skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Define those three terms and I'll give you a cookie.

I'm writing an app. In the app the user categorizes things and says whether he likes them or not. So he might categorize one thing as "blue" and "heavy" and say he doesn't like it.

Now in the future when a blue or heavy thing comes along, I'd like the machine to try to predict whether he'll like it or not.

The thing that's making my head twist around a bit is that there are about 200 tags, and the user can choose 1 or a dozen. So it seems like I'm going to end up with this hugely complex nest of cartesian products from all the tags.

I think.
Current project is built on ASP.Net MVC, Azure and SQL Server 2008.
We are also in the BizSpark program and love it!
You say that as though being hypersexual is a bad thing. :-)

Seriously though, any "emotional and psychological complications", etc. are only because of our societies ridiculous, puritanical, anti-sex attitudes. It's really way past time for society to move past these dark ages attitudes about sex. Sex is natural, and even better, it's FUN! :-)
Can someone point to a useful program written in a 99%+ functional style?
UCS Satellite Database
Mobile-phone culture: The Apparatgeist calls
this motivated me to search for info on coworking here in santiago, chile. i've posted to the obvious hit on search results and also sent an email to someone else i found via blog comment, but thought i might post here too on the off chance someone is local...? if so, please email me (see profile)
Twilio raises 3.7 million
for messing with anyone with a Mac. Just walk over and invert their colors. :)

If you do it fast enough and they are newb enough they'll spend a couple minutes trying to figure out how to undo it. ;)
Whoever downmodded this should really downmod the article - after all, it's just a blatant repost of material found elsewhere.
You sound just like my old pointy haired boss. I'll do with you, what I did with him. I'm going to roll my eyes and call you names when you talk to me, because I know you're too dumb to do my job and smart enough to know that.
Are you trying to work for 1h on top of the 10h you've already worked in school? If so, that may be your problem.

Almost nobody can work for 10h straight. I'd guess that you're taking breaks for lunch and between classes, and to hang out with friends. It could just be that you've run out of juice by the time you get home.

I've found that I get about 3-4h of good, productive, cognitively demanding work done a day. My friends in grad school say this is fairly typical of them too. If there's an exciting project with a deadline, I might be able to go up to 7-8 hours in bursts, but that's paid for by a week or so of complete unproductivity afterwards.

The good news is that this is enough. Those people you hear about who've built world-changing inventions? They didn't do it through working more, they did it through working more effectively. That means paying attention to what's important, doing it, and letting the busywork slide.
I was thinking of a more specialized OCD site, but you're probably right that's it's not going to be that much of a difference. Thanks for the tip, will think about it. Probably not worth doing then.
I find your use of the terms "close a sale" and "feast" in this context disturbing.
Any advice on starting a coworking space in the DC suburbs? Where can I locate cofounders, what skills should they have? How much capital should I expect to need?

I think this is going to be a huge industry in 10 years and I'd love to get in on the ground floor somehow.
I always like to think of an application when learning new concepts. Bayesian theory is often used in machine learning, for example, where the "learning" is simply done by updating a bayesian equation. In ML you often have this:

posterior probability = conditional probability * marginal probability.

where,

marginal prob is an initial guess (ie you have two boxes and the probability of choosing one is 5/10)

conditional probability is typically an observation given the marginal (ie you look inside one of the boxes and there are 4 red balls and 2 green balls, so the probability of a red ball in box 1 is 4/6 or 2/3.)

posterior is the simply the probability of those two multiplied together (ie 2/3 * 1/2 = 1/3).

Now, in ML, because of a property called conjugacy...you can use this posterior probability to update the learning process. In the next iteration, you would use 1/3 as your initial marginal prob guess.

If you're looking for good tutorials, I would suggest:

Paul Graham's Spam Bayes filter:

http://www.paulgraham.com/better.html

Andrew Moore's Statistical learning tutorials:

http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/

Christopher Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning- Chapter 1: Probability Theory

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cmbishop/prml/...
Focus Factor works well enough for me. 8 pills a day/$40 per week for a bottle, and it's probably masking some underlying condition, but it works.
so what is a v-team? vertical? victory?
Russia May Try to Deflect Asteroid With Spacecraft
You're right. Those are Microsoft internal jargon.

"compete": Term used for "not Microsoft" (I came from "compete")

"v- team": This position will have contractors working for them. Contractors working for Microsoft have usernames in the format: /[a-z]\-[a-z]+/. Contractors or "Vendors" have usernames starting with 'v-'
John Gruber (of Markdown) responds to Atwood's criticism
Going without until 19 definitely gave me psychological complications. I can't imagine doing that voluntarily.
now write out a detailed plan on how to achieve it or it will just be a dream and never be achieved.
I'd say the coworking wiki is not a bad place to start for reference and to get in touch with folks who have founded spaces themselves:

http://coworking.pbworks.com/

I haven't personally founded a space, just adopted one ;-)
I can't comment on what definition of blue moon they use, but Google calculator says that ~0.37 occur every year:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=1+year+*+once+in+a+...
The writings of Mircea Eliade need to make their way into the Muslim world. The need to separate the "sacred" from the "profane" will greatly benefit Muslims to experience transcendental views internally instead of imposing superficial ideals externally.

It is difficult to have a transcendental experience without an appreciation for the sacred, and these two things are not mutually exclusive or only reserved to those who follow a religion. I don't think anybody here can argue that witnessing the birth of a child is anything but a sacred moment; perhaps for some achieving some level of success in their profession may translate into a sacred moment; even something as mundane as sipping a fine brew of tea can be sacred. (These are things that don't require you believe in a "higher power" or even a religion - but it could mean something to you and to you alone; when it happens in the presence of somebody else and they feel it positively at the same time, you could call that "bonding", and that too is sacred.) It really doesn't matter what the worldly manifestation is, but rather how it may positively affect you internally on a purely human level. The point is that "sacred" is internally directed and brings peace to your being. For me, defining "profane" or that which is worldly is a bit easier to define: anything that is not sacred.

The mixture of technical problem solving and "religiosity" is a perversion of the highest degree because then there is no distinction between x and y and to simply delete one of these variables becomes a technicality without emotion, insight, or appreciation for one another or even oneself. In my experience, this is happening in the Muslim world because there are schools of thought (such as engineering or science) that solve problems wonderfully and in a methodical way to give excellent results in the real world; when combined with the uneducated view of treating every word in scripture as fact then these two things can be intermingled without distinction: religious views are explained through logic (sans sacred/transcendental experience) and wordly methodologies that otherwise benefit humanity enable actions to be carried out in the name of "religion".

If only this simple distinction of "sacred" and "profane" can find their ways into the hearts of all people from all walks of life, I think we will be a step closer to relating to one primarily as human beings. It is a universal and even human understanding that anybody from any belief system can appreciate. Anybody who mixes sacred with profane and proclaims that they understand the belief system they adhere to is either fooling themselves or is a flat out liar.

If you are Muslim and reading this, please reflect upon what I mean by this distinction and discuss it at your next Halaqa, if that's your thing.
People inside Microsoft are working on changing the reality. Things are changing, but change is happening slowly.
It sounds like you want a recommender and maybe a bayesian classifier to determine if something is blue and/or heavy.

I recommend reviewing Apache/Mahout Taste source code.

http://lucene.apache.org/mahout/taste.html#overview

There's even a book coming out on it. http://manning.com/owen/
That's interesting. I have friends in Toronto who do a Rails' Pub Night that has a similar purpose (casual gathering space for Rails-oriented startups), but we're pretty quiet and focused in our space (Wburg Coworking) unless it's beer-o-clock.
Which infinity? If you believe in infinite rational numbers, shouldn’t there be a rational number equal to the ratio of a circle’s radius to its circumference?

(I don’t believe in God or infinite universes. Standard Model FTW!)
Sony Ericsson W980 Black Unlocked - 8GB
Sony Ericsson W980 is a Walkman phone which let you entertain all the way you want and it let you do any functions at a time with its multitasking features and your friends will be attracted towards your handset and you because of its stunning look.
The words "evidence" and "compete" have special meanings inside Microsoft:

As I understand it, "evidence" is proof that your work was received well by the community you are targeting. Rather than sales figures, "evidence" is the currency of the division that this job is in.

"compete" is a blanket term for "not Microsoft": Mac OS X, Linux, (Free|Net|Open)BSD, Plan 9 are all part of "compete".
Virtual team, as in remote or distributed. (I assume.)
I'm very confused.

I expected a different conclusion from the one you describe, so it didn't sound twisted to me.

In the last question you quote, he refers to "tools". The question will only make sense if you understand that he is referring to imperative tools, not functional ones.

because you get functions with 316 parameters that thread the state through the program.

He assumes that you would never write a single function which depends on 316 different parameters, but that there could be 313 global variables.

Now you have a function which takes three arguments.

His argument is that to understand what this function depends on will require reading all the code in the function and all the code in every function which it calls, to work out which global variables it accesses. Without doing that, you have to assume that this simple function depends on all 313 of them, even though you would never write a function which explicitly took that many arguments.

On the other hand, in a purely functional language, you would still have a function with only three arguments, and simply by reading the function signature, you can understand what it will depend on.

The middle ground is to say, hey, but the function really did depend on some of those global variables, so in the real world the function will have more than three arguments. More than three, but less than 316, lets call it five.

But you find yourself with six other functions which depend on the same two global variables, while nothing else does. So, you go off and make that explicit by having one class with two instance variables and a few methods, one of which takes three arguments. And then you ban global variables. Welcome to OOP.
If I was being accused of argument ad hominem, I would take that as an insult too that since it's a fallacy in thinking.

My comment was providing lessons on the levels of reasoning used to downvote along the lines of pg's essay on the levels of argument.

Feel free to offer more levels or refinements/replacements for the reason to downvote, I started the first two levels, somebody else followed up with another couple levels.

I think they ran roughly parallel to pg's essay in terms of the lowest level being the lowest form of downvote, the next higher level being slightly more sophisticated, and so on.

People want to just use the downvote to be contrary without having to deal with the consequences of being contrary. It's passive-aggressiveness at its worst.
Vendor. A team of contractors.
Of course an elegant solution is desirable, however I prefer bloatware that works, over a beautifully architected one that is vaporware.
Tyler Durden’s Rules For Writing In The Zone
Oh, you should drive your boat near a beach on a hot day. Either way you can run over strangers ... however, in general if you want to be prepared for a specific target (in general), then it's more likely to get the job done with a car since not all people go to the beach or take a swim :)

So while driving a boat is fun, keep that car nearby.
Seconding music, I've found this album to be good:

http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/18256
Greatly enjoyed the talk.

But, really, taking what he's doing to the limit (he even says so himself) is just re-creating the Socratic method. (Though choosing the questions is hard work, as he notes.)

And he can't do that, given his large class sizes (one of my classes at Harvard was 700+ people, Ec 101 with Samuelson from MIT), so he uses this peer-teaching approach to work around the limitation that he can't sit down with a small group of them and work through the questions.

That's why we are sending some of our home-educated kids (those that show the interest in and capacity for a rather intense education) to Thomas Aquinas College in Ojai, CA.

It's probably the only school in the world that uses 100% Socratic method for all courses (each no larger than 17 people), with no electives all 4 years, outside of St. John's of Annapolis/Santa Fe (on which TAC is modeled to some degree).

http://www.thomasaquinas.edu for those interested.

(Yes, it's an unabashedly Catholic school, but that doesn't diminish the intellectual rigor in the least. It's also in one of the most beautiful spots in the world, in the foothills of the mountains north of LA, near Ojai, which is where the 50's film "Shangri-La" was made and which is still a spa/resort area today.)
It's just a style thing for me, but I prefer to have my replies available in a separate tab. I also prefer to have the ability to keep scrolling back easily through my history.

On the plus side, the UI is more polished than ChromedBird's, and the response is much faster than Brizzly's. Overall, decent polish on the UI.

But that's not enough to get me away from ChromedBird, my client at the present time.
Writing APIs to Wrap APIs
I wouldn't sweat it, people downvote when they suspect something might be humorous, sarcastic, or a parody. Adding a tag like <sarcasm> or <humor> simply confirms it for them so they can downvote with a clear conscious.
Don't be afraid to post what you think.
How did you get 10 upvotes for a two sentence comment, the first boasting about how you don't understand something(!), and the second being an incomprehensible mash of a two word quote, a misspelled dismissive phrase and an unclear acronym ('For The Win'?).
The hash could be used as the response in a consensus protocol, but it looks like Enchilada leaves building that protocol up to the developer.

So like I said, it's nice to have that hash for every reference, but I wonder if it's worth the storage overhead, and if a developer will use it when he's building his own distributed system anyway.
What you can do is have a classifier for each tag. You can use a naive bayes technique, which is in PG's essay that I posted to above or you can check out the chapter in Collective Intelligence. You would need to know how much the tag appears for the user given all the other tags, how much the tag appears in the whole document, and then maybe an initial guess of what you think the tag's distribution is for every user.

To do prediction, you would take that tag's posterior probabilities and multiply it by the user preferences. Then you can just recommend the ones that are the highest. You can do this with any language as it just revolves around counting and such. For extremely large datasets you can write a MapReduce script, but that probably isn't your usage case.
> [1] Exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021157

This is one of the rare cases where humor bought upvotes. I'd say for every 10 evenly mildly humorous comments, 9 of them are voted down.
I assumed vertical, but vertical to what?
Jargon arises because it is useful for compressing information exchanged within a given culture. If this really was an internal posting which was accidentally exposed, what is the problem with using the jargon of Microsoft's culture?
People often pay for ads per click and per thousand impressions. Having purchasing power isn't really a prereq for clicking or viewing ads.
He's trying to make a tenuous leap to suggest that engineers are smart, smart people are sexually repressed, and sexually repressed people are more likely to be violent. I understand what he's saying, but I don't buy it. Claiming that terrorists' grievances are based in deeply-rooted sexual problems is juvenile, and doesn't respect the gravity or history of the situation, IMHO.
Being sexual in a loving relationship between two adults is a good thing. Being indiscriminately sexual is a bad thing. Being sexual with the wrong sort of people is a bad thing.

I don't have any problem with an isolated casual sexual encounter. As far as I'm concerned, that's none of my business. However, I absolutely hate living in a culture that glorifies it, to the detriment of loving relationships. I also hate living in a world where the vast majority of available women have such awful attitudes as to be unmarriageable.

Those "puritannical attitudes" exist for a reason. Some people take them way too far, and their application is very unjust (e.g. gendered double standards); but they shouldn't be cast aside as relics of "the dark ages". There are many great things about loving, long-term, monogamous relationships and family formation.
2010, the year of Internet Tablets.
This is what he actually wants: http://www.lukas-renggli.ch/smalltalk/magritte
Running Chrome 4 here, no problems using the Repl. Did you install the Java plug-in?
ah, ok, thanks. for "simple" values they wouldn't need to actually store the hash. instead they could use, for example, the actual value of an int, byte, float etc, xored with a type-specific base (but it wouldn't be that great as a hash in, say, a hash table - better to use some function that preserves uniqueness but disperses related values). that would mean they only need to store large hashes for composite structures.

edit: i am making life too complicated. in short, if it can be calculated quickly, it doesn't have to be stored.
Emphasis on "easy": even if it's just typo-fixing in your code or doing problems from week 1 of class, mundane/brainless tasks fine kindling for getting your brain chugging along for the bigger problems.
>breaking through womens' defenses

I think this metaphor may be your problem.
Interesting, that's the first dictionary i've ever seen that lists it - Merriam-Webster, Cambridge and Websters all claim it's not a word. (As well as google - "Did you mean: minimalist")

In any case, all three are adjectives with what appear to be interchangeable meanings, so using the shortest suitable word seems most in the spirit of minimalism.
Syncretism
"Celebrating [copyright infringement]" is definitely speech, however.
So.

I have 200 tags. For each tag in the system I need

CountOfThisTagInAllDocs

CountOfThisTagInTheCurrentDoc

---- Then I need ----

CountOfAllTagsInAllDocs

and CountOfAllTagsInThisDoc

---- Then For The User ----

CountOfAllTagsInAllDocs

CountOfThisTagInAllDocs ??

CountOfThisTagInAllFavoredDocs

Which somehow gets me to likelihood that given the current tags the current doc will be favored by the user.

It's like I have all the pieces and still can't see how the puzzle fits together. Sorry so slow here. It seems like for each user I need to have some sort of cross lookup for each tag. Either that or compute it all on the fly.
they all "had" to drive their own cars

I can imagine that this must be a hard thing to overcome in a car company. When you work for a car company, you want to be proud of your product so you want to buy from your company. However, most families have at most 2 cars, so you have very little incentive to buy and really understand a competitor's product.

I can see how in Microsoft you have the same forces at work. When building infrastructure or programming there is so steep of a learning curve regardless of what technology you choose that it is all but impossible to really understand all possible choices. Couple that with the inherent Microsoft desire to dogfood everything, and you get a lot of people understanding only the Microsoft way. Once you start going down that path, it's very easy to create your own mini-languages. It's all very incestuous, and not a good way to run a company. I think this is why Microsoft seems to have a hard time understanding Apple and Linux.
The Beautiful Art of Japanese Web Design
Another suggestion in this vein. If you are in productive mode, leave the easy stuff alone.

Do the easy stuff when you need to get started.
I like the way you layed out the metrics on the dashboard. Very well thought out. We can defiantly work something like this into our system. Do you use graphs with this data also or just numeric data?

Robots, lol.
What awful attitudes would these be? Just because a person is sexual doesn't mean they are a cheater or doing everyone.
Talk to Dave Troy, he founded the Beehive in Baltimore and could fill you in on the details and his experiences so far:

http://beehivebaltimore.org/

http://davetroy.com/?p=599

There's an email address on the beehive page or drop me an email and I'll hook you up.

(I work next to, not in, the beehive)
The comment about mindsets is especially poignant.

I didn't think this submission was that great though. Waking up earlier when you have a reason to do so will often work better than if you have no real reason to do so. And the other two examples were about software rather than habits, which I see as two different beasts.
If you are waiting for the decade to end, you have already missed it
You should. I'm not sugarcoating the ugly, ruined world that supposed "sexual modernism" has brought us to.

I am all for the right of gays to marry, legalized abortion, and 95 percent of the feminist platform. The problem is that we now have a generation of women who feel "empowered" to "try out" a few of the scumbag men that, in previous generations, they wouldn't have dared be seen with. That hurts almost everyone.
don't feed the troll

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=time_management
The hiring manager probably meant for it to be an internal only posting but failed at posting. The training you get very early on as a manager-of-managers covers how to write good job postings, and avoiding ridiculous acronyms is part of it.

Fear of IP taint has traditionally kept most MSFT teams away from direct external contact, except through legal-approved intermediaries. Maybe Joel has forgotten that after fifteen years away? I'd stake money he didn't "talk to anyone outside the company" when working on VBA :-)
you are right. Deleting.
Chimps use cleavers and anvils as tools to chop food