skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the contrary, I stated that grades measured the ability to get grades, which is almost tautological.

Demonstrating anything beyond that would require proof, hence the burden of proof is squarely yours. :)
> Protocol Buffers are crazy fast but aren't self describing or human readable.

Protocol Buffers have a text format that is equivalent to the binary format.

Also, XML isn't that much more self-describing than Protocol Buffers. Sure, you can read the tag names in XML, but what is the set of all allowed tag names? What does the stuff inside the tag names actually mean? You have to communicate that stuff somehow, out-of-band, in a spec of some sort. In Protocol Buffer land, a .proto file is just part of that spec.
Steam Hardware Survey: December 2009
If you're a "scanner" rather than a by-the-word reader, some advice here.. make sure you don't quit before you get about 7 paragraphs in. That's where it starts getting funny/sad.
I think all of the items on the first list can safely be moved to the second.
Yeah, that's really where it takes a turn for the surreal. "How not to promote," indeed - and the scary thing is how you can sympathize with his bitterness and sort of see how there, but for the grace of God, go you.

The part where he calls the founder of the list a troll is also choice.
Look at the context again. Was I bragging about my knowledge, or questioning the amount of specific relevant experience of the other poster?

Now, what was your point again?
You gotta love his sweet pic at the bottom...
page - http://PDXCell.com
pic - http://pdxcell.com/images/johnpratt.jpg
If you read the article, you notice that the inventor claims that it's not something he'd use himself, but as a "low brow" product especially marketed towards children. A little kid would be more entertained by the notion of "spraying" food rather than go through the hassle of measuring ingredients and cleaning up the mixing bowls, etc.
But part of the beauty of the current financial system is that most of the time if I use a trusted intermediary, I can confidently engage in financial transactions without having to build up a trust history.
Lessons learned from learning new programming languages
is it really faster to write to a bunch of text files, sort them to a new bigger text file, and then do the insert? seems like a lot of extra steps, all involving a lot of reading and writing..
Your comments are very insightful. I know this because I try to read the whole comment before judging. Unfortunately, even in fairly intelligent audiences like HN, it is common for people to form judgements based primarily on first impressions.

"First impression" now equals "Incorrect conclusion from careless partial reading?"

And people wonder why I so often complain about "poor reading comprehension" even on HN?
Right, but it's still winning the game.

If you don't start by copying single human you will always end up with patched up Frankenstein like creature that can be easily discernible from human.

Besides, mind is just big lookup table with simple, not very effective reasoning engine and desire to fill in the gaps in the table.
I would be interested in reading up on those. Could you perhaps give a link? I tried googling, but I didn't get very interesting results. Maybe you can think of a few memorable discussions that?
Sounds much more like a rant to me. The complaint about the war file size is a prime example. There are several quick / easy ways to analyze this and fix it / force it to generate exactly what you want. None of that is particularly advanced mvn black magic.

It sounds like he chose to just give up on the tool, spend a lot of time ranting about it on a blog, and go back to what he was familiar with.
Two fields is adequate. Image verification can be staged. With Javascript you can check that someone is actually clicking and not show a captcha. However, if JavaScript is switched off you can show a captcha so that you can stop bots trying to register.
Just playing devils advocate here; This is another one of those standards that assumes the whole world speaks English.
It appears the author has the wrong idea that a good idea demands exclusive success...if that were the case, I would imagine most of us would be millionaires.

You can't complain about something being hard to execute on and then bitch because others executed the idea better than you could. That's just the nature of the game.
I think it's a fantastic case-in-point about how much value people place on convenience over quality.

Also, it is impossible to overstate the importance of not making people think. Making pancake batter requires either remembering the recipe, or (gasp!) looking it up.
With this product, all you have to know is that when you push the nozzle, shitty pancakes come out. Magic!
What DRMed files is the DMCA forcing you to download? You make the decision to engage with companies that use DRM. No one is forcing you. (I don't mean to defend the entire DMCA, just the idea that you're being forced to download DRM)

"Possession is 9/10ths of the law" is not a useful principle in cases where there is a contract. It seems that you want to force others to not have the option of entering into certain contracts, because you find them distasteful.
An Unfinished Idea: Open Source Code Review As A Social Game
There was no Gregorian year 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ..., or 1581, either. There is no contradiction in the calendar starting on a 1 but decades starting on a 0; either way the calendar actually started in the middle of a decade/century/millenium. True pedants should be insisting the decade starts on a 2, and centuries start on 82s!
I think it is a little bit odd that he links to Kickstarter from this PDXCell page.
I hope nobody takes this blog post at face value.

You may, depending upon jurisdiction, be legally obligated to provide the following:

* Vacation policy

* Phone system

You may need to have the following documented, to comply with labor laws:

* Set time you need to arrive in morning

I, for one, have never worked anywhere that had:

* Windows that open

* Democratically controlled music system

* EVDO cards

* Gmail and Google docs
What you're missing here is sort of described in the RTFM. There are a couple very good, free books on maven that describe this, but in essence:

1) You absolutely should have your own local repository (e.g. Archiva).
2) You should use <dependencyManagement> and <pluginManagement> tags to force all projects to have the same versions o all deps and plugins.
3) Don't even try using snapshots unless you know what you are doing.
Try this link:
http://noblesoul.com/orc/critics/
Thanks very much for linking to the book - that will be very useful.

(I know Maven doesn't actually redownload everything each time, but it does seem to do something on the internet every time I build without -o; and even with -o, it still seems slow to get going. Might be project-specific / PEBCAK error though.)
I've always thought dataAt(x) would be more correct then dereference(x)
That was my (probably engineer-biased) take as well. Pratt seems to think that their awesome idea even with shitty execution (by his own admission) should have won the day.
It will go live around 2015 :-)
I think it depends. Is learning a new programming language a waste of time compare to getting better with the current programming language that you knew already?

While I'm learning Ruby, it did not make me a better Java programmer. I still suck at Java programming.

Reading books like Code Complete, Pragmatic Programmer, Clean Code, and reading Zen of Python (import this) help me to become a better programmer; but learning Python does not help me to become a better developer. Reading better code (other people's or projects's) do make me know more.

I finally understand what does it mean with the phrase "no matter what they tell you, it's always a people problem.". Languages have nothing to do with it.
Compared to my early 20s, I'm also better at remembering names and conversations, but worse at remembering insignificant things like what I wore the day before or whether or not I locked the front door. I'm also much better at seeing connections between things rather than the facts themselves, which I think is more valuable. I think I'm reworking the way my brain learns to focus on things I think are important.

For reference I'm 31 and write software.
Yeah, I totally forgot that Apple made a tiny MacBook Air with a touch screen and detachable keyboard.

Have you ever seen someone use a clipboard? One hand, pointing to interesting things. Very convenient. Have you ever tried to use a laptop like this? There's no way to even hold them open with one hand without worrying about dropping or flexing them. Clearly a couple of people appreciated the two seconds you expended to throw a snarky comment out, but you've completely missed the point and added nothing to the conversation.
One of my old startups in 2003, we made one of music system from spare parts and one guy wrote an web base controlling daemon for it. Then we contributed our collection of CDs. We can use web interface to control the system and up/down or veto the music. And we also have an anthem around 4pm. (The whole Coffin for Head of State by Fela Kuti). It becomes like a ritual.

It creates a bond among people because we know what music that each of us likes. We did not play pop charts or technos, but more like Jazz, Punk, Art Rock and any fun but not mainstream popular songs.

We have almost 128 GBs of mp3 after 3 years. That was one heck of good memory than listening through headphone.
This was before Turing and von Neumann; it wasn't well established that everything is data and can be stored and manipulated in arbitrary ways. (Heck, phone companies have trouble with this concept today). They were extrapolating what they saw as the special cases of telephones and cameras and phonographs.
This will be an unpopular opinion but I think that if anything blogging and social news will cool down whereas traditional media will just become more compact until both mediums compliment each other.

Traditional media won't sit back and watch their businesses succumb to bankruptcy. In its current state social media seems to be overly reliant on traditional media to first do the grunt work. Websites like Newsvine have attempted to create citizen journalism alongside its traditional counterpart and in some special circumstances it has worked, but for 99.999% of stories there's no difference between news and blogging. If traditional media ever feels threatened it will react against social media and without the references to stories that the traditional media brings both will lose out.

Until someone comes along and provides real news and journalism outside of the traditional media newspapers and news broadcasters will continue to make money. In the same way that people still want to listen to the radio when they have televisions I'll still want to read a newspaper on the bus or during my lunch break.

I'd love someone to poke some holes in my reasoning, but I cannot see any way for traditional media to lose out to the Internet.
I'm about to do a hobby project and Maven seems to be a good choice for me. In fact, I'm about to learn how to generate project related websites using Maven.
I wasn't serious :)
ha, thanks :) not that I can take credit for anything either, I just happened to have been subscribed to the barcampla mailing list.
Making a 3D game with Ogre - Adding Enemies
Thomas Hardy's Jude The Obscure, absolutely brilliant. Its littered with literary goto statements, referencing every imaginable literary text. Its really pretty cool, Its hard to follow along with, and harder to catch all of the references but the norton edition fills half of each page with footnotes. I really liked this book. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/039397278X?tag=safet-20
It's maybe a little nicer for assembly programmers, but x86 is not that bad any more, and the predication and auto-shifting features in ARM are not that easy to deal with for compilers.

The main thing that may be problematic for x86 is that the individual cores may get smaller and simpler, which means that the decoding hardware will take up a proportionally higher portion of each one.
"Great Gatsby" by F.S.Fitzgerald. Really awesome book.
Again, not sure how this matters as it seems like you are going down a path that is unrelated to the actual protocol. There has been discussion of Ripple on the agile banking list and other payment systems that rely on intermediaries, and OpenTransact could be used in those systems, but the issue is not inherent in the protocol alone.
3 Ways Yoga Can Benefit You in Everyday Life
Making a 3D game with Ogre - Collision Detection
Maven mixes many programming tools in one program: project building (make), dependency management(apt/yum), project management, etc.

I replaced maven by ant+RPM+yum+Hudson in one large project, and everybody is happy.
You can even combine this approach with split and parallel make to do a cheap single-machine parallel sort. I use a little script that generates a Makefile that can be called with make -j n that splits an input file, sorts the parts, and then merges them with sort -m. It's proved to be quite handy.
It is a good approach and one I share. NLP has done it for years, once you have a corpus which is tagged is so much more easier to then work on your data. I also like your idea of using the Mechanical Turk to gain traction on the manual tagging, in any way that is probably what would super intelligent computers might do in the 40-year span - use humans to tag - before they super-massively carry out with the balance of the calculations! :)

One area which the article did not touch is how to introduce controls to identify 'rigging' of the system, ie, similarly to controlling link farms at Google. This is where the problem in my opinion is turned the other way out.
I listened to a panel recently discussing similarities and differences between human and machine learning. One thing I found interesting, was a human researcher who disputed the commonly held idea that computer memory is perfect and human memory much more faulty.

He pointed out that this comes from comparing human memory to simple RAM or disk access. Given an exact memory address, file path, etc. the computer always gives back exactly the right data. However, maybe Google is a better metaphor. You send in a query term or terms, and then evaluate whether what came back was really what you were looking for.

This highlights the importance of associations, indexing, and everything else that goes into using one piece of information to retrieve another.

Google doesn't always get it right, and there are lots of aspects of human memory that Google can't replicate (yet). But it's interesting that the article concludes with an acknowledgement that Google can remember for us much of the trivia we often forget.
Wow, you just described my very same path into programming, albeit it appears mine was 15 - 20 years after yours. Could you talk a little more about your "fix" for this issue? Was it more of just an epiphany that helped you deal with work related stress?

I'm afraid that I can't have the quality of home life that I want if I ditch on my programming career, but I'll never have the quality of career life that I want if I don't. I love programming, but not when it's retardo CRUD sites.
It is not as swing and miss if you remember that 1900s was the dawn of Eugenics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics) -- the selection and breeding of a superior humans, a country of healthy, youthful and perfect men and women...

We often forget that America and Britain were very much in love with Eugenics. Unfortunately that is probably not something included in the high-school history curriculum...

Search for footage of the controversial "Olympia" by Leni Riefenstahl it typifies the mood and the idea...
To CNN: Remember, it's my language you're abusing.

No, it is not. It's their language too. There is no central authority which hands down the rules of the English language, only common agreement and a shared understanding. If a collection of words and punctuation has clearly expressed an idea, then it has served its purpose.

Rules of grammar are useful, but getting too pedantic and authoritarian about them can do nothing but suck the joy out of your life.
Um, no.

The trade-off isn't between utilizing humans VS utilizing computers. It's the R&D cost of building simple, and proven systems, and paying peanuts into mturk VS the R&D of complex, and sophisticated systems * probability of working.

In other words, our tightest bottleneck is not the cost of supervising, but rather our understanding of the strategies, and abilities to tackle a given problem domain using only the limited tools of a fancy abacus.

And since this is HN, I'd like to digress here, and propose the curse of researching such strategies, and abilities, is that from an investor's POV, the math simply doesn't add up. The R&D phase can go on practically as long as the budget; probability of even incremental success is slim; and except for a couple of well-defined domains, applicability is negligible. Investors have 2 AI-winters[1] to point, and laugh at, which I suspect is the main reason behind ML/IR/NLP to re-market their terminology. This is a very deep problem I would pay for humans to tackle.

To deconstruct the second part of your argument, the notion of "having more reasoning and processing power than biological entities" is naive at best. In the context of human brains neither "reasoning power", nor "processing power" could be quantified in any way that would even resemble our quantification of these properties in computers. It's like comparing the Na'vi[2] to Steve Jobs.

This naivety stems from the common misconception of presuming a singular/general reasoning capability; instead of a fairly large amount of highly specialized modules, each responsible to a single type of cognition, and reasoning. An important point to note here, is that what our brain does VS what we are building[3] differ significantly: the market is much more interested in functional diversification, than exchanging pennies of supervising for pennies of computing power.

In conclusion, the "reasoning, and processing power" of humans, and ML/IR/NLP/etc systems are not only incomparable in terms of quantification, but also in their evolutionary environment, and thus their functional goals.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_winter

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navi#Na.27vi

[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1050696/the-business-of-a...
What legal jurisdiction requires phone service for all employees? And which labor laws require that there be a set time of arrival in the morning? (I can understand laws requiring a documented number of hours worked per week, of course.)
"The trip from suburban home to office will require a few minutes only. A penny will pay the fare." Ha! That very well may have been true if we didn't wreck our economy with fiat currency.
It kind of scary that tech support is #2... I still have nightmares.
I saw Catmull's keynote at SIGGRAPH 2008, and it was spectacular. It had some common elements to this one, but was different overall. What really struck me was how he is not quite a manager, nor a technical person, nor a creative person, but somehow an "organizer" for all 3 of the above groups to work together to create magnificent works of art.

I think in large part this comes from his technical background, which is simply incredible: student of Ivan Sutherland's (of Sketchpad fame), inventor or discoverer of z-buffering, antialiasing, texture mapping, subdivision surfaces, b-splines, and key developer of Renderman!

(For those not in computer graphics, any one of these would be sufficient to give you lifetime fame.)
because (as it says in the article) he's running on EC2 and it isn't an option.
Facial Recognition Door Lock and Time Clock for Less than $500
Passenger of Flight 253 describes controversial airport scene after landing
Another useful tool along these lines is http://domai.nr/, which searches all the available TLDs, not just the big 5. However, it expects you to have a full word in mind rather than suggesting things.
Sorry for the repost, I missed that other one.
Second part:

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2009/12/dutch_co...
I work out of a co-working space here in Boston that has Airtunes hooked up. I like it. Sometimes people are on the phone or playing something I don't particularly like so I throw on headphones. Other times it's nice to remove myself from the headphone bubble and interact with the world a bit more. I'm pretty much guaranteed to miss out on any interesting conversations when wearing headphones.
I just see a blank screen. I'm using Chrome 4.
What if your hands were rubbing all over the back like this patent? http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...
They now have a PPA Debian/Ubuntu archive for igraph and python-igraph:

http://launchpad.net/~igraph/+archive/ppa
I'm using Safari, but you have to wait a bit. It kind of fades in.
The words "[it is] pancakes" are incompatible because "are" is the plural equivalent of "is".

Not true. "It is pancakes in a can" is entirely grammatically correct, because "pancakes in a can" is a singular noun -- an idiomatic one, to be sure, but "pancakes in a can" is taken to mean "a can containing pancakes", which is obviously singular.
I'm sure this is neat on some level - but honestly, I don't really know what this is or what the significance is. I tried to read up on attractors on wikipedia, but it didn't really help me understand anything about it. :)
Influence,
Predictably Irrational,
Fooled by Randomness,
The Blank Slate,
House of Cards,
and Planar Microwave Engineering come to mind.
Why Apple Was My Company of The Decade by Om Malik of GigaOM
"He also needs developers with open-source expertise -- a rare talent, he says" - Shane Kilgore

Surely OSS developers aren't particularly rare beasts. But perhaps they don't want to talk to him. That and the bit about AJAX the programming language make me think these folks are barking up the wrong trees.
Wow, this is great, thanks for posting!

The 1980s were a fascinating time in computer graphics, and there are few people who are better qualified to talk about it. Ed Catmull practically embodies the history of the field, starting out at the University of Utah, moving to commercial work and struggling for years before finally achieving the ultimate success at Pixar.

I also find him to be an excellent role model, as someone who worked over many years to achieve a real and lasting impact, very much different from some the lucky entrepreneurs of the last decade who receive so much undeserved praise.