skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, it felt like a bubble. Then again, I don't really know. You never really know with investing, I suppose. It felt like a bubble when I sold for 7€, and now with hindsight 7€ was very low...

Maybe lots of people started buying drugs with BTC and hence demand went up, or whatever.

I am also happy about the money I made. But I am not chiding myself for not selling more BTC at the peak. Maybe if they dropped to zero value I'd be a bit remorseful :-)
Watch Tonga vs England Saxons live streaming online TV link here
Most welcome to Churchill Cup between Tonga vs England Saxons live stream online on your pc. Tonga vs England Saxons live stream online will be held on Sunday, 12 June 2011. So, Rugby fans, don't miss to watch this important games today.
Show HN: Interactive paper time tracker
Basically, it's great for the black market. For the US, that means primarily drugs and gambling. That's why the price shot up after the Wired article about Silk Road: A whole bunch of people wanted to get Bitcoins to buy drugs online. In some countries the black market is even more important, because it's the only way to get certain necessities. The fact that bitcoins are being used as an investment vehicle right now is depressing, since the world desperately needs a form of digital cash.
It depends on what you want to do as a researcher. If you want to prove theorems in machine learning theory, courses like convex optimization make sense. I would also add statistical machine learning (CMU 10-702) for a broader view.

But a large part of ML research is not theoretical stuff, and involves building real systems. And in that case you should get a cursory overview of ML and then focus on the subdomain you may be interested in. By cursory overview I mean getting a gist of things like graphical models, SVMs etc.- a typical entry level grad ML course. This should be enough when you delve deep into your domain of choice.
Why would a site need to rely on utm_* query params to identify you when they probably already have your IP/user agent/cookie session?

Can you think of a practical way in which this would actually make a difference?
When should you prefer GraphLab over MapReduce, and vice-versa?

http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/285/when-should-you-pre...

(Answers by the authors of GraphLab)
IDC: Windows Phone to surpass Apple's iOS by 2015
What's Next? Apple
Totally agree. The only problem about indicating 500 mil people could be wrong is that your voice gets drowned in the noise. Just wait it out and then send a post..."I told you so".
It's much more convenient to use than existing methods of money transfer. Once you already have some BTC, that is - getting BTC might be a bit too cumbersome at the moment.

For example I bought some T-Shirts at SquareWear.biz. Upon checkout I get told a bitcoin address I enter into my client to transfer the required amount of BTC. A couple of seconds later squarewear knows I transferred the BTC and all is done. No registration with a payment processor required.

Another example: in my blog I once offered 0.1 BTC to the first five commentators on a blog post. Try that with other payment methods. Maybe money wires would work, but then not internationally without high fees.
Nice! How does that handle upgrading the permissions later? That was one of the big problems I ran into before: that we requested read access and then to get write access we had to have users first revoke permissions and then grant them again (a nonstarter.)
Why is cutting spending hard work? You just write a lower number on the budget, voila, less gets spent. I mean the only thing you really have to do to cut spending is for a Governor to refuse to sign the budget, spending gets cut automatically. In my opinion cutting spending is less work.
Twilio?
Why do Republicans tweet so much more than Democrats?
What are the best resources to use when starting machine learning for an experienced programmer?

http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/334/what-are-the-best-r...

As other commentators have said, try to build something and ask for help along the way, unless your goal is to be a theoretician (which I assume it is not).
The LEGO argument may make people believe that linux is just a toy and not for production uses. Apart from that, it's quite simple and straight forward.
BTW, we do have pre-built, highly customized distributions offered for those who likes things that work out of box.
thanks! thought of asking what an SVM is but I guess google gave it up as first result:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_vector_machine
>Getting your phone to work as a modem is not a problem that most people have.

I'm just going to address this point right here. Almost all normal people I know would really appreciate being able to get internet in any variety of locales where they'd otherwise have to wrangle with stupid WiFi login screens and money portals or where even crappy commercial WiFi is unavailable (park?). The thing is that most people just don't even consider that it is or should be possible.

If the "normal person" is incidentally using Ubuntu and Cyanogenmod, all we have to do is plug the phone in via USB, turn on tethering on the phone, click "HTC Android Phone" on "the two computers on the screen" (nm-applet), and that's that.

This is extremely handy in a lot of cases. Today, for instance, I tethered my phone and used it to browse for a few hours because Comcast was choking to death on my new modem and I had to wait for a "backend engineer" to process the ticket the customer service people created. Do you think that having a redundant net connection with just your phone and a USB cord is valuable, even to "normal people"? I sure do.

As to the rest of your post, you can generalize anything you want into a niche. I could say, "You know, 'normal people' only use their computers for Facebook, they definitely aren't trying to plug them into projectors". The reality is that plugging in a projector should work on Ubuntu and often does. As you noted, Windows is not perfect in this regard either; Ubuntu works excellently for a large number of people. Is that OK with you?

Saying that Ubuntu can never take off because you have to manually specify projector output is quite far-fetched. Should I say that Windows will never take off because you usually have to install software to use your peripherals when on Linux they are almost always supported immediately upon plug in?

Here's the real answer: desktop Linux will come around when it gets a company like Apple behind it, just as embedded Linux came around as TiVO, Google, Boxee, etc., put their weight behind it.

Microsoft sells relatively few copies of Windows directly to consumers; almost all consumers receive Windows pre-installed on the computer that they purchased at major retailer X. The manufacturers integrate the OS and the hardware, ship it out, and sell the whole thing as a single product called a "PC". When Linux gets someone that does this on a major, Dell-like scale, we'll see Linux on the desktop. It's well past good enough; really, these things don't take all that much. The biggest obstacles are social: "Why doesn't this greeting card creation program I just bought for $60 work on my 'UBUNTOX'?"
Most people (meaning the 'general population', 'mainstream users', and 'average Tom, Dick, or Harry') who aren't GNU/Linux users have either:

a) Never heard of G/L

b) Don't know how to install it; don't care; 'Windows/Mac is good enough for me'

c) Have had compatibility problems with it when they tried

Of course, the idea of general population depends on who you interact with the most, but let's assume general means people who go to Best Buy/Costco/Walmart for computers. These people would probably be willing to try G/L if it came by default. Yet the moment some weird error came up that involved anything more than a simple Google search, back to the store the computer goes. This is not only a loss of money for sellers and manufacturers, but also ends up being really bad PR.

G/L distros like gNewsense or Trisquel (both of which run Linux-libre) would run and sell really well at Best Buy if the video cards, wifi adapters, etc. they would come with worked out of the box. Yet God forbid you use some other [wifi adapter, insert other unsupported device] that doesn't have the right firmware! (Of course, this also applies to regular G/L albeit much less so.) Most 'average Joes' don't care about things like FLOSS unless it works and doesn't require a lot of work to setup and use constantly.

That's not to mention running Windows programs that don't have a FLOSS alternative.

My point is this: G/L won't become immensely popular without the major compatibility issues being fixed and it becoming a default install on a whole major line of computers. Compatibility won't be fixed until the vendors of the devices or programs see a significant profit intake from releasing the firmware/whatever and do so. Default installation won't happen until some major hardware company comes along and sells G/L only.

TL;DR: G/L needs major support to become commercially popular.
Wish I would finally follow my own advice, but I think it would be best to pick a problem and start hacking. There are lots of data sets available on the net, and competitions like the Netflix prize, too.

A while ago there was a story on HN about somebody who built a recommender system for boardgamegeek.com, for example. I thought that was inspiring.
Thanks for the link! You're mostly correct, I wish to build stuff around, but I also want to get deep into the theory. Just deep enough to be able to try out stuff I guess.
I don't know, ED is a pretty easy problem to trivialize, but when you think about how meaningful and important sex is in a relationship and life in general, I don't know if it's on the level of hair loss medicine. I'm not saying it's as ”important” as cancer, but I don't think it's trivial either.
What WeekendHacker Has Taught Me
Great! thanks for the tip, didn't realize youtube could be a better help to me that most books about the subject at my level
Lupe Fiasco - The Illuminati & The Music Industry
Programming Collective Intelligence (http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...) is a great resource. It serves as a practical introduction to several different machine learning algorithms. Although they are presented from a specific perspective (collaborative filtering), many of the techniques are general and are used across machine learning. The explanations of the algorithms are clear, simple, and the author does a nice job of building up the level of complexity over the course of the book. Also, you will get much more out of it if you follow along with the provided python-based implementations.
Do you think a bitcoin based payment processor where you can pay with bitcoin or with credit card (processor converts to bitcoin behind the scenes) would have any advantage? Would it be enough of an advantage to incentivise bitcoin use (eg avoiding conversion costs)?
I am using Firefox 4.0.1 on Windows XP Pro; however, it seems to be working now.
Heh. How many BTC do you have?
helwr, I respect the fact that you're intelligently and politely continuing this debate. Maybe it is not worth your time because of my cynical attitude.

I have very little respect for Quora, HN, retweets, or bookmarks which are accomplished with a click. If it makes you feel better, something I wrote also reached the front page of HN and received an undue number of upvotes, retweets, and social bookmarks by people who I guarantee have not read even 1% of the works I pointed to -- all because the blog post followed the linkbait formula.

I Truly Believe that people bookmark/upvote/retweet things they "intend to read" but never actually read, and that this systematically increases the level of noise masquerading as signal on the web.

Having stated that background - some of the response you got on Quora looks fine; the intelligent professors retweet just as sheeply as everyone else since the private cost is $0; and bookmarks signify nothing more than that this story reached the front page of HN.

Cheers, thank you for the rational back-and-forth.
Would be more interesting with more sources, otherwise, why not just check mtgox directly?
I am in the same boat with you. except i am 16. but i was driven to learn so while juggling school i learned html, css, php, javascript, and jquery.

the key is to keep building.

i have built sites that i dont tell anyone about. why? because i didnt build them because i thought they would be useful or interesting. i built them because its the first idea that came to mind to learna new language with.

let me give you an example. the first web site i put online is ratemybeards.com it isnt designed. in fact it still has a major bug in it and it is useless. but through the experiance and trial and error. i learned php throught that website
Take a look at Machine Learning video lectures by Professor Andrew Ng (Stanford). Highly recommended. http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A89DCFA6ADACE599

You'll also find a bunch of resources on this page - http://www.quora.com/Machine-Learning/What-are-some-good-res...
I have to agree here.. Anyone who has worked with Microsoft technologies and ventured in to Silverlight land KNEW it was not something to bank on. Slow maturity and lack of community, this product was dead from day one.

I'm glad they are moving towards HTML5 as their presentation layer standard. I've been doing this for months now anyway, like most .NET (ASP) developers.
One good point in PHP is the hello world code is just "hello, world". Not print("hello, world") neither <?php echo "hello, world"?>.

Simply type in hello world in a file, save it and run it as PHP script. It will print "hello world". And that was the start of the good things.
I have not checked these out, but I know that there is a Hacker Dojo course that posts course material to the following site.

http://machinelearning101.pbworks.com/w/page/32890312/FrontP...

I have seen some of the lectures and notes posted on the following Stanford CS229 site. However, they will probably be hard to follow prior to learning some linear algebra.

http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=348ca38a-3a...
Just curious, how has your experience been getting jobs as a dropout? I dropped out of college a couple years ago as well, but found that a lot people wouldn't even talk to me simply because I didn't have a degree (or stopped talking once I told them), so I graduated eventually.
I inadvertently hit someone else's server when refreshing XXXX.localtunnel.com that I had left open in my browser (but since closed my tunnel). That was annoying.

Two suggestions:

1) Randomly assign subdomain names instead of reusing existing ones.

2) Increase the length of the subdomain from 4 characters to 6 characters. With 4 characters, each being a-z0-9, there are 36^4 subdomain possibilities. 36^6 would make it much more difficult to locate an active subdomain through trial and error.

36^4 = 1,679,616

36^5 = 60,466,176

36^6 = 2,176,782,336
An Update on Meet Clojure
Ask HN: Looking for a web developer
Hi,

I'm looking for a professional web developer freelancer to create a site for an idea I had. They would need to be in San Francisco or South Bay. Shoot me an email if you are interested with work sample and all the necessaries and we can have a consultation about prices and such.

Drop me a line at craigslistthroway@gmail.com.
Care to add historical prices?
Reasons for using Golang
their website is quite slow and the numbers are small :)
Not sure this is good advice - without background I have mentioned there is no chance of actually making sense of the material in the CMU course - note how linear algebra is a prerequisite and they cover convex optimization at the very beginning of the class (even though it is not possible to do the subject justice in 2 lectures).
This is the only way I can make sense of the XML frenzy of the late 90s/early 00s.
True...but on the other hand FB is now the Internet for many people. What is more FB is just a begging of the communication revolution. It is so funny how many companies are now trying to get rid of the main role of email in business - to name just a few Chatter, Yammer, Discourse...
http://www.twilio.com/engineering/2011/06/06/making-a-local-...
IMO, the fundamentals are the only really important factor in a long term stock purchasing because the rest is mostly just paperwork.

Companies can start to pay dividends even if they have avoided them for a vary long period of time. EX: Microsoft

Companies can also be bought out and have their total stock price + a small premium paid out to their investors.

And finally rather than pay a dividend a stock buy back program can accomplish the same net result with significant tax advantages.
probably not, just wanted something really fast & simple. try bitcoincharts.com or mtgox.com
You would have to offer a discount for paying with bitcoins for this to work. I know a lot of merchants (in real life, not online) that offer small discounts to people who use cash so that they don't have to pay credit card transaction fees.

In any case, if you accept online payments via credit card, there wouldn't be much point to converting them to bitcoins after the fact, unless you actually prefer to hold BTC instead of USD. You've already paid the transaction fees.
All of the desktop OSes I use suck.

On Linux, I can't even use X + Awesome + <terminal emulator> without huge amounts of tearing and nearly 1 second delays while the WM redraws my terminal emulators while switching virtual desktops. A more experienced friend of mine suggested that this could be due to using nvidia binary graphics drivers, so I tried out the open source ones, but the tearing and delays got worse, and occasionally an entire window would be mangled for no apparent reason. He also suggested that it could be due to XRandR, but I noticed no change when I stopped using it (other than that my displays were no longer vertical), so now I'm using the binary drivers and XRandR again.

After upgrading from Ubuntu 10.04 to 11.04, I was unable to use my onboard NIC at all. I thought that it had been bricked, so I put another in, but eventually someone I knew experienced the same problem and was able to fix it by temporarily removing the battery from his motherboard. Apparently the drivers that ship with 11.04 like to put your network card into an unusable state until you physically mess with the machine. You could just be careful not use them and download the working drivers, but you might need a NIC for that...

On OSX, Spaces has a bug that causes windows to randomly rearrange themselves on the Z-axis when switching spaces. It also has a bug that causes your keyboard to stop working completely. The first time I encountered the second bug I had to reboot my computer because I couldn't kill Spaces without using my keyboard, but I have since put Activity Monitor in my dock just in case I need to do that. Fullscreen games on OSX (Starcraft II or Heroes of Newerth, for example) run a reasonably high chance of never giving up exclusive mode, even after dying, so your machine will become mostly inoperable after playing the game a lot of the time. There's also no reasonable way to run these games in fullscreen non-exclusive mode (the most useful configuration on other OSes), so you can't quickly switch between the game and Skype/screencasting software/IRC.

...And I hardly think I need to tell anyone here what sucks about Windows.
As an alternate option, it's more than possible to run a static site on Google App Engine (for free). Obviously, this is for low traffic and resource requirements.
MLDemos is a great free cross-platform GUI program that you can use to play around with various algorithms and visualize their effects: http://mldemos.epfl.ch/
Apple sued over use of iCloud name
Right-Click -> Save As -> Dropbox will let you change the filename and Save.
Of course you stand a chance, if you like it you'll learn everything pretty quickly. I toke a class in Turbo Pascal in the 90's very basic stuff, I left the whole computer/web world for 8 years and then came back and in 2 years I picked up PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript and today Web Development pays my bills. Oh, and when I started learning all these technologies I was 32 (2009).
you have a better domain name, don't be lazy

;)
> for companies that pay no dividends ... there is no value at all in the stock outside of the stock price [but] the perception of the stock value is still tied to the performance of the company

Owning a stock is like owning a fraction of a company. The value of stock comes from the following:

(1) dividends (that is, a fraction of current profits)

(2) assets (that is, a fraction of stuff the company has that could be sold; one of Warren Buffett's strategies is to buy companies that have more assets than their total stock price, such that merely liquidating the company would turn a profit.)

(3) estimated future dividends (a company may not presently be paying dividends, but may be on a clear trajectory to profitability and therefore future dividends)

(4) estimated future assets ("growth" type stocks are in companies that are investing profits in assets rather than paying out dividends. This has certain tax advantages over dividend-paying stocks.)

(5) estimated future valuations (that is, guesses as to what others might pay for the stock later)

Notice that only one of these involves perceptions of others' valuations. The rest are a matter of company performance.
some good toy projects to start with: http://www.quora.com/Programming-Challenges-1/What-are-some-...

for more see http://www.quora.com/Machine-Learning/What-are-some-good-lea...
Wait. You're using the nvidia driver, but are you using an accelerated window manager. Are you using mutter? Are you using compiz?

Ubuntu's 11.04 compiz is unstable, don't let me deceive you. BUT, it is far superior to plain old metacity with nvidia. Ugh, that shit tears and is awful.
Oh you meant tethering? Yeah, that's super easy on Windows, you plug your iPhone in enable tethering and it just works. Same thing with the bluetooth tethering.

I thought you meant using your cell phone to place an outgoing call to a dialup internet service.

Note: I don't have an AT&T iPhone where I understand this doesn't work and yes, if you don't like iTunes it's probably going to be a PITA to get this to work.
I suspect #4 Getting Money In or Out is the only one that matters. There have been problems getting USD into Mt.Gox for most of the week. Now with the weekend upon us the trickle of new funds has become a drip. There are no shortage of people in the forums looking to buy bitcoin with paypal, trying to get in before all the bank wires on Monday. I expect it will be back up to around 20 USD by Tuesday. Regardless of the cause, big swings like this don't exactly help it's cause in becoming a widely used currency.
The exchange rate stopped going up shortly after The Silk Road closed to new users. It started dropping soon after. TSR was the most compelling and publicized use of bitcoins, and I expect that if the site re-opens there'll be another round of publicity and bitcoins will rally.

So sure, probably some component of the initial rise was a bubble, but it's important to remember that the actual utility of bitcoins also went down significantly preceding the price drop.
Take Silk Road, for example -- the topic of a recent Gawker piece. An IP accesses this site, which is known for selling narcotics illegal in the U.S. If this is a user's direct IP, anyone who can sniff the traffic of the site can trace that user back to their home address, assuming cooperation of the internet service provider.

However, if you first route your IP through Tor -- an anonymizing service, you can make it extremely difficult for anyone to trace you.

Silk Road is only available through Tor; it can't be accessed from the clearnet unless you use something like tor2web.