skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
win the "go" competition.

check out http://evolvedmachines.com

those guys might like to help you out.

also there is http://www.numenta.com/

that might be interested in some good algorithyms
"I just can't be a college student if I'm too goddamn stupid to open another account."
To this day, I wish I'd taken Shriram's class when I had the chance.
"But it sure does suck ram. Anywhere between 5-20mb at any given time"

Not to be a contrarian here, as we are in beta and working to improve, but seriously? Outlook: 220M, Firefox: 350M, Dropbox: 25M

Dude, if we hit 20, that's pretty much par for the course.
When I was in college it was cell phones. One year, no one had them. Next september, everyone did.
Facebook launched at Pitt in October of my freshman year. The adoption rate in one week was amazing. It was just word of mouth... Facebook launched at Penn State before Pitt, I knew lots of people at Penn State that said Facebook was great.

I was banned from Facebook for 48 hours about a month ago and I felt lost. Too bad I didn't think to email Mike Arrington.
I'll second this recommendation - I bought the printed copy, and I'm constantly going to it for reference. The fact that it's available for free is just an added bonus.

I would also suggest Elements of Statistical Learning: http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/

As well as Duda, Hart, and Stork's Pattern Classification: http://rii.ricoh.com/~stork/DHS.html
I didn't particularly like the WEKA book, but Bishop's book is excellent.

If you're interested in introductory data mining stuff, I would recommend Tan's Introduction to Data Mining: http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kumar/dmbook/index.php
Top Ten Signs You May Be Charging Too Little
Ask 37signals: How do you test your software?
My thoughts exactly. I think anything under 50M is sensible for a resident app. If you're on a 256MB machine I suppose you won't agree, but then you really shouldn't be running Outlook.
Kevin Rose makes Wall Street Journal free for Digg users
Why We do Dumb or Irrational Things: 10 Brilliant Social Psychology Studies
What is graph theory collapsing into? Can you point me to some info? (I'm starting studies as a mathematician)
The Wall Street Journal Gets Cozy With Digg
I love Microsoft Software
While no company is perfect, deep down inside you know you love their software.
Another still unfixed Gmail XSS attack.
Mac OS beats Windows in Japan: 54 percent of OS share in October
Carrer Calculus
Brits snapped up Apple iPhones
anyone have any suggestions as to how i can make this a little more functional? it's the code for the score ticker on my site, http://www.qtoro.com. (uses the prototype js framework.) it was feeling pretty good til i had to put in those 'if' statements...

Urtog.score = new function() {
this.init = function() {
this.upmod; // boolean. if increasing score, it's true; if decreasing, false.
this.unit = 34; // the pixel height of one digit
this.digits = $$('div#scoredigits img.digit'); // array of all the digit images
}

/* change the score.
* first arg is the # of points to add or subtract (if negative).
* second arg is optional, specifies which digit img element to mod. the default is the "1's" digit.
*/
this.mod = function( points, digit ) {
this.upmod = (points > 0);
digit = digit || this.digits.last();
var di = this.digits.indexOf(digit);
var dy = (this.upmod ? 0-this.unit : this.unit);
(Math.abs(points)).times(function(i) {
new Effect.MoveBy(digit, dy, 0, {
queue: {position:"end", scope:"d"+di},
duration: 0.075,
transition: Effect.Transitions.linear,
beforeSetup: preroll.bind(Urtog.score)
});
})
}

/* the callback that's run before the digit is modded.
* does two things:
* 1. resets the image strip to the top/bottom if necessary
* 2. checks if we should simultaneously mod the 10x digit (e.g. going from 09=>10 or 10=>09)
*/
function preroll(effect) {
var d = effect.element;
var di = this.digits.indexOf(d);
var offset = d.style.top;
if (this.upmod) { // adding points
if (offset=="-340px") { // at the bottom of the strip, so reset to the top
d.style.top=offset="0px";
}
if (offset=="-306px") { // transitioning from 9=>0, so mod the 10x digit, too
this.mod( 1, this.digits[di-1] );
}
}
else { // subtracting points
if (this.digits.all(function(d) { return is_zero(d.style.top); })) { // we've hit zero!
Effect.Queues.instances.keys().each(function(k) {
if (k.match(/d[0-9]*$/)) { // cancel all pending digit mods -- digit effect queue names are like d3,d2,d1
Effect.Queues.instances[k].each(function(e) {
e.cancel()
});
}
});
new Effect.UrtogShuffle('scoredigits'); // :)
return false;
}
if (is_zero(offset)) { // at the top of the strip, so reset to the bottom
d.style.top=offset="-340px";
}
if (offset=="-340px") { // transitioning from 0=>9, so mod the 10x digit, too
this.mod( -1, this.digits[di-1] );
}
}
}

// account for bizarre safari behavior... wtf is "-0px"??
function is_zero(offset) {
return (offset=="0px" || offset=="-0px");
}
} // end Urtog.score
The History of Tetris
Peter Norvig: Warning signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation
what's in it for Google? MSFT _sold_ DOS and became rich, GOOG is giving Android away.
I get annoyed anytime whenever I see "Best Videogames of all time" lists that don't put Tetris at the #1 spot. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Alexey Pazhitnov designed a second puzzle game after Tetris, this is my favorite implementation of it. http://www.popcap.com/games/bigmoney -- click play free online.
I'm here from Ambush Networks (http://www.ambushnetworks.com)

Not really a hacker, more of a computer security consultant.
15 Puzzles in 30 Minutes
BTW, how would you design a twisty puzzle construction set so that anyone can easily invent and play with new twisty puzzles?
My team is currently in 5th in the Netflix Prize competition. The main part of the method I'm using is pretty general (nothing specific to movies). If anyone here thinks they might have a use for this kind of thing / wants to collaborate on something, send me an email.
This is kind of moot, truthfully I'd go, now (or look first at, but they're both getting praise so...) for Chris Bishop or Ethem Alpaydin's new books. But between Norvig and Mitchell, Norvig has 138 pages on learning vs Mitchell's ~390, but, Mitchell's is from a different era, Norvig is easier to read - larger pages, more diagrams, better writing, and you know where you are better - and fresher material. To each his own. But like I say, I'd probably go with one of the even newer ones. For a while Mitchell was all there was, then Norvig came along, and now there're a few to choose from.
Precisely the reason I haven't bothered to own smartphone until now. I am content to let my friends cuss at their flaky unresponsive operating system and browsers that can't render anything accurately.
Can we agree to call it Dalek? So much cooler, yet so much more trademarked (unless trademarks expire??)
The Downfall of the Microsoft Empire
Microsoft is seeing a monumental, momentum shift. Never before has Microsoft seemed so vulnerable. It is being attacked on all fronts by huge, game-changers. Is this a repeat of computing history? Microsoft changed the scene when they licensed MS-DOS and later Windows to IBM -- which was the dominant force, at the time. In those days, everything had to be IBM-compatible. Microsoft's operating system powered IBM computers -- and, as we know, software can be highly profitable. Thus, Microsoft quickly eclipsed IBM and went on to rule the world with an iron fist. Is this deja vu'?
Automattic Founders To Take Big Money Off The Table
agreed. i clicked on the link because pcmag.com confers some credibility, which dvorak squanders.

the dude has openly admitted to being a troll. i think it's time to move on.
The jvm is just bad at accommodating dynamic languages though, unfortunately. Similar was the fate of parrot. At the moment this idea is more of an academic dream.
Peerflix Hits the Replay Button (Again)--Wants to Become an Ad Network
if at first you don't suceed...
The puzzle states that he has to be 100% sure that everyone had been to the room. "fairly confidently" is not good enough here. And, it won't matter if you increase the number of visits in a row to 5, 20, or more, there is still no guarantee.
dude, it's a puzzle. Don't think of it as a real life situation.
Point taken, google stock is down more than 60 bucks from the peak...time to buy!

Uh, but not because of this. Because I'm not so sure you can just take a comparison like this and make it equate. Unlike in the Era of PCs, there are already quite a few established smartphone OSes. DOS had relatively smaller competition in terms of personal computer OSes. Theres linux based OSes now, then of course the Apple, Palm OS actually is still alive somewhat, then Win Mobile. Its still a different ballgame. And remember that the open handset isn't all inclusive, there are those that havent joined.

though not many, so I do see your point. And its a good one. But of course we should know that it doesnt completely equate.
Angels do well, but not when they reinvest in own companies
Check out the lecture notes for CS229, Stanford's class on Machine Learning. The class has no textbook, so the notes are fairly comprehensive. (Though the math notation can get a bit intense...)

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs229/materials.html
Also, the notes assume a reasonable knowledge of probability theory and linear algebra. If you're unsure, you might do well to review those topics before approaching machine learning (or at least keep good references handy). (Edit: the link above has Section Notes that review probability theory, linear algebra, and convex optimization. You might find those useful.)

And it's not an easy course. Don't be discouraged if the problem sets seem impossible. (They very nearly are.)
wow !
that (Gladwell's article) was inspiring!
Thank Zach!
"Pissing in the well": Shelfari spam and the social contract
Also see the absurdly long list of pissed-off bloggers at http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2007/11/shelfari-spam...

(Disclosure: I used to work for LibraryThing... and built their address-book inviter. I'd like to believe we implemented it a little more tastefully, though. =P)
Who's to say that the two can't be the same?

Though I don't think the "winner" won't come from Google.
Why's that? Sure, you have to ship some more support code (parts of the language runtime) as part of the compiled bytecode, but that just increases the size of the bytecode somewhat. It's not a fatal problem at all.

Parrot always seemed like an odd idea to me, but I just assumed that there must be enough to be gained by doing such a high level VM if people were bothering to write it.
November's puzzle from IBM Research
So the way I currently have it the man-in-the-middle is useless because once a client connects to the SSH server all other IP addresses are locked out from that port.

I agree about congestion, but IIRC the TCP connection timeout defaults to 75s so since I'm tolerant to connections across two windows (i.e. two minutes) then I think I'm safe.

John.
Agreed. A hash could be a good CPRNG, but if I want to claim randomness I probably should use a cipher with an incrementing input.

John.
It's a way of deflecting a brute force attack on my SSH server. I think it makes things more, not less, secure, but I'm certainly open to comments.

John.
I only need sync. to the nearest minute. NTP does that fine for me.

John.
Bad Behavior Does Not Doom Pupils, Studies Say
Of course! Say, if you have the time, watch his recent video on the changing face of genius:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2007/gladwe...

I think it has something to say about living near a startup hub, why the great hackers of the past are different than the ones of the present, and maybe even the future of tech startups.
In response to the idea that your search algorithm is better than all others:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_opt...

In response to your question I say that it should be easy to monetize your algorithm if it is truly good at solving some class problems. Just find problems where the solutions are valuable to some group of people and sell the solutions you create.
Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network
Norvig always has exceptional essays. This kind of understanding should be prerequisite to being allowed to read scientific papers.

At the very least it's required to demonstrate personal credibility when talking about said papers.
It is only important for pedigree and networking
On a related note:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/08/untwirling-photo-of.htm...
At least patents are only 20 years, copyright is forever.
Visual Basic was great. Maybe barely usable as a language alone, but great because it allowed you to do lots GUI-wise with little code.

As far as great hackers having an effect on much of anything, as long as most corporations continue to ignore disparities in skill among programmers and pay them all equally, the more skilled craftpeople naturally will be driven away from the average corporation, into areas like research, stock trading, startups, or the safe umbrella of Google, where they are either compensated in money or in being not treated like kids. This is perfectly natural (indeed, I'm surprised that many skilled white collar workers in other professions are willing to work at the average corporation). But in the meantime, the skilled craftspeople have little effect on the mainstream development of computer programming, which is done by the large corporations. Thus "skilled hackers" are neither here nor there in the development of things of late, and this shouldn't be surprising.
...they let you telecommute from 10000 miles away.
Reddit founders talk
I'm working on a solution using the current day (modulo the population) as a kind of covert channel to keep track of the number of prisoners who already visited the room (the basic idea is that, if the light is on on day 64, at least 64 people have visited the room).

I still have a bug in my algorithm and I'm not even sure it will really work.
I/O Brush: The World as the Palette
This shows some amazing dedication, but the beans don't have any facial expressions so the emotion in their voices seem kind of strange.

Still, I'm pretty sure every kid on earth would love this movie, based on the preview.
Balls to that. I'm armed with a bad attitude and worse math. By my reckoning:

On any given day, a given prisoner has a .99 probability of NOT visiting the room.

Over a period of N days, a given prisoner has a pow(.99, N) probability of having _NEVER_ visited the room. Therefore, the probability a given prisoner HAS visited the room at least once over a period of N days is (1-pow(.99, N)).

Therefore, the probability that X prisoners have each visited the room at least once over a period of N days is pow((1-pow(.99, N)), X)[1]. If I'm in the room, the question I need to answer is: How likely is it that each of the 99 other prisoners have visited the room at least once in the preceeding N days?

Let's visit Mr. Python:

N P(safe) Cost[2]
----- -------- ----------
100: 0.000000 (18250.00)
200: 0.000001 (18249.99)
300: 0.006887 (18124.31)
400: 0.166419 (15212.86)
500: 0.520678 ( 8747.63)
600: 0.787901 ( 3870.80)
700: 0.916504 ( 1523.81)
800: 0.968598 ( 573.08)
900: 0.988391 ( 211.87)
1000: 0.995735 ( 77.83)
1100: 0.998437 ( 28.53)
1200: 0.999428 ( 10.45)
1300: 0.999790 ( 3.82)
1400: 0.999923 ( 1.40)
1500: 0.999972 ( 0.51)
1600: 0.999990 ( 0.19)
1700: 0.999996 ( 0.07)
1800: 0.999999 ( 0.03)
1900: 0.999999 ( 0.01)
2000: 1.000000 ( 0.00)
2100: 1.000000 ( 0.00)
2200: 1.000000 ( 0.00)
2300: 1.000000 ( 0.00)
2400: 1.000000 ( 0.00)
2500: 1.000000 ( 0.00)
2600: 1.000000 ( 0.00)
2700: 1.000000 ( 0.00)
2800: 1.000000 ( 0.00)
2900: 1.000000 ( 0.00)
3000: 1.000000 ( 0.00)
3100: 1.000000 ( 0.00)
3200: 1.000000 ( 0.00)
3300: 1.000000 ( 0.00)
3400: 1.000000 ( 0.00)
3500: 1.000000 ( 0.00)

After 1000 days, I'm guessing everyone's visited. Screw you guys, I'm going home.[3]

[1]I know this can't be exactly right, because prisoner visits aren't independent events, but I figure it can't be that wrong, and I want to go home.

[2]Cost is calculated in expected days of life forgone, multiplying (1-P(safe)) by 50 years by 365. Arbitrary, but it gives some idea of how much expected life you gain by waiting longer to roll the dice.

[3]I know this is ducking the intention of the question, but I think the point that death isn't that bad a risk if the probability is low is a legitimate one.
I didn't have a chance to post a more elaborate response earlier but I'll give it a shot now. The problem that needs to be addressed is the ability of attackers to brute force the SSH service. In order to mitigate this one should

1) Use only public key authorization for SSH or
2) Use VERY STRONG passwords
3) Have a long limit between password attempts or
4) Have the computer blacklist any IP that tries to log in unsuccessfully more than X times (where X ~ 10)
5) Have SSH running on a non-standard port. This will deflect the majority of automated attacks but will not stop a dedicated attacker.
6) Use port knocking or the technique described to allow only users with some knowledge of the system to be able to talk to the SSH service
7) MONITOR YOUR LOG FILES. An attacker should not EVER be able to brute force passwords for a few days without YOU noticing.

Now you are free to layer as many of these as you need and each will reduce the probability of a successful attack, but you need to take into consideration the cost vs risk. For example the technique described in this article offers added security but places limitations on connecting to the machine (from a client that has the right algorithm, with synchronized clocks, and also make sure not to make a mistake otherwise you'll get locked out for 15 minutes which can HURT if you're dealing with a critical matter).

Personally I like the concept but I think the added costs are too great and compared with using some of the other security mechanisms.
Me 50 days ago (
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59218 ):

> If google leveraged the gmail user base to make orkut bigger and integrated it with igoogle widgets, it'd be something approaching facebook.

They should totally hire me to tell them things they already know. Actually thats pretty much the definition of a consultant already...
Whoaaaa, double negative, my bad. What I meant to say was

"Though I don't think the "winner" will come from Google."
People who are programmers might not have as much respect for or interest in college, because C.S. tends to be a little watered down as far as standards go. If you want high standards, go into physics or math.

Probably confirming this general prejudice, I programmed a lot in high school, and I never thought grades had anything to do with intelligence or ability or willingness to work, because all the smart people I knew had bad grades. It annoyed me when people with good grades got into good colleges for not doing interesting things, so in undergrad I decided that I'd get perfect grades. I did that, majoring in math and physics, and switched back to C.S. for grad school. My adviser told me grades don't matter in grad school, so I've now gone back to ignoring grades.

I'm in grad school at the moment. I'm sure I have a lot of learning to do, as far as what different groups of people think of all this grading information. I mostly just look at it as a proof that I'm willing to teach myself, learn, and occasionally work, so it seems frustratingly tedious to me, as I already know the answers to these questions. Since perhaps middle school, with the exception of graduate school, I've disliked much of school because I don't like being taught, as compared with being given enough freedom to teach myself (gently guided exploration is my preference).

Grad school is fun if it's your cup of tea.

Despite having extremely limited information on the subject of how grades change job prospects, I think people worry too much about grades. If you get the perfect white collar job after getting perfect grades then chances are you will still be unhappy unless it is a good fit for you. A college degree is the access card to the academic and corporate systems, so it's an important constraint, and nothing to casually dismiss or yawn at. And grades are part of that. But rational, informed decisions can be made to not go to college, or to not get good grades, depending on one's interests. For example, the corporate side of the world doesn't interest me at all, and I have the nagging feeling that in undergrad I really should've been exploring what I wanted to do with my life more instead of spending four years trying to get good grades.

The bottom line is that I'm not convinced that careers and that ordering them the way that everyone tells me to will necessarily give me happiness. When in doubt, ignore everyone else and listen to oneself, but first maximize your information by reading lots of good books on the subject of grades and careers, and also be rational and don't overly discount the worth of your future time; realize that grades are a part of the union card for corporate America and the academic world.
AstroTurfing is fun.
Institutionalized AstroTurfing is sad.
How I read Hacker News
Algorithmic trading is actually commonplace:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_analyst

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_Trading_Platforms

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/23/business/trading.php?...

Typically this is not a question of "find the secret strategy and make billions!", but rather finding a good execution algorithm to break an order of $billions down into a series of smaller orders for a good average price, or finding and exploiting minute arbitrage opportunities, etc. Algorithmic trading is responsible for many billions of dollars of trades daily; I don't know offhand of particular people who have become billionaires off it, but there are definitely lots of folks who have made a lot of money.
Nice - reminds me of a much better version of the old Slashdot interface - I was always going to "Threaded" and "view all on one page"

Now if someone would just create a working RSS full-text feed for Paulgraham.com...
I am looking for a co-founder. drop me a line at enginedriver at telltrains dot com
fincancial fraud detection bottlenecks are typically between ram and the processor. Thousands of snychronously incoming transactions have to be examined simultanously, because they correlate heavily.

It is not like "here is one transaction, is it a fraud?" but "here are 2^20 transactions, what are the frauds?".

You could do this by pipelining, but I guess Banks want a zero downtime system and I personally would not trust an API in terms of reliability.

Another point is, that banks will not give you the original data. They will have to "pseudonymize" several entries, such as credit card numbers, names, ...
This would force them to preprocess the data which gives every transaction a very little + O(n) and which might decrease the speed even more.

(I'm not saying it's technically impossible, but I'd say there are better ways, such as releasing it closed source or just using it to predict financial data - which as we all know is possible and being done by hedge fonds, so this should be the best way IF you have that algorithm ;)
Just get it to fill in new items automatically via javascript updates, and then we can leave it running full screen on a dedicated monitor. It then would become something of a medusa head though, because if you hope to get any regular work done you'll have to completely divert your eyes.
> I think by worked he means setting the standards and being the platform and eliminating any competition

Well, I suppose if you redefine "worked" to mean whatever you like, then it's hard to prove the guy wrong. But a platform that "worked" is not generally considered equivalent to "eliminating any competition".