skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't have believed this earlier. But, today we're getting ever closer to it.

Best example: http://www.academicearth.org
I hope this was added as a peculiar historical artifact from 1991, not a statement of how to best write code today. These tricks don't work with GCC 4.1+ and i86_64.

For example, in the loop section, the good trick now is to make your code accessible by the GCC vectorizer. If you turn on -fdump-tree-vect-details in GCC, you will see - for every loop - the weighting factors applied and what might have blocked the vectorizer's operation. Vectorized computing existed in 1991 - heck, 1969 - but was not commodity like today.
Good point re:Flickr ... my though is that it would have a much better signal-to-noise ratio for those seeking such images ...
Yeah but gcd is very simple (and also your version of it stack overflows around 7 digits, depending on how quickly a gcd is found, so it isn't really "correct") - most simple tasks will have similarly sized simple representations in nearly any language. The argument levied against Java is that it's code size does not scale linearly in relation to other languages as the complexity of the problem increases.
I totally agree with your statement that "There's gold in the intersections of disciplines.", and I've put it down on my list of things to become (a polymath).

I've quite seriously looked at the medical sector as one that lacks technological innovation, and both this answer, in addition to makerman's answer seem to validate that opinion.

Look where things lack innovation seems to be the best way to go.
HP CEO Mark Hurd forced to resign over sexual harassment investigation
Why was it a terrible decision?
Personally, I think it would be best to, as much as possible, disconnect the teaching and the certification. both are hard problems by themselves; when you put them together, you end up with what we have now.
I don't think you read the article, or specifically the quote in my comment you're replying to. It specifically refers to the concern about balancing the budget. You can't run a unbalanced deficit budget without borrowing.
Demand Media’s IPO: The Google & SEO Aspects
Whoa whoa whoa, WHAT? Historian, cook, screen writer, journalist, director? On what planet can directorial skills be conveyed via a lecture video clip? Did CalArts, which graduated Tim Burton, John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Joe Ranft, and countless other masters of animation do so simply by showing them what amounted to the same stock lectures with some automated method of remote feedback? Or was it instead significantly in part a communal learning experience that involved peer criticism and one on one tutelage from professors who were in the room with them as they drew and developed their craft?

I'm sorry, but believe it or not, not all professional skills can be remotely acquired without a kind of human transference of intangible, personable skills. Education in higher academia is about much more than the acquisition of particular facts--it's a culture, practice, and way of life. Critical ideas are meant to be discussed in person, ruminated on, and debated in real, highly dynamic discussions. Real life work environments, especially in software companies, are ones in which critical, GROUP brainstorming dynamics are particularly important, because oftentimes the answer doesn't lie in the answer key in the back of the book, but rather as a result of a group process of rumination, guess, check, and revision.
I homeschooled my sons. My sons are "twice exceptional" -- gifted with learning (and other) disabilities. I have always told them that their best hope of making their lives work will be to found their own company. They can very effectively get things done but I don't think they can work for other people. When you found your own company, you don't need accreditation. Either the product sells or it doesn't.

Similarly, I spent a lot of time very sick. I made a lot of dietary and lifestyle changes and I am healthier now than I have ever been in my life. I am not a doctor but I am also not impressed with the current healthcare model followed in the US. I think I have a cheaper and more effective alternative to offer. Study after study after study shows that diet and lifestyle are huge factors in all the major (deadly) illnesses, like heart disease, diabetes, cancer. But doctors mostly don't push for dietary and lifestyle changes. They are mostly in the business of selling pills and surgeries. A big part of why they don't is that people aren't very receptive. Many people just want an easy answer. And it's quite hard to make money off of promoting lifestyle changes.

So to me, the big challenges are how to more effectively convey information and how to monetize it. I am still trying to decide if I should largely abandon my current websites and start over in a new space. I don't yet know the answer to that. But I do know that I have narrowed it down to "education is the answer" and I do know that I am very good at some things that other people seem to not be good at. I know this from years spent on homeschooling forums where for some particularly difficult things, I often was the only person who had much to say.

So I find this article very relevant at the moment and encouraging. I don't know if I have much to really contribute to the conversation that will be of interest to others or that they will value. Perhaps I just need to talk about it. For my own goals, accreditation is unimportant. The piece that matters is whether or not the information is conveyed adequately, which my current websites are not doing. I think I will be doing something educational on the web in the future. So I am kind of excited to see this piece.
Eh, it seems to me that if he knows how to do well /without/ a formal education, he may be in a position where he knows more than most people about what parts of 'education' are important, and which parts are not.
The building blocks he lists are things that are possible right now. It's not a matter of figuring out the future, but rather seeing technology trends and creating a unique mix of those things that were previously impossible. It doesn't have to be in an unknown field or about unfamiliar topics. Technology changes many things, as it changes, can you do something new now?

This shifts the problem from the difficult (predict the future) to the straightforward (applying building blocks). It's not an automatic business plan or a bullet-proof vest, but the unwritten assumption is that by looking for the opportunities in the changing tide, anything you create will already have a first-mover advantage by default.
The question is: after the dust settles, can it be repaired?
I actually learn that kind of stuff here. Even though I use Fedora these days and haven't used Debian since Potato (that was a long time ago) I am still interested to hear what's going on with Debian although I'm not following it closely.
I can't remember if it was Stanford or Berkeley, but one of them was going to open up the ability to earn a full degree online. I'm not sure when, but I heard that transition has a lot of students at the university in an uproar.

One step at a time and the elite education will be everywhere, though it'll still cost an arm-and-a-leg.

I am huge on web-based education. I can't imagine what my skill-set would look like if I had access to today's web when I was growing up. I would love to build a website that brings educators together, from anywhere, to instruct groups of 10-15 people on specific topics-of-choice -- for free.

Edit: Looked it up, apparently it was UC in general -- http://bit.ly/aCmsNF

"The idea is that UC could become the first top-tier American university to offer a bachelor's degree over the Internet."
Under a frequentist interpretation of probability that's correct (and the paradox doesn't arise), but Bayesian decision theory does allow you to reason in the way the paradox proposes, starting in a situation where you've already picked an envelope, and estimating the utility of switching to the other one by multiplying the probability that you're in the high->low configuration with the value of a high->low switch, and likewise with a low->high switch. So you have 50% chance of halving your money, 50% of doubling, and thus estimated 1.25x return.

Frequentist probability doesn't let you do that, because it doesn't let you say "there's a 50% likelihood I'm in this state, and 50% that I'm in the other". Instead, it says you must be in one or the other state (non-probabilistically), and the probabilities are only attached to a previous process that generated that outcome. But Bayesian probability does let you interpret the probabilities as belief in each current state, so you have a 50% belief you're in one state, and a 50% belief you're in the other, and the value of any decision is thus 0.5 * value_if_I_was_in_situation_A + 0.5 * value_if_I_was_in_situation_B.

(If you don't allow that kind of computation, Bayesian decision theory has to be revised in some other cases as well.)
I believe there's some problem with assuming that, given an envelope containing X dollars, that the other envelope has a 50% chance of containing 2x, and a 50% chance of containing X/2. This step is clearly what leads us into the paradox.

Suppose you open the first envelope, and find $100, and are given the option to switch. If there is a 50/50 chance of the other envelope containing 200/50, we could easily model this problem a million times and find that it averages to 125.

The problem here is that the numbers have not been pre-determined in the start. If a naive player repeatedly played a game where the numbers are guaranteed to be 100 and 200, then the always switching strategy would be exactly the same as the always staying strategy.

In this case, let the difference between the two envelopes be x. When you switch, you have a 50% chance of losing x and a 50% chance of gaining x. There is really no problem if you define the two envelopes as differing by a fixed number, rather than one being a multiple of the other. When the two numbers have fixed, predetermined values, the two problems are the same.
It looks pretty interesting. I studied physics in school and have been thinking about going back for an MS in computational modeling, so I'm thinking I'll start in on this book over the weekend just for fun. I've never used a Lisp-like language before, and it looks to be a pretty comprehensive review of classical mechanics as well.
I think there just isn't enough good information out there for a surgeon. It's already hard to find good information on some obscurer topics of software development, like for example windows driver programming, where you won't go far without books and/or learning inside a company with knowledge about it. Now jump into a complete different profession and suddenly the web isn't all that big. How many useful & high-quality surgeon sites do you think are out there? Maybe 2-3?

On the other hand learning iPhone programming, which may be all you need to get a job as a developer, is significant easier than any learning any other profession online, just given by how much information is available on the topic and how well it's presented.
Poligraft from Sunlight Labs: Political analysis for any article
"Who you are is a more accurate predictor of entrepreneurship and success." is a wonderfully succinct way to put it, and I hope to become more and more like those who have succeeded in the future (e.g. solid work ethic/reading about a variety of subject/talking to more people).

I guess I'll just have to improve myself, and chase the smart people, who seem to swarm to these universities.
Something like this would be quite useful with a real-time source/feed of images/video. Or connect remotely to your home camera and spy on your neighborhood.

Seriously though, there should exist an implementation like this (at least from security firms or NSA/CIA).
Darn, wish he would have hidden a little play on initials as Hofstadter did in his title: GEB:EGB.
One "bug" that seems like it would be hard to fix is normalizing the volume. Linkin Park's New Divide was substantially louder than Neon Trees's Animal.

The site looks good and I get the idea, but I'm not sure exactly how useful it is for regular listening. It seems to me that it's designed to play one song at a time? Personally, I have my own music library that I ranked and then listen to mostly on random. Sometimes I'll be in the mood to hear an album or an artist, and I'll play that. I have several friends that listen exclusively to Pandora.

The point is, I and everyone I know basically put on music we like and then go about our business, pausing only occasionally to switch to another album or thumbs-up/thumbs-down a song. Sitting there and consciously "discovering" music is just not something that I know anyone in my circle to do.
Within many game companies, the goal of DRM is to prevent people from pirating the game for the first week or two. They know better than anyone it'll be cracked eventually. But DRM definitely has an effect on sales if the pirates have to wait a few days to get the game for free. At least some of them will pay, if they have to.
Amen. I'm taking a class in Abstract Algrebra in the fall. I already have a general overview of the topic and have been working some practice problems from online resources. It's amazing what's available these days if you want to teach yourself.
I dunno...even being from 1991, I had actually assumed this was intended as humor. Those are all simple enough (if not entirely trivial) optimizations that it doesn't take a particularly heroic compiler to perform them, even twenty years ago I'd guess.

Frankly, I got a good laugh out of it (that I thought was intended by the author).
Are you seriously arguing that you should switch exactly once?
The curse of the publicly traded company, after the founders retire. There are precious few companies that can survive this transition - as the principled, long-term management style is swapped out for quick profits and lowest-common-denominator management.
Clojure 1.2 RC2
Wow, big fan of http://js1k.com/demo/15

Also nice to see mrdoob on there. I like his canvas experiments.
As it turns out, there are already a couple of sites similar to zoom.it [1]. However, it should be interesting to see if zoom.it gains substantial traction, and how. I suspect that the fact it's Microsoft releasing something lightweight and useful will make this an interesting news story. This is seeming to be confirmed by Twitter showing a steady stream of links to it, and its gaining a lot of buzz on social media sites.

But, we'll see. It's possible that there just isn't enough demand for this type of thing, yet.

[1] http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/zoom.it
Spectacular Ads for Pictionary
Build something that had previews not been built is unnecessary. There is a whole universe of possibilities with APIs, mashups or re-doing something with your own twist.
Right. But you're talking about 'as-is.' Someone could easily come along and change all of that with an amazing way to instruct people online. All of a sudden we have people that know a lot about medical topics or windows drivers instructing classes online.
I imagine with VR getting better and better, a surgeon could eventually train for new procedures much the same way pilots get trained in simulators to handle different scenarios.
Please do watch the unedited video. Respectfully, there is much popular opposition to the war, it has materialized, and there is plenty of photographic and video evidence of exactly how much war sucks.

If you have evidence that the military deliberately killed a journalist, please share it with me.

And respectfully, the military has done a good job of helping journalists do their job. Mike Yon, who was openly critical of General McChrystal (and frankly kind of unprofessional in how he did it) has spent a long time in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and is apparently now on his way back for yet another embed.

Also, I think it might be worth pointing out that while the US military often does get it wrong -- causing collateral damage that is sometimes disproportionate to the tactical objective, and does kill innocent civilians, I have yet to see a case where killing innocent civilians was their actual goal. This is in stark contrast to the people the US military is fighting against -- Al Quaeda remnants and some elements of the Taliban -- who target civilians intentionally.

Personally I don't think the amount of effort we're expending in Afghanistan is justified based on the expected future benefit, and after a long time supporting our mission there I'm ready to pull our forces out. But Julian Assange is doing his best to make sure a) America looks worse than it is, b) that American soldiers have a harder job to do and c) anyone Afghans who have reached out to us in the past are more likely to pay a price for it in the future.

If Assange had taken the time to sanitize the documents he released of any information regarding names and villages of sources, I'd have more sympathy for him. Instead he stupidly and needlessly put their lives in danger, and now wants to blame the US military for their deaths. He's a piece of shit.
I should disclose that I am a massive music junkie. 94,000 plays on Last.FM to date[1] - it wasn't clear what the bet I was taking was with Like.FM (good domain) what is it? how is it different to Last.FM? Seems like its this:

> Merge their top tracks intelligently into the ultimate list of new songs

Sooo why not a Last.FM app?

Just my brief $0.02 cents, feel free to reach out to me (or reply here) as I am obsessed with this space.

edit: some thoughts...

1) nice simple sign up

2) omg is that ajax logging in? always wondered why people don't offer that, cute.

3) the player on the right is the right concept but wrong implementation - I like how hypem.com has done it. takes up less space.

4) still not entirely clear what the value proposition is - what does it do? specifically what value does it bring?

After playing with service for a few moments and reading your comments, I can imagine this being an epic service that acts as a "Last.FM for Online Content" via scrobbler/bookmarklet, and tracks what i've recently watched/listened to - just my $0.0.2

[1]: http://www.last.fm/user/Hejog
Fun with Interfacing Chicken Scheme and C
Here's a bug, I tried to listen to "OMG by
Usher Featuring will.i.am" through billboard top 100 and it says "Embedding this video is disabled by its owner".

Very cool app though.
What if you did? Would it be a better framework? Would anybody care at all?

I doubt it.

This a code style and if you like it, then maybe you use the parts you want. But "micro branching" is still branching and it makes little difference how you do it (except the nod to performance concerns towards the end).

Thinking about code style and readability is useful and good, but this is by no means a common way to code. Beware of excess cleverness. It would be far better to worry about the correctness of the code rather than optimizing for a meaningless benchmark (no ifs).
Video Chat.

It's a completely different way of thinking, no doubt about that. I love the university atmosphere.
Names are hard. Two of us running ErlangCamp have been organizers for Chicago BARCamp for the last 5 years (I've actually backed off but Jordan still helps) and we've heard this a few time already, hehe. Now that events like CouchCamp are popping up I didn't think it was a big deal to do the same for our Erlang event.

Sorry if it causes any confusion. It will still be a great conference!
Engine Yard Co-Founder leaves / big news end of month
First I'd recomend learning about Visual Studio as if you don't know about the IDE it can slow and even impede your programming. Wrox's Professional Visual Studio 2010:
http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Visual-Studio-2010-Progra...

Second, I'd say that for a general book that's informative and not too hard to learn use Wrox's Professional C# 4 and .Net 4. I prefer Wrox books as they are usually the same format book to book and most have you complete a project to practice what you're learning:
http://www.amazon.com/Professional-4-0-NET-Wrox-Programmer/d...

Depending on what you're using for your data store I'd also suggest reading up on ADO.NET 4 but I don't have any experience with books on that topic so perhaps someone can suggest some.
Agree with messel. Beside stranger wanting to listen or not your new product I believe its about "shut up and do it" finish your 1.0 version then show around different kinds of people (tech and non-tech, biz and non-biz related people)and try to get a rich feedback from them
So perhaps build critical mass via the backdoor? Build trust via some other means then segue into the target domain. No need for immediate displacement, just wholesome competition.
>you should be thinking "how can I build a site that will have scaling troubles?"

I work for a company that does consulting for startups, and occasionally one of our clients takes off like a rocket. Everyone has scaling problems, even the people who have thought about and worked on scaling. Load tests and projections are only so good: at the end of the day theory will meet practice and we all know who wins there.

We always tell them the same thing, "these are good problems to have". Everyone has a sleepless week or so until the bottlenecks are cleared, and then life is back to normal (except now people have heard about that thing you've been working on for the past couple years).
Autoplay is something I'm planning to add, mainly to complement the merged top tracks from your followers (so that it can auto play the top tracks of people you follow).

The ability to play music on the site right now however is a convenience thing. You can browse a friend's profile and check up on what they're listening to. And I figured you'll eventually pull up youtube to listen to one of those songs, why not just integrate that into the site directly.

I guess at the moment, until I get auto play integrated, I'm targeting more of the people who listen to their own iTunes library and occasionally try to find some new songs to add to their library.
The iframe on the side has to go. It looks very out of place. Maybe try something like extension.fm's [1] player that is more unobtrusive.

Also the layout doesn't work well with smaller screens. The margins are cut off on my 13" MBP [2]. The width is >1200px. It should be 1000px max.

1. http://extension.fm

2. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/533753/Screen%20shot%202010-08-06%20...
Bubble Alert: Xobni’s Spending Money On A Mural
What happened here? Double posting shenanigans at HN
I was just browsing through the previous days top stories and saw this. It caught my eye because obviously it was the same story, twice. Same comments. But 2 (marginally) different karma scores. I'm always curious and wondered if anyone had an explanation.
@mcgraw5 I guess I'm coming from the angle that most of my humanities courses in undergrad took place in seminar settings, and the discussions that we had were sublime, in part because we could share moments of intense intellectual discussion. I simply can't see that happening well with the same group of 11 + a professor over video chat.
Oh no you di'n't! (lots of apostrophes for that)

I put a piece of dust on yo drop.
so everyone wants to know: Is it VMWare?
Yes, I think you are correct. I would word it this way:

Let:

{X, 2X} := The amount of $$$ in each envelop

A := 1st envelop has $2X

B := 2nd envelop has $2X;

The flaw in the paradox is to assume that events A and B are independent, when in fact they are mutually exclusive.

Now, we can rewrite the whole "(0.5 A) + (0.5 A'/2) /= 5/4 A" nonsense as:

P(A|B)2X + P(B|A)X = 02X + 0X = 0

Which is zero because it only covers half of the probabilities space, the other half is where all the density of the probability function lies.

P(A|B')2X + P(B|A')X = 0.52X + 0.5X = 3X/2; which is what we would expect by intuition, halfway between the 2 prizes.
That sounds completely fair. But you should still by able to resell the game.
He's getting an 8-figure severance package:

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100806-715953.html