skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I remember correctly, Amazon has sued over web-only supposed patent infringement. It's just that Amazon is so big and powerful, while Yahoo has fallen from grace. I hate it when companies feign moral outrage over what is simply corporate warfare. There are very few companies that, when standing over a cliff like Yahoo is, would choose the right thing over using whatever is in their arsenal to survive. So, yeah, changing the rules of the game is a necessity, but it is Yammer's CEO who's crossing the line by implying Yahoo employees are somehow tainted, like ex-Nazis or something.

One company does stand to (possibly) gain from all this - Google.
Congress Wants to Have a Chat With Apple About Privacy [Privacy]
What version is it, does it have support for hstore? If not...homebrew ftw!
Yeah, we think the models that Kickstarter/Indiegogo have for projects and pre-sale retail is pretty amazing and we actually see campaigns that go up on our site that are more suited for a model like Kickstarter. With Crowdtilt, we've essentially taken our favorite elements of crowdfunding models like those and provided it for groups of friends/existing networks instead (so think of it for funding a wedding gift between bridesmaids or renting out a bar for sxsw, instead of a documentary or creative project).
I know this is going to put me in the minority but the download iconset for simplecv (OSX/Windows/Ubuntu) is one of my biggest pet peeves. The worst offenders will use the Ubuntu logo to lead to a generic linux page. Its slightly less annoying that clicking the ubuntu link leads to downloading a Debian package file.
Brain Damage: 87 ways to stupefy intelligence
Einstein notation is nice when you actually have to compute something, but it doesn't help in understanding the geometry of the problem.

In fact, it might be more of a hindrance because it encourages thoughts along the general line of I don't need to care about the geometry of the problem as long as I know how to calculate the stuff I'm interested in, or as a more specific example It doesn't matter if there's an upper or lower index as I can always contract with the metric tensor.

A personal pet peeve is when tensors are introduced as entities with given transformation laws (transforms like a vector in each component, etc) without ever mentioning specific geometric meanings.

Thing is, classical tensor calculus makes everything look the same - even things that aren't. I prefer the 'modern' coordinate-free notation of differential geometry (which has been around since at least the 60s), and it's easy to introduce Einstein notation on top of it...
Python hackers should check out NLTK, if they don't already know it.
Well, sad in the sense that no matter how many employees move, I doubt they can take YUI, YQL, etc. with them. They'd likely die a long death.
What do you suggest could be done? Is not bad to attack an opponent from different directions.
Forecasting, pricing and marketing analytics roles are all good transitions. Lots of excel still necessary - all you really need to learn is some SQL and maybe R/SAS.
Before this post inspires people to go on a crazy I-can-do-computer-vision-the-hard-way binge and impulse-buy O'Reilly's (excellent) "Learning OpenCV", the second edition is being released sometime this month so you may want to hold off:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920022497.do
The original Perl script gets very little use, but the formatting conventions established by Markdown have become enormously popular the past few years, displacing older conventions like BBCode.

Some implementations (like the one here on HN) support only a couple of features. It's more of an archetype than a proper standard.
I'm curious, what do you do differently from Kickstarter? What makes your product more ideal for small ticket items?
But there is built-in risk aggregation in the crowdsourcing model. If you raise $100,000 from a single angel investor or VC, that investor is risking the full $100k; ten-thousand backers each contributing $10 don't have nearly the same risk exposure.

On top of that, the expected reward is likely different: a traditional investor is looking for a financial return, and analyses the project in terms of its ability to deliver that return. But the motivations of Kickstarter contributors come from their qualitative desire to see the project itself completed and to enjoy the product it generates. There's also the possibility of prestige and networking opportunities that can come along with being a top-tier contributor.

The crowdsourcing model appears to exist in a grey area between traditional investment, pre-ordering as a consumer, and charitable giving, and it's probably too early to know for sure what its limitations are. It's actually possible that funding new and risky projects will in some cases be easier via crowdsourcing.
In the old days (80's and early/mid 90's) where people would distribute
small and simple patches to disable protections (i.e. "crack" executable
files), a fast release cycle for the software thwarted the simple
cracks. This situation did not last long. The crackers started using
more sophisticated patching techniques, like search-string-patching and
key generators.

The task of maintaining on-going disassembly across multiple release
versions of some software is actually straight forward. The "dumb" (but
useful) way to do it is by finger-printing all of the subroutines in the
old disassembly, and then using the fingerprints to identify the similar
routines in the new disassembly (IDB2PAT). The "smart" way to do it is
the graph theoretic approach of Halvar Flake.

Anyone in the Anti-Virus or compatibility industries can confirm both
the capacity and the need to maintain disassemblies across multiple
versions of software.

Pumping out a relentless stream of new versions of your software is no
longer a deterrent, and hasn't been for over a decade.
Matlab's 3D rendering speeds are disgustingly slow...
Looks like Gotham Black to me.
Actually, YC's real returns will come from IPOs of big profitable companies like Airbnb and Dropbox, not exits any smaller than them.

And I think there's room for more Dropboxes. What I find strange is that so few startups (YC-funded or not) even try the freemium model seriously. It took Dropbox a long time and a lot of experimentation to find a scalable business model, and they wouldn't have found it had they not been persistent.

Building something great is harder than making money, but even YC's success depends on startups that can do both.
Internet Explorer 10: touch-friendly, and securely sandboxed
I'm not with Udacity (though I did talk to the team last year before they launched). The difference with the Coursera courses I'm seeing is they're more conventionally lecture-heavy with a few questions mixed in, while the Udacity ones try to exploit the new medium for more interaction and to encourage people to think more on their own. I see no reason that style can't work for harder courses; I don't know if they intend to go that way. (I can say the CEO had lots more in mind to do, and what we see in the courses now is just a start.)

I'm taking the PGM class too and in fact right before I switched to this tab I was stuck on the d-separation question because I hadn't had enough practice on the active-path stuff, apparently. So I'd like to see Coursera work more towards the Udacity interactivity, while keeping their greater polish.
Amazon did get a lot of flak back then, there was a boycott. And Amazon, thankfully, stopped its lawsuits. Meanwhile we have seen an entire industry - mobile - become a patent battleground, so people are more concerned now then then.

I do see the point that threatening employees to leave or be blacklisted is... disturbing. I think we should put pressure on Yahoo and its employees to change Yahoo's ways, but not like that.

Edit: Google doesn't stand to gain from this. Well sure, in the short term Facebook's loss is Google's gain. But if patent lawsuits become a norm in the internet industry, Google in fact has perhaps the most to lose.
I don't see anything illegal in disassembling shareware or any other type of software. Compare it with disassembling your smartphone/alarm clock/hand watch/.. to find out how it works. Why should it be illegal?
That's a pretty cool idea. I could see integrating it with facebook events and invites being a logical next step.
My favorite classes (and the ones I've learned the most from) have always managed to balance theory and implementation. The formula has usually been a mix of

1) purely theoretical exercises emphasizing fundamental concepts

2) project-based assignments in which you must understand the theory and write a decent amount of code to apply it. Usually a bunch of code not central to the concepts has already been written for you. But just implementing it is still not enough. To test your conceptual understanding, they ask you to run your code in various situations and explain the results.
Rolf Rolles' paper is a pretty fun read:

http://static.usenix.org/event/woot09/tech/full_papers/rolle...

In fairness, symbolic execution and theorem proving was a future direction for him; this paper is mostly compiler theoretic.
If he was still running his network of pimps I suppose that would count as racketeering. Either that, or the FBI was after someone else and got the goods on him as a bonus.
"sure, if, by "theory" you mean "outlandish idea someone made up without any basis in fact and might as well have pulled it out of their ass"

I meant it in the sense of classical greek philosophy, since that's what it seems most similar to. E.g. it sounds like an idea out of Phaedrus or something.
> Using two distinct constants which differ only by a factor of two sounds more confusing than choosing either one and sticking to it.

Physics is incredibly unusual in that it has very few overloaded terms, and so almost everything that is expressed in daily use is expressed with as much precision and as little ambiguity as possible. Most scientific disciplines are not so lucky.

It does still happens in physics (h and h-bar, as noted in another response below), but it happens all the time in statistics, so much so that it's incredibly frustrating to read a new text for the first time.

𝜀? Probably refers to the error of a regression, assumed to have mean zero and be independent.

e? Uh-oh. Possibly refers to the error term in a regression, as above. But it could also refer to the residuals, which always have mean zero and are never independent. Very different.

ê? Okay, once I see this, I know that the author probably doesn't use 𝜀 as well, so this narrows it down somewhat. But not entirely.

And don't get me started about 'standard error'. I have heard that term used in reference to a sample mean, a sample mean divided by the square root of the population, or the standard error of a regression (which is more complicated than I care to describe in plain English).

Do you want to get started about economists, who often use π as a variable? Or computer scientists, who use it to refer to a process calculus?

How about Σ, which can be used to indicate a sum, but can also be used to indicate a covariance matrix? Which, by the way, can also be expressed in terms of either S or Q, depending on who you ask.

Ooh! How about Λ? That's the precision matrix, so it has to be precise, right? Well, yes, except that all we're doing is writing the inverse of Σ, so it's an unnecesary letter altogether[1].

Right now, we're dealing only with conflicts within a given field, but we could open Pandora's box and talk about the fact that λ is an anonymous function in computer science, but a constant that (partially) defines the stationary point for a given optimization problem.

Or letters that look like each other - can you really tell the difference between ν and v? Or ω and w? What about when I write them out by hand?

[1] Unless you're using the term to implicitly declare that the covariance matrix is invertible, but if you think that substituting one capital Greek letter for another is a clear way of telling me that a matrix is full-rank, we need to have a much longer conversation.

EDIT I must say, I'm very impressed that HN handled all that unicode beautifully. Kudos to pg (& co.?)!
That's some misplaced hope.

Considering he was elected I kind of assume a lot people like what they think he stands for.
You might try HTSQL, it is a navigational query language for relational databases.
And I care why?
"Reflections on Wolfram's New Kind of Science"
"circumventing a copyright protection mechanism"? (or whatever the wording is in various laws.)
But then wouldn't they need to coordinate changes to the same data items? (I'm not too familiar with the Datomic transaction model) If so, making transactors scale would require sharding.
~50% of the smartphone market vs ~1% of the desktop market? I certainly sympathize, but that's the excuse.
Drip.fm Music subscription service signs Diplo's "Mad Decent" label
No, the datomic videos suggest only one transactor can be operational at a time. Not sure how hard it would be to "switch over" to a second transactor waiting in the wings.
Looking to get creative? How about doing something which actually develops creative thought? Getting drunk does not sharpen your mind, nor does it help you explore new venues of thought (other than whatever you typically self-inhibit as a sober person).

Play trivia games. Learn a new [natural] language. Paint. Write a song. Go and socialize with people you have very little in common with - look for new connections. But leave the alcohol behind.
The Authoritarian Left (i.e. Obama administration et al) would love to make meat the new tabacco... Wait a minute! 'Meat _IS_ the New Tobacco'! They are on the case already, dictating the agenda, wrapping our language in their swaddling clothes, to meet their Utopian ideals. Count me out.
Patorjk, it has been a while.

Poke around for their infamous "API Spy"
I live about ten feet away from his district (literally, I'm on the line) and I can assure you virtually no one in San Antonio knows what he stands for or knows about SOPA.
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A coalition against software patents.
I think its time that the internet as a whole weaponized agains the patent trolls.

We need a coalition of companies against software patents, where upon joining you declare never to pursue a software patent suit offensively, and pledge to donate all the relevant patents to any other member for defensive purposes.

I might not stop "pure trolls" that do absolutely nothing but sue others, but it would definitely stop companies like Yahoo that use their patent chest as a last stand during the downfall.
I'm pretty sure #3 in this list is not a concern. In datomic, all reads are done with a stamp that indicates the "point in time" that the read should be done at. This stamp is essentially the name of a transaction. Therefore, you can have reads essentially in the same transaction, if you just use the time of the transaction for this stamp.

(I'd love to hear answers to his other points, however.)
With version control software like git (and especially github), and the ability for anyone to build anything on their own, accreditation doesn't matter much. Not every company agrees, but enough do that it's not a big deal. The real question is "can you do the job", and with programming, it's not too difficult to show that you can, if you can.
The bigger issue is that Yahoo's move here threatens the entire software industry and specifically the internet.

Oh please! Get over yourself. Yahoo sued Google in 2004 for similar reasons; and the world didn't end.
I can't think of anyone with more to teach on good taste in programming. Admittedly that doesn't answer your question -- it's a different medium from the books he's done such a great job on. But where are you even going to find another course on this exact subject? I'm genuinely curious.
What private company discloses their revenue numbers?
I have never seen any half way decent developer write code for more then a few minutes without some sort of feedback, automated test suite or not. You are right that it will work more or less, but they work out the "less" part of that statement sooner rather then later. In my experience, that is a place you get to over time, only the people out of college write code for multiple hours straight, then debug everything afterwards.

That is actually the primary goal of tdd, to free you from the more mundane aspects of the code/run/debug loop. The secondary goal is to give you a good base for changing the code later and finding out what broke, again without a ton of manual actions. But as useful as that is (and it is extremely useful), it doesn't hold a candle to the first benefit.
Best way to contribute? Was this a serious question? I'm not affiliated with simplecv but if I had to guess I would say:

https://github.com/ingenuitas/SimpleCV
my first reaction to this was similar to most people here, that this guy is just looking for publicity and why punish the good engineers at yahoo for this.

However, I do remember the SCO fiasco http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO-Linux_controversies . The feeling I got from the tech community was that SCO engineers were certainly black listed from alot of jobs at other tech companies.

I guess it's worth exploring what makes Yahoo and SCO different.
Aren't ClearChannel and Viacom the two big billboard companies? That's just going by the logos I see at the bottom.

If so, you're right. This is money going right back into their pockets.

Though I know area around his San Antonio office might have some private billboards set up by local landowners in the area. He's right off a major highway. Maybe one of those is a possible choice?
How does it compare to open-source Matlab alternatives such as Gnu/Octave?
This would be much easier if compilers/interpreters would expose their parse trees in a friendly way. They have all this knowledge about the code and won't give us.
This is clearly an introduction. You're not going to spend a semester talking about "Error and Noise" in a class like this. I had the opposite impression --- that it covers a relatively small number of topics that are very highly related.

Now, will you come out of this class knowing how to do practical machine learning? Probably not. But these are fundamental concepts that you must know. When your tools are not enough in the real world, you can appeal to these concepts to understand why.
Rational decisions correctly apply information and resources to optimize values that the decider cares about. (meta level: you can also be rational in deciding how much effort to allocate to MAKING a particular decision - deliberating or gathering more info).

Those values can include morals, culture, and feelings.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan
For LedgerSMB, one of the really critical problems we run into is that of the legacy codebase. We test some critical things, but the legacy codebase has scoping issues that don't impact normal use in a CGI environment but impact test cases. It's one reason we are getting rid of it.

90% of the testing we do is actually on the stored procedures and the general framework. The reasoning here is that these areas have to work right and therefore we have to get this right all the time. Workflow and the like is more fluid, less easily spec'd out, and the like. Test cases aren't as meaningful there but we do have some.
It definitely seems that the author, as you say, "willfully" misinterprets Greg Smith's qualms about GS.

What makes matters worse for me personally, is that said author is hidden behind the guise of "The Editors" of Bloomberg news. I wonder if this is yet another attempt by online media to pump out articles with an edginess to them that will get them the much sought after page views, rather than taking a balanced and thorough look at the situation.
Unrelated to the topic, but my god what a incredibly fucking unusable site. I don't how what kind of javascript bullshit is going on in the background, but it froze firefox for a good 30 seconds. (Core i7, 2 gigs of ram)

Edit: Tried it in Chrome with the network tab open. 267 requests, 2.43 mb transfered, loaded in 23 seconds. Something like 40 of those are javascript files. Then 8 font files.

For a news story! What madman wrote this?
a very interesting direction for Crowdtilt. I'm interested to see how democratised crowd funding for political intent plays out.
I'm not sure about "drone", but Zoho comes to mind. They've built a workforce by hiring young kids out of high school/college and training them on the job. I suspect they turn out to be pretty good programmers.
Highly unlikely, but a lot of people like what party is listed next to his name on the ballot. They probably couldn't even tell you his name.
> The only "entitlement" being asserted is literally the right to copy: if I create a book, which is the fruit of my intellectual labor, I then have the right to exchange or extend or license the right to copy that book on whatever commercial, ideological, or personal terms are mutually agreeable to others, and to copy my book without such an agreement is to violate that right.

And how does the right to control the downstream copying of the work emanate from the right to enjoy the fruits of your own labor?

The point I'm making is that the direct product of your work is the book itself and nothing more; the right to enjoy that product literally cannot be taken away from you. Other people's copying activities do nothing to diminish your ability to enjoy the direct utility value of the book itself - copying can only diminish the potential return available to you from selling your book to others, but you never had a positive right to a market return in the first place.

The argument you're making requires that there's already some legal mechanism by which you can restrain others from copying your work. Your reasoning is circular.
I agree. In Vancouver (slob city) people for the most part don't even dress up to go out. They ask why should I? Here is an answer: Dressing down, ubiquitously known as "being comfortable", says that you don’t care about how you look, as if your appearance were an entirely private matter that has nothing to do with anyone else. It’s the exact opposite: what you wear is part of the visible environment, as relevant as the architecture, the decor, the food on the table, the scents in the air. http://betweenmypeers.com/2007/09/20/why-dress-up-for-social...
in TDD what you are talking about is called a "spike", just write a bunch of code to try out assumptions and find a direction to go that you are reasonably sure is a good one.
To the people who down voted, do you honestly think my comment was an expression of support for him?

There are clearly some number of people who support this guy, and assuming that everyone who sees his name is also aware that he's a bad person is naive at best.
Need early adopters 
Need tech people to test a brand new social network and get feedback. Thank you