skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was at the same point about a year ago. I never really found a single primer, and I looked. What I realized is the industry is complex because it is fragmented by tons of companies doing their own thing, not because of any real inherent complexity.

I started following adexchanger.com pretty closely and I read through their archives, which helped a lot. Adexchanger is good because it gives you a chance to see what companies are doing, and how they sell themselves.
Thats a very wide classification. I could say everything is a machine algorithm since they all run on general purpose cpus.
That's a pretty shitty replacement for, say, owning your own home, or being able to afford to send your kids to college.

But owning a home is easier now than ever before, not harder. It's up about 10% since the 60s: http://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/histtab14.xls

College attendance is up too (you need to combine this data with population stats): http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98

If it's harder to attain these things, how are more people doing it?
Exo IDE, an environment for coding, building, and debugging apps in the cloud, just revealed new features and partnerships, all designed to make developers and their teams more productive.

Here are the top 5 announcements:

- Smart project creation and deployment for Java, Spring, Ruby, Python and PHP apps.

- JRebel integration that saves minutes on every deploy.

- Added AppFog deployment to the existing supported PaaS list, in addition to AWS, CloudBees, Google App Engine, Heroku and OpenShift.

- Fixed-width font for better reading and coding.

- Team development through JAR publishing
This looks awesome.
It's also perfect timing to recommend to some clients that I have.

Is there an 'agency' option available where we can monitor more than 8 campaigns? Or even rebrand/white-label it?
Hey, I'm Jeremy - the author of the book in question. I'm happy to say I completely agree, and proudly own two of the book in question! My book's goal was to be a simple read with little overhead in allowing readers to start writing code and see results immediately. Though C is incredibly powerful (goes without saying), many students have a very hard time understanding that C is a language, not a library, and thus has a hard time "outputting" real-time interactive graphics. HTML5 / Canvas, on the other hand, are ready to go without any sort of installation!

Regardless, in my next update I'll be making this point explicitly clear to readers :-) I am not trying to become any sort of tome in the library of great computer-graphics books.
@slowpoke gave a reason in his answer:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4826022
Come on. We're fighting proxy wars, losing friends, and recession is biting us in the ass. Please don't try and lecture us on what a real crisis is. We might not be in a world war right now, but war is war.
Hey, I'm Jeremy, the author. Yep, no excuse, my writing skills are far from great. Re-reading my text over and over again to catch mistakes is clearly still not effective enough - which is why I love reading people's feedback, so thanks! :-)
Don't bet your productivity tools into the "Cloud" propaganda.
Neural Nets cannot loop (unless they are recurrent neural nets) and are memory bound.
I think it's worth thanking Mr. Crispin for all he's done to help enable us to overcome the barriers we all face trying to get our thoughts communicated to another person.
Content based user interface. Hasn't worked before and won't work this time. The Gnome people are taking something I'm not. Such a pity, I used to love Gnome and I still love Gnome 2.x.
To me that always seems like a rationalisation. I don't seek meaning and consider it an egocentric conceit. I don't mean that as any sort of insult, it seems to be part of the human condition for a lot of people.
Imminent split of Linux userland between Ubuntu/Upstart and RedHat(etc.)/Systemd
That's also what mojuba was referring to.
Did both of your parents have to work to support the family? Then if one of them lost their job did you have to wonder if you were going to lose the house? Or if someone in your family got sick would you have to worry about losing your house or going bankrupt?

I was just talking to my grandparents about that the other day, and they had the exact same concerns in their time. They said it wouldn't have taken much of a hiccup for them to lose the house. I'm not sure this is a new problem at all.
Avoiding "the stupid hour"
"The following line of python code is able to simulate a Universal Turing Machine:"

while len(word) > S : pIndex, word = (pIndex + 1) % len(C), word[1:] + C[pIndex]
if (word[0] == "1") else word[1:]
This is an assumption.

Based on the quality of other Google products, I think it's safer to assume the inverse: Google's mail servers likely know about a domain's MX records and adjust accordingly without account configuration or external intervention.

Maintaining a system as large as the one they do without this feature would seriously suck for the mail admin - it really has nothing to do with the customer at that point. I wouldn't want to work that job if it did because of a) all the angry people it affected and b) the overhead in my job introduced by a bad programmer.
So sad. But shouldn't we post well-wishing messages using IMAP?
Are you talking about Hinton's "A Fast Learning Algorithm for Deep Belief Nets"? Before that was published, Hinton's lab and their spiritual allies were training large restricted boltzmann machines via truncated sampling for decades. And Yann LeCun's convolutional networks (the architecture used in Google's vision project) have also been trained via plain old stochastic gradient descent for decades.

As far as I can tell there hasn't been any single revolutionary breakthrough in this field...we just keep getting more computing power, discovering better tricks and heuristics, and trying to build larger and larger networks.
I don't understand why people use google apps for something as important as email in the first place.

Is making a marginal cost saving really that much more important than having actual support?
The breakthrough was the insight that while you cannot train a deep neural net at once with backprop, you can train one layer after the other greedily with an unsupervised objective and later fine tune it with standard backprop.

Years later, Swiss researchers (Dan Ciresan et al) found that you can train neural nets with backprop, but you need lots of training time and lots of data. You can only achieve this by making use GPUs, otherwise it would take months.
Contrastive Divergence.

The deep learning / RBM tutorial here is quite good and explains the technique.

http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/rbm.html#rbm
Good points, but I personally feel safer in the present time, and even with global economic challenges, I feel generally optimistic about the current world situation. A economically and socially more tightly connected world seems more likely to be safe.

Chaos theory informs us that the future is impossible to predict for non trivial systems. I admit that I am partially relying on a gut feeling about this.
Rdp into your windows file server and work there (I work over rdp for about 7 hours a day).

The web is shitty for serious productivity apps from experience.

Regarding open source, use openoffice instead.

Alternatively use Windows' offline files feature when you are away from the fileserver.
I was about to say that. 8 turns for a company called Atebits is certainly not random. (actually the name and logo are very clever: it's 8 dots that form the letter A)
Hi Andrew, I'm Jeremy - the author of the book. So yes, I immediately agree with everything you say, and would even like to ask you to clarify more on some of the technique divergence. Optimisations (such as acos vs. normalization) was done on purpose to make the math and code crystal clear to the reader. I've really been frustrated with great books that explain one equation but then implement its optimized form without any clear transition or derivation. I'm also aware that my texture system is very different than the standard approach; this was done for my own sake since I felt more comfortable with the Barycentric system, though (correct me if I'm wrong) that is rarely used in comercial applications. I'm always looking to make things better for the reader, so do tell me what other professionals think!

As for coding style - PLEASE do comment on it! I'm pretty anal about formatting and standards, and wrote this tutorial over a few months so things might of broke down over time. I'll be posting the book's code on Github tonight and allow several users to modify some code as requested by users here and on Reddit.
Closer, but still no :) Geoff Hinton proposed contrastive divergence training for Restricted Boltzmann Machines in his 2006 science paper. CD does not apply outside of RBMs though, and most of these nets in the article here are not in fact RBMs. The paper did spark a lot of interest in the field though.

These are all neural nets (with some bells and whistles in some cases like tied weights, pooling units, etc) trained exactly as they were trained before using stochastic gradient descent or LBFGS. We did come up with a lot of tricks for making SGD work though, like momentum terms, clamping of weights during learning, dropout, unsupervised pretraining, etc., but in large part it's just a lot more compute power. These networks just turned out to work very well when you have a LOT of (fairly homogeneous) data and can afford to scale them up computationally. And that's pretty awesome, looks like we have a powerful hammer and there are plenty of nails lying around :)
The first time I saw a paper on feasible deep networks was at NIPS 2006, specifically this paper:
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/fastnc.pdf

It's been awhile since I read the paper, but as I recall it involved training an unsupervised model layer-by-layer (training a layer, freezing the weights, then training another layer on top of it).
Is that speculation or do you know it will happen?

I feel reasonably confident that ignoring MX records would violate some part of the smtp process, and I would be be very surprised if Gmail did this.
I made this some time ago: https://gist.github.com/3747038

It's my attempt to port the "koehler" vim scheme into Sublime text. Might be incomplete, but at least looks similar.
Machine Learning: Neural Network vs Support Vector Machine
Having been inside cargo containers they are not nearly as 'cosy' as one might hope, and if you finish off the inside with interior walls it cuts into the space. If you have never visited or stayed in a 'mobile home' (US term for pre-manufactured house) the 'boxness' is impossible to hide even at that scale. So while I think its a clever concept living there long term will be challenging I expect. Now as a hotel? A quick place to spend the night on the way to somewhere else? No problem.
Microsoft's big Windows 8 secret? It's actually about advertising.
PSY have been doing that stuff for 10 years , i dont think there is anything "satirical" in his work.
I think a lot of it has to do with who benefits most from efficiency and where that benefit is allocated after.

For example, if I'm expected to work a 40 hour work week but I figure out a way that everyone at the company with my job can do their job twice as fast, I don't suddenly get to work 20 hours a week and get paid the same--I get half the other employees fired because the company doesn't need them anymore--and maybe I get a pat on the back and some extra paid vacation.

The company gets a tremendous benefit, they take that money and invest it in software and robots that will help eliminate more jobs and make a small startup's founders rich in the process. The people that got laid off take whatever money they happen to have (which is probably a negative value) and try to get another job in a similar scenario and continue the cycle of being expected to do "more with less"

And what do people do with their savings if they're lucky enough to have managed to save something sizable? They buy houses, cars, TVs, and other stuff that has little likelihood of building more wealth.

I don't think anyone designed it this way on purpose, it just works out this way and will continue to until people start building value for themselves and escape from 9-5 prison (or 8-6 since no one actually works 40 hours anymore, or 7-7 if you include a decent commute)
There is no "a neural net". Which model do you mean? Certainly not the deep belief networks under discussion in the article.

edit: I'm not sure I was clear enough-- the term "neural network" is a misnomer that encompasses extremely different models that are largely unrelated except for being vaguely inspired by the brain. A vanilla multilayer-perceptron is essentially a generalization of logistic regression. Restricted Boltzmann Machines are different beasts-- they're a restriction of undirected graphical models made amenable to efficient training. Recurrent neural networks aren't in any way a minor extension of other neural networks-- you need different terminology to talk meaningfully about them and they essentially don't have reliable training algorithms. This latter class can be viewed as Turing-equivalent computation, but they're not at all the same as the models in the original article.
http://www.socher.org/index.php/DeepLearningTutorial/DeepLea... is also a good reference. I wrote a short blog post this morning on the same subject http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/11/deep-learning.html
>I started it off as an experiment(1 hr a day of DVORAK for 2 or 3 weeks) find that my writing stamina has improved.

I think that anything that causes the person to pay more "perceptual" attention to the details of the physical process of typing will improve "writing stamina" and will reduce the chance of RSI. I tend to think that the reason people's RSI goes away when they start to learn Dvorak is that the need to learn causes them to pay more attention to the physical process of typing (and that a Dvorak user who never learned Qwerty would see approximately the same benefits if he started to learn and to use Qwerty). I am much more confident of my first sentence than my second sentence.

(To be painfully explicit, I tend to think that there are better ways of paying more attention to the physical process of typing than learning Dvorak. E.g., just resolve to pay more attention works pretty well.)
Just a week or so ago someone posted an article that stated "Increases in electrical efficiency just lead to the use of more electricity."

It seems to be true economically. Take a look at the communities built post-WW2. The homes are tiny. As wages increased, people didn't reduce the % spent on housing, they increased the value of their housing so that the % stayed the same.

I have a colleague at work who is the sole breadwinner in his family. His wife home-schools their 7 (yes, seven) kids. He earns $75K if he gets a lot of overtime. He has substantial retirement savings. It can be done. Of course, he buys steers from 4H, raises and slaughters them for meat. He penny-pinches like crazy (not unlike my grandparents).

I think a big cause of human suffering is the built-in human psychology that you always have to work to make things better. Of course, humans never would have reach the level of wealth (in the broad definition) without that drive. However, it also leads to a lot of suffering as people who are very well off (the vast majority of the US) lament their unfortunate circumstances.
All the UNIX systems used in Fortune 500 companies, mainframe systems and embedded devices.

The consulting world is much more than just Linux/Windows/Mac.
You can't train fully connected deep models with backprop, or at least not easily or well. An alternative solution to this problem is spatial weight pooling (Yann's convolutional networks) which play well with SGD.
"The first U.S. multi-family condo built of used shipping containers is slated to break ground in Detroit early next year."

There are good reasons nobody has done this before.

Among them is that despite more than a decade of attempts to to create such projects, shipping containers remain grossly ill-suited for conversion to dwellings. Their dimensions are poor for commodious habitation; they remain uninsulated, unfenestrated, and expensive to modify due to unibody construction; and in relatively short supply for the purpose.

It makes little more sense than cutting teddy bears lengthwise to make carpet slippers.
What exactly is wrong what I wrote? I did not say that all nets nowadays would be trained by RBMs (in the contrary, I said quite the opposite, that new algorithms had been developed). I just said that they were part of the breakthrough.
OT, but: Why the hell do Americans refer to the old-blue collar workers of the 1970s (eg General Motors factory workers) as "middle class"?

The term working class was invented for a reason.
"Being able to send all your companies work to China is a big advantage for the company owner"

This is also a big advantage for the American consumer. Y'know.. the middle class?
Sure enough the tax code has similar "dump truck" sized holes. That doesn't mean we change the rates so as to balance out with the crooks.
So well made that the author thought it was piggy backed on UIKit. :-) all compliments.
tablecloth.js (http://tableclothjs.com/) is another add-on compatible with twitter bootstrap that helps make nice looking HTML tables.
What do you mean by "cashed by the top 1% only"?

Last I checked, the 99% were enjoying the benefits of PCs, mobile phones, satellites, and better batteries every bit as much as the 1% were.
These things will happen, by usually businesses care about their customers and make humans available to fix the problem.

Google is notoriously awful at this.
I remember setting up three-way calls like this when I was a kid (and had a landline... not sure it would work with a cell phone).
Trailer homes are far better suited for habitation than shipping containers because they are designed and built for the purpose. To put it another way, shipping containers are burdened with too much technical debt.
{wrap}bootstrap is a great theme site for twitter bootstrap: https://wrapbootstrap.com/
Visually, it reminds me quite a bit of an Android game called Gyro. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl.submachine....
How to Dress Up for an Event or Business Conference
Please see this follow-up post: Approximation relating lg, ln, and log10

http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/11/24/approximation-relat...
"The app and its website both play the mystery card. No mention of who made it and where it came from, but I found this Mashable piece that provides a bit more background."

This seemed bizarre to me, so I went looking. There's like half a dozen places on the website with background:

It's in the FAQ: http://www.atebits.com/support/faq/what-is-atebits/

The News page: http://www.atebits.com/news/ ("atebits 2.0 October 15, 2012 In 2007 I left Apple...")

The Contact page: http://www.atebits.com/contact/ ("Follow us on Twitter at @atebits and @lorenb.")

The Press Kit: http://www.atebits.com/contact/press/atebits-presskit.zip (Contains an about.txt that's exactly what it says.)

All of these are one or two clicks away (except the press kit, which is 3). Loren's not exactly bragging about his background on the front page, but if you're going to say he's secret and mysterious, at least take the time out of your day click a link or two.
Living cells captured in pyramid cages
I remember reading elsewhere that he accepted that explanation (right in the beginning when the video went viral first) as well. He was recently signed up for some record deal by the man that talent spotted Justin Bieber. Perhaps there was a diktat/mandate from those circles as to to not antagonise the "prospective audience" for his music anymore.

Jackie Chan had similar problems when he made the crossover to Hollywood (Source: his autobiography and Wikipedia entries). So, I won't be surprised if PSY was made to temper his views lately to avoid unnecessary controversy to his new paymasters.
All this and it's not counting places like China which has it's own youtube like service. And my understanding is that countries like Germany, with overly aggressive IP laws blocks the music from the video so it doesn't get nearly as many views. (it'd be great if somebody could confirm)
I don't think you read what was written. First, it says that this form of production has an organizational drive/inertia of its own. I don't think this idea would be that alien to most people here. Bureaucracies are created to achieve an objective. As the bureaucracy grows larger and larger, sometimes the original objective begins to get hazy, as the objective of a bureaucracy protecting itself becomes larger and larger.

Then it says "the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers". A repetition of what was said before. The means of production is not JUST about improving the standard of living for the society of producers. It is about other things. You're claiming it says somewhere in there that the standard of living will not rise for producers. It does not say that. You have not contradicted anything.

We live in a day and age of shareholders rights and profit and dividend being the key objective of corporations. This is actually codified into law. Layoffs, mergers and salary freezes/cuts are seen as good things. This is not a secret at all, just read Business Week or the Wall Street Journal. So the original point holds. "The means of production are not MERE means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers." You seem to be ignoring the word mere in that sentence, and the sentence before it.
I had the same issue and contacted Google Apps support using PIN of another account I already had. I told them the issue and they basically cleared out all the internal Apps data of the previous domain owner. After 48 hours I was able to set it up as new with Apps.
Laptop and Tablet in one - Lenovo Ideapad Yoga Review
Hi, thanks very much - if you shoot me an email at dave@recon.io, we can have a chat about an agency option.
my friend wrote this!
@slowpoke did that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4826022
I've been looking for a functionally equivalent alternative to gmail largely because I fear ending up in a similar situation. I'd like to host my email with a company that has remotely competent and caring support.

What are the best services?

And no thanks to cloud haters - I will not be setting up my own imap servers.
This ad is running on ESPN today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y39dP0zcWTk
> the transaction is considered valid if the
> signature on the card matches the signature
> of the receipt

In the example above, both the receipt and the card were signed at the register. It would be extremely odd if they didn't match, even if the person paying was a fraudster, therefore it's odd for her to verify them.
It's a great vid overall. But, if you can only spare 20 seconds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJtHNEDnrnY&t=3m5s
Wow, that looks way more polished than I recall linux ever looking. Good that there is more pressure across vendors to make things look better.
Thanks, I didn't realize this. I've updated the sentence in the article with a reference to your comment.
Thanks for the incredible response, everyone. For the people wanting to donate, I've put up a Stripe-powered donation page here: https://docverter-donate.herokuapp.com/donate
Electirc cars are better in some respects. Nonreusable energy will get more expensive while reusable energy will get better.

The market will figure out if electirc cars are a workable, maybe it want work. Maybe we should have hydrogen cars or maybe something else. Maybe we just have to live with it, use all the oil and only then we will stop. Sure you can add a carbon tax or something but that will at most drag things out (or maybe make the adoption of diffrent cars faster).

Fundamentally the way we will live and how we will produce energy will be guided by markets.