skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey all, I'm one of main devs of Mahout and saw this article and commentary. I think it's basically right. I'd like to add my own perspective.

I think Mahout has one key problem, and that's its purported scope. The committers' attitude for a long while, which I didn't like myself, was to ingest as many different algorithms that had anything to do with large-scale machine learning.

The result is an impressive-looking array of algorithms. It creates a certain level of expectation about coverage. If there were no clustering algorithms, you wouldn't notice the lack of algorithm X or Y. But there are a few, so, people complain it's not supporting what they're looking for.

But there's also large variation in quality. Some pieces of the project are quite literally a code dump from someone 2 years ago. Now, some is quite excellent. But because there's a certain level of interest and hype and usage, finding anything a bit stale or buggy leaves a negative impression.

I do think Mahout is much, much better than nothing, at least. There is really only one game in town for "mainstream" distributed ML. If it is only a source of good ideas, and a framework to build on, then it's added a lot of value.

I also think that some corners of the project are quite excellent. The recommender portions are more mature as they predate Mahout and have more active support. Naive Bayes, for example, in contrast, I don't think has been touched in a while.

And I can tell you that Mahout is certainly really used by real companies to do real work! I doubt it solves everyone's problems, but it sure solves some problems better than they'd have solved them from scratch.

I strongly agree with here is that you're never likely to find an ML system that works well out-of-the-box. It's always a matter of tuning, customizing for your domain, preparing input, etc. properly. If that's true, then something like Mahout is never going to be satisfying, because any one system is going to be suboptimal as-is for any given system.

And for the specialist, no system, including Mahout, is ever going to look as smart or sophisticated as what you know and have done. There are infinite variations, specializations, optimizations possible for any algorithm.

So I do see a lot of feedback from smart people that, hmm, I don't think this all that great, and it's valid. For example, I wrote the recommender bits (mostly) and I think the ML implemented there is quite basic. But you see there's somehow a lot of enthusiasm for it, if only because it's managed to roughly bring together, simplify, and make practical the basic ML that people here take for granted. That's good!
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EBay readies next generation search built with Hadoop and HBase
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I nominate Emmy Noether, whose work on the relationship between mathematical symmetry and conservation laws is still the heart of theoretical physics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether

Hers is a remarkable story indeed.
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Going Concern
Swedish activist receives Nordic Free Software Award 2011
With due respect, cryonics won't work. Why? Because "I am a strange loop" as Hofstadter would put it. We are NOT the code. We are the code execution. Think of the human subject as a really complicated, recursive sort of while(1) loop. When the program ends, we end. You can freeze the source code all you want - possibly even restart it but there is no reason I know of to think that such a restarted program would be "me", more like a fascmile of "me". I could be wrong, but not sure why I would be.
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What gives you the idea that he loved the idea and/or something he'd fund?
I'd expect anything interesting to have been covered by an NDA.
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I'm sorry, I can't really parse your argument.

My point was that there is a school of htought that exceptions should only be used in "exceptional" circumstances.

The examples given were not exceptional in that a programmer should expect those types of errors during the normal execution of their program. Therefor exceptions aren't the solution to those types of errors.

Does that make more sense to you?
Feynman clearly mentions in "Surely You are Joking..." that he got turned down from Columbia for his undergraduate degree due to Jewish quotas that existed among universities at that time. So yes, it certainly mattered in America in the 1940s.
For anyone who has followed MCSFT over the years, this kind of behavior comes as no surprise. What does surprise me though is how many people (usually younger) think MCSFT can do no wrong, as evidenced by Gate's significant philanthropy. I don't think this event will do much to sway those people from having that opinion, but it does seem to be a teachable moment.
Has Bootstrapping Become Under-appreciated?
No need to get rude, I'm not some teenage
troll guy, I'm here for intelligent
discussion. I don't seen where I've
"proven" myself wrong.

This thread is not about investment into
nsa, but commercialization of nsa
(or other military/government org)
technology. My point was that regardless
of nsa'a official stance of secrecy, tech
gets "leaked" out into the commercial sphere.
You can't stop a good thing from spreading,
no matter how hard you try.
There was a great anecdote (or perhaps an urban legend). Back when Mir space station was still operational, one of its crews lost something. What it was exactly doesn't matter, but they looked everywhere. Twice, and then some. Out of utter desperation and puzzled beyond belief they started peeling off parts of the cabin walls and looking underneath. And what do you know - under one panel there was a folded piece of paper that said "It is not here. We already looked." Signed by another crew from a year ago. Apparently they also lost something, but were thoughtful enough to leave a note.

So, yeah, notes are great... even if not terribly useful :)
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Work with Codecademy (YC S11) to Teach the World to Code
Exactly, the same points made in this article applies to Windows aswell. Maybe Windows AV will be a few points better, but who cares? It gives users an equally dangerous false sense of security.

Yet, lots of people (both techs and non-techs) will think you are crazy if you dont use AV on your Windows PC. Its some sort of mass psycosis.
A sobering reminder of the devastating effects of Sleep Apnea
sounds so sinister. maybe there is an agenda behind square too - making everyone open a mom & pop store or sell from a cart - leaving the field open for him to bulldoze the high tech stuff
The fact that most of these companies are also Microsoft Windows licensees in their PC business might also play a role here.
Bruce Schneier's post today, http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/11/remotely_openi... , is about SCADA networked prisons being on the Internet. Sometimes linked by guards wanting to browse at work, sometimes by the contractors that set it up for monitoring.
i did a stint in insurance sales...you grow a thick skin pretty quickly! one point: try to keep a measure of your success to failure ratio for calls. that way, you can know that if you make x number of calls, you will land y number of meetings. in insurance, they followed the 10-3-1 rule: 10 calls, 3 meetings, 1 conversion. So if I'm looking to hit a certain goal, I know the rough number of calls I need to make to achieve it.
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Nice snarky response, not sure it's warranted. There are lots of UI design techniques that work great on desktop that don't work at all on mobile, for various reasons, mostly because there are other interface paradigms that take their place. Dropdown menus are one such paradigm. Typical ways to reorganize this type of design to work on mobile:

1. Show a grid of icons that let you navigate to various parts of the app on a flat hierarchy. Facebook used to do this and now many other apps copied their approach. This nav menu is typically the root view in a navigation hierarchy.

2. Show a tableview where each row shows a different part of the app, you tap to go there. This is also the root view in a nav hierarchy but you can group table rows under headings to essentially get 2-levels showing at once.

Should a dropdown menu creator also make the decision of how to reorganize the dropdowns to work on mobile? No. The decision of how one will display a similar navigational structure on their mobile app is very personal, very rooted to how they currently structure the interface on their mobile app or website.
Agreed, as a shareholder I'd also prefer to have a well rested CEO dedicated to just one company
"the Fire is not nearly as versatile as a real tablet. It is designed almost exclusively for consuming stuff"

This is a criticism that can be made of all tablets, including the iPad.
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How many hours would they expect him to put in normally?
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software for deer management

Software for... what? Is this some kind of idiom or is it some kind of wild animals control? Please, could anybody drop a line of explanation?
SEO mühendisleri olarak bizim amacımız, sitenizin ana arama motorlarında ilk sayfada çıkmanızı sağlayan tüm çalışmaları (SEO hizmeti) yapmaktır. Bununla birlikte, SEO'ya uygun olarak tasarlanmış ve tasarım açısından da arama motorlarında hedeflediğiniz ilk sıraları almanıza imkan veren web sitesi çalışması hizmeti de vermekteyiz. İstediğiniz takdirde son zamanlarda popülerliği giderek artan sosyal medya alanında da kendinizi en iyi şekilde tanıtmanıza imkan sağlayan SMO hizmeti ile size destek olmaktayız.
Web sitemiz olan www.googleilksayfa .org, verdiğimiz tüm hizmetlerin birbiriyle ne kadar bağlantılı olduğunu, tek bir hizmetin eksikliğinde firmanızın da eksik kalacağını ve tüm bunların olmaması için uygun fiyat imkanları ve garantili çalışma prensibi sayesinde Türkiye’nin en saygın SEO şirketi olmanın gururunu yansıtmaktadır.
Kısacası Seo Mühendisleri olarak biz, arama motoru optimizasyonu (SEO) alanında yılların deneyimine sahip olmakla bu sanata hakim olarak, garantili SEO hizmetleri sunuyoruz.
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I would put it on heating stove.
Rails 3.1.2.rc2 has been released.
"Pearls of functional algorithm design" by Richard Bird is a fabulous book along these lines. It's not exactly light reading, but the chapters are short, and some of the results are surprising, like the faster implementation of nub (unique elements in a list).

An aside: I was trying to brush up on Python and looked at Learn Python the Hard Way, and found exercise 25 absolutely appalling. I hope that's not idiomatic Python.
Good in principle, but largely pointless in the real world. Someone with enough motivation to learn to program but no money for professional books is just going to torrent them.
>> However, I'd say that it's the async programming model that is broken, not try/catch.

This is an interesting point of view, however I'm inclined to disagree on the basis that the async model is representative of how things actually happen; the imperative model is not.

In an asynchronous architecture, the developer is concerned with only the current state and the set of all events that may cause a transition from that state. Whether or not an event is the result of an error condition is irrelevant, one simply invokes a different handler.

I used to consider the asynchronous model much harder to program in, that is until I changed my thought process to work in terms of state machines. Then it actually became much simpler to program in this model since, at the handler level, one has no preconception about what should happen next, only what can happen next and how to handle each of those situations.

>> C++ is pretty nice when it comes to error handling and exceptions as resources are cleaned up on error.

There has been many a discussion about the benefits vs. pitfalls of C++ exceptions. I personally am not a fan since the lack of garbage collection means that there are situations that require lots of tedious and error prone boilerplate code just to ensure that all resources are cleaned up.

I have to admit that perhaps the nicest way I have seen of handling failure is in the concept of Monads in Haskell (and other functional languages). The ability to add the context of failure as a possibility in any computation, without requiring that computation to explicitly consider it is extremely elegant. Add to that the safety of always returning a well defined value that is fully type checked by the compiler and I believe you have a recipe for very effective error handling.
Those ideas are also pure speculation by the author. The closest she comes to backing any of them up was when she said that the founders like space elevators.
Microsoft is the little-guy using patents to defend themselves against the big-bad-monopolist. This is one of many regulations that promotes innovation. Trust me, I went to school.
I did 80+ hours per week for years in medical school, residency, and fellowship. Many people in medicine make a career of it. It's not as unusual as you think. There is certainly a fair argument to be made that it's not particularly healthy or a good idea, but I can assure you that for some people it's quite sustainable.
It's possible to hack a 747's engines, but don't put it high on your worry list
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Rolls-Royce has a unique engine monitoring program - generally the airline leases the engines and they are owned, monitored and serviced by RR.

When I worked on the ground based GRID computing system for their initial system 10years ago the 4 engines on a 747 logged about 1Gb of data locally during a 10hr flight onto hard drives that were removed and copied locally on landing. The grid system was so that all the data didn't need to be shipped back to HQ unless it was needed - all the queries could be farmed out to all the places the engine had landed over it's life.

Now MUCH more data is captured and the engines have their own dedicated satelite link back to RR where there is a vast data center that can pull up second-second measurements of every parameter of an engine for it's 20-25 year life.

There is also a complex system that automatically spots any abnormalities - not just out of 'normal' spec, but looking at the history of that particular engine and other engines on that particular route/flight configuration - but I didn't work on that!
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Kaczynski was arguably in part created by the worst aspects of the academia he attacked. It's worth reposting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3234014 which was posted on HN some time ago.
Kindle Fire’s flames have been doused
22 years. That's no time at all, not on this planet.
This isn't exactly the conclusion of the test it's reporting. That test said that free Android AV apps were poor-to-useless. But they included two commercial apps in the test, which fared pretty well (although not perfect).
MixPanel to Shut Down Email Analytics Product on Nov. 28th
Any suggestions on a viable alternative? Or should we just go back to Google Analytics?
But using that school of thought to support that school of thought isn't an argument, it's a circle.

PaulHoule is explaining why he likes a specific mechanism compared to another, and you are only replying with the previously-established fact that there exists a disagreement here, not a counterargument.
Google dedicates a special Doodle for Children's day
A video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=locNEna0of4&hd=1

Every other mobile OS presents you with a "sea of icons" as the home screen which is pretty boring by now and is essentially a rehash of this http://images.yourdictionary.com/images/computer/_PROGMAN.GI...
Putin to Decentralize Power in Russia; Admits Unpopularity
Cloud 101: What the heck do IaaS, PaaS and SaaS companies do?
P/E is pretty important, or could you back up why it is not?
> Is MPEG-LA really dominated by MS in any sense of the word? Just curious.

I have no idea.

> MS seems to be actually paying them more for licenses in the end than what they get for a few patents they have in the pool. Not sure about Apple.

Microsoft pays more, but they get more out of it. The more entrenched H.264 is, the bigger the barrier to entry for competition. If your competition has to pay the royalties, and you want to compete against Microsoft, the competition is at a disadvantage by being forced to pay those royalties.
Whitetail deer hunting is a 6+ billion dollar industry in the US.

Many ranches sell hunts on enclosed ranches for trophy animals and you pay a sliding scale of how good a trophy you kill. This is so popular that many people are getting in the business of breeding deer to sell to other breeders and those ranchers. There is still a lot more demand than supply.

On top of those segments, there are many hunting clubs and individuals with land that wish to manage the animals responsibly or in accordance with state guidelines in exchange for special privileges and tax breaks.

All of these people need record keeping and analytics to measure what they are doing and report it to their state.
I'm curious. Specifically which part needs to be taken with a grain of salt? Most of the information is straight from court filings.

Are you claiming that Barnes & Noble is perjuring themselves and Groklaw is helping to spread the misinformation?
I appreciate the beauty of the pointfree style but whenever I tried to use it I found that I couldn't read my own code the next day. It seems that my brain is just hard wired to expect a list of parameters in a function definition.

EDIT: That is, all these years at school I was taught to write f(x) = x^2, not f = (^2).
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> then made a lot of Windows Mobile devices for a long time, which gave them a ton of valuable knowledge about how to make smartphones.

Making a Windows Mobile phone only teaches you how not to make a smartphone. Not to say it's not valuable knowledge.

> Microsoft isn't too happy with the current state of patents

Something that, oddly, doesn't prevent them from using ridiculous patents exactly the way they don't want patents used against them. Their own conduct invalidates their previous position as they seem more than happy to milk every Android licensee until they bleed.
I'm sorry for all the good folks at Microsoft. They should kick out those few idiots making the word "microsoft" synonymous with "evil", and focus on product evolution.
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yeah, that sounds like a much better approach even. thanks man!
I think a good rule is that if you're not planning (or able) to confidently deal with an exception and put the app into a known state, then don't catch it.

Some developers seem to have a fear of allowing any errors to be seen by the user and so they have a habit of swallowing exceptions. I guess it makes them feel that the code is more stable, but it actually masks bugs and makes them impossible to troubleshoot. I have a name for these - I call them "insidious bugs" especially when they result in data loss, which is common with those types of bugs.

I was just in some code the other day that was littered with a bunch of these:

try {
... code here ...
}
catch(e) {}

not even a console statement or anything! It took two of us over 6 hours chasing down what should have been a 15 minute bug due to that code.
AOL Has A Profitable Mobile Business, But It’s Not Because Of Apps Or Ads
Interesting take on advertising and presence, especially if you follow through to his Counterparties http://counterparties.com/, and thence to Percolate http://www.percolate.com/.
I believe your link is broken - it just leads to this page.
Please, read the HN guidelines, especially the parts about being civil and replying to arguments instead of calling names.
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One without power relationships --- thus without American moral conditioning. Just because we grew up in the American system doesn't mean that other systems don't exist. It is far easier to raise a happy, flourishing, nuerosis-free child that integrates with society's norms and morals, than it is to discipline your way there with the child. The domination streak of America gives very predictable results: we bomb other countries relentlessly, using excuses that appeal to our moral conditioning. It is really funny to see the condescending responses (not yours) in this thread from people that belong to a moral system that bombs innocent people (whether directly or indirectly via delayed detonation of cluster bombs). Note: I've appealed to the indoctrinated American moral conditioning by mentioning the bombing, hoping to highlight the contradictions.
Didn't "a sufficiently ambitious kid" already try this with the Crunchpad/JooJoo? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JooJoo
Right, but doesn't that just strengthen my point?

If they are tech-agnostic then they aren't in the hardware/software business, which was my original point. They are in the hardware/software business because it helps them take your money for the wetware side.
When writing, say, a parser, I'd rather throw and catch exceptions.

Which is also possible in Go, and template parser from its standard library is, actually, written in this style:

http://golang.org/src/pkg/template/parse/parse.go#L96

Functions call panic() (via t.errorf) to avoid passing errors between multiple levels of functions, but then Parse method catches it with recover(), checks what kind of error it is, and either panics again if it's a runtime error, or returns other kinds of errors.
This is pretty far into the land of "taste". One man's "old" is another's "iconic". If anything, it looks like the industry is moving more toward the iPhone's understated style (see Ice Cream Sandwhich) and emphasis on texture (look at the new Milk app) than the "anti-skeutomorph" thing, whose internal logic is a lot stronger than its appeal to most people. As someone that's been using Ableton Live for the better part of a decade, it's amusing to me that people even find this look remotely "fresh". MS will find out the hard way that designers and normal people like gradients, shadows, texture.
Compared to your local big-city nuclear plant, no this thing doesn't compete.

But if you are off-grid or have unreliable power it is better than a Honda gasoline generator, especially because they can pretty much burn anything - from wood chips to pig manure.

Although you do need a big cold sink for it to work well - a river/stream is ideal.
I don't think it would be the hours as much as the mental focus. When I get done working for 8 hours, I'm usually with my family about an hour and a half before I can mentally break away from what I've been doing all day, and some nights my mind will always be on my tasks no matter how hard I try to refocus.

Imagine going from 1 high pressure 8 hours job to another with only a 2 block walk between them, maybe lunch. I don't know, it sounds like overload to me.
Do the engines downlink that telemetry in real-time, or is it still a function that occurs at the airport?
Iran claims defence computer systems hit by another 'supervirus'