skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I built a workbench in my shop with some 4x4s and good quality plywood. It's standing height, has our data recovery setup on one half and engine rebuilding area on the other half.

It's a really nice change of pace to go out there and stand for bit.
Medical dictation is a success for recognition, but it's important to remember that no such system can function by itself. Instead, they're often advertised as making the human transcriptionist's job easier -- reducing the number and type of fixes a human has to make when correcting the dictation results.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+old+are+you%3F
Searching for different varities of mac book case | macbook cases
Protect and Stylize Your MacBook Pro cases with this Stylish Pink MacBook hard Case. New MacBook Pro Cover for 13" MacBook Pro.
Interesting about it being used heavily and "successfully" in the medical field. That's the one field where I'd want 100% transcription perfection. Mistakes there could kill.
This submission strikes me as being incredibly condescending. Don't you think the typical HN reader can figure this out on their own?
I think you're mistaken. The Clojure version seems to be derived from the Arc version at http://ycombinator.com/arc/bst.arc, which is turn derived from the corrected Common Lisp version.
I grew up in Berkeley and lived in the Bay Area until I was 27. I moved to Seattle 13 years ago and have no plans to return. I don't miss the weather at all, in fact I enjoy the generally cooler summer and actually having some variation (I lived in Boston for a year and actually like having more defined seasons, but the cold and heat did get to me.)

Anyway, I can't ever see myself moving back to CA. The cost of living is definitely better, I find people much less self absorbed up here, and I love the scenery. The latter is probably the biggest factor, it's so incredibly beautiful up here I couldn't bear to leave the trees, mountains and islands.
As much as I agree with you in general... why this? "So, failing easy pattern recognition, we have to use frequency analysis, DFT, and tons of AI."

It's not like we hear the waves really. We hear the pitch and volume mainly (proved nicely by playing simple impulses at >10Hz). So it's not like we fail easy pattern recognition on waves. I'd say that it's something we should not be looking at. Ever. Especially when you can have many representations which sound the same (they sound the same, because they look really similar in the frequency domain).

Using the frequency analysis, DFT, etc. is the way to approach it.
I've been using the Sean Luke's ECJ library for years, and following his work on this text for a while.

The book is a great (and free) addition for anyone interested in computational intelligence, metaheuristics, biologically inspired computation and related sub-fields of artificial intelligence.
> According to this listing, Australia is not even in the top 20:

That was back in 2003.

These days Australians take their drinking far more seriously:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/foo_alc_con-food-alcohol-c...
Not pictured: two wastebaskets and a giant recycling bin :)
Ask HN: Stanford GSB vs HBS? 
I was wondering whether any alumni (or HN users) from either of these schools could tell me about which is better ? At least what are the advantages of one over the other ? I got accepted into HBS for 2012 through their 2+2 program, and I can't decide whether I should apply to Stanford ? I have heard that the Stanford program takes in a relatively small number of students (250+ vs 900+ @ HBS). I am going to start working at deloitte (starting this July) and though HBS is a great business school, I'd love to consider other options. Please let me know your opinions. Thanks.
That list doesn't account for the type of alcohol. A liter of whiskey would do more than a liter of beer. Point: Australia could be drunker if they drink relatively more hard alcohol than those higher on the list, giving mahmud the win.
I just linked to a random GIS for waveform to highlight what I was talking about. However, looking at the gif, you can't even tell if it's music, human voice, machine noises, or something completely different.
I'd like to see Google offer a VoIP solution based on the Gizmo5 acquisition, integrated with Google Voice (on Android at least). I'm pretty sure it's coming within 6 months though.
Bootup Labs in vancouver is very critical of this term. They adamantly stick to the word 'accelerator'. {try telling that to their last round of investments}
I disagree. This is another example of underestimating how powerful the human brain is: it is an exquisitely designed piece of dedicated hardware with more power than even our super-compute-clusters. Hardware that's dedicated, to a large extent, to language processing. I think current statistical approaches, ramped up on future computing resources, will continue to chip away at 'word error rate'.
Assuming that a large number of people are deactivating their FB accounts due to the recent privacy 'issues', is this really accomplishing the goal they are attempting.

As Matt points out, you can always revive your FB account later, which means FB is keeping all of your information.
I assume this also means that FB is continuing to share the information they already have on you.

Therefore, aren't you better off just turning off the sharing features and not using the 'like' button or other FB tools on the web.

You can still get the benefits of having FB and take privacy into your own hands.
Just google the fizzbuzz problem, people struggle to solve even simple problems. Here's a link:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...
A better accelerator/incubator/social network for entrepreneurs.

Nothing against YC or PG, but both are focused on a particular niche of the market, and a particular strategy, and there's room for someone else in the game for sure.

e.g., something with a mentoring system; something with well-defined series of steps that can help introduce individuals with different kinds of businesses to people that might be interested in partnering or investing in them; something with occasional regional social gatherings; something that reliably connects freelancers to the businesspeople that need them; etc.

(There are many other things I'd like to see, some more than this, but this seems like the only thing that might have a chance of coming to fruition by mentioning it here.)
I like how the author focuses on being able to link to content within an HTML application.

The use of the window.location.hash property to support linking to content within apps has been hit and miss in the last few years with web apps. Many times the back and forward buttons don't work, bookmarking a particular hash doesn't go back to that content on refresh, or there is no hash change for content at all.
WTF is the point of a graph if you have to read the fine print to avoid misinterpreting it? Why not just use a table? A graph is supposed to convey the relative magnitudes of the data points, not just their ranking. If I just wanted to show who drank more than whom I would just list them in order.

Looking at these graphs you'd think that: Almost nobody in the south drinks; The vast majority of blacks do not drink; Catholics are twice as likely to drink as Protestants.

And so on, when in fact these are all false conclusions. The real conclusion, which you would easily get from properly scaled graphs, is that the majority of people drink across almost all demographic groups.

If you blame me for drawing false conclusions from such graphs I blame the shitty fucking graphs for being misleading. I mean, they don't all even start at 50%. One starts at %40 and one at %0. Seriously, these graphs are garbage.
I wasn't aware delicious produced an RSS. Thanks!
This is basically why I wanted to drop out through most of college. I wanted the challenge, I wanted to make things difficult for myself, because I certainly hadn't been challenged until then.

I realized halfway through senior year, when it was nearly too late, that I was being silly. Mostly because I finally realized how hard what I wanted to accomplish in life actually was, and figured that if it's intrinsically that hard, why make it even more difficult on myself? I can challenge myself by working on harder problems, not by throwing up artificial roadblocks in my way.

The way I wished I'd approached college was to treat it as a menu of opportunities, each of which I could sample or gorge myself upon as I saw fit. I did this to some extent, but there's so much more I could've exposed myself to had I made different choices back in high school. Unfortunately, it's difficult to understand just how big the world is and how much richness is out there when you've spent the first 18 years of your life in an institutionalized box with your parents making every decision for you.
I am also on LinkedIn, and am linked to many of my current and past colleagues. However, we rarely use it communicate.
The issue is not at all readability. The issue is that the way the data is presented changes your interpretation of it.

If you try to puzzle out the meaning from these graphs you can. But even if you do you're going to have to fight with the visuals to do so. Is 70 twice 60? No, but it looks like it is when the x-axis starts at 50.

You shouldn't have to try. You shouldn't have to carefully scrutinize all of the numbers there. That's the entire point of presenting the data visually.
Do many thinkers on the level of Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell or Leonardo Davinci exist today, but are just not as widely celebrated? Is the advancement of scientific knowledge held back by a lack of such individuals, or do teams of researchers with technology make it less important?
But Hinton recently made significant advances in speech recognition using RBMs.

Google Tech Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU
Your articles seem to follow a theme of "no new ideas/breakthroughs". The anecdote of the NASA head imploring people to come up with ideas was striking.
Any guesses as to why this is happening now? After all, we _were_ having critical breakthroughs through much of the last century.
> VP8, by the way, has already been open sourced by Google. This will very likely change everything.

It has not. It's only rumored that they will release it at I/O in May.
Yea, there's a big trend in programming to make it simpler, frameworks and languages that let you get more done while thinking about less. It's suddenly important to understand the underlying principles?

I don't think that message will get through with those distracting frameworks everywhere.
They should be. If you feel strongly, you're iterating, and you're getting feedback - you're probably onto something :)
Been forced out of a jailbreak on my iPhone in the last 6 months (one hardware failure and phone replacement, one software screw-up) this is great news... Except, I just bought a Nexus One. A week ago I had to be issued a replacement iPhone 3GS from Apple- with the new bootrom and 3.1.3 things weren't looking good.

Still have both, still in the process of trying to decide which to keep- do I want semi-freedom and a less useful phone or a locked down but very functional communication appliance? Getting sick of riding the jailbreak/jailed roller-coaster!
The Last Question

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+can+the+net+amount+...
I wasn't familiar with nativeclient before
http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

Looks interesting.
> Using the frequency analysis, DFT, etc. is the way to approach it.

Indeed. I meant to say there is no shortcut that immediately makes speech recognition easy to solve. Hence, we have to use a lot of advanced math that works pretty well but like the article says, not as well as a typical human.

However, I don't think humans are that great either. The proof of that becomes evident when working on projects with people from around the world. Ask 10 people from around the world to dictate 10 different paragraphs that the other nine have to write down. I doubt they'll have the 98% accuracy that the article states, especially if there is no domain-constraint. Understanding what the other person says is hard. Put a Texan and South Indian in the same room and see what I mean. Of course, this doesn't mean it's not fun and interesting for computer scientists. It's just hard for most people to realize why the stupid automated voice-attendant can't understand they said "next" and not "six".
Is it really a large portion that wants to delete their accounts? The last time I visited that Ask HN thread the highest rated comments were from people saying "uh, no." Perhaps it's just a vocal minority within the greater vocal minority that is HN.
I think you may be asking the wrong crowd -- this is primarily a community of entrepreneurial developers. If you're at school, you're not coding. If you're paying for school, it's not going towards a startup. I think I'd go nuts at a biz school thinking "I could be building something right about now."

I also know a lot of us write off business school's actual real-world value, but I won't weigh in on that debate, because I'm sure someone else with more to say on it will.

Here's the advice I'll give:
1) Business school is about connections and reputation. You're going to make great ones at either of those two schools.

2) It entirely depends on your goal. Stanford is closer to the entrepreneurship and tech scene, Harvard is closer to the financial and academic scene.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3592/3413712214_6651949ef9_b....

If you're curious about what you're seeing, I've added Flickr notes on everything here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leftist/3413712214/
Being on Facebook is only fun if other people are doing it with you. Turns out the same holds true for being off Facebook.
Nashville Flooding: Twitter and YouTube Tell the Story
There's a difference between not being satisfied and a "step on their throat" mentality. I don't think enough people in the business world know the difference.
Exetel’s NBN pricing: Cheap as chips
Nice article with a lot of information. Honest question here: you make some strong claims, have you been involved in speech recognition research, or are you an informed outsider? It seems like the latter? Poking fun at AI optimists like Kurzweil is fun, but not insightful at this time. The field has taken a different direction since then and I'm not sure that people know where corpus based statistical methods are going to go. Again, honest question.
Nice post.
Question-
Is there a relation between RBM and HMM?
Simple: web vs net. The net is a means of connecting one computer to another. The web is interconnected content, accessible via the net.

The web, with its interconnectedness, happens to be a pretty good tool for distributing content. Applications tend to be tools for manipulating content. So we get web applications: tools for manipulating content that you can find or create on the web. The problem comes when web applications start to bite the hand that feeds, by isolating the content within the application from the rest of the web.
The "Delete your Facebook" crowd remind me of bad televangelical ministers. Why are they trying to get other people to delete their accounts? We can save our own souls, thanks.
Really, quite a few of these hold outside of Haskell as well.

* "reduce the interactions between components by relying on pure interfaces"

* use purely functional data structures to model key parts of the world you're talking to. Model-driven design with easy to verify logic

* Avoid partial functions

Pure interfaces require you to declare all context, and it's arguably
all the context implicit in typical OO software that kills reusability.
As Joe Armstrong put it, "...the problem with object-oriented languages
is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with
them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the
banana and the entire jungle."

* use types to encode the design into a machine checkable form

* picking a good data type (like a zipper) will make hundreds of unit tests meaningless -- improving productivity.

The point of static typing is to structure code in a
way that more assumptions can be expressed and automatically checked. A well-chosen
data structure brings with it all of its expected behavior.

* ensure components have 'axiomatic' interfaces -- reduce complexity by avoiding redundancy

* if at all possible ensure your core algorithms and logic are referentially transparent -- this will dramatically simplify maintainanace and QA effort

"Declarative programming clears the mind." - Sterling & Shapiro, _The Art of Prolog_
I think this article conflates two quite different things: speech recognition and understanding language.

The problem of speech recognition, it seems clear now, is unsolvable without understanding language, because only with an understanding of language are the ambiguities inherent in speech properly resolved.

But having a workable understanding of language would seem to rely on us having some kind of model of a mind. Mere statistical relations between words or sentence structures aren't enough to map human language into mental models of the world, but having a consistent internal model of the world seems to be the key to understanding language. We disambiguate by minimizing the internal inconsistency.

Having a computational model for such an internal view of the world seems to be a Hard AI problem. We probably won't make much further progress with speech recognition until we've made headway there.
The risk of the unknown is worse than the risk of H264 license fees. Theora and other OSS codecs will be legally tested sooner or later. Until they are tested they will be at a huge disadvantage. Why not get it over with? Arguing that you don't like IP law, or you personally have faith these codecs don't violate someone's IP, or they shouldn't be legally tested is a head-in-the-sand perspective.
Playback isn't a problem usually, but i did encounter problems with encoding H.264, on server side, using ffmpeg of which the build process wasn't trivial.
It could hardly be worse than doctor's handwriting...
That chart doesn't take into account the difference in latitude, it gets dark pretty early up here in Seattle, and while it stays light later in the summer, it is more than some people can bear.
What privacy leak is Facebook implementing that GMail Buzz is not also attempting?
Er, so all graphs of temperature should start at absolute zero? It's absurd to expect all graphs to start at zero -- the point of a bar graph is to show relative comparisons, and the whole point of the labels on the axes is to relate the graph to an absolute scale. You even admit this, "[a] graph is supposed to convey the relative magnitudes of the data points" -- Exactly, and so the graph should be scaled in a way that efficiently conveys the relative information. I apologize for the ad hominem, but this is just serious PEBKAC: you need to learn to read graphs. The mistaken conclusions you arrived at could have been avoided if you paid attention to the labels.

Yes, a poorly made graph can make a tiny effect look huge, e.g. if it was the case that 99% of people drank, and the graph was just plotting variation within the remaining 1%, that could be pretty misleading. This is yet another reason that the consumers of information should pay attention to the labels and understand what the real message is from the data. Don't expect the creators of the graph to present the data in the "fairest" way (whatever that is); instead it's our responsibility to think critically and make sure we understand what's really going on. The creator of the graph will naturally act to advance his own interests.

tl;dr: It's a mistake to consider the labels to be "fine print".
This article seems to be claiming that intelligence = class.
Wordepress has a vibrant community, great features, and a fairly elegant backend. It's a great way to go about building a website without having to futz around too much, if the content of your site is what you want to focus on rather then the manipulation of code, its almost a no brainer.
"I’ve interviewed people with a good deal of experience in industry, with degrees from prestigious universities, who have founded startups or done any number of impressive things, who just melt down when asked to write a simple piece of code."

Doesn't this just show that the ability to write code in an interview situation is a poor predictor of future performance?
Doing a high-quality video encode is a non-trivial procedure. Even using a GUI tool like Handbrake effectively, requires understanding a lot of parameters. You could just take defaults, but the results will be nowhere near as good as if you tweak the settings for your particular source material. I encode a fair amount of video using FFMPEG, but usually I am using x264 directly.

As to compiling ffmpeg yourself - again, non-trivial. Better to rely upon good builds or packages. I've done it on occasion to take advantage of some new cutting edge stuff. The thing is, ffmpeg works really well. It is a fabulous tool with a tremendous amount of power and capability. But any complex piece of software, with many pieces and many dependencies, is going to be difficult to build.
Features That Give Lisp Its Power
Still no tethering =(. Anyone knows otherwise?
Use Wordpress or some other CMS. There are so many plusses: RSS feed, Web presentation, comment RSS feed, pinging of news aggregators, automatic generation of per-category and per-tag pages, date-sorted history pages, plugins (related posts, recent posts, popular posts), statistics, comments, different user roles (and capabilities), and control panels (to name a few).
Yeah. The same is true of certain actions like '[name] commented on [otherName]'s photo' - you used to be able to control those kinds of feed stories but no longer.
Do you want to go through life scared of everything, hiding in a hole, or do you want to be out there, prone to danger, but in the mix of daily life?

This is just a classic balance between security and openness.

The more secure you try to make things, the less usable things become, and the more you worry about things you don't need to worry about. The more open you make things, the easier and more efficient things become, and life is more enjoyable. You might get bruised and cut every once in a while, but it's the price you pay for a more open, fun, and social life.

I'm in agreement with Zuckerberg on this. Openness is the future, whether we like it or not, and you can either fight it and become a hippie 2.0, or just go with the flow and enjoy the advantages that come with.
Actually, it's implicitly claiming that large vocabulary is the same as class.
For those of you who jailbreak often: What do you most use the jailbreak for? Any specific apps?

I've jailbroken a few times but haven't found much to do once it's jailbroken.
Um, have you visited the U.K. recently?! Based on their ethanol consumption, I think embalmers have a pretty easy go of it.
What's the draw towards jailbreaking these days, anything interesting?
When you ask someone to stand at a whiteboard and write code with a pen you're asking them to demonstrate being able to write pseudo code with a pen. If you need that skill at your company go ahead and interview that way.
Most software activities require the ability to write software at a keyboard with an IDE.

I suck at writing pseudo code on a whiteboard...I also suck at writing code while someone there is watching every mistake I make. If I don't know the exact answer in advance, I need to feel my way by trying something, back tracking then trying a variation etc...You can't do that process effectively in an interview at a whiteboard with a pen.
Also, I don't bother carrying around advanced algorythms in my head for doing this and that. What I do have is an effective strategy and skill for discovering the algorythms I need just - in - time. Who's got time to memorize arbitary algorythms so they can pass whiteboard interviews anyway?
McLuhan For Testers