skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey everyone, thanks for the comments. There's too much to respond to everyone, but a lot of people have brought up an "echo chamber" concern.

As other people have pointed out, the naive Bayes model works topically, so it will learn that I like stories about "patents" but not (usually) whether the stories are pro or anti-patent. It is totally true that I might miss an interesting story about the new OSX or about Pinterest, but I'm willing to live with that.

Two larger points are that

1. HN is only a small fraction of the news I consume, so it wouldn't matter that much to me even if it were a bubble chamber, and
2. The main reason I did this is that I simply couldn't keep up with the volume of stories otherwise.

Last night when I spoke about this, someone asked me whether I was concerned about all the false negatives I was missing. But before I started this, my RSS feed had like 800 (and growing) unread HN articles in it. Reading some of them, even a targeted some, is better than none.

Anyway, thanks for all the comments. I'm suprised (and glad) that people are so interested in this!
I've made something very similar, but using Ubigraph and for Python: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2kyssgtUvM
Goldman is simultaneously pursuing civil resource for copyright violation?

They could be but really why? Its a single guy, with likely limited monetary resources, and unless they can prove large monetary or punitive damages they wouldn't win much. I guess they can go the "make his life a living hell, dissuade folks from doing this in the future" kind of attitude but its a costly way to go about it.
Let's be fair - poorly designed code causes memory bloat whether you're on the client or on the server-side.

Also, garbage collection efficiency in browsers is a metric of fierce competition among browsers. It's superb already, and it's getting awesomer by the minute. It's a safe choice for the future.
That's only because he was doing it as a hobby and because it's one person. A team of workers with larger equipment working 24 hours a day in shifts over the internet could get it done much quicker and cheaper.

In addition to digging basements, there's also grass cutting, delivery bots in restaurants, hospitals, tractor driving.
Why iCloud integration on Apple’s Mountain Lion OS fails
>playing sky rim
Screw that, I'd be sitting in my lawn chair watching the trucks all day!
Striving for greater efficiency in scientific research
That beautiful neon banner makes the page almost totally unnavigable for me (Firefox 10/Centos).
This is very similar to what Google+ does with Closure Templates.
Responsive App Design
Does OS X Mountain Lion take us one step closer to a more unified and responsive approach to app development?
I have to say, reading this made my day. I've been feeling such a push towards client-side templates lately, that I felt like it was just me that didn't get it. I really don't understand what's so compelling - unless those exact same actions are actually (YAGNI) used as endpoints of a web service. render :partial => '..' is such an sweet, simple and natural paradigm to web programming.
Nice article and an interesting approach. thanks for writing it up.

The model can only get better with more training data,
which requires me to judge whether I like stories or not.
I do this occasionally [using] the above command-line tool,
but maybe I’ll come up with something better in the future.

Well, you could analyse your server logs to see which stories you really did click on and which you skipped over (You'll probably want to only consider pages that have at least one click for the edge case of "I didn't even look at that page". Need a cookie or login to make sure it only counts your clicks)

Also consider scraping your HN "saved stories" list as a positive source.

Don't recall if you mentioned it in your article, but you'll probably want to randomly insert the occasional low-scoring article as a check for under-weighting.

I really wish our profile pages supplied a (private) log of up/down votes for comments and flags for stories in addition to the the up votes for stories. It would make for some interesting datamining
My response to this post is, what on earth for? While you can use LaTeX for a ridiculous number of things [1][2][3], LaTeX is primarily a tool for typesetting technical documents. Note that word "technical" in there; why would a non-technical person want that? It's complex; you have to type ridiculous things like "\textbf" to get bold text, and "\begin{enumerate}" to make a simple list. It's complicated; you have to look up what header argument to make to simply change the margins. It's also difficult to debug; try to explain to a non-technical user what this means:

("C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\tex\context\base\supp-pdf.mkii"
[Loading MPS to PDF converter (version 2006.09.02).]
)
! Undefined control sequence.
l.66 Your text goes here. \agweagsd

The whole idea doesn't make sense to me. Let them use Word or whatever, it'll save both you and them a lot of headache in the long run.

[1] Crossword puzzles: http://www.tex.ac.uk/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/gene/crosswor...

[2] Music: http://www.mab.jpn.org/musictex/mtex_lib_e.html

[3] Animations: http://pages.uoregon.edu/noeckel/PDFmovie.html
FTP Audit Logs: What's the Value?
Mario Islands
I really don’t think I am - at least not by (lower-48) US standards.

I’m probably just thinking that /very/ large sacrifices may be needed, even just for diagnostics.

--
Heavily edited
I would recommend allowing a person to add multiple symptoms up front on the landing page instead of just one. Requiring a postback and then having it to calculate the probabilities under "I may have" after entering only one symptom when the person already knows they plan on entering 2 or 3 more is a waste of resources on the system end as well as a significant delay on the user's end.
Check out [Programming Collective Intelligence](http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Bu...). I found it to be a good introduction to machine learning because it uses practical (and neat) examples to teach the concepts. One of my top 5 programming books.
Well, it's really stacker + pushState + MAX cache.

But why would there be a performance penalty? Doesn't this result in the client doing _less_ work all around? Less work than the multi-page approach...and less work from the client-side templating approach, no?
Do you think wordpress/web developing would be the best route to go?

I've been torn between going that way or trying to establish a cloud accounting/bookkeeping practice and supplementing with wp/dev work.
I wonder what the battery capacity is on those things. How often does he need to charge? I'd love to see a record of the electricity cost to excavate a basement with small motors.
Windows 8 is a true major version of the OS. Mountain Lion's historical equivalent is Windows 95 Plus! -- a miscellaneous pack of gadgets/apps that Snow Leopard users may not be able to even justify, let alone Lion users.

The comparison doesn't make much sense.
Darpa Wants to Give Soldiers Robot Surrogates, Avatar Style
I would love to see a sample of his art pre- and post- prosthesis to see the evolution.
In my head it's much easier to imagine manipulating a UI based on objects and their state, rather than partial snippets of HTML. It seems like it would get complicated to track the pieces of html you needed to request in order to redraw only portions of the UI. Wouldn't there still be a lot of javascript involved with that logic?
The Challenges of Adding "True" Unicode to JavaScript: A Gist
2011 iPhone Sales Top 28 Years of Mac Sales
The data comes from ED and outpatient doc visits so it "assumes" a certain level of concern from the user at the outset. However, the algorithms can learn so that less severe diagnoses ("lack of sleep", "caffeine withdrawal", etc) will rise to the top as more people indicate that is the problem.
I think "House" should end with him and his team being replaced by a computer. It will need to be a robot (like the one on Lost in Space, ideally), not a web page, but symcat has the right idea. It would also be cool if the robot was a master game-player, finally putting House in his place.
It's a quick thought, but what we could do is the following: Have a wiki-like site, where the community update source information about news items. On the items pages, they also make links to news articles on the web. Along with this there is an analysis tool, so if you see an article on a news site somewhere, you pass the URL to this site, and it will point you to the relevant wiki page based on the URLs that are set on the wiki page or by guessing the best one for you based on content and similarity to other news reports.
Yeah, we're working on that. :)
Great summary..seriously...I felt like I read the book!!

I giving you a point for that for sure.
having people in india control it is probably isn't that much cheaper than hiring someone to actually drive it. it mostly likely does not cover your costs of developing systems to remotely control expensive and destructive construction equipment from thousands of miles away.
That's really neat, had taken a couple stabs at this myself but not gotten all that far.

I think there's probably some really interesting data in the comments (maybe just take top ten comments, 3 layers deep?) And wrt following links, one idea that occurred to me was taking a screenshot of the page linked to and basing part of your model on that... I suspect there may be graphical, layout similarities in some of the pages people like.

But kudos for doing it, very cool!
This ia a bit of a tangent, but Stacker feels like breadcrumbs that require more real estate than necessary. Maybe the physical metaphor is important, but my first thought was 'this is just bread crumbs'.
If one needs to use Maven, what advantages does Gemfury offer over a self-hosted repository manager, such as Artifactory?
Sometimes I come across grand hobbies/challenges like this that inspire me to challenge myself in similar ways..

1/4 scale grave digger:
http://www.youtube.com/user/rcWizzard/videos?sort=da&vie...

Matthias Wandel's various projects:
http://woodgears.ca

Giant robot project:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL13A11662BDE6EB83

But at some point, I end up convincing myself that it's a bad investment of my time. Some examples:

- The above referenced 1/4 grave digger project would be an awesome test of my fabrication skills. But when it's done, I won't enjoy playing with it. 1000's of hours for "push stick forward, vehicle goes foreword". Kind of like lego's, the fun's all in the build.

- I'd love to get into woodworking, but I already have all the furniture I need. Why would I invest in a 1k wood shop (that's CL prices)? What would I create with all the tools and experience? I'm not going to quit my job as a programmer to become an entry-level woodworker.

- I'd love to build my own sawmill (kind of like Jaimie), and build from nature in general. But where would I get wood? Can I make it cheaper than store bought? Do I have the time to invest so that I don't wind up having to go to the store anyway?

- I'm really fascinated by CNC, 3d printers, and metal casting. I want to be able to make my own stuff, and excuse myself from a consumer culture. But those things all involve pretty significant money/time investments. And who are we kidding? After that huge investment, what am I going to print/cast/machine.. that would be worth that investment?

And that's the motivation for my side project.
I hear this difference is even more staggering with Google and Android.
Meditation helps kids pay attention, neuroscientist says
Was it a broken arm?
A great many iOS devices do not require a data plan. Most of those can't even use a data plan.
How Much Are The 2012 Presidential Candidates Worth?
This is one of the more recent peer-reviewed publications found on that researcher's website related to attention training:

http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/web/pubs/2009/LutzMentalJNeuro....
That's a fair suggestion. The question is if "rewarding" people with a list of diagnoses from just 1 symptom is worth the cost of resources. My fear is that in the process of having people enter an arbitrary number of symptoms and then having to click a "next" button, they will lose their interest, but we'll test that.
IIRC, double jeopardy doesn't stop both criminal and civil charges from being filed for the same offense (it only applies to being criminally charged multiple times)?
Learn Ruby on Rails (bias) or Python

It will take you 2-10 months, but there are plenty of opportunities once you've made it.

I'm learning Ruby on Rails and I've done the research....plenty of opportunity.
Learn Ruby on Rails (bias) or Python

It will take you 2-10 months, but there are plenty of opportunities once you've made it.

I'm learning Ruby on Rails and I've done the research....plenty of opportunity.

Take a look at my submissions for more info
> I deeply believe that yes, it is. Making Javascript mandatory on websites where it should only enhance the user experience still seems to me like a very bad practice, and I hope it will stay so.
> I even want to say that, if your website if correctly designed, offering its content in a Javascript-less way should not be that hard...

This is problematic when JS is the user experience. Many modern applications are just brower/javascript clients on top of rest APIs.
Funny. I was thinking it sounded low.
Make the best out of SXSWi - Here are the Top Guides
How to Develop a Disruptive Mindset
Here's my attempt at the similar trick, covering all 4 possible ways to bind to DOM ready using jQuery: http://blog.colin-gourlay.com/blog/2012/02/safely-using-read...
I hate it when an article like this doesn't give a link to the _actual product_. Here it is. http://makeplaylive.com/
New Xbox Games – Xbox Games Reviews
This site about Xbox 360 games. Can come to my site to read and see it now.
Brian Hayes had an interesting column last year on what could happen if these became common, or even universal.[1] One advantage he pointed out was that you wouldn't have to waste time looking for a parking place. The car could drop you off right at the door and then go, maybe far away, to park. Valet parking for everyone!

[1] http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.13359,y.2011,no.5...
I wonder how long it will take until it is illegal to have a human driving a car. I am sure self-driving cars will cause much fewer accidents. Even better: once all human-driven cars are gone, traffic can be organized incredibly efficiently, esp in areas without human interference like on Freeways. Cars won't need to stop anymore. Traffic lights could communicate when they will be red or green well in advance and allow cars to slow down or speed up a little. That would greatly increase fuel efficiency and allows prevention of traffic jams.
RIAA: The Pirate Bay is The Worst of The Worst
Added, and extra fonts and colour depth fixed :-)
How does this impact if you are aiming to build a JSON API too?
Nobody has been able to volunteer the CPU time to build binary packages, so there haven't been any to download.

Fink ships apt-get which is still perfectly capable of using them.
As elemenohpee pointed out above, it's really a difference between creation and consumption. Always be doing.

If I need to just relax, instead of coding non-stop, instead of watching TV and melting my brain, I"ll just play guitar, or sketch, or grab the camera and go for a walk around town and see if there's anything interesting to photograph. (although I'll admit, it's much easier to do in a somewhat urban environment, that's walkable, and people are about, suburbia kills, man) Playing guitar is especially nice, cuz I can mindlessly do it for hours, and let my brain wander around while I"m just strummin out random chords.
On top of all that, who has time for TV? After work there's always something goin on, Tuesdays it's the running club, Wednesday the pub 2 blocks down has $1.50 pints, Thursday is bowling league (actually more fun than you'd imagine, especially when you becomes friends with all the randos in the league.) Weeks are for travel (SKI TRIP) You gotta fill your life up to the brim, not spend it inside with the curtains drawn, and boobtube glowin! Why live vicariously though a screen, when you can do it for real. I hate watching other people have fun and build relationships, when I'm not. That's exactly what I see, and what I'm not doing, when I watch TV.

TV shows are fine every now and then, but I'm not a regular to any one show. My GF can't stay up through an entire movie (narcolepsy city), so maybe we'll watch an episode or two of Glee on Sunday night, but that's about it. I love books, and always try to read for a bit just before bed. I think that stimulates the imagination a bit more than tv though.

Now I'm not saying TV is evil, and you shouldn't watch it, I'm just putting my alternative point of view out there. To each his own.

edit: I didn't downvote you, I don't believe in doing that on disagreements, I think you bring an interesting case.
it does, right there at the bottom.
Does the Sheet paradigm supports back-button? (just curious) if so, is it via normal browser history or AJAX '#' trickery?
It probably makes very very little difference in terms of ranking. In terms of click-through, it probably makes more of a difference.. as long as you have a friendly URL that looks clean, and has the keyword.

So you want
/how-to-drink, NOT /article/123131 and definitely not /sasdabasd2312121.asp
Does any iOS device require one at all? The iPhone works fine without data and I’ve been without a data plan on a few occasions.
The UK NHS has a pretty good expert system, like I assume this is supposed to be.

I entered (but do not have) "bloody feces" as a test case, it gave me 4 options for symtoms that they think I meant, none even anywhere close. Hint: if they're black and stinky you need immediate medical help, if the blood is red and sparse it's probably piles - THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE.

Is this an alpha test?
RapidShare introduces 30kb/s free account speed cap, disables resume
We did a standard 80/20 training/testing trial. We found that the correct diagnosis was in the top 5 of the generated possibilities 50% of the time.

What will be helpful is to update the algorithm from user input. I'd be interested in hearing about your particular case. We use symptom/disease prevalence in the calculations, so it is usually great at getting common conditions. Maybe you can leave a comment using the feedback form on the website and we can look into why it missed your diagnosis?
Safely using .ready() before including jQuery
Thank you very much for sharing this.

Wish you all the best to hit and solve that problem (meaning you'll be successful by that time I'm guessing (^_^)).
Seeing my analytically minded friends (physicists and mathematicians) go into banking and finance really pisses me off. I really hate the "it is just a job" mentality.

You have your life before you. You can do anything you want. Instead they lure them in with the six-figure salaries.

In fact I have made it my life mission to do something about it, because I feel that if we cut out the lifeblood (the new recruits) of "the system" then it will crumble.
Only if you want the subsidized price... or data.
Would you start with Ruby or with Python?
Ask HN: Worthy ideas? Critique my thought process
Hi Hacker News community,

Let me say that I truly enjoy all the wonderful comments you've made to this community and it's been a great source of inspiration for me.

tldr; #1 Can't find a really good finance related idea to build upon

tldr; #2 Not sure which platform to target

I'm interested in building something on my own but I have some questions that I thought I would run by HN. I'm interested in business and finance but I can't seem to find an idea that I feel compelled to spend countless hours on. I have an idea or two and usually when I begin, I sometimes finish but the hardest part is finding someone who will purchase it. I have built some apps and while there could be feature improvements, I don't think I have been hardworking in adding those features.

I've been flopping between platforms (web, iPhone, Android, Windows) with no focus. It's probably bad and I feel that I should focus on a single platform.

I reckon PG's advice on how ideas aren't worth anything and how you execute is all that matters is probably true in this case.

Thanks!
This is all fascinating ... but does it feel like a sustainable approach going forward, or more like a turbo-charged horse and buggy?

Developer happiness aside -- there are plenty of folks who like JavaScript just as much as Ruby -- and assuming that we're talking about an non-public-facing app (like Basecamp Next), is there still an argument that can be made in favor of doing your UI on the server side?

Even just in principle, it can't possibly be close to as fast (client-side can render optimistically, where possible), and it can't be close to as flexible (you don't have a model of state on the client to perform logic with).

I think that the truth of this is already admitted in that the really fancy bits of UI are being implemented in JS: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3094-code-statistics-for-base...
If I knew anything about pinterest, I might be able to help you more..

One area where MongoDB (and almost everything else) suffers is with a large skip/offset value for paging. Getting the first page of results from MongoDB or from Redis will yield similar results. However, the greater the offset the worse the performance. In Redis, whether you get the 1st of the 1000000 page, the performance is constant. So, if you are doing paging with large offsets, at scale, a Redis sorted set is almost a must. It's a pretty specific use case, but I think that's what you asked for :). YMMV on the exact #...you should test it..but if, like 95% of all apps,only the first 5 pages are important, it's really a non-issue.

Redis sets are great for follows..and you can do some nice set operations on them (which you can't in MongoDB)...so something like which of my friends, and which of your friends, are following the same people. However, if you want to go more than 1 level deep (a graph), Redis isn't great (nor is Mongo for that matter, but it's probably better).

Low hanging fruit for Redis would be analytics...both can handle basic analytics, but Redis will handle it faster. For more complex analytics, the two differ substantially...MongoDB will invovled writing Map Reduce...Redis will require that you do the transformation for reports in code. Still, for simple counters...Redis. In fact, maybe this will inspire you:
http://blog.getspool.com/2011/11/29/fast-easy-realtime-metri...
Normally that basic cycle would go:
1. I need to view some data, if I do not already have it, request it.
2. Generate html from data
3. Take generated html and place in appropriate place on page.

This skips step 2 by requesting the required html rather then the raw data. Step 2 is the part that would require the most code.
Poll: What OS do you use for your production web server?
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Does that make it easier to grasp why this is a serious problem.

What would make it easier to grasp that this is a serious problem is if you had evidence it occurred to any significant degree. You are telling me a huge business opportunity exists and no one is exploiting it.

If you can find good women being paid less for doing the same job or who find themselves not getting hired, send them my way. I'd love to hire them myself.

Until you do (or hire them yourself), I'm lumping you in with all the inefficient market crackpots.