skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While you are correct of HMMs as an example of a Bayesian network, the essence of Pearl's foundational contributions lie in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_propagation and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_blanket.

Bayesian Networks tend to be used not as classifiers but a tool to explore joint probability distributions.

Interestingly related to your topic, HMMs and Naive Bayes are related in that HMMs are kinda like the sequence sensitive version. HMMs and Naive Bayes are generative models. They both model/estimate a joint probability on the data with very strong conditional independence assumptions. Where as Logistic regression and Conditional Random Fields estimate the conditional probability of the output/labels directly.

HMMs : Naive Bayes as linear chain CRFs : Logistic Regression. CRFs are state of the art at sequence and time series prediction. I have not yet gotten my head round them though. The relationship between logistic regression and naive bayes is not commonly known (although the comparison of log reg to a simple Neural network is common). Knowing when Logistic regression outperforms Naive Bayes is useful (simple rule of thumb: logistic regression less sensitive to independence assumption, more data use log reg, less data use naive bayes). I've implemented a multi class sparse regularized logistic: SMLR. Its up there with linear SVMs but simpler but also gives a probability.
As his last couple startups (Digg + Milk) have seen fairly bumpy roads of late, I can't blame him for wanting to leave the startup scene in favor of a little stability, courtesy of Google.

It will be interesting to see what role he ends up playing at Google. He's not much of a developer, so I suspect his role will largely be a promotional one.

Either way, I wish him luck with this latest endeavor. Having seen the Digg implosion, followed by the failure of Oink, I hope this third venture proves to be the charm.
Sounds like you really planned it through. I'm sure you'll meet lots of people, good luck!
Ah, thanks for the info :).

I'll admit I haven't had to mess around with X for...probably 5 years? The last I remember, you'd run an X server on your machine, then your window manager would connect to it on the loopback device.

The point stands, though, that "getting rid of localhost" is incredibly naive.
Interactive learning startup Top Hat Monocle wants to gamify learning
A slight increase in "virality" can make the difference in the success/failure of an app - surely worth a small increase in time. In reality, frameworks like Trigger.io make it straightforward to access native functionality in a few lines of Javascript and it's much quicker to iterate on a single codebase; so (particularly) the ongoing time/cost should be less than native development.
> I obviously needed to find someone technical to build the website, whether a freelancer or a cofounder.

Two jokers drop out of Goldman Sachs after a very short employment stint and hire some kid to build them a Facebook-based link-sharing game that targets emerging artists who have no money on the most garish website I've seen in quite some time and all he gets credited with is Lead Engineer. Not even Mr. Lead Engineer.

If non of the above doesn't embarrass you from turning down below-market deals with non-technical, inexperienced dreamers than nothing will. You need to recognize that your skill set is a finite commodity and the more time you spend on loser projects like these, the less in-demand you become. On the other hand, everyone knows that you'll do almost anything for cheap and you'll end up as the "coder dude" while the co-founders debate the merits of shitty internet-generated logotypes and branding as they plan their trips to SXSW.

tl;dr: Facebook-based link-sharing games are loser projects you need to avoid.
Yes, well I'm sure if you only provided sales through a specialised fax number, virtually every fax would be solid sales enquiry.

You might only get one fax a month, of course.
What music do you listen to when you hack?
Yes, it's absolutely in the same vein, though Piglet is intended for smaller uses than using for full languages. I was gunning for a small tool that's easy to use an easy to integrate, and with the coolness factor and useabilty that fluency gives you.

Irony is a great tool indeed!
> If customers tried to set that up with a web form they'd screw it up and hate our product.

I'm sure it's true for quite a number of products. But what I wonder: how many products are that way because of the sales channel?

Even in the best case, a product built for self-service and user-driven adoption is going to be designed very differently than something sold through a high-touch sales channel with an expectation of expensive training before use. And that's before you account for all the product distortion that many enterprise salespeople introduce. "Why of course we'll have feature X in the next release!"

I expect there are a lot of companies that started out with an enterprise approach that are now ripe for disruption with a user-friendly, self-service model. A classic Innovator's Dilemma situation: the competition would seem laughably weak until it's too late. E.g., Linux vs proprietary Unix solutions.
Wow, if Google did not acquire Milk outright I wonder what type of deal was worked out with the investors? There would have to be some type of upside for them otherwise KR's reputation would be seriously tarnished. "Sorry guys, remember that money you gave me to start a company?. Well no more company and I'm off to bigger and better things, K tnx Bye"
Details in CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/person/kevin-rose Fab (Series A), Zynga (Series B), Twitter (Series B), Foursquare (Angel). Only Foursquare looks like an Angel, the rest look more like he knows the right people and/or has the right name.
I think the effect on http://www.marketo.com/ (no affiliation) works better. I get inertial scrolling for instance, just feels more natural.
Hah! That makes more sense :)
This is awesome. Good luck, Kurt.
"Don't be that person, folks. So much of the pain in life, over time, is caused by distance from the truth. And the same is true in business."

Love this line. Just because you hate the alternative of a job, or really want to change the world doesn't mean much. If anything it just adds undue stress and pressure.
Software Turns Movies Into Comic Books
tldr: capabilities you want already exist in languages. Non-mainstream stuff to check out for the curious.

What we need, in my opinion, is a dynamic language with powerful optional static typing...with sane object-orientedness, and support for immutable values. The core has to be really simple, but the language has to be powerful enough so that libraries can provide the missing functionality

Check out Strongtalk. I know it already has almost everything you just mentioned above:
http://www.strongtalk.org/

* optional static typing - Check!
* sane object-orientedness - Check! - superlative, actually
* the core...really simple - Check!
* language has to be powerful...libraries
can provide the missing functionality - Check!

I'm not sure if it has immutables, but VisualWorks Smalltalk has it, so it is feasible to add it. (Especially since the engineer who added it for the private vendor is now working on Cog, which is an open source VM.) In addition, Squeak/Pharo run with a >bit-identical model< on something like 50 platforms. (Including different ISA, not just OS.) That's an ideal capability for a browser language.

I'm not saying that we need to use a derivative of Smalltalk in the browser. Smalltalk doesn't have operator precedence, so it comes across as strange to lots of technical people. In fact, lots of things are elegantly different in a lateral-thinking weird way. Alan Kay said it best: the computer revolution hasn't happened yet -- it is in progress. It takes decades for the full impact of what comes out of research labs to really reach the mainstream. It's time for some far-sighted people to take stock of capabilities we're not aware of yet, but which are there to be used.
Here's one of the placebo-controlled studies that suggests lifestyle can reverse coronary artherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1973470

And for something more digestible, here's Dr. Dean Ornish's TED talk discussing his research on the same:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dean_ornish_on_the_world_s_killer_d...
Russian Esquire magazine fined for covering bitcoins SilkRoad story
I was thinking about this on the way to work this morning while Steve Martin was talking about his experiences with twitter on NPR.

The problem with search right now is that PageRank is not at all a good indicator of individualizing social search results, and contrary to Facebook's, reddit's, or the new, hot social network's goals, the social network ecosystem is constantly evolving. In ten years, I hope, for the sake of progress, that the social networks we have now are mostly dead, relegated to the core of dedicated users similar to sites like metafilter, MySpace and kuro5hin.

What I'm awaiting is a dedicated, personalized (but not 'personalized' or Personalized) social search engine that has enough implicit value for user buy-in. A search engine with enough context to make the facebook wall obsolete.

This hybrid search that Google is attempting wont have the value that they think it does - Wikipedia already does that, and better, without ads. Google needs to step back and think about what made their approach to search a killer app ten years ago and try and understand how to apply that value to the search needs of people today, instead of trying to apply their model from ten years ago to the search needs of people today.
Sorry if this sounds harsh, and I know he has a lot of fans out there. But this guy struck gold 5 years ago with Digg. Sure, he deserves props for this. However, he's not a developer. He's an "ideas guy" as far as I can tell. As a developer, I hate these kinds of people because more often than not their ideas suck.

In any case, what I am saying is that it seems like people in the industry get by based on one previous successful project. It doesn't matter if it happened yesterday or 10 years ago. It doesn't matter whether they had a little to do with it or a lot. It doesn't matter if they understand how to code or not. Once they have that reputation as being awesome it will stick around no matter how badly they perform after their initial success.

What could he possibly be bringing to the table with Google?

Just my two cents. I'm probably alone with this opinion, but it's extremely frustrating to see this stuff happen over and over again.

/end rant
Experiment: Does Googlebot index dynamic content from a JS app?
Single Page Web Apps with Backbone.js
What the MPAA fails to understand is that the harder they try to control content, the faster it's going to slip through their fingers. Instead, they need to embrace digital and find new revenue models beyond the theater and the DVD. They screamed and cried about VHS and DVDs and made money when they finally embraced the newer technologies. It's time to move on from punishing your customers and making it easier to use their content in online channels more easily. The idea is to get people talking about your content and sharing your content, and then they buy your content. The MPAA and RIAA are right that people do want what they make, but they have to make it easier to buy the content than to steal it, and so far by fighting as hard as they can against the Internet, they have made stealing the easier path for many people. More fool them.
What about using Native Client (nacl) to compile an implementation of python (without the batteries)?
Some cautionary comments from Kemp: http://martinkempsthisandthat.blogspot.com/2012/03/leonardo-...
Radeon HD 7990 coming in April
It may be interesting to note that Windows syscalls (i.e. to the NT kernel rather than the Win32 layer wrappers like CreateFile) do not actually use null-terminated strings - they use UNICODE_STRING[1], which is a structure containing a 16-bit length, 16-bit buffer length, and pointer to a buffer of 2-byte characters.

NtCreateFile[2] (and the kernel-side implementation of ZwCreateFile[3]) take a file name in the form of OBJECT_ATTRIBUTES, whose ObjectName field is of type PUNICODE_STRING. CreateFile is implemented in terms of NtCreateFile; CreateFile enforces Win32 semantics like case insensitivity that NtCreateFile does not; POSIX semantics can be implemented on top of NtCreateFile, but not easily with CreateFile.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff5...

[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb432380%28v=vs.85%2...

[3] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff5...
Consequences of using Copy-Paste method in programming and how to deal with it
well, there's a lot of big names already working in Google who once owned companies. They probably have more leverage/freedom than the average google employee
Better Magic Methods in PHP 5.4
No, you don't understand.

He is going to "work on others' ideas" -- i.e. Ideas that are not his own.

---

What will be really commical, is if he is going to join google with the intent to work on Google+ -- as if he were some success in the "social" play.

Remember, digg failed because it alienated the users, attempted to wrap too much UI around the content; limiting the consumption rate, and pandering to media channels.

Unless KRose can pull a magical pivot on his own visioning abilities - this would be bad.

However, I will send good thoughts his way. Let's hope we see him do something truly revolutionary to + (if that is what he is going there for) and lets hope he follows the mantra of the new Reddit CEO: "Don't Fuck It Up'
If you compare it with 19th century polar expeditions, a trip to Mars doesn't look that bad. They sometimes took multiple years, with men trapped in iced up ships, usually with no chance of rescue or even communication - at least we know how to prevent scurvy now!

Have a read of the book "Barrow's Boys: A Stirring Story of Daring, Fortitude, and Outright Lunacy":

http://www.amazon.com/Barrows-Boys-Stirring-Fortitude-Outrig...

NB Having read too much Kim Stanley Robinson and Zubrin, I'd jump at the chance to go to Mars.
I guess one could pinpoint it to the clashing of the traditions of pure mathematics and engineering which one finds in Computer Science.

Elegance is an often trotted epithet in mathematical writing, and sure, it has some sort of established connotation (minimalism, what we call orthogonality, etc.), but in the end it's almost always something like "it has sugar, and marmalade, and skittles and ketchup! All my favorite ingredients! I'm very glad they didn't put that icky caramel stuff in it".

Anyhow, Clojure sports a fair bit of ``pragmatism'' with its own, very leaky sequence abstraction, as you sometimes feed a vector to a function and you get a linked list and next thing you know, your head has been put in your ass (when you conj/cons an element to a sequence).

Lisp has also always leaned to a sort of messiness in its use, even if the language's features and libraries are held to a higher standard. Thus you see phrases like ``ball of mud'' used in a subtly positive way.
Watch out for the police. Bizarre as it may seem to prohibit someone from sleeping in their car, in many places it's not quite allowed, whether through law or habit. Google it a bit for the horror stories and some advice.
Sure. My view is that Rose has done a very good job of making a name for himself and translating that into personal wealth. It is not clear that that adds anything to Google and if Google thinks it does then my view of Google is diminished.
The most important part of the article:

"If you are ever consumed by an idea, focus on that idea and see where it takes you. Your obsession with it likely means that it embodies your passions and values."
Right, this is a GoDaddy 'technical glitch'. I have a couple of domain names about to expire with them. I certainly will not be renewing with them or using them again for anything new. Their SOPA episode has left a bad taste...
Latest Post Blogroll Slider with jQuery and PHP
I would guess that they just paid off the investors. It was only $1.7m and Google Ventures was one of the investors anyway.
What are the possible implications?
> I am still amazed that the Rovers are still operational.

A lot of people are. I had the pleasure of chatting with the NASA program manager in charge of one of the rovers. She was a bit hilarious: When it came time to set the height of one of the mission cameras, someone whipped out a ruler and measured the distance from the floor to her eyes -- and then wrote it in the spec.

Her comment on the first manned mission: Inevitably it leads to a discussion about one-way missions to mars. The next discussion is "who would volunteer", next followed by "who would you volunteer?"

[btw, she said NASA will not officially consider one-way missions as a matter of principle.]
In practice, CGLayer is not some pixie dust that magically makes your drawing fast. It helps only in a specific instance: when you are drawing repeated instances of the same content, into the same context. Otherwise, it ends up being extra complication for no benefit.

(Note that CGLayer is not related to CALayer or CGTransparencyLayer -- they are absolutely separate things. CALayers are incredibly useful in practice; CGLayer was kind of a dead end.)
Remember, digg failed because it alienated the users, attempted to wrap too much UI around the content; limiting the consumption rate, and pandering to media channels.

To be fair, I think that was after Kevin left his role as CEO.
The second part of your sentence ("they'll start complaining . . .") is incorrect. It should be:

Once mayor offices have trouble funding their campaign promises because of shit like this, they'll raise taxes, and screw the taxpayers yet again.
If I'm using a service such as Mailgun or Sendgrid, what parts of the article apply to me?
Looks like you want to play another FPS. There are enough of those already. Top-down action RPGs are a different genre.
TL;DR "Jonathan [Gillette] is _why, he is fine, and he just wants to be left alone."
Idk jgc's opinion but personally this seems like nothing more than a PR move I mean the only thing Kevin seems to be able to do is attract buzz.
Unfortunately the taking-a-day-off-from-work part predesignates it as a college student event.
What is this term you are using, Depth?
I had very rudimentary HTML/CSS knowledge when I first started. Now I'm proficient with HTML/CSS and I'm learning PHP and Javascript through working on the site and studying in my free time.

I'd define building as putting pieces together to create something of greater value. I came up with the idea for the site and compiled the team and resources necessary to ship an MVP. Our tech co-founder built the site, our designers built the feel, and our bizdev co-founder built up the content. I managed this process strategically and am heavily involved in each aspect. We all built it together.
The title lead me to believe this was an amazingly clever way for a phone and pc to infect each other making it more challenging to remove viruses.

In a way, it kind of is, but not in the way i was expecting.
Kurt,

Kudos on having the cajones to do whatever it takes to make your dream a reality.

Couple of tips: First and foremost, the pariSoma idea doesn't seem like the best bang for your buck. For a working space, Hacker Dojo (two blocks from my house) is a much better value. Save that $300 a month (at least $600 after gas and parking in the city or caltrain fees) and get a 24 hour fitness membership (showers and exercise) and maybe 3 or 4 nights a month in a budget hotel for a break. There are sooooo many networking events and meetups in the valley you really don't have to pay $300 just to "have access" to any particular group. Start with 106 miles and expand from there.

Second, while Palo Alto may legally allow sleeping in cars, it is still in incredibly wealthy town whose residents don't really like "homeless" people mucking up their view. Expect some harassment.

Third, hit me up when you get to town and I'll buy you lunch and some handiwipes.

Ben
Could you elaborate on what you mean, are you talking about Kevin Rose specifically? What makes you think he's after fame for fame sake?
I've heard from real people interviews why they do not work long or hard in France. They officially have one month of vacation more than the working class in US. The reason people told is they think tomorrow is not going to be better than today so why work?

And they themselves find it depressing which they accepted in the interviews.
I think that's mainly because of tradition and the difficulty involved in getting people to make a wholesale change in their diet, not because of the superiority of the medication in reversing the condition.

See my other comment for sources: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3709426
It may be a journalist's job to probe, but it is a fellow human's job to have empathy. raganwald is perfectly correct in distinguishing between _why as a public figure, and the man behind _why as a private one. The man behind _why clearly wished to remain private; why are his wishes not being respected?

I think that you are being dismissive when you say, "a few phone calls". From the article, the author tried: asking RubyConf attendees, asking people he had been known to have a working relationship with, wrote him a letter, called his home phone, contacted a former employer, searched patent records to discover his current employer, and contacted his current employer, not to mention in the process naming his wife's Twitter account, publishing his real name, and publishing the name of his current employer.

That's pretty poor form, and I don't think that "journalism" is an appropriate excuse.

Like raganwald, I really liked every other aspect of the article. It's well written and I enjoyed taking the time to sit down and read it with a cup of hot chocolate. But -- and this is a big "but", one that eclipses everything in the article that I enjoyed -- I was tremendously disappointed at seeing the private man behind _why outed as he was in the article.
You can safely trust me on this. Also, if you're concerned, the patch is very straightforward, minimal, safe, and fairly unintrusive. It's not going to break anything.

Just patch it.
I like the idea, I hope the name is a "working title"
FWIW domain_info doesn't appear to be on rubygems.org.
From their homepage...

>Royal's under the age of 20

I don't know the implications for search, but that should be: Royals under the age of 20.
I don't want to be some sort of Kevin Rose defender in this thread, but I don't think it's fair to say that he just "had an idea". He had an idea and spent years working on it, iterating and improving until Digg finally hit the big time. I think he deserves credit for that.

As a developer, I agree that some "ideas guys" suck. But some of them are fantastic, and have a huge talent in taking a core concept and fleshing out requirements, objectives and so on. Often we developers are actually really bad at that, and we end up getting distracted by endless refactoring, or bringing down response times, etc. etc.

There is nothing wrong with a mix of the two.
Show HN: Foundstyles - Ready to use styles, based on Foundation framework
I think Kevin is a smart guy but for some reason he just seems to lack some focus on products and I wonder if going to Google will maybe somehow wack him into place a little? Hmmm
Well I guess one way to promote google+ is to hire every celebrity in the world and force them to abandon twitter and facebook.
Question, the Samsung LCD display they linked to shows a 1024x768, not the 2048 resolution of the iPad, what gives?
Personally, I'm heavily entrenched in the electronica camp. Coding favourites include: Deadmau5, Daft Punk's Homework, RJD2, DJ Shadow, Battles, Trent Reznor's Social Networking Soundtrack, Crystal Castles, Holy Fuck.