doing? c) how can I cross check its answers? d) if I use another algorithm, how do I gauge performance?

2) Like it or not, ML requires a very solid background in mathematics. You can get away with using algorithms "out of the box", but then its just that...a box. Knowing what goes on inside gives you the confidence that the solutions are correct and can be used reliably. It's important to know that ML is not like a car that you can just pick up and drive without knowing how an engine works.

3) I think the author should have listed easier algorithms that are used more often in industry. K-nearest neighbors is good, but I would also add k-means clustering and perhaps Principal Component Analysis (PCA) over SVM or KSVM. And if you're going to cover the more advanced stuff...you need to talk about Bayesian learning.
Just as an aside this { code }, was typed without any conscious thought. As an average touch typist (about 60 WPM), I didn't have any difficulty on my MacBook Pro entering curly paren while keeping my fingers on the home row.

At least once a week I thank my teenage self for taking Grade 7 and 8 typing course (on ancient Manual typewriters - not even electric. The CBM 8032 was _just_ entering our world, and 100 Mile House had never bothered to upgrade to electric typewriters. I expect there is some meta-story regarding how you can teach people to do things without spending a lot of money)
Sanger adds two cancer genomes
Analysis of recent papers published by the folks at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (presumably most people here don't have access to the parent journals).

Among other things, of relevance

"Intriguingly, in both studies the authors identified distinct mutational signatures of exposure to the long-suspected environmental risk factor - ultraviolet radiation (in malignant skin cancer) and tobacco smoke’s “cocktail of carcinogens” (in lung cancer). The substantial number of mutations in each genome made it possible to characterize these signatures with unprecedented statistical power."
Atomic Underground: Deep inside ORNL's Holifield research facility
Mongodb 1.3.0 unstable released
From 5 to 10 I took public transportation with my father to school. It was exciting, I got to read the paper like my dad on the bus. I got to meet new people at the bus stop. When I was 10 I started taking the public bus to school by myself. At first my father rode with me, helping me transfer, and watched me get off at my new school. After about a month of that, I took the bus and made the transfer by myself.

I did dumb things. Played with matches and fire at the bus stop, but I didn't hurt myself. Since there weren't any other school children on my bus, if I wanted to socialize, I had to talk to adults - strangers (shudder). I did fine. I cherished my independence.
If you think about it there are things you can do with a not too large an amount of liquid chemicals that would cause serious problems on plane. I don't think making explosives is one of them.
That seems to be reliably true for the single-node case only.
has read concurrency, bulk delete concurrency, and more. great way to end the year!
I really hate to see people bashing the OLPC for the wrong reasons. The project has a lot of flaws and a good couple lose ends, but, all in all, it is a great idea that has faced huge resistance from the very governments that should embrace it. I also suspect some governments active sabotage it because such a device allowing communication and free access to information would weaken their grip on local populations.

You really don't need the courseware, at least not at the start. All you really need to start is the regular textbooks transcribed as e-books. The kid can then carry and access all their books, current and future, in one compact volume, breaking any limitation on the kid's reading. Since OLPSs have network connections, governments (and educational associations) can also spend some money translating relevant topics from wikipedia, creating better localized versions. Classroom activities can also be developed on top of the localized software that already ships with them.

It's also lovely to suppose that local people cannot fix the machine because "this intended market is illiterate". Living in a third world country, I am deeply offended. This is, however, a failure of the OLPC plan. The OLPC should also have been directed towards US schools in order to gain momentum, perhaps even before attempting to go after the third world.

It's also foolish to overpromise impossible hardware. XO-2 and XO-3 are ludicrous. XO-1.75 is great, however. I love the idea of Windows-proofing it by running on ARM. I fail to see the educational value of running MS Ofice.

But it's absolutely unfair to expect the OLPC folks to develop courseware for the machine beyond the outstanding materials already there.
What is the fix for merging OpenID with Hacker News account?
I wouldn't say "Amazon is moving in the right direction with the Kindle"--even Cory wouldn't buy one--but it's at least a start.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/20/amazon-kindle-the-we.ht...
"Mint.com from the makers of TurboTax"
Received an email from Intuit today with this line: "Tax time is here again! TurboTax Online is the easy way to get the help and advice you need to get your biggest refund possible. Have questions? Get all the answers you need at our Solve It Center™. Plus, you can manage your money FREE year-round with Mint.com, from the makers of TurboTax. Start your taxes today!"

Not sure the makers of TurboTax can claim Mint.com came "from" them. :-)
I'm curious as to how much demand there are for these overly focused Stack Overflow clones. I mean, I enjoy learning about CV, but to have its own dedicated domain?

What we should have instead is a Computer Science board that has a more general focus, perhaps "algorithms and theory in Computer Science," or perhaps a narrower "Artificial Intelligence".
10 minutes with the Google Nexus One Phone
My guess is the tablet will run Touch OS 4 and the 4th generation iPone/Touch will inherit most of the new features as well. A multi-tasking UI, Expose, widgets. All would be welcome additions to the iPhone. You've already got the concept of a Dock so extending it to be a multi-tasking UI seems obvious. The iPhone would benefit from a user home directory that was accessible between all applications. If we have an E-Reader app for books, magazines, catalogs, etc it seems like they would extend this to the iPhone/Touch as well offering content formatted for the smaller screen seamlessly. The only area of difference I can think of would be the need for a windowing system on a 10" display. It probably wouldn't make sense to limit developers only to full-screen applications with a higher resolution display. This might be a clever way to offer iPhone/Touch application compatibility to the tablet. Instead of restricting access to these apps, or automatically scaling them full-screen, why not just run them in a window?
US economic statistics graph generator
I think that there is a lot of stigma around Microsoft based platforms. But imo C# 4.0 is one of the most innovative languages out there right now. With Mono supporting all of C# 4.0 features (ExpressionTrees and all) I would say, if you're not using it give it another look. My ideal .NET stack doesn't have ".NET" in it at all:

C# 4.0
HAML
LESS
MongoDB
Here's just one of many potential sweet spots: I've been looking for a solution for a portable music reader for some time; the Kindle and Sony Reader's screens are a bit too slow, too dim, too small and are straight PDF readers (meaning, no intelligence around multiple endings, codas, and etc.) and the dedicated solutions out there aren't exactly worth the money as they're one-use devices. There's always the option of getting a used TabletPC and installing some music reading software designed for touchscreen, but I've been avoiding that because we really have no use for the keyboard, and their interfaces were never as snappy as even the iPhone's.

Count me in as pleasantly hopeful that this is a real product, and that I can get sheet music onto it in a way that allows for ease of using it live...
Agreed - One who is a "Luddite" is not, by the very definition of the word, opposed to technology, per se, but instead are opposed to "technology change" - the author does seem to be opposed to technological change - but does make some good reasons as to why he is.

I think the article may have been written half tongue in cheek - I expect if I was British, instead of just Canadian, I might have more fully appreciated the humor. Hints were as follows:

" If a burglar enters your home, you can drop your typewriter on them from above"

"To get the most out of Google Docs, you must use an arcane device known as a mouse. "

But, if you read the article all the way to the end, there are actually some parts that cause you to think about the (particularly for the ADHD among us) issue of using Google Docs as our principal text entry / editting tool (as opposed to something like "Pages" in Full Screen mode)
Certainly in terms of the DRM and licensing issues the Kindle is a step backwards, but it is an attempt to make purchasing books more convenient. As a lifelong bibliophile, I'm still waiting for something better to come along.
Guidance questions to ask yourself every month
Is your designer local to you? Ask them about local print shops. Most freelance designers know who can do quality work locally for a great price.
Loopt is just in San Francisco, right?
DRM isn't the main issue. Most book readers don't know or care about it particularly. Yes, eventually ownership products should be DRM-free, but raging about it from a moralistic standpoint isn't helping with the key issues.

We need affordable, high quality readers with convenient, low priced books. DRM-free would be great, but if some DRM lets the transition happen more quickly, then so be it.

Hulu, Steam, etc all show that DRM can be useful and create compelling products.

I would also remind all web startup founders that the SaaS model is basically DRM. One of the major benefits of server-side code is that it is very hard to pirate. You don't "own" your instance of Basecamp, you just rent it. And there's nothing wrong with that.
The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother
Not so much typing ability as actual typing output. And this was supposed to be only half-serious :)

What I meant was that it's better to spend some time solving the problem in your head, rather than bang out line after line of bad code. So, in essence, the typing speed is not the bottleneck of coding productivity.

Of course, a proper study on this would be a better argument than just me making stuff up.
IMHO it's more about concepts than technologies - eg, MVC based Web frameworks were a good concept to pick up a few years ago, whether you chose Rails or Django or Zend Framework etc, OOP were a good idea to pick up somewhere in the 90s whether you ended up writing games in C++ or banking apps in Java.

I think one of the next concepts to take off is asynchronous (or event based) programming. It's been around for a while, but only recently (with growing interest in concurrency) becoming mainstream for non-UI, dynamic language apps. Good intro here: http://simonwillison.net/2009/Nov/23/node/
"Norwegians are sanguine about their coughs and colds, toughing it out through low-grade infections."

I think this is one of the key elements. Are people in other countries willing to do this?
The six stages of drunkenness
If you listen to one thing I say in 2009, let it be this: Bookmark the above comment and execute on it.

I wanted to mention a lot of it but figured "client confidentiality" (although in the future I will hopefully have more stringent and expensive definitions for "client" than "bought me a cup of coffee").
First time I've heard of Flook. Very, very interesting, but agreed that it's a disconnect from Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite.

Good points on the user base, too. According to Compete data for November, Facebook is pulling in south of 130M unique visitors/month, and Twitter is pulling in around 22M. By comparison, Foursquare is pulling around 368K, Brightkite is around 228K, and Gowalla nearing 80K. Amazing what downtime in an airport can get you ;)

There seems to be some evidence that users are willing to share their location with micro-conversations (the reason Mashable called Foursquare the Twitter of 2010), but unlike Twitter, none of these guys have really robust APIs built out. Hell, Gowalla still doesn't have one, and Foursquare only let's you grab at per-user data, not per-location (beyond 3h).

I'm anxiously watching to see which network grabs the most users, and have my fingers crossed that the winner will have a way for the ecosystem around it to develop. Maybe it will be Twitter w/ Geo, but does that assume users will change their behavior and start using Twitter more while mobile? (see: Twitter usage over weekends. Most of the usage is us bored at work)
And beneath that CISC instruction set is a RISC core and a translation layer. The fact that the instruction set is CISC has more to do with backwards compatibility (hello, Windows) than an actual advantage of CISC.
Empty aspx forms returning JSON to a client. I guess you could call that very lightweight ASP.NET, but in principle the fact the pipeline is called is not important.

I could have done the same thing with CGI, and I anticipate it being easy to move to other platforms without much or any rework.
You may also like the story of LEO then: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Called-LEO-Worlds-Office/dp...
I really like this. I paid the $10, and I don't buy software often.

On Ubuntu Karmic, the game runs slowly, but that's mainly a result of poor flash performance. I have a Core 2 Duo at 2Ghz and an Intel GMA 950 running it. On Windows the game runs very smoothly.

When I booted into Windows to play the game, I couldn't access my character I was playing with on Linux. Why don't you have the option to save files on a server? I was really bummed out by this!
While we're all making predictions with no basis in fact: If in fact Gruber is right and the MacLet will not be a giant-screen iPhone, but rather an entirely new thing intended as the future of personal computing, I predict that every app available for the MacLet will be officially available for the MacBook. The most straightforward would be an officially-supported MacLet emulation mode for MacBooks.

If Apple really is going to position the MacLet OS as the next step in MacBook evolution, they're going to want to gradually transition MacBooks, and the bulk of their owners, toward the MacLet way of doing things. And the way to do that is the same way that Apple has pulled off every other major architectural transition in Mac history: Emulation.

Actually, let's have even more fun by noting that the Mac tradition has always been the other way around: Introduce the shiny new thing, but provide consolation by having it seamlessly [1] emulate the tired old thing. That implies that the MacLet might have a Mac OS X Desktop emulation mode, not the other way around. Now that would be interesting.

---

[1] Well, seamlessly enough to make it usable, but not so seamlessly that it doesn't still feel tired and old. The freight train of Progress must not be derailed!
Ideas are cheap. Everyone has them, and most have more than one. The ability to make something work is a whole different matter.

As an investor, you're determining risk vs reward. How much risk is there that I'll give my money to this guy and not ever get anything back?

If you have a prototype to play with, you at least know that the entrepreneur is capable of building his idea.

If you have actual users using the prototype, you know the entrepreneur is capable of building something others want.

And if you have any paying users, even if they aren't paying much, you you know the entrepreneur has been able to build something that people want bad enough to pay for.

Each of these steps is a reduction is risk.

The more risk an investor has, the less likely they are to invest. And if they DO invest, the more expensive their money is going to be. Anyone willing to invest in just an idea is going to want a lot more of your company for their investment, because they're absorbing a lot more risk than the entrepreneur.
I'm pretty happy with printplace.com. You can request a free sample package to see what kind of paper and printing they offer.
Start-Up IPOs Go Elsewhere
I think network effects guarantee that one hardware platform will dominate most (almost all) of the installations. You can't expect software to be portable & everyone to provide source.
Any sense if plexiglass is as good?
Share credit card bills online with Blippy
$2.50 for a 2000 hour work-year would be $5000. There are billions of people who live in countries with a per capita GDP less than that. By 2020, most of these people will have broadband.

This sort of crowdsourcing is likely to become a big industry.
Also, consider that the greatest threat is not from people who hope to live and accept a strategic risk of death. Rather, the greatest threat is from people who believe that death is the ultimate success, for both their worldly and otherworldly aims.

While a one-in-a-twenty chance of success sounds good from a terror chief's perspective, no suicide bomber wants a 95% chance of winding up in captivity, famous only as a failure. Out of the twenty, they want to be the one!

So plans that allocate many participants to expected capture will have far fewer volunteers. And every report of a capture will decrease potential-volunteers' willingness to sign up, because they will adjust upward their expectation of embarrassing capture rather than martyrdom.
Interesting aside - has anyone else noticed that the requirement to identify jargon that not everyone will be familiar with (UMPC was new to me) - is basically solved when google/wikipedia are about 500 msec away at any time?
Which Tech Skills Are in Demand Globally?
I like the Mr. Men (& Little Miss) books by Roger Hargreaves. Not just for kids; I still gain pleasure from reading them several decades later. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Men
Synchtube: Watch Synchronized YouTube Videos With Your Friends
Another data point for you, Opera on Gentoo Linux:

http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/4621/1231150731.png

To me it looks pretty similar to your Firefox screenshot.
Catching Google Wave With Waveboard Mac
My bet is that it has a PixelQi screen- eink mode that does everything the Kindle does, but better, and then a normal mode for web browsing, email, media content, and applications.
UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) strikes me as something of a misnomer for the tablet. A 7"-10" flat screen, non-foldable tablet PC would have to travel in a folder, or in a bag, or somewhere that's not your pocket.

Seems like iPhone/iTouch would be a better UMPC.
I too agree. After seeing the Joojoo, I thought, it'd be better to get that thing instead of a laptop. And when I need to be at home to program, I just attach a keyboard. Keyboards can pretty small nowadays. The only time I really need to type a while are when I'm writing blogposts and programming, and usually I have a hard surface available for that. Every other time, like for search terms and comments, it's enough to use a touchscreen keyboard.

You won't need to carry around different devices because you won't need to. you'll use the Tablet instead of your laptop--and perhaps (but less likely), your iPhone.

Just like having a multi-touch screen relieves the need for a mouse, I think there's a possibility that something similar exists for typographic input. If not, I don't mind just attaching a keyboard.
"NASA had put the chances that Apophis could hit Earth in 2036 as 1-in-45,000. In October, after researchers recalculated the asteroid's path, the agency changed its estimate to 1-in-250,000."

So this could end up being history's most notable example of premature optimization.
> It isn't that I don't trust you, officer, it is just that I desire to renew our traditional understanding that my papers and effects are mine and not to be trifled with lightly.

That's a very nice (and very quotable) way of putting it.
Here's the key technical innovation which I think would open the door to really cool tablets, apple or otherwise. Fast refresh rate e-ink style displays (presumably with some manner of touch and/or stylus sensitive screen). That combination would (at least for me) make it the perfect reading and note taking tool.
Cap and Trade in Practice: How to get paid for laying off workers.
That'd be slick, the screen was the best thing about the XO. I gather that the tech has been further improved--the XO in color mode isn't so good (but killer in eBook mode).
Bah, learn to read or at least to skim with some accuracy.

It's tongue in cheek, and the point of the article (as stated early on) is that when changing tools there are always advantages and disadvantages.

The author then goes on to demonstrate that there are plausible disadvantages even for something as implausible and absurd as using a mechanical typewriter instead of a word processor.
Read my comment below (which I made b/c I assumed someone would bring this up). I'm not talking here a/b people working in countries outside of the US.
Ghosting issues.
A failure is hardly the same thing as a tragedy. The words are not interchangeable. People working toward the same end using different methods is not a tragedy even if one method is "better" than another.
Spot on. V-team also often connotes geographic dispersal, as well as reporting to different orgs.
Maybe it's just me, but I could see many uses for a tablet beyond just reading in the bathroom or in bed. For any job where you're standing/ walking and taking notes (real estate agents, etc), it's awkward to try to open a macbook, and the iphone is too tedious.

Pair a tablet with a solid voice to text app, and it'd be pretty useful for lawyers, reporters, etc.
Nope, it's normal screens.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/12/28/apple_orders_1...
RAI-TV-Player - La Rai e Mediaset in Streaming senza Silverlight/Moonlight
if you are in your car, they can simply arrest you (no charges, but can hold you for 72 hours)

Are you sure that you can be arrested and held without charges, generally speaking, in the U.S.?
I love this post because it mentions me!#!

Some good material here, whether it mentions you or not ;)
Like Gruber says, I think the likeliest solution to the too-much-gear problem is that the iWhatever will simply replace laptops at some point. Maybe I'm being unimaginative, but it seems like anything a 10-inch screen can do, a 13-inch screen can do better, so maybe they'll eventually have a ~13-inch version. And at that point, it'll be too close to a laptop for both to continue existing.

The counterargument is that the iWhatever will be too specialized to replace laptops, but to reference Gruber again, that level of niche play isn't really Apple's style.
That explains why he said "You keep the fingers of your left hand on the ASDF keys and the fingers of your right hand on the HJKL keys."

I haven't met any touch typists who didn't know the right hand is supposed to rest on the jkl; keys.