skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Masters coursework isn't worth it across the board. Some areas are too theoretical for what Masters students will want to do.

I got a more directed MS in Robotics, and am very glad I did. I think it helps to have a niche. You can do the exact same work I did for my robotics degree in a general CS degree - so my advice is to pick an area of focus, and work on building something interesting.

You shouldn't work on many projects. Take the opportunity to build up a single real system for 2 years.
Yer....I think Google did this.
Start out in an MS program that lets you develop a research based thesis. After your first year you will have much more knowledge on whether the PhD track is right for you. Get to know your classmates that are PhD students and their experiences. Get to know the projects in your department that have provided PhDs to others. If you find something interesting then the PhD might be worth the effort. No matter how much advice from others, only you will know when the time comes.
I guess it depends on who your friends are, but mine have no clue. Part of the trouble is that awful name.
This was precisely my point. I know you're not Stallman, but newcomers might not.
Warren Buffett to investors: Think small
How is LVS not practical? LVS is awesome... it's kernel-level and doesn't use any resources, plus is very simple but flexible. Forget the ultramonkey configurations and go with keepalived to handle the monitoring, failover, etc.
Its not that its inherently hostile but it demonstrates one of the possible scenarios where private control can slip away with a majority of directors votes.
The Interrupters: Blocking the Transmission of Violence
Why don't you just use the next few weeks worth of data?
Why?

They should have dumped their stock when the offer was first floated (and stocks reached about the same premium MS was offering). Yahoo's management never said it would accept that first offer and all shareholders who "lost" money are those who expected a reversal of the initial positions ("we won't pay a penny more" and "we will not sell at this price").

Things like these happens all the time.

And I would not rule out an evil plan where all MS intended was to keep Yahoo's management buried in zillions of frivolous lawsuits (that would have to prove Yahoo's management somehow knew this offer was in Yahoo's shareholders' best interest and resisted despite of that)

IIRC, MS was buying back stock. By making this offer they got a nice discount.
The developers of Vendetta Online (http://www.vendetta-online.com) used to use Lisp for some of their server-side components but have since switched to Erlang.

Don't leave out the free Lisps - CMUCL and SBCL are also capable of generating very fast code. Scheme can be fast too - Chez and Icarus are known for speed, and there's always Stalin if you're willing to deal with a static program or add your own interpreter.
This is a long article -- 10 pages, I'm warning you now. It's also one of the most interesting things I've read in a long time. It describes the efforts of CeaseFire, a Chicago organization trying to apply the principles of public health to preventing violence. The organization was founded by an epidemiologist with experience fighting infections disease in Africa, but the people who work for the organization -- the "violence interrupters" -- are mostly ex-gang members. The article ends up mostly focusing on the interrupters rather than the science itself, so it's not really a science article. It's still well worth reading.
If one wishes to work in the US, there are 20,000 H1-Bs delegated to those who have an advanced degree from the US.

That's one good reason to get the degree in the States.
By daily manual polling, I can track when submissions occurred and how many points they received, but I can't so easily track when they received those points.

I could write a program to poll more frequently, to look for changes in each submission's score. That might be even more valuable data than hourly traffic data. I wonder how involved that would be.

Is there a better way of doing it?
Apprently "should I get a [Masters/PhD/plumbing certification]" is the new "what should my startup do if the economy tanks?". Can we just have one thread on this and be done with it forever?
I don't think you are aware of much modern economics. In general, the Chicago school exactly takes the viewpoint that one is dealing with a complex, nonlinear and nondeterministic system. Neoclassical economics takes a similar viewpoint.

See also [complexity economics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_economics).

As for econometrics, they do exactly what you said economics doesn't do: try to fit the models to real life, and reveal when the models fail.
Be sure that it is not only me having these kind of problems, especially memory usage problem. You can check Stan's post and its comments out, there is a link on my post.
Not much else to add except I would recommend picking up two books as well.

1. A standard price theory text that will give you the basic tools of economists.

2. A book that provides real-world applications illustrating how these tools are used. (I agree - Basic Economics by Sowell is a great place to start.)
Doubt it!
In several markets - such as search, search marketing (i.e. pay per click advertising), web-based applications (i.e. Google Docs or whatever MS calls it), etc., Microsoft has really dropped the ball.

The two things they lack are respect for their competition, and respect for new ideas. The ideas were there, but Microsoft didn't listen. Their competitors did.

Probably the result of Microsoft getting huge and evil and not caring about their customers. They didn't notice that technology was passing them by.

And then there was Google. When you get a lot of smart people working on something and give them a head start, it makes it very difficult for a competitor to catch up. :)

I don't think Yahoo is much better. If the average Yahoo shareholder understood how bad "Panama" is given all the hype it got, they probably would have sued Yahoo by now.
I think newly acquired startups shouldn't be told "go buy your Porsche"

Now it's "go buy your Teslas"
"We will pursue partnerships and investments to realize the competitive advantages that come with scale"

I don't think Microsoft will get much more scale than they already have, they are on most peoples desktop already. What they should pursue is technology - they are obviously unable to create compelling technology themselves. Besides with their resources they would easily be able to buy every interesting startup in sight.
I have Firefox on a Mac, with 23 extensions installed. Very occasionally, it bombs (usually when leaving Gmail) but otherwise it's been fine. Maybe the people who have problems should try, you know, just closing it now and then. Not exactly a high-tech solution, but it works OK for me. Having said that, I often run my computer and Firefox for days at a time.

I would be interested in the alternatives, but afaict they don't exist. Another browser with extensions like Adblock, Web Developer Toolbar, Firebug, etc? I doubt it.
The power density arguments are valid. I work in a large data center and the statements about empty floor space because of power limitations is accurate. The data center was designed in the late 90's, since then power density has increased to the point that we cannot fill it with equipment.

Also, the decentralized distribution of hardware described in the article reminded of a MMORPG described in the Charles Stross novel Halting State. There the MMORPG was distributed over the players hardware so that very little centralized hardware was required.
Not true. A CS Masters will get you a higher salary across the board. Even if you end up doing your own thing the more in-depth studies of a Master's program will help you in that respect as well.
Recently switch all of the WordPress.com load balancers to be nginx. They push a little over a gigabit of traffic right now and about half a billion requests per day, no sweat. We use Spread + Wackamole for failover, there's more info on Barry's blog:

http://barry.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/load-balancer-update/

I wouldn't recommend DNS round robin for load balancing. (We did it for a while, many problems and flaws in the approach.)
Honestly, I still think RSS is useless to normal people.
Web 3.0 = online markets that are the best hope for U.S. wage-earners vs. the Fed
It is not "scientific" in the sense that it does not prove its claims. But it's not "pseudo-scientific" either because it doesn't pretend it's proving claims. It's more like a book of interesting ideas from a smart guy written for a general audience. It's different from most AI in that it's very focused on drawing inspiration from neurobiology, while still being written from a "computer guy" perspective.

Here's an excerpt that might give you an idea of what it's like. It's in support of one of his key points, that many current AI methods ignore the role of change over time, whereas in your brain it's crucial.

"You know the alphabet. Try saying it backward. You can't because you don't usually experience it backward. Your memory of the alphabet is a sequence of patterns. It isn't something stored or recalled in an instant or in an arbitrary order. The same thing does for the days of the week, the months of the year, your phone number, and countless other things.

"Your memory for songs is a great example of temporal sequences in memory. Think of a tune you know. I like to use 'Somewhere over the Rainbow.' You cannot imagine the entire song at once, only in sequence. You can start at the beginning or with the chorus, and then you play through it, filling in the notes one after another. You can't recall the song backward, just as you can't recall it all at once. You were first exposed to 'Somewhere over the Rainbow' as it played through time, and you can only recall it in the same way you learned it."

Other interesting discussions are around the role of feedback and hierarchy in the brain's structure. I recommend this book to anyone who's a good programmer with some interest in AI.
I second the recommendation of skipping chapter 6 - when I read this comment I went to check where my bookmark is because I had gotten bored while re-reading, and it was near the start of chapter 6 ;-)
Let's count Ballmer's winners:

- MSN search vs. google?

- hotmail vs. gmail?

- xbox vs. wii?

- zune vs. ipod?

- Silverlight vs. AJAX?

- Windows vs. linux?

- Vista vs. OSX?

- .net vs. anything that works?

At what point do you stop blaming the soldiers and hold the general acountable?
I have a PhD and do not regret it but my degree is in Physics not Computer Science. I enjoyed the work and believe that I was exposed people and ideas, that I would not have been otherwise, which have had a major impact my approach to work and problem solving. I would not pursue a Computer Science degree but would consider Physics or Mathematics instead while working on problems of interest to computer science. Study in either of these areas will give you a perspective fewer people have.
I'd advise against getting a master's degree for someone who already has an impressive resume and knows what they want to do next.

I dropped out of my master's program after getting accepted into YC. It was a no brainer; I flew back to Boston and met with my adviser the same day to tell him I was dropping out. I had already published with him so we were good friends.

With few exceptions, people in the tech industry rarely care about graduate degrees.

Beware of opportunity cost when reading posts saying it's only one year, or you can make $x more / year with a master's degree. It sounds like you're going to learn much more in the first year of your venture than you would in school.
Ballmer's performance has been questionable but its not wise to fire a CEO without a ready replacement....I dont think Microsoft have anyone.
Good points.

But I'm pretty sure hotmail still has higher market share than GMail. And though I use Ubuntu over Windows, but the world is still all about Windows. From a revenue perspective, Windows made more money this year than in any previous year. That's good news for Ballmer.

And Surface is really cool. MS Research does incredible work. Office is still king, and no one has come up with anything close to an Outlook-killer yet.

I don't actually use any of the products you or I mentioned, but MS has plenty of strengths and smart people to balance it's blatant failures.

Edit: Photosynth is yet another highly impressive product from MS Live Labs.
All the more reason to go outside. How many more buses are they willing to miss?
Yes, when the field of AI first sprang up it was focused on logical deduction. In retrospect it may seem doomed to failure, but this is partially because our notion of "what artificial intelligence means" changes over time. There's a joke about this -

"Artificial intelligence is just whatever computers can't do yet."

Before chess-playing computers, a lot of people thought that chess required a lot of real intelligence, and if you could play chess well, that was a sign of intelligence. It's not unreasonable - for humans playing chess well is a pretty good sign of intelligence. But then we got chess playing computers that obviously weren't "intelligent like people are". So nowadays it seems obvious to us that playing chess isn't a real sign of intelligence.

So it's not that the logic-driven approach to AI failed. It succeeded at a lot of things that previously humans could do, but computers couldn't. Like playing chess. It just didn't get all the way to the Turing test.
I'm a first year CS PhD student who is dropping out of the program after completing my MSc in another week or so. I went directly to a PhD program following my undergraduate career because 1) I had the opportunity to do so 'risk free' (a one year PhD salary at an Ivy is ~26k) and 2) because I would one day like to teach computer science at the university level. This first year was fairly painful because my interests were not in line with my advisor's and my advisor has reached the level of fame & respect within academia that his graduate students are more like cogs in a complex system than research colleagues.

A Computer Science PhD (especially in more concrete areas like systems / security / perhaps even PL a la Graham), I believe, is different from many other academic PhD's in that what you learn through the course of your research and dissertation can have real world implications in industry. Whether or not it does, though, depends on the idea you are working on which is entirely your responsibility to define. There have been some comments below about being forced to work on "somebody else's problem" with which I disagree. It is your responsibility to find the best advisor for you and the best advisor for you is going to be the advisor who either A) shares a serious interest in the exact problem you would like to solve -or- B) has a general interest in the problem you would like to solve and has an advising style that is concerned as much or more with your growth and success than his/her gain from your work. For another perspective on choosing the right research I suggest Hamming's remarks: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

So what's next for an entrepreneurial minded PhD drop-out? Another PhD program! This time with an advisor whose research interests are very in line with my own and in an area whose commercial market is only growing (collaborative systems).

One must not either be an entrepreneur or an academic. One can be either, both, or neither. The entrepreneur considering the pursuit of academia must convince herself/himself that it is a risky investment that, at best, will lead to great commercial opportunity, at worst, be a painful 4 or 5 years and have lead to research that dead ends, or, most likely, will be a challenging experience where you will learn a vast ammount of new information and instill a certain level of discipline when approaching new ideas. Economically one is safest in going to Microsoft/Oracle/SAS immediately after obtaining a BS/MSc. However, if you're the type of entrepreneur who dreams of innovating on technology (a la Google, Akamai, SAS, Sybase, INGRES, etc) versus the type of entrepreneur who dreams of innovating on applications of technology (Facebook, MySpace, Web 2.0 in general), then a Computer Science PhD may be a very worthwhile investment in the path to your ambitions.

"Any day you can be paid by someone to learn something new... that's a good day." -Prof. Gary Bishop
Now.

<rhetorical question>

Do you think Microsoft's board is smart enough to know how fast the tech world is changing?

</rhetorical question>
I am currently just waiting for Safari's Web Inspector tool to reach par with Firebug before I switch to it over Firefox permanently
Load Balancer Update
HTML will get native video support in the future so we won't need flash for it anymore.

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video
Yes, we will keep making progress in AI.

There's two parts to the success of any machine learning program (like the stuff Daphne Koller is working on mentioned in the article). Your algorithm, and your data. To paraphrase Peter Norvig:

"Ten times more data will beat any algorithmic improvement."

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/10/advantages-of-big-data-a...

With the rise of the internet, more and more data will be online. Even if we can't figure out smarter ways of analyzing this data, we will at least keep getting more of it.

Here's a thought experiment. What if you had a really large dataset of chat logs, so large that any sequence of 1000 words, you could find it somewhere in the logs. Then you just wrote a chat bot that

1. Looked up the history of the chat in its logs

2. Said whatever the person in the logs said next

3. Once you got to 1000 words it said "Gotta go, talk to you later!"

Seems like that could pass the Turing test to me. Of course since there are about a million English words you would need on the order of 1000000 ^ 1000 = a googol^60 items in your data set. ;-)
I'm running Firefox 3.0b5 on a PowerBook G4. I seem to have random crashes multiple times a day. Currently, it is fairly common to find that Firefox has crashed upon wake up from sleep. Performance is snappier than FF2, but it is far less stable. I expect that much of this will be sorted out prior to the final release. That said, if it weren't for a couple of extensions that I use regularly, I'd be inclined to make the switch to Safari.
But I love Ballmer!

He does in fact perfectly fit Minisoft (...and thinking that I wanted to make it BIGGER.)
I think you should ask if they're informed enough. More data (informed) beats better algorithms (smart).
I wasn't aware that the web came with different version numbers.

$ sudo apt-get upgrade internet
...

:(
Leaving Las Yahoo: Microsoft's $5 Billion Mistake?
An MSc and a Masters of CS are slightly different. Basically a Masters of CS is a masters lite. 2/3 the coursework with no thesis. Its a whole different bag.

I'm doing a masters in applied math, and not having to do a thesis would sorta ruin the whole super independent part of it. I'm looking forward to doing cool research that I want to do. It will probably suck towards the end when I'm finishing the details of my thesis, but right now its exciting to dream of things to research.
He probably does a great job with all those Microsoft haters out there (and here)
Does OSS Work for Business Users?
Immediately, my head says yes. Then I think about this question and realize its not that simple.
Most econometricians would admit it, it's just that the linear models, and Gaussian models are easier to handle since they require much less data to calibrate, and the results have more or less confirmed economic theory. There is no doubt that economic theory does not have near the predictive power that physical sciences have attained, but that is due in part to how recent new developments have been, and how sparse the data available to economists is. Indeed, estimating all the parameters necessary for non-linear models is significantly trickier. Anybody that developed robust nonlinear economic models could safely bet on receiving a good academic appointment at a top-20 school, and very probably an economic prize.

I can't think of a single econometrician who claims to have all the answers through Gaussian statistics.
If your business plan is "maybe one of us will turn out to be the next Steve Jobs," it may be better just to sell to MSFT ;)
TweetWheel - Twitter Friend Network Visualization Tool
half of these arguments are of the Facebook vs. Myspace variety -- or the Yang should be outed argument as well

1. Same could be said for Yahoo vs. Google

2. Hotmail/Live mail has more users than Gmail (ditto with MSN messenger and Gchat, or Yahoomail/Yahoo messenger vs. Gmail/Gchat)

3. How many years did the iPod have on the Zune? You should be making an argument why Ballmer/ MSFT didn't release a Zune Phone, not comparing the iPod to the Zune.

4. Xbox v. Wii? Are you serious?

Wii is heavily targeting a casual gamer market, while Xbox is more geared towards a more hard-core gamer, which is OK. Apples and Oranges. Wii outsells in systems, but not in games -- many dont even buy one game but just play what comes on the system.

I've had both the Wii and the Xbox/Xbox 360, btw, and I know many who do, just as I know many who have an Xbox and a PS3 for the game variety (i.e. Gears of War, Halo, Tom Clancy games on one and MGS, FF, etc. on the PS3)

Don't know any non-hackers who use Linux.

what about synch, surface, or photosynth?

You think OSX has Vista beat in the business world? Nice try. Most consumers and businesses buy machines not for the OS, but for the brand name of the machine --- Apple, Dell, HP, etc. so I'm not sure I see how OSX is a big winner over Vista. Gaining market share, sure, but Vista as a non-winner?

you obviously dislike MSFT but aren't really making any logical arguments why Ballmer should be outed other than that you prefer competing products.
In fairness, he's been with them since 1980. Who knows what role he has played in their many successes over that time period.

Also, hotmail is far larger than gmail. That one belongs on a non-ironic winners list. If you want to make fun of him, go with hotmail vs. yahoo mail.

It might be best for all involved if he moves on though.
I think this is the problem. The c-suite at MSFT is full of people who were in the software industry in 1980. I don't really know who all is on the board, but they definitely need to get some fresh blood in the executive offices.
Blippr: Radically Short Ratings and Reviews [beta]
I just noticed the comments link is grey, whether or not you already visited it. Lately, I start by looking at the comments thread in case there's an upvoted comment saying the article is a waste of time, in that case I don't even bother clicking through to the actual article. But since I only followed the comments link, I can't tell later on if I had checked the comments and then decided to skip the article.

So the feature request is obviously: Make the comments link black and then grey, just like article links. But seriously, an even better feature would be if we could mark an article as "Not interested" so that it permanently falls down from our own main page. And to avoid that our main page gets filled with lower-ranked articles as a consequence of deprecating articles, maybe the page should just become emptier and emptier instead.
I don't know a person who uses RSS and I am in college and all my friends are engineers. I think hackers often mistake their friends as representative of the national demographic. I bet more people type URLs into Google search than use RSS. Seriously, have you ever noticed how many internet users type www.cnn.com into a Google search box? That is probably the median level of internet proficiency in this country.