skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The very best of youtube for me as a wannabe, spareroom, hacker is the independent channels. You just can not beat them. For instance, the Geekgroup (great channel) which as far as I can make out is very well funded just doesn't hold a candle to the likes of Photonicinduction, bkraz333, Afrotechmods, jeriellsworth, UnknownLobster, et al when it comes to raw talent.

If I was the head of this google project I'd get in bed with the raw talent.
A response from Charlie Nutter (JRuby): http://blog.headius.com/2011/10/why-clojure-doesnt-need-invo...
I don't agree that 20 Under 20 is a stab at changing the educational system. Nor is 20 Under 20 very much like YC. The projects that the Thiel Fellows are undertaking are not all money making enterprises. Many of them are attempts at disrupting current trends without the explicit goal of gaining profit. The 20 Under 20 program is for those who have great ideas but no money with which to see them come to fruition on their own.

Many of the Thiel Fellows have already undertaken 3rd level studies but the majority have not, and the Thiel Fellowship is not meant to be a condensed college replacement. It's a platform from which the Fellows can launch their ideas.

Education is a very broad term. We shouldn't limit it to what happens on a college campus, but I think that we should bear in mind that for the majority of people a college setting works best for their development, both social and intellectual.
> Science can progress even without software - the only difference that software makes is rate of progress and its cost.

Depends on the science. Facial recognition software? That requires software to make progress.

> Did you ask yourself why ? Maybe, because what's now, just works for them ? I didn't see any description of problems on this page, that this manifesto wants to solve.

It is usually to the benefit of the individual researcher to keep the code under wraps, but not to the benefit of the field of research. A researcher benefits from generating results. They do not benefit from other people being able to verify their results. In fact, they may even benefit from raising the barrier to entry, as it makes their own results more important in the field.

> The code is not as important as descriptions of algorithms, and the ideas behind code

In theory, this should be 100% true. In practice, results are determined as much by parameters, implementation choices, and flat-out bugs, as they are by the algorithms and the big ideas. I absolutely agree that people should re-implement the algorithms, rather than share the bugs (Dijkstra wrote against this). However, what happens when you find a discrepancy between your results and what a paper said? Without having access to the original source code, you can't figure out what caused the difference. Anecdotally, my girlfriend has been in this situation before--she couldn't replicate a (computer vision) result from someone else's paper. The original author was reticent to share their own code, so she didn't know whether the difference was a bug on her end, a bug on their end, or a platform difference. Open source code may have helped answer that question.
One of the differences between tv and Internet is that tv channels have an oligopoly on your attention. There's a small limited number of channels competing for attention across all tv viewers. YouTube has to compete not only against millions of Other things on the net bit also millions of other videos on YouTube itself. It'll be interesting to see if the tv model of taking large million dollar bets on unproven shows works here.
Jack Ma's talk at Stanford
>One benefit of the card-swiping system is that I know the state of each application visually when I'm switching between them-- for me, there is a better mental model that the application will have the same state when I retur

Couldn't agree more. I'm very, very happy that Android has cloned this feature.

>It mimicks the PC, and it preserves state a lot longer than Android/iOS. I can leave Notes, a web page, a map, and phone open; they'll be open in the sequence I opened them, and if I drop everything, when I return, I'll know I'm in the middle of performing data aggregation with each of those applications. Android/iOS simply tackles this differently, I guess.

The only part that is unique about WebOS "It mimicks the PC" which I find to be slightly dubious anyway - switching apps in Ubuntu and Mac OS X are done via app icon ala Android-style. Resuming Applications in Android puts you in the same exact spot you left them in, in fact that is an essential component to how chained Intents work (whose absence on all other mobile platforms' multitasking implementations is an enormous wasted opportunity in my opinion, Intents are one of my favorite application mechanics ever).
Of course. Just realize that many universities have services like this provided by the local honor society and chatpers. (I know this to be the case at my current university, where I ran the program there.)
Oh cool; higher education. My hobby horse.

Here's the thing.. all of these statements are true:

- Higher education can give you a great professional career path

- Higher education can give you social skills

The problem is this; there is a third option, which is not to go into higher education and to do something vocational. Unfortunately we live in a world where this is a worse option.

That is fucking unbelievable.

I just got someone in to do a bit of extension work on my house. It looks great, it is precise craftsmanship from someone who has worked at it his whole life. He learned it vocationally and worked his way up to a pretty successful living. OK, so he is not making millions, but neither do most graudates.

Here in the UK, at least, it is assumed you are aiming to go to university and get a degree. In my time it was pretty bad, I think now it is even worse.

That's such a worrying idea; I mean, if everyone is a high flying management executive, who the hell are they managing?

Kids are sold this idea that you have to go and get a degree and then your life will pan out for you. What a joke; you can hardly blame students for being dissillusioned when they realise that they now have a stonking debt, and there are still no guarantees.

I'm not criticising the risk of doing higher education on debt, just that we lie to our younger generations and pretend that it is a done deal if they just get through a couple years are uni.

Fucking stupid.

We need to refocus. Going from school at 16 to college to learn, say, graphic design is awesome. Except as a society we are supposed to roll our eyes and go "oh, college.. right."

I myself fall into the second of my bullet points; my career now is entirely through finding a job for my hobby skills, learning a new "trade" (digital forensics) on the job, and working my way up. Sure, I learned a lot about critical thinking in my degree, but the real takeaway was earning some friends, developing some social skills, making connections, letting myself go for a bit (uptight as a kid, sigh..). My career is entirely self-made at this point (learning programming myself, before uni., Learning forensics. Learning business acumen. etc.) - there are many many similar people out there but because I went to university I must be somehow awesome at this! here's the joke - my grade was about average because I barely turned up for lectures, having more interesting things to do :)

The aggravating thing is that I look at really smart, capable people being passed over because they never went to university. Because it is ingrained, now, that for any vocation there is a degree for it.

The education revolution, when it comes, doesn't have much to do with cost. But with perception.
I'd recommend reading Martin Seligman's "Learned Optimism" book when you have a chance, as it would be very helpful in reframing the way you think about your experience:

http://www.amazon.com/Learned-Optimism-Change-Your-Mind/dp/0...
Instead of Occupying Detroit how about taking Responsibility for it?
Andreessen Horowitz Joins The Start Fund To Seed YC Companies
For the wifi, turn off wifi sleep in the advanced wifi settings.
Inches? I'm not that impressed.
(I kid, all the best to this young man.)
Reminds me of this story. Substitute Apple for Google and Panic for you:

http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/

Excerpts:

We [at Panic] also seem to remember that Jobs painted us a vibrant (but genuinely honest) picture of how he viewed Audion [our product] fairing against iTunes:

"It's like you guys are a little push-cart going down the railroad tracks, and we're a giant steam engine about to run you down."

***

I remember [Jobs] asked, "Do you have any other ideas for apps you want to work on?"

I replied, genuinely, "Well, we've got an idea for a digital photo management program..." and he replied with a simple, "Yeah. Don't do that one."

Everyone in the room laughed but I had no idea why — remember, my head was still exploding — so Steven Frank had to explain to me that he meant, basically, it was already being made and, of course, it would be called iPhoto. Oh. I get it now.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1055153

r/K selection is a nice addition to the mental toolbox. (I learned about it while in high school, because I cut class to hang out in the library.)

There is a difference between liking an outcome (people who have the intellectual tools necessary to contribute to society) and being wedded to any particular means (ever more students going to ever larger institutions to spend ever more money learning ever, ever less).
I think the Stanford coure was a great reference.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/cs193p-student-final-proj...
I also didn't know they did motion capture for Mortal Kombat. That's even more impressive considering they only had a team of 4.
Know thyself
Rebooting the CS Publication Process
Congrats on running against the herd. If you keep running against it you'll be wildly successful. I went to college for a semester after I already had a job programming, dropped out after that semester. The only decent thing about college was that I met a fair number of people willing to pay me to learn what they paid to learn. (eg. do their homework)

Due to good luck with the real estate bubble and getting paid to program instead of paying to learn it I posit that the personal cost of my degree would be around $400,000.

$200,000 in lost wages
$150,000 in lost in tax free capital gains
$40,000 - $50,000 for the degree

I don't need someone else to give me a piece of paper that says I'm 'educated' I'd rather take the dollar fifty in late fees at the library. I can read myself, I don't need to pay a professor $200,000 a year to read me a book.
I think google code was very expensive to run because of the regular expression search feature, which was awesome, but cpu intensive... I'm sure they are killing the project because of feautres like that.
I can see your API Key
The repos update too slowly for them to be up to date on Redis, at least at the current pace Redis is moving at. You can find the latest build here: http://redis.io/download

it's pretty simple to build and install. Setting up a production environment takes a few more steps. Here are a couple of posts that will get you there:
http://www.denofubiquity.com/nosql/412/
http://jramirez.tumblr.com/post/2589232577/prime-time-redis-...

Those are both written for 2.2, but my config still works fine with 2.4 using settings derived from those posts.
Why Calculators Need a Better User Interface
Do eyeglass prescriptions make a normal distribution? If you measured that you could produce a whole bunch of lenses following the distribution.

Then I wonder if you could loosen tolerances in your production process so that the lenses produced follow the prescription distribution in the population. If you can loosen tolerances like that you can potentially save $$$.

Now you have a bunch of lenses whose distribution matches the population. At this point, could the people who need these lenses not simply walk up and try on glasses until a matching pair is found?
This is great — now I can test my spamminess without needing to have an expert look at it first :)

Update: would be nice to see a legend with the whole scale ratings possible.
Having faced a similar dilemma in the past back when I was an student, the advice I got was that any kind of royalty-based agreement could easily get me screwed depending on how it was structured (and the company likely has more experience than you do on drafting such agreements). For example if the royalty is based on number of licenses sold, they can just give it away for free to customers and charge them a "maintenance fee", so you would get $0. You get the idea.
Anyone else have trouble reading the API? There is no contrast between the text and the background.
@antirez and the Redis team.

Thank you for the wonderful work you do. Redis is an integral part of our infrastructure, and we have truly enjoyed working with it.
Video: Hacker creates Super Mario game in a cardboard box
It is de-referencing the image pointer, *image, and taking its size.
I never said you are clueless, but I have been using OS X for a while now and it seems ever since iOS and massive iPhone uptake Apple has modified their OS design to dazzle rather than actually do work. They often take good ideas and concepts out of the OS and put something in that feels like a hindrance and step backwards to users who depended on the functionality and behaviour.
Everyone in the boat!
In response to Hisoka: it looks like your "Did Google pay you to say this?" comment got your account auto-killed.
"How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality"
Very cool guys, thanks for providing this. Would love to see some stats along with the service over time.
Japanese and Western gaming art styles
Bringing in Taxpayers into the argument about people getting the opportunity to goto University is not cool. Education should be a choice, that all are allowed to make. It's an investment in the future of the country, and it should definitely not be a "passtime".
Education in the USA is a massive financial scam, whether or not you think formalized and standardized education is a good idea. I'm with Thiel on this.

From Wadhwa's bio:

Vivek Wadhwa is a Visiting Scholar at the University of California-Berkley School of Information, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization, Exec in Residence at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, Senior Research Associate at Harvard University’s Labor and Worklife Program, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Emory University’s Halle Institute of Global Learning, and faculty member and advisor at Singularity University.

Vivek declare your income from Berkley, the CERC, Duke, Harvard, Emory and Singularity and we'll be happy to explore how much your lifestyle could be impacted by Thiel's point of view.
why are people downvoting this comment? do people think that khan academy provides the same level of networking and credentialing that harvard does? or that networking and credentialing have no value?
LXer: Disappointments of Kubuntu 11.10
This is like posting naked pictures of yourself on Facebook and being surprised when your boss sees them. What part of 'pubic code repository' don't these people understand?
just because someone is biased does not mean they are wrong
Anyone that things that going to College will make them successful is retarded. College can help you be successful, but it's what one makes of it; In the end a college degree is just a piece of paper; and no piece of paper can make you successful. If we as a society cannot comprehend that, then we are in a sorry state :/
Maybe you're familiar with the trickle-down theory (whereby the rich are the wealth-creators, so they should be encouraged with low tax rates) : That line of thinking should have you advocating that people with high intelligence should be similarly encouraged to improve themselves, even if that means that others lose out - because those lucky few are better prepared to lead?
Apologies for the vagueness there. Also apologies for the lack of structure following. I don't have time to write an essay, so I hope you can settle for some meandering commentary.

While the more complex topologies, activation functions, training algorithms are interesting, the current workhorse of ANNs are still plain MLPs (to my knowledge). So, yeah, I was referring mostly to MLPs.

The argument I'm doing a pale job voicing is the one that exists between the statistics and ML communities. For those unfamiliar, stat people generally demand comprehensible, general statements about the performance and meaning of the various techniques. This has historically largely restricted the power of statistical techniques. Advances in computing expanded in the ML field because people aimed to solve simpler goals (maximize training and testing predictive accuracy, ignoring why or how it works). This was a major force in the current renaissance in learning technologies, but leaves a big divided camp.

One side demands theory, story, and proof. The other just demands results. Which is great. They complement each other.

---

ANNs (MLPs in particular) bother me because they're essentially general non-linear discrimination boundary learners. Once you have that decision boundary you can (with the usual enormous concerns toward overfitting) predict new data with arbitrary accuracy given enough compute power, large enough layers, and enough training data. But even with all of those things you won't learn much from your parameter space.

Compare this to, for instance, LDA. It's hard to be certain that the usual high-level interpretation of LDA in data mining (that it finds mixtures of topics on documents) is terribly meaningful, but you still are able to learn a lot about the data space by examining the topic space. It's the kind of thing that allows for many interaction points between the algorithm and the users.

MLPs of course will also induce a latent representation on the hidden layer. There are really fascinating implementations of non-linear PCA that take this approach, but it's not clear to me what the properties of this latent representation are or how to influence them.

---

In some sense, the heart of my argument comes from how flexibility can hurt you in a learning algorithm: it makes your parameter space less meaningful (though I imagine mutable topologies can help this a lot — I have a little experience doing grid search over recurrent nodes and attempting to rank signals by their temporal information using the resultant best-performing topology and I'm sure that rabbit hole goes far deeper).

I'm not looking to be awed by a rule based system or GAI (whatever the hell that even means). I want hypothesis spaces which allow you to flexibly describe a question about a large class of data and then learn things from the optimum. I also want these algorithms to solve real world problems. Bayesian modeling gives you a lot of the first one. MLPs give you a lot of the second.
> I thought he'd stopped reading HN?

Apparently HN still reads him.
Google producing creative content? What could possibly go wrong?

It will be entertaining to see how they A/B test the color of the clothing the actors wear for maximum effectiveness.
I don't care a thing about "true AI". I just want ML to learn more from statistics.
Learn how to make demo videos for your startup.
This guy creates totally funny demo video's for startup type companies. He's actually done a number for graduates of Y Combinator I beleive. He sells an online class to help people create their own videos if they can't afford the $3K-$10K price tag of his work. udemy lists the class for $297. It's on sale for two more days at $115 at the grumo site. Sorry if this is considered spam. It's actually my first posting here so I don't know all the rules. But I love the guy's work. So much so I just bought the class today. It's really valuable to me in launching my start up and I figure there are others who can benefit. He's also as a mixergy.com interview that's great.
I'm afraid that unless the Monolith is somewhere under Gran Sasso, those effects are completely negligible. The time scales of the experiment are very short indeed (1e-9 seconds), but the influence of General Relativity is even smaller (1e-15 seconds).

The point to remember that there are so many possible factors that could mess up their results, that the error estimates that were published by the OPERA team were way too low.
Ubuntu 11.10 Review: Incremental Refinement
> I think there's an argument, currently, for telling people "I could give you the code - but it'll only take you a couple of days to write your own code to replicate the results, and it'd be much better if you could do that" - but I'm sure this varies drastically across domains.

While I can definitely see a PI setting this kind of task to a student, I don't think that by releasing the code the task suddenly becomes impossible. If (and when) the two independently written programs disagree, it will then be possible to immediately step through each and figure out where the point of divergence happens, and which (if either) implementation is more likely correct, rather than then starting an email chain with the original authors saying, "we get different results, but we don't know why".
more to build, and for people who may never buy.
Another huge issue is just accounting. You need to be able to check the books or they can just choose to pay you whatever they want.

A simple cash deal is probably something you can do yourself, or with very little assistance. Anything more complicated requires an experienced attorney.
I don't know whether this qualifies as a "trick", but by far the most useful idiom I use in C code is:

// in some header file somewhere
#define CHECK_ERROR(rc) \
if (rc != SOME_SUCCESS_VALUE) { report(rc, __FILE__, __LINE__); goto error; }
#define CHECK_MALLOC(ptr, rc) \
if (ptr == NULL) { rc = report_malloc_error(__FILE__, __LINE__); goto error; }

// in code
error_t somefunc( ... ) {
error_t rc = SUCCESS;

widget_p = make_a_widget(...);
CHECK_MALLOC(widget_p, rc);

rc = this_could_fail( ... );
CHECK_ERROR(rc);
// ...
rc = this_could_fail_too( ... );
CHECK_ERROR(rc);

return SUCCESS;
error:
// ... error clean up ...
return rc;
}

There are slight variants; like for sharing the cleanup code (e.g. "finally"), but that's the essence of it. I'm sure I've typoed something above, nit-pickers beware :-)
>>Don't use Java

I would say it should really be don't use GWT? Blaming entire java for a framework that is developed originally at Google doesn't seem right to me (particularly when Google Employee does that).
Cautionary tale: A friend and his co-founders developed a product and then sold it (and their company) to a large company with the agreement that they would get a percent of sales of "their" product. Their product (call it "Product A") sold for something like $20K a license. What the acquiring company did was to bundle it with their own $20K product ("Product B") only now they charged $40K for Product B and gave away Product A (when purchased with Product B) so they wouldn't have to pay the product creators their cut.

Happy ending: My friend and his colleagues eventually got their money in arbitration.
By that definition, nothing is visible. You never see anything except photons.
I don't think so. If I tell my friends "hey this app is cool, we should all buy it" I think that could work. It's only $2, you spend way more than that doing most anything with friends anyway.
Easy way for iOS/Android devs to link to content inside of an app