skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My point is a simple, mathematical one: 80%. That is a good lower bound on the percent of kids in India that are not in the "system" as described by you, not because their parents are enlightened but because they simply can't afford the system you describe. Most of these kids would attend schools where barely much of anything goes on at all. Those kids aren't going anywhere, and by the same token, they aren't spoiled by the learn-by-rote system either. There is a ton of talent there to be tapped, if the concern is that learn-by-rote system has totally destroyed the creativity of the other 20%.

I am not saying this to justify the education system in India or to refute what you said, but to simply point out the existence of the other 80%.
CoolPreviews by Cooliris, Inc.
This is an ~10 minute interview with Sharkey, with some fascinating video clips of current robotics technology interspersed among some of his sage observations.
You should not follow me on Twitter
* It was pretty cool that your new phone's number display was not only dot-matrix but could do 4 shades of gray

* Your entire office was full of bulky CRTs and a 15" flat panel cost more than a 21" tube

* Windows XP offered a better user experience than OS X
He said that? I didn't see it.

Must have been printed between the lines.
Encouragement is destructive
Intake of saturated fat not associated with an increased risk of heart disease
I don't remember any ads appearing on OiNK.

And I also seriously doubt that the bulk of that $300k, if it was really there, had anything to do with donations from OiNK. OiNK was pretty big but imo nowhere near big enough to yield that kind of bounty off of voluntary donations.
"It was not until we moved from benchmarks to customer workload that we were able to make detailed performance comparisons and find bugs in our implementation."

So true. I don't know how many times I've been frustrated by people (ab)using benchmarks. The only real benchmark is your actual load. The closer you can approximate that, the better. And no, Dhrystone is nothing like your actual load.
Thanks for the response and your hard work to build up and sustain a great community!

Have you thought about hiding the submitter's and commenter's name for an hour (or twelve :)) after the post is submitted?

Won't that solve the problem of mob voting?
The 2nd edition can be had for less than $30 used. The cheapest you can get the 3rd edition for is ~$60. For $30 you can pick up a linear algebra textbook used. If somebody had only $60 to spend, it's a no-brainer to pick the 2nd edition + a linear algebra textbook.
It's there, on the lines, not in between them. The flaws that he's pointing out are, in fact, inefficiencies for which I am thankful, for the exact reasons dpcan mentioned.

"Believe it or not, in our patent office -- now, this is embarrassing -- this is an institution responsible for protecting and promoting innovation -- our patent office receives more than 80 percent of patent applications electronically, then manually prints them out, scans them, and enters them into an outdated case management system," Obama said a today's Forum on Modernizing Government.
Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY edition spotted
OK, good point, no negativity taken (actually, I was just tracking what the article said - the various comments here have made me want to learn a lot more about Tesla, an obviously fascinating person about whom I knew very little up to this point).
Their effort to obfuscate their tracks does sound pretty nifty, but part of me is disappointed that it all depended on the target clicking on something they shouldn't have. Glorified phishing schemes just don't have the pizazz of a remote buffer overflow exploit, for example.
I ride similarly for errands etc. I have noticed such a similar reaction from drivers. I live in a college town, and most drivers are pretty OK with cyclists -- there is the occasional "use the sidewalk" or close pass w/ horn, but mostly cool people. This past month, since the snows have gotten all wintery, I have also noticed increased agression.

I think the cause here may be surprise -- drivers are already nervous about the crappy road conditions, and they can't fathom how a bike is even ridable in winter. They view my riding as extra dangerous (both to me and them) and their stress level increases even more. Such a thing frequently comes out sideways as anger/agression.
I wrote a supplementary blog post to Brad's ( http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2010/01/learning-about-machin...) with the list of books I found useful (no amazon referral links if anyone is worried) with brief descriptions of each. I work in somewhat different domains and so have a different list of books.

I hope someone finds this useful.

For those who want a summary,

Proof Technique

(a)Velleman's "How to Prove It"
(b)Gries and Schneider's "A Logical Approach to Discrete Math"

Math

(c) Calculus (best "lite" book - Calculus by Strang (free download), best "heavy" books - (d) Calculus by Spivak, (e) Principles of Mathematical Analysis a.k.a "Baby Rudin")

(f) Discrete Math (ALADM above + (g) a good book on Algorithms, Cormen will do - though working through it comprehensively is ... hard!

(h) Linear Algebra (First work through Strang's book, then (i) Axler's)

(j) Probability (see Bradford's very comprehensive recommendations) and

(k) Statistics (I would reccomend Devore and Peck for the total beginner but it is a damn expensive book. So hit a library or get a bootlegged copy to see if it suits you before buying a copy, see brad's list for advanced stuff.)

(l) Information Theory (MacKay's book is freely available online)

Basic AI

(m)AIMA 3d Edition (I prefer this to Mitchell)

Machine Learning

(n) "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" by Christopher Bishop,

(o)"Elements of Statistical Learning" (free download).

(p) Neural Network Design by Hagan Demuth and Kneale,

(q) Neural Networks, A Comprehensive Foundation (2nd edition) - By Haykin (there is a newer edition out but I don't know anything about that, this is the one I used)

(r) Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition ( Bishop).

At this point you are in good shape to read any papers in NN. My reccomendations - anything by Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton. Both do amazing research.

Reinforcement Learning

(s) Reinforcement Learning - An Introduction by Barto and Sutton (follow up with "Recent Advances In reinforcement Learning" (PDF) which is an old paper but a GREAT introduction to Hierarchical Reinforcement learning)

(t) Neuro Dynamic Programming by Bertsekas

Computer Vision

(u) Introductory Techniques for 3-D Computer Vision, by Emanuele Trucco and Alessandro Verri.

(v) An Invitation to 3-D Vision by Y. Ma, S. Soatto, J. Kosecka, S.S. Sastry. (warning TOUGH!!)

Robotics.

(w) Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning) - not about robotics per se but useful to understand the next book

(x) Probabilistic Robotics (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents) by Thrun, Burgard and Fox

PS: I own all these books (except AIMA 3 for which I only have pre pub pdfs) and if any HN folks in Bangalore want to browse before they buy anything (friggin expensive when you add amazon's postage) send me email.

PPS: on languages, I think Bradford is on the money with regards to reccomending functional languages. I would just say, also know C well. Saved my ass a few times.
I had to look up the meaning of "astroturfing." Never heard it before. Is it specific to North America?
Interesting, could you explain a little bit more. Are you saying the default human behavior is to repeat yourself?
I agree that Ellis should have tried to turn this into something positive before all of this went down. There were several signs that OiNK was on radar, including [successful] efforts to block the renewal of the .me.uk domain name.

I also think that record companies may now be seasoned enough to accept something like this; the thing is that the pitch needs to be made before they pay off INTERPOL to take you down.

Such a pitch should also come from one whose hands are clean, so to speak. If Ellis had made the pitch they probably would have said, "Good idea, but instead of paying you, you just give it to us for free and we'll put in a good word after your arrest."
Yes, that has been announced for a while.

There's no specific timeframes (and it looks a bit outdated), but here's the latest roadmap:

http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/39934
I don't know what "average processing time" means, but the amount of time it takes for a patent to issue is more like 5-7 years.
Another aspect perhaps most of people ignored is:

Chinese government has all the source code of Windows systems:

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1016_3-5083458.html

Including:

Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, windows 2000, Windows CE 6.0/5.0/4.2(PSK), Microsoft Office Pro 2003, Microsoft Office Systems

It's reviewed by top three Chinese universities and other three government agencies.

The Party is the new overload of 0day farmer.
What's illegal about buying or selling books?

The publishers have a contract with distributors in those poorer countries that prohibits those distributors from distributing the books here. But, anybody who DOESN'T have a contract with the book publisher can buy from the distribitor and sell them here, unless their local laws prohibit that. And, nothing in OUR laws prohibits buying them--by now it's well established that you cannot really enforce laws against buying books.

Do you want the international edition? I have a few of them, and they are better than nothing. But, the paper is so thin that I get distracted by the words/figures on the other side of the page.
From Ruby to Fantom:introspection
Ah, Hitchens. The right wing can have him. :)
Weird. You'd expect HN to be overstocked with those, just because of its target audience.
They just have to negotiate a royalty agreement with the patent holder.

It would be a clever denial-of-service attack to start filing patents that would preclude the USPTO from "practicing" its work without negotiating agreements with patent holders.
This sometimes bites me.. I find myself frustrated when I am repeating myself. I'm usually thinking, "but I said that like 2 minutes ago wtf". Nice explaination.
I would say that's pretty close to true, yes. If you look at most successful human communication, the important points are almost always repeated. If the communicator is good, he will have rephrased things such that you don't immediately notice that the same thing is being said over and over, but it's definitely there.
So presumably he could re-open the site, and not face further prosecution, provided the service didn't change?
Biologists merge different disciplines to find new meaning in old data
RIAA: Net neutrality shouldn't inhibit antipiracy
I like his language toolbelt for this kind of work.

At a minimum, I would recommend learning python (numpy/scipy), R, and at least one nice functional language (probably Haskell, Clojure, or OCaml).

This is effectively what I use as well. Python as a general purpose data munging library that's good for all of your dirty work whenever you need it. R for graphing, graphing, graphing, running statistical tests other people already wrote and foolproofed, database munging, and then more graphing. Haskell for prototyping and reasoning with types and then that occasional algorithm that screams for functional implementation or the not so occasional one that requires more speed than Python can provide.

I also write a few things in C/C++, though I try to avoid it. It's mostly there for standing on the backs of other people and that occasional need to blaze.
Is Gawker's "Apple Tablet Scavenger Hunt" illegal? Probably
if you do, let me know! I guess it will be useful when the early adopters start playing with it around as well :)
Not only did you not need a pass, but often times people would go to the boarding area and watch planes go off for an afternoon of 'fun'. Others would go and photograph all the planes (in case any crashed they would cash in $$$)
Sadly, this says a lot about the stigma of public transportation in certain parts of the world (esp. in the US).

"Oh, so you're poor."
I actually think lack of people who are not traveling at the gate almost makes having to spend any time in an airport terminal almost bearable.
The problem with mobs is they gang up on individuals and the problem with that is the mob can easily over power an individual.

If you take away the mob's power by only allowing points to go down to 0 or 1 for example instead of -4 it might feel less mob-ish..

EDIT: The end result of mob encouraged commenting is someone ends up with negative points for their comment(s).. Maybe only users who've reached certain karma level should have the ability to down vote below 1. Reduce the size of the mob?
Yeah, North Korea, Iran, and Afghanistan also have all of the source code of Linux. What is your point?
The Underlying Tragedy (of Haiti's Poverty)
Overheard in Pompei (Italy), one american teens describing the scene of the ruins to another: "It's like like like like."

(Yes, I am serious, and so was he)
One time on an airplane I was doing some erlang programming. I had about 10 terminals and Textmate open. After about half an hour I get a tap on the shoulder from the smoking-hot woman sitting behind and to the left of me. She says, "Excuse me, but I find what you are doing to be utterly fascinating. What is it?". I explain that I'm programming, and she asks if she can watch. I said "sure", but I was so self-conscious that I couldn't get any real work done after that. I just ended up flipping between Textmate and my terminals, typing random commands. Sadly, I didn't get her number - we were both on a connecting flight to different cities.
That's a neat idea.
.. so can oink re-open now? : D

I sincerely hope so. It was the best torrent site I have ever had the pleasure of using.
Sorry, this article lacks real detail. Sounds like standard fare -- an IE vulnerability, malicious emails, "several layers of encryption?" Sorry...not impressed.
More like 19%, but yeah...
The Sarcmark: punctuation for sarcasm
Well, from the article alone it mentions Miley Cyrus & Stephen Fry. I know Summer Glau, Seth MacFarlane, Judd Apatow, Nelly Furtado, Larry David, Denzel Washington and JJ Abrams have all left among probably many others.

The trajectory is exactly like a fad, some popular people do it, everybody does it, it becomes mundane, then popular people leave, everybody leaves, fast forward 10 years and everybody makes fun of it.
I've been unemployed for about a week, and I think bicycling is the only thing other than a paycheck I'm missing. I have trouble riding for ride's sake. I ride for transportation. I've done some really long rides (a 135mi/~225km ramble once, with a friend, and a couple of 70mi/120km one-night bicycle camping trips) but as a general rule, I ride to the grocery store, post office, bank, to the office, and just to get around.

a 30mi/48km round trip commute by bike takes just about an hour each way for me, and it's great cardio. I'm still fat, and not terribly fast on my bike, but I feel good. At my last job, I had a great route that used mostly frontage roads along main highways. Folks who wished to go fast would use the highway, and cyclists were a common enough site on the road I used that we all got plenty of respect and room most of the time.

The worst offenders of cutting it too close? Prius drivers.
I need a hammer, and I can only hammer on each nail no more than 2 times.
the point is that even if he had had NO trouble himself, anyone wanting to get his data was just one search on the intrawebs away of find a really easy way of getting it.

so easy that he even managed to find by accident!
I wish there was a more hands on introduction, somehow. Having read through MacKay, I didn't feel as if I could just approach a company and suggest to do data analysis for them.

I suppose I should come up with my own projects, and I have some ideas, but they always have a huge question mark at the beginning.
The embarrassing part of the patent system is not how long it takes but the way patents have been perverted from their original purpose.

The point of a patent was that you would get an exclusive license to your invention for 8 years. In exchange, you would provide detailed instructions on how to duplicate your invention so that after 8 years, other people could build it. It was supposed to spread innovation. It was a trade you made with the government: they would protect you, you would inform them.

Instead we have patent trolls who build nothing and use patents to extort money from those who do, actively hindering development of new products. The patents granted these days do not include instructions on how to build a device, they just say "I do it this way so now you can't". It's a disgrace.

If it's possible for somebody else to copy your invention without reverse-engineering your product, then you shouldn't be granted a patent.
If you donated 5 euros, you were allowed to invite 2 friends to the site.

If you were a member of the site for a certain amount of time with a certain ratio and amount uploaded/downloaded, you were able to invite 2 friends a month and had access to the same features as donators.
great stuff. this and other feedback is helping to shape the revision to my post only a couple hours after I made it. Second edition iterations are so much faster on the web. :-)
"Can someone justify these downvotes?"

It seems some folks here are overly sensitive to anything that vaguely resembles criticism of Microsoft and their products.
I said I liked being banned. Why would I want to change something I like? It's a reminder to avoid getting into arguments with people who pay no attention to logic and have weird, arbitrary loyalties to systems which present no actual usefulness.
I don't understand how was thresholding related to this - at all.

RoG was getting more downvotes than average HN user (1.88 vs 2.0). How does inhibiting his power to rate help this "crowd egging" thing you are referring to?
This kind of attitude has to stop. "Glorified phishing" might not have pizazz, but it was DAMN effective in this case. Why go to the trouble of finding, coding, exploiting an increasingly difficult target when end users will do all the work for you?

This is the kind of scenario that gives security people nightmares. It takes VERY sophisticated processes and technology to find covert backdoors on your network, and very few places devote the manpower or $$$ to the effort.
I would agree with you, but she drove to the bus stop in a Lexus, like a lot of folks out here. And she probably drove two miles or less to get there. I live in the most affluent county in the region and "public transit" is in place ONLY for the 8a-5p suburbanites commuting to downtown. A few buses in the morning go downtown. A few in the evening come back out to suburbia. It's worthless for anything other than getting to and from work for an average work day.
Adaptive mind: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
I hadn't heard of either before. I'm somewhat interested (nice design—especially the signup form), but not quite sure if I understand it completely. I think a demo video and/or some examples of good user newspapers would help clear this up immensely.

(I looked at the "Discover more newspapers..." link and most seem to be ones people just started to play around with and gave up on.)
If you are going to discount some peoples votes, (Mine seem to currently be discounted), can you let them know that? Or at least not update the UI for them when they click an arrow, or just not give them an arrow at all.

Then I won't be wasting time clicking arrows that don't do anything :/
:) This may be the most positive news in the history of file sharing.
If it's indecipherable, how do you know it's threatening?
Most the countries you've listed you can't be even searched without a warranty. In the US you can be imprisioned w/out one or notification to your family.

http://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/01/14/2226219/Obama-Ap...
and the donations did buy additional access to features on the site, yes?
Not yet, but you can probably make some educated guesses. What US companies have technologies that China might be interested in?

-Google
-Microsoft
-Boeing
-Intel
-Cisco (imagine the value of their source code)
-Apple
-Any of the defense contractors
etc.
I'm still not convinced that tablets will be popular in the near future. The current paradigm of tablet PCs–make the screen touch sensitive and chop off the keyboard–has major ergonomic and usability problems. How do you hold it for more than 5 minutes? How do you input text without it being a complete chore? The software and hardware will require radical changes to solve these problems. Maybe Apple has thought of something, but a big iPod Touch won't work.

Voice recognition isn't viable either. Do people really want to talk to these machines all day–in offices, subways, coffee shops? Doubtful.
I dual-boot OS X and Windows 7 in bare metal on my MacBook. That gets me a few serious "WTFs" as well. I also run several other OSes in VirtualBox, usually full-screen. Karmic is one of them, but OpenBSD and Arch Linux are more common.
Linux security assumes source code visibility, Windows doesn't?
Just curious: why no panels?
Yeah, so you give it to a government who is reviewing it for security problems. More than likely the NSA and CIA also have the source code for Windows.
I think the larger project has to do with the language-neutral framework that he's advocated for (and is now apparently building). Google's now definitely got static analysis for Python, Javascript through Closure Compiler, and Java through a ton of open software (and probably a bunch of google-specific stuff too). Interesting to see where this goes.