skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Basically he brought Bayesian Networks to machine learning. He did a lot in their structure and in particular efficient/approximate inference on Bayesian Networks. He has been contributing brilliant ideas since the early 80s I think.

Search belief propagation, junction tree algo, markov blanket, belief propagation statistical physics. The last search showing his ideas finding use beyond where he introduced them. Whenever ideas keep showing uses in different places especially in something as well evinced as the thermodynamic/information link then you know you have done something profound.
Python also has lambda syntax, therefore closures are quite easy to do. Example:

items.select {|e| e.isFoo}

It's arguably more terse and superior to javascript in that particular feature as well.
In other breaking news, advertising companies report that 100% of website traffic wants to buy my product!
Yes, because Twitter never goes down.
It seems that every once in a while an enticing story comes out about a person (or team) who beats the house and wins big.

I spent a short time in the 'gaming' industry building electronic slots and other types of games. The word on the street was that the industry encouraged these types of stories. And, while maybe they didn't directly sponsor them, they looked favorably on them. These types of stories perpetuate ideas of the little guy beating the house.

The profit of the gaming industry comes from the average person thinking that they can beat the house, when, the fact they can't. When the average person begins to believe that they can't win, casino profits go down. As such, casinos put billions of dollars into R&D and marketing to give the average person the illusion that they can win.

I wasn't involved long enough in the gaming industry to be an expert, and I'm sure there are some exceptions. But, generally, to average people, of which I would classify 99.9% of the population, even those of us terribly smart people, the house advantage always wins.
Oh, no, I just meant that most forms with a password field are either log on or sign up forms, which I wouldn't want to bother with preserving locally.
Our system is nowhere near a direct democracy at the federal level. Our party system makes this worse as very few people willing to join a party will leave it over issues.
Not every function, but often enough that it gets annoying.

It mostly happens when dealing with very tight systems, e.g. a RabbitMQ queue consumer fetching messages from an external system and writing stuff to MySQL & Cassandra.

The general issue is that there are some kinds of data types (integer, string, datetime) that cannot really be duck-typed, i.e. replaced by different objects. In my experience, it is better to catch such type errors sooner rather than later, therefore isinstance() checks.
Modulating solar neutrinos is a good idea, but you could only send a message to someone on the other side of the planet, and then you'd have to wait twelve hours to get a reply.
It's how Apple has commoditized mobile apps and is now trying the same on the desktop.
Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby
Google IO Input\Output game has resolution bug
Well, as the linked article says, he basically coined the term "Bayesian network" and developed much of the underlying theory (e.g., which kind of independencies it can/cannot capture). This was arguably a crucial step for many areas of modern AI in terms of dealing with uncertainty, cf. the full ACM press release: http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2012/turing-awar...

He is also credited with first describing the ever-popular belief propagation algorithm for approximate reasoning in Bayesian networks and graphical models in general.

Edit -- I found this to be a nice, short exposition: http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r368.pdf
How Not To Die
> The counterargument is that the sales process may not be optimized for total revenue. It may be optimized for commissions.

In theory, companies' commission plans are supposed to be optimized for total profit (vice revenue). That's really hard to do.

Not the least of the reasons for this is that the people who work on commission can be quite creative in maximizing their personal goals, such as commissions, 100-percent-club junkets, etc.
I appreciate the beauty, but you are breaking the web when doing things like this.

Some breakages:

* PageUp and PageDown doesn't work.

* Home and End doesn't work.

* Long-clicking the scrollbar doesn't work A: Should react immediately, not on mouseup.

* Long-clicking the scrollbar doesn't work B: Should rapidfire (like with holding down PageDown).

* Middle-clicking the scroll wheel doesn't bring up the analog-ish scroller floater.

(Using Chrome on Win7)
The Scala community is more of a blend on this front. It has FP aficionados, but it's also in production use and has commercial contributors focusing on practical issues. If Scala continues to gain popularity, it will probably continue to get more of a practical focus (there are only so many FP geeks in the world).

The other thing with Scala is that it compiles to bytecode; once compiled, it's just Java. And you can always use any Java library. So there's that base of a very solid JVM runtime and very solid ecosystem of libraries that's always there.
Amazons mobile website does not have a 'splash' message asking users to download their app. This could be one reason , why their mobile web sales is higher than app sales. it will be interesting to see loyalty of customers who use apps vs the mobile web.
By technical, I meant in my own field of web development/mobile development, but I'm sure it applies to other fields as well. I can give a few general examples of where I've noticed that results are worse:

- Stack overflow and other forum-type pages don't show up with relevant content, though if you dig deep enough through the pages you will find it. It used to be that I never needed to go past page 2.

- As a corollary, there are sites like bigresource.com that show up all the time and they only exist to scrape content from other sites, and these guys show up near the top. I thought that this was a big reason for the update in the first place, but I only noticed them after the update. I also can't seem to block them when I hit the back button (this only shows up sometimes)

- Way more aggressive auto-correction. This should be an option that is adjustable. There are many technical terms that are spelled a certain way that the system attempts to auto-correct and if I go with verbatim, it seems that this hurts results quite badly. Maybe the indexing itself does some auto-correction?

I don't remember specifics, but the most recent one was trying to find information on SIP and SIP trunking - it's taken me 2 weeks and I'm sure it would take me less if I had better results (like I had in the past).

All is not gloomy though. I love that you can now use some special characters: this has saved me many times.
I know this is a bit offtopic, but does anyone else get a 404 when you try to readability the article?
What was the name of that company that would post bad Yelp reviews then contact the company offering to even things out by posting positive reviews in exchange for cash?

Not sure what made me think of that...
As far as I recall the espresso experience in Portugal is very close to Italy. Cheap, good and quick. Compare to France: almost as slow as the US, much worse than your average Starbucks and around 1.5-2$.
The server logs for my sites reflect a great number of bots as well.

EC2 especially is home to a great number of bots that scan and probe sites for vulnerabilities. We completely blocked EC2 and bot traffic fell, but then users complained that they couldn't pin pictures from my site. It turned out that Pinterest uses EC2 to grab files when users pin pictures... so we had to turn EC2 access back on unfortunately.
I meant they should remove the gradual swipe, and do a full swipe once the touch moves say 30px, instead of the cell moving along with my thumb.
Don't forget about all the repeaters/boosters, hardware, and networks that signal is going to propagate through (that’s going to slow it down at every point).

With a neutrino network, you just set it up to point to the receiver, and let the fabric of space-time do the rest.
Game design articles
If all you need are 400 sq ft and one or two persons behind the counter. And of course they also sell all sorts of other beverages (also alcoholic) and sometimes cigarettes and phone recharges.
I used to be of the same mindset until I got into enterprise sales.

Face it, some products and sales processes are going to be complex and can't be boiled down into a simple pricing scheme like a startup would use. It doesn't mean the company is old or dishonest or that you should take offense, just that it isn't practical to list prices on the site.

Examples would be:

Per user pricing (what constitutes a user? Any discounts for users past a certain number? What about simultaneous access? Can we share accounts?)

Revenue scaled pricing (what if we're pre-revenue? Any discounts for newer companies?)

Contracts (can we work off of a contract for an increased price? Do we get a discount for longer term contracts? Who owns the data? Do we get onsite support? How much does support cost, if anything?)

Basically, stop looking at large enterprise sales through a startup lens.
Calling card counters cheaters is like calling people who get good grades on tests cheaters because they discovered the solution to the problem during the test with their mind by eliminating the wrong answers using statistics and probabilities.

Card counting is a code phrase that translates to "if you don't let the house win, we won't let you play".
If my case can help you, my company uses services of one company for load-balancing trafic across multiple CDN/Cloud. We are no longer impacted by the failure of some providers. You can read this http://tinyurl.com/7pwfza7 (i'm user, not vendor)
Unfortunately awhile back when I looked at that option it requires that they hold you CC info on file for the full year, you cannot prepay it nor use another method.

One of the little gotchas for those who do not like leaving the CC with vendors or choose one time pay options.
I used Ceridian for COBRA services after I left a previous employer. (For non-Americans, COBRA is where you get to keep your employer-provided health insurance for a limited time if you pay the full cost of it, and yes it's a hassle.) I noticed in January that I hadn't gotten a bill from them in a while, and thus began months of agony where they told me they hadn't gotten updated rates for the new year from the insurance company but were sure it would come any day now. After a while they sent a notice saying that the insurance had been cancelled. Many long phone calls to them over three or four months got me nowhere, until finally frantic calling to the HR department of my ex-employer got it sorted out in a mere two weeks or so. And yes, I should've involved my ex-employer sooner.

The upshot is that I will never willingly do business with Ceridian again.
> It tries to cut funding to peaceful NGOs because they don't align with Zionist values.

Ah yes, "Peaceful NGOs"....

Even if they are "peaceful" (many aren't), that doesn't imply that they're good.

There's nothing inherently wrong with attacking NGOs. In fact, it's actually good to attack some NGOs because said NGOs are evil.

The fact that you've taken a side does not imply that the other side is wrong to oppose your side, let alone that this guy has done anything wrong in his opposition.
.
There's a button for doing that.
I am in this situation. Our baby is turning 1 next week, and we have about 250GB of pictures and video from his first year. We are keeping them on a couple external drives, but that's not all. We are also trying to make a printed photo book every so often.

I try to imagine my kid at 18 or 30 years old. He's going to want to have his baby pictures. What file formats from 30 years ago are still readable? Are we really going to keep converting our TBs of pictures to whatever new formats come along? Maybe, but having printed books around is going to make me worry a lot less about those external hard drives over the years.

My parents kept a lot of the negatives from when I was a kid. We have never gone back to the negatives; we only ever look at the albums my mom put together when I was a teenager. I think it's pretty much the same thing.
I like to think he's on a beach on a remote indonesian island, drinking out of a fresh coconut he just harvested, resting in the shade to the sound of the waves rolling on the sand and the far away cries of the Gibbons and paradise birds in the forest.
Or the communications requirements of Earth's population would need to change in such a way that communicating through miles of planet becomes our most practical option.

For example, nuclear/EMP attacks kill all the comm satellites and force what's left of humanity deep underground...where luckily some superpower or three has tucked away big particle accelerators in addition to MREs.

Or perhaps off-planet, trying to send messages to mining operators, or through asteroid fields...work with me here.
Obat Tumor
The Lighter Side Of The Cloud – Self Education
Because Microsoft NEEDS Win8 on tablets(that people actually want to use) or MS will be dead.

Nokia married Microsoft some time ago, Microsoft had the cash Nokia needed, Nokia made good quality hardware that Microsoft needed to compete with Apple. MS paid Nokia billions for not using Android and abandoning Symbian.

If necessary Microsoft will buy Nokia at a discount, but they can't let Apple and Google to convince people that they don't need Windows in their computers.
Samsung Galaxy S II ICS Update Now Rooted,Instructions Available
Your Niche – 3 Criteria to Be Sure You’ve Got the Right One
HireArt: Pre-screening Interview Hopefuls In The Cloud
HireArt: Pre-screening Interview Hopefuls In The Cloud
If your python eventually compiles down to JavaScript it's worth doing. That way you can get the developers to hop on because it's easier to program. Browsers could then implement functions to directly process the python source and not the JS which would have speed benefits.

But I really feel there is no need for python in the browser. JS is good enough. If you want an easier way to write it use CoffeeScript.
The same is pretty much true with Scala.

The only exception where the signatures are really long and complex are parts of the collection infrastructure, because Scala developers tried to make it work as intuitively for users as possible: E.g. making non-collection classes support collection operations, always returning the most "precise" type, etc. etc, which is very hard and painful work not done in any other language to this day.

In the end while I hope signatures get shorter and more like the use case signatures already existing in documentation, I don't think it matters much.

Untyped languages have more or less no useful signature at all and they are still pretty much alive.
For better productivity, I watch 6 hours of TV a week
Delivery Services
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That's Ruby, if I'm not mistaken. In Python you'd do

filter(lambda e: e.isFoo, items)
I want to emphasize your post with even more information. I believe the person implementing macros is actually a first-year PhD student at EPFL and he decided to do his first major project on porting a Nemerle-like macro system to Scala (http://www.scala-lang.org/node/10978). Of course he isn't going to do a project on making Scala's documentation as rock solid as PHP's!

Also, as for why macros are being put in the language: this is what Martin Odersky had to say on the subject (see http://www.scala-lang.org/node/12494):

"The intention of macros, and of Scala's language design in general, is to simplify things. We have already managed to replace code lifting by macros, and hopefully other features will follow.... Optimizations such as on Range.foreach are another use case. I believe that in the long run macros can be a simplifying factor."

Macros therefore can actually satisfy at least one of the complaints the Yammer CEO made about the language: slow foreach loops, along with simplifying the language in general.
You are right. But I think the point that the author makes is that pure(or almost pure) open source project will have only "interesting" contribution, where as by far what makes a programming language usable are those "unglamorous" fundamental things.

Yes, whoever contributes can choose whatever they wanted to contribute. But most successful project, companies or startup or anything else for that matter, involves doing things that most people would rather do, but necessary.

When you choose a programming language for your business, your business/life or anything related to it will depends on the language. I think its fair for anyone to choose a language to make sure those necessary boring stuff are robust in the language.

Those who contribute can choose what to contribute. Those who consume, can choose what they want to consume. Probably all of us have been on both side of the fence, so I would say its a fair assessment.
Gom Player 2.1.39.5101 on Downloads App
> A unit test for a piece of code like this might be "Given that the time signature for the music is 3:4, the software puts 3:4 in the appropriate place on each line of output".

Don't you still have the same problem colomon described here, though? Testing your stated condition "the software puts 3:4 in the appropriate place on each line of output" still implies some form of image recognition on the graphical output.
Typically scientists try to reject the null hypothesis (in this case, that a particular pair of drugs do not interact) by showing that it's unlikely (less than a 5% chance) that an apparent interaction is caused by random chance. But if you go looking at millions of possible interactions, you're going to find a lot that seem to meet that criteria by chance. 5% of a million is 50,000. 0.1% of a million is 1,000.

That's why drug companies have to prespecify the outcomes they're looking for before starting the study. If you look through your data after the fact, you're going to find something that makes your drug look good just by chance.
And yet still my twitter timeline is clogged with stuff I don't care about from there.

I get that that's not twitters fault, of thisismyjam even, it's the people I know / follow, but for a while at least it seemed to be throwing out a disproportionate level of stuff I didn't care about.
MountainWest RubyConf 2012 Live Stream
The countries in Europe (Germany, France) that are bailing out other countries (e.g. Ireland, Portugal), are the ones with long holidays bailing out the countries with short holidays.

Ireland is a great example of bare minimum employee law to meet EU standards, and light touch regulation that needs to be bailed out by 35½ hr-a-week France.
An association should be treated with suspicion until it has been replicated in an independent sample. Even then, the association is based on deviation from a simple null model which is little more than a straw man, so its causal basis is obscure. The authors have tried to correct for this by identifying patients with similar characteristics, but you can do so much of that before you destroy your statistical power.
We are really happy to be streaming MWRC live this year!
Is Europe hiring software developers?

Yes. Like the USA, there is a shortage of developers.
A Tcpdump Tutorial and Primer
Putting yourself in their shoes for a second.. they were just trying to pre-qualify prospects who really are in pain, enough pain to really try to solve their problem by talking to a salesman who can properly communicate the value and figure out if you are a good fit.

You are right that this pisses some people off, people who are prepared to spend money on their product, but many marketers don't try to get ALL the business out there, they try to get the RIGHT CUSTOMERS FOR THEM... Customers who will appreciate their value. Afterall, if you can't differentiate them from others without tools like price points, you probably wouldn't be happy to be their customer either..It is a Win For You.

Odds are, if you are making this decision based on price, and not being able to compare price is enough to scare you off, you consider their product somewhat of a commodity, which exposes the company to price resistance, which is bad for business.

So, while you hate these companies, and their process pissed you off, I would argue that you probably don't fit into the profile on "their perfect customer"

Perhaps they are guilty of not qualifying you in a better way, like with content so compelling it convinces you to call them to discuss your needs...
Why Ireland is the best place in the world for a start-up
So, how about we set up a patent-trolling company specifically to target and annoy people in a position to reform patent law?
How Green Is the Cloud?
How Green Is the Cloud?
Here's a tip: Write in a "top down", "newspaper" style.

I don't want to have to scroll/scan to paragraph 8, or to the end of the article (blog post, whatever), to see what you're about.

While you're at it, put the publication date and author at the top. If you don't, experience tells me it's at least 50% likely that you're "hiding" these deliberately.
Yes I think you're right, it is legal but it can hardly be used anymore because most casino's use an automatic shuffling machine where they refill the cards after every deal and that continually shuffles.
Sorry for the delay, things got away from me for a while.

How little Spanish could one speak and realistically get by? Yo sé un poquito, solamente un poquito. The website says they work in English but the general Chileans?

If the idea is a web & mobile service that focuses (almost) exclusively on the US & UK, would that be feasible?

Can you talk about what type of talks and events are required for founders to give / attend and how demanding on your time this is?

At the end of that time period, what happens to your work visa and whatnot? Can you stay to work there, are you expected to work there, etc...

Sorry for the delay again & thanks.
What the Cloud Really Means for Your IT Job 
What the Cloud Really Means for Your IT Job
This is a really great article. I didn't realize that Slate gave their journalists a month out of every year to do something like this.

I think the description of her initially trying to learn ruby is really instructive for everyone who wants more people to learn how to code. There are just simple things you don't think about that a beginner can really get hung up on. For example, why can't you enter code into a word processor? How do you run scripts? I don't think programming books do a very good job of explaining these types of things, even now. Zed Shaw's Learn X the Hard Way series is probably the best at it I've seen so far.
Can we hack the company model?
If you're trying to generate electricity by exploiting a difference in two temperatures, it would probably be more cost effective to just drop a cable into the ocean.
Lockheed Martin Broadening Cloud Computing Solutions to UK Government
Lockheed Martin Broadening Cloud Computing Solutions to UK Government
Remember the voices that think not enough hackers get into stuff that matters? This is a hugely interesting talk about what the future could look like and about some of the workings of our brains.
BMIT to launch pioneering cloud services in a few days - All VoIP News
BMIT to launch pioneering cloud services in a few days - All VoIP News
Probably towards the end of the year...
Version fragmentation is nearly a non-issue if browser updates are automatic by default and non-intrusive. Firefox is slowly catching up, and Chrome is very good at this. IE would obviously need to substantially change its release cycle if it lost enough market share, though I imagine that won't happen for quite some time.
How meditation strengthens the brain, new research