skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Good books on memory?
Having suffered with a sub-par memory most of my life, I've always been amazed by people with precise, accurate, and expansive memories. I always wonder about the nature of memory, perhaps what causes the differences in memory abilities. Is my bad memory genetic? Is it the result of an education system that trivialized rote memory?

So, HN, can anyone recommend a good book on memory? I'm fine reading either a more academic book, like a textbook, or perhaps something more anecdotal, like a good non-fiction novel. Any book that illuminates the topic of human memory would be perfect.
They didn't actually pick the coat hanger they just couldn't tell the difference.

Not like it matters ;-)
I've been using http://www.changedetection.com/ but this would be a nice change - less email for me ;)
I think using css sprites is definitely a great technique. But I always find managing sprites a bit hard to manage.

Any tips for making managing sprites easier on developers/designers? Any tools in your toolbox?
Flash was included by default in Windows XP. It also has a simple update process.
Here comes the new cell phone etiquette
I admit that so you, or someone else, can say "that does not reflect the content of the entire book", if that was indeed the case.
Prototype Flexible Notebooks, TVs, and Smartphones by Asus
It's interesting though, there is a very large population of extremely bright and creative people who tend to score poorly on standardized tests as well.

Selecting people based on standardized tests means that you have selected people who are good at standardized tests not necessarily the smartest or most creative people.

There's a growing consensus that, at least at present, while China is certainly capable of producing complicated stuff (TV's, Cars, Electronics, Plastics, etc.) and very large numbers of well educated engineers, there is very little Steve Jobs type innovation happening in the country.
34% of the numbers in this article start with 1.
Project Gutenberg, Flickr, and Wikipedia (to cite just three examples... there are many more) don't pay their contributers money. On Wikipedia contributions can be mucked with by others. Yet these sites are all wildly successful.
Worth the time to watch this from beginning to end...and then do something about it.
Really? Did somebody just run through this entire topic and downvote every comment? (8pm EST)

(seriously, every single comment in here was sitting at 0 points right after about 8pm).
Google Form 8-K, Announcing Brin & Page stock sale, down to 48 percent of votes
Girls may learn math anxiety from female teachers
I took it more as true privacy is an impossibility. Any time you participate in the system there is a trail.
What rbanffy or the Tor team thinks about HD Moore is irrelevant. HD codes. Talk all you want. People with 8-9 figure budgets have tried talking him down. He doesn't care. He's still getting it out there.
The tablet is an iteration on the iphone. This is direct from a friend at apple.
Limitations of Hash Functions
Without taking the time to read the rest of the book, I am suspicious of the author's claims that he has really solved the problem. Consider:

- Wolfram Mathworld references this topic and claims Benford's Law was put on a rigorous footing in 1998 (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BenfordsLaw.html), but this is not even mentioned in the book.

- the author makes "straw-man" type claims that (unnamed) prominent mathematicians view Benford's law as "paranormal". Also see the last two paragraphs on the first page of the original article, where the author dismisses the idea of a "universal distribution", which is used at Mathworld to give a heuristic derivation (suppose some rule governs this distribution -> apply scale invariance -> derive needed properties) - it seems like he misunderstood this.

- the author claims that he is the first to have solved this mystery, but doesn't reference any literature since 1976

- he claims on a blog (http://www.dsprelated.com/showarticle/55.php) that he tried to publish in journals, but was rejected because mathematicians weren't interested. He then published in a textbook, not even in some sort of paper. His "proof" is really long, uses very elementary mathematics and unnecessary computer programs, and refers back to other parts of his book (so that I don't want to actually try to parse the whole thing and see if I believe it).

Can anyone confirm or deny my suspicions?

That said, Benford's Law is really cool.
For me as well. It was also my first real introduction to recursion. Thanks for the dragon stories.
The point is that if all you do is drill, by the time you get to the beauty, your students have already made up their mind that math is the most useless crap in the Universe. Motivation is a powerful force and unless people see that there's any point to what they are being ordered to do, they will comply with the smallest amount of effort they can get away with.

And to say that they want to fall back on "what works" sounds a little funny given how dismally American students in general are doing. If people are so afraid to make the mediocre worse, they'll never discover what works better.

Besides, I'm not even sure I agree that you need to be able to multiply numbers before doing algebra.
"Fear the Boom and Bust" a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem
Google Reader Can Now Track Changes to Any Website - Even Without a Feed
Thank you nkh.

We should start a nice collection of free programming books like this, there are quite a few of them.
There's a really good segment on Benford's Law (and how it's been applied to business fraud detection) in a recent Radio Lab episode called "Numbers":

http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2009/11/30/numbers/
There's another thread which has a relevant link about veblen goods:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075994
Jason's recent fits of sanctimony over other companies' behavior contrast poorly with his posturing when people criticize him in turn. His dismissal of any accusations as "silly", old news, or naive mistakes ring hollow and insincere when, in the next breath, he boasts about his long experience and great team of smart people.

I think it's this hypocrisy that's caused sentiment to turn ugly more than the (depressingly common) behavior of his company.
http://www.reddit.com/r/csbooks
At the scale of a small-time investor, you must pay your damn debts. But do you feel that holds true going up the food chain? GM will never have to repay all of it's debts that were coerced out of the american public against our will. The bankers at the large banks who coerced almost ONE TRILLION DOLLARS worth of debts are getting their fattest bonuses ever, and will likely not fully repay those debts.

But the little guy has a moral obligation? Yeah, his only mistake was only borrowing $100k. If he had been a slick stanford or harvard MBA he would have borrowed $250million, and gotten a congressional pat on the back when he defaulted.
> There is a reasonable expectation that documentaries should be unbiased depictions of whatever they happen to be about.

Since they're not, that expectation isn't reasonable.

More important, even if they're not distorting what they're showing, they're choosing what to show, and that distorts.

> I also expect journalists to at least try to properly inform their audience.

Good for you. However, that's not how they actually behave.

And no, this is not specific to Fox or NBC. It's universal. Every source has a point of view.

> You know the saying: with great power comes great responsibility.

Nice saying, but it's a hope, one that isn't actually true. Great power does not imply anything more than great power. It doesn't, for example, imply truthfulness.
The mob wants blood..... be careful not to get dragged into it. :-)
> he's clearly smart enough to have known the risks.

I'd say the opposite: he was too smart for his own good.

He was an Economics major(like me). He was likely taught economic theory based on rational behavior.

During those years, credit card companies sent absurd numbers of 0% offers to everyone over 18. If he didn't borrow money at 0% and reinvest it, that would have been irrational and gone against everything he was being taught in school.

I'm assuming he had a few things working against him:

- Limited knowledge of the world and no first hand experience of a recession.

- Dangerous knowledge from Economics class that teaches you people act rationally, without emotion, according to a simple utility maximizing function.

- Employees in the financial industry who earned their incentives based purely on the amount of money being borrowed in the short term, with no consequences if the debts turned out to be bad.

- Very limited understand of probability and statistics. I've met very few people in my life who have adequate schooling in these subjects.

I had a similar experience(though luckily on a smaller scale) my senior year of college. I was given a $50,000 line of credit from Bank of America, despite the fact that I'd never held more than a summer job or made more than $8,000 in a single year.

If I had walked into my local bank and asked for that kind of loan, my banker would have laughed in my face. But Bank of America gave it to me just by filling out a form and making a phone call.

The system was absurd and many people were screwed. Banks should have known better. They've been around for hundreds of years while myself and many others have been around for about 20.

The lenders should have been smart enough to have known the risks.
You can italicize with stars. Don't think you can bold.
A Tribute to Sun Microsystems
As a friend of mine pointed out, how is this possible? Shouldn't fraudulent numbers also follow Benford's law?
This (using the internet) is usually limited to things like programming and lower level classes though, I can see an entire software engineering curriculum being laid out with minimal references and books but I cannot see any such thing for degrees in math, science (such as physics), engineering (mechanical, electrical, civil), and so on.

Some things just need that extra bit that an established textbook can bring.
Jack Diederich (my nick is an old UNIX login, "jackdiederich"[:8]). I'm an invited speaker this year so I'll definitely be there.

At least two automated trading firms sent contingents to PyCon last year so you won't be alone (I think both were state-side). As for microbrews? Although it started with states that had odd blue laws for liquor licenses (limited regular licenses but unlimited for on-premises brewing) you can now find micro-breweries in every major city and most minor ones. PyCon always has a beer BoF group.
Did you get this from looking at the source code?

http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc
Heh, as if I didn't have enough to read already on top of work and school. This is great, thanks for posting!
Someone who needs easy mode might start on normal, get to some point where the game becomes impossible, then switch to easy. (Speaking from personal experience here.)
But will your therapist also have sex with you for that price? Or is that extra?
Apple Execs Downright Giddy About The Tablet
Debugging Crashes With Small Scripts
Check out spaced repetitive learning:

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...

Some open source software:

http://ichi2.net/anki/
Iterating over lines in multiple Linux log files using Python
No, just by observing the various postings and how they appear and disappear on the homepage.

I think this is one of the main reason why plenty of Ask HN style threads are gone before anybody gets a chance to look at them.

They're unpopular by definition, after all they ask the audience to do something (answer a question), this adds to that.

Then today I saw an Ask HN that was doing exceptionally well, and I noticed that the only thing that caused it to be ranked so high was that it was an external link.
But introducing non-free (as in freedom) part in basic protocols is another story.

What on earth are you talking about? The issue as it pertains to the spec was decided over six months ago. Here is the post by the editor of the spec saying so: http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-Jun... Neither h.264 or Theora are part of the HTML5 spec. The spec is open. Nobody is trying to force a proprietary format into the spec. For that matter, I don't recall anybody ever trying to get h.264 made part of the spec. <video> was format-agnostic from the start, just like <img>. Honestly, I have no idea where you got the idea that anybody was trying to add proprietary extensions to the spec--even Mozilla hasn't claimed that--you really don't seem to be familiar with the subject at all.

You also completely missed the point with Dirac. The point is that they are actively blocking their users from using it along with every other format except Theora. Nobody gives a shit about whether Mozilla implements it--they just want to be able to use whatever formats they like without having Mozilla play the role of Daddy--a role that nobody asked them to play and which does not follow naturally from their previously espoused values.

Mozilla is fighting to keep an open web

You're doing that thing again where you pretend that everything Mozilla does is automatically the right thing just because they claim it helps freedom. I am saying that that this mistaken, and have cited a very specific thing that they have done and many specific reasons why I think so.

All you have done here is repeat your first comment, which was bullshit fanaticism that has more to do with scaring people than it does reality.

try to keep out patent encumbered formats in core protocols

Nobody is trying to put h.264 in HTML5. Where did you get that idea?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_surrogate
Writers Can Prosper Without Intellectual Property
Yeah I'm really split on this myself. On the one hand he should have known better than to take on that much debt. On the other hand, the people offering him such easy credit should have to face the consequences of the risks they were taking by lending money to overextended borrowers.
Fascinating.
Google App Engine Java Persistence Tips
Here's the comment about some downweighting for lightweight sites. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=294439 Here's one confirming the downweighting of self posts, though without saying the modifier. I remember the modifier as being 0.7, for what it's worth. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304058
Ummm.... thanks?

seriously, no big deal. I mix it up, so I expect that folks will do the same with me from time to time.
Likewise, although I kind of read it alongside PCL. A chapter or two in Gentle Intro, and then the similar/counterpart chapter in PCL.

http://gigamonkeys.com/book/
Modelling Congress as a Sandpile
Using the Android NDK
Been waiting for this for a while. Already subscribed to Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox.
It's a shitty way to go. A guy just froze to death at Targhee.

http://www.tetongravity.com/forums/showthread.php?t=182614

Remember -- treat the outdoors with respect. Don't go out of bounds without a partner and know where you are on the mountain. If you get lost, don't try to figure out where you are; instead, use your cellphone to make contact right away. For god's sake, carry a gps and know how to use it.
Sounds to me like HN is a victim of its own success and is rapidly going the way of Digg. There's a reason people write "trivial" content: It gets clicks.
Paul Graham's On Lisp:

http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
If you are aware of it, you make sure your fake data follows Benford's law. Otherwise, your fake data will be 'random', because people assume that is how it is supposed to look.
Finished watching it, another vote for "well worth watching". Given me a lot to think about personally.
I'm using auto_sprite (Rails) in my current project. Works pretty well.

http://fargle.org/auto_sprite/
By the way, I'd encourage you to post that data as a seperate post as my original didn't seem to get much traction and I think it's an interesting topic that should be presented to the community and the data clarifies exactly why.
Think about it for a second, if she's hot and educated and can be with him in public, why doesn't he just marry her?

If he wants to keep enjoying a certain quality of experience, marriage may not be the best means to get that. Wives usually stop dressing as well as they did when they were dating. Housework takes more of her time and energy. There are endless jokes about women having no energy for sex after doing housework and raising kids all day. A woman who is expected to look good 24/7 and "perform" for him at the drop of a hat...well, it's not very realistic. A prostitute only has to meet that standard during work hours and can then go home, take off her high heels and make-up, and not care what he would think about it because he isn't there anymore to judge her.
More Development Resources Released For Chromium Project
I've been trying to see if that's true or not. I still think any topic has enough information/resources out there. When you say things like math+science, are you referring to very advanced topics or simpler topics (or both) ie- algebra, high school chemistry,etc.
Curious. I did so:

1 ****************************
2 ***************
3 *********
4 *****************
5 *******
6 ******
7 *****
8 ****
9 ***

That spike for 4 is due to the default directory size of 4096 (my experiment included directories as well as files). The information was pulled from 503,444 files and directories.
Probably would be called AdKit.
Until that happens, you could reduce it to a single field and show results for both types of searches. I found the prefix/suffix thing pretty confusing.
It's precisely this kind of post that makes their pre-orders so successful.

"open development is key, especially when you are small. If we had been in stealth mode for 1.5 years, we simply would not have had the awesome community to have made this possible."
Debate on the Merits of Financial Innovations (video)
Study: Kindle falls short as newspaper delivery device
No Checklists Please: Valuable in some settings, but a menace in others
Google, any comment?
The elisp tutorial that comes with emacs is a well written starting-point for the total beginner.

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-lisp-intro/html_node...
Web Laureate Insight, "Anonymously – In Kentucky"
DropZap: level limit removed from web version (when not using iPhone/iPod touch)
Well I am still in the same company I was back when you call my industry scum (while you were selling links to shady casinos). As far as I am concerned your opportunistic jumps between companies are all part of the same general trend / strategy. You still have not changed as a person.

I'll probably get voted down for this, but I think you're crossing a line here. I agree with some of your opinions, but these kind of rants against a person in particular and some kind of personal dislike you have for them really hurts your case. It's just petty bullshit and it reveals personal bias that really clouds the issue.
> No, producers will move to platforms where it is difficult to impossible.

Short of increased enforcement I completely agree with you - this is the only viable long-term solution. Ad supported software is always suggested as a another workable solution, but I don't buy that argument. Ad supported software suffers the exact same problem, it can be hacked to the point where eventually all the ads are removed.

Oddly enough I've always wondered why publishers haven't fought harder against the e-books. Books were already "on a platform where it is difficult to pirate". The move by publishers towards the Kindle seems to directly contradict: "producers will move to platforms where it is difficult to impossible".
That's around 60% of the talk i hear on the locker room at my expensive gym.
An excellent point, and one seldom recognized by those who implement 'tracking' students. The result is only as good as how scientific the test is. Most such tests have high levels of cultural and socio-economic bias that perpetuate the status quo.

So yes, they are great filters to keep creatives out ... and what they don't catch, the gatekeepers in colleges will. Leaders fear creativity only slightly less than compassion.
I'm...not sure where you're going here other than possibly using my comment as a springboard for your soapbox, but since you asked; I never implied in any way I feel that just the little guy has a moral obligation. I think GM and your "slick Stanford or Harvard MBA" toting strawman should have to pay their debts too. <shrug> Now if doing that would cause even greater grief, say to the hundreds (of thousands?) of employees who'd lose their jobs? It's a tough call, and one I'm glad I'm not making.

The correct response to elected officials not doing what you want is to vote someone in who will.
"Explaining Benford's Law" may have been a more accurate title, but "Why 30.1% of numbers start with 1" brought this neat article to a larger audience. Taken too far, though, that kind of thing can ruin social news sites. Headlines have always been a gray area.
Translation could be the key to bringing more material to non-English speakers. It is the local knowledge that is vital from these Kenyan contributors, the thinking goes, assuming that Swahili-English translation tools improve.

As alluded to in the paragraph following this quote, the only way "local knowledge" gets successfully added to English Wikipedia is if it was already printed in an English newspaper which also puts its articles online. If it's uncited, or cited to a blog, "anti-vandal" patrollers remove it. And even if it's cited to a Swahili (or worse yet, other local vernacular) newspaper, plenty of Wikipedia editors will claim it's "not notable" because they personally can't read it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notability/Archi...

But aside from the quirks of Wikipedia, I'd agree incentivizing Swahili-English bilinguals to put content online in English, and then Google or whoever translating it themselves into Swahili, is probably a more effective way of getting Swahili content for the foreseeable future. The main point is that most Swahili-speakers with internet access are bilingual in English too, and so have a choice of what language to use to generate content that others might search for. (And their choice of language is heavily influenced by the topic domain.)
Math is easy to find (to an extent): http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/

Other subjects are a bit more difficult and scattered, for physics hyperphysics does well

But I am indeed talking about advanced topics which are available in abundance for computer science and programming on the internet but when it comes down to it that is the extent which the internet provides (except maybe graduate papers, but that is usually too high a level to matter)

Say for example you wanted to learn thermodynamics with only the internet and a teacher. You can gain a large amount of theoretical knowledge from the teacher but without a book it will be hard for you to find examples on when/how to use integral and differential energy and entropy balances (Thermo might be a subject just on the boundary of finding information on the internet and having to buy a book).
Maybe Your CEO Shouldn’t Blog.
1. Buy a domain and point it to Google

2. Spread rumors to get lots of people to link to it

3. Point the domain back to your own site

4. ???

5. Profit!
Last I checked, the UK was not part of the United States, so this discussion is irrelevant.

Europe's laws on derivative works differ greatly from American laws.
Not a fan of the head-first approach. Crashes and the aforementioned neck strain.

On the other hand, I would imagine it would be possible to construct an L-shape sitting cockpit that could rotate in relation to the engines so that the pilot would be head-up in both takeoff/landing and flight.