skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I would take math Olympiad performance more seriously than graduate level math courses.

As for publications, that would depend on where the paper is published and how much of a contribution was made by the candidate vs his/her coauthors.

IQ doesn't change much. If you were super bright in high school, you will probably still be super bright in your 20s and 30s.
We'll all look like fools if we cry "bullshit" and you happen to be right. But we'd look like even bigger fools if we just took your word for it.
Artificial Intelligence A Modern Approach SE, by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig.

I am a big fan of Peter Norvig in particular, he has a ton of great essays and code available online: http://norvig.com/
worldofwarcraft.com front and back-end analysis
I wanted to submit this write up I did on what I think is an extremely impressive setup by Blizzard on the World of Warcraft site. I really was hoping that someone might know the back-end that was responsible for doing the XML/XSLT transformations because I was unable to figure it out.
I was hoping that someone else might know what is doing the back-end XML/XSLT transformations because I wasn't able to find any signs of it.
This is what's wrong with our patent system. Imagine if all those great minds who came up with theorems you had to learn in 4-6 years of college decided to patent them.

Math should not be patentable. It's a crime.
The different thing is that much of this Google platform is open source, whereas DOS very much wasn't.
I've taken classes from people who worked on fraud detection for banks (Fair Isaac) and they were working on legacy hardware (shitty old mainframes) with retardedly limited floating point precision.

Performance is of the essence in these situations; any clever trick you can think of to speed things up should be used in such a situation (but keep it fairly simple; lookup tables and so forth, for example).
It's tempting to be a tool vendor, but unfortunately there are many established tool people. You don't even know the names, most likely, of all the little neural network toolkit companies that flopped in the early-mid 90s.

It's better to use a new technology to create a complete solution for people.
Thank you for your answer. I was curious about it, and I'm sure this info would be useful for anyone interested in contacting you.
I think we have to do neither; if he's clever (and if he's done what he claims, he surely is) he's not trying for us to take his word for it, or for us to say he's a great genius and all that. He's just looking for a way to monetize his discovering, and I think it's right.
A few more things no one tells you about VC
Machine Learning by Tom Mitchell for a serious academic book.

Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran for a practical approach in Python.
Murdoch Serious About Tearing Down WSJ.com's Subscription Wall
Forget it. Modern game AI is 90% specialization to the problem domain and 10% application of algorithms. That's the breakdown of how much work is involved as well as the breakdown of what contributes to a "good" game AI.

When it comes to what middleware game AI developers want, they're far more interested in a framework that helps them organize all the domain specialization rather than improved algorithms. And game middleware is an increasingly well-trodden and difficult market. Again, forget it.
books about machine learning applications/tools:
- "Programming Collective Intelligence"
- http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321/
- "Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Technique"
- http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/book.html

books about machine learning background/theory:
- "machine learning"
- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/mlbook.html
- "learning and soft computing"
- http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/view?isbn=0262112558

For a simple-to-use (Python-based) machine learning tool/API check out Orange: http://magix.fri.uni-lj.si/orange/
PLT Scheme getting rid of set-car! and set-cdr!
Serious geopolitical change -- China's submarine shadowed the U.S. fleet
The problem with building a complete solution is that it usually requires a lot of investment and domain specific knowledge.
Having a better algorithm offsets a lot of it but I am not sure I could write a better CAD (computer assisted diagnosis) software on my own in a reasonable time frame that will outperform the market leaders even if using their data I can improve their results by 50%.

There is just too much science involved in feature selection etc...
Do you have any information of anyone algorithmically outperforming the market enough to make them personally billionaires?
Fine, let me rephrase.

Or maybe people are _wasting_ way too much money to talk about it openly?
From my experience genius isn't a boolean thing, people can be brilliant in somethings and horrible in other things. I try to acknowledge my limitations and ask for help in the things I suck at.
I hear this one a lot, but no one ever explains why. Would someone like to explain their reasons for suggesting to get a lawyer?
Puzzle:  100 Prisoners and a Light Bulb
100 prisoners are imprisoned in solitary cells. Each cell is windowless and soundproof. There's a central living room with one light bulb; the bulb is initially off. No prisoner can see the light bulb from his or her own cell. Each day, the warden picks a prisoner equally at random, and that prisoner visits the central living room; at the end of the day the prisoner is returned to his cell. While in the living room, the prisoner can toggle the bulb if he or she wishes. Also, the prisoner has the option of asserting the claim that all 100 prisoners have been to the living room. If this assertion is false (that is, some prisoners still haven't been to the living room), all 100 prisoners will be shot for their stupidity. However, if it is indeed true, all prisoners are set free and inducted into MENSA, since the world can always use more smart people. Thus, the assertion should only be made if the prisoner is 100% certain of its validity.

Before this whole procedure begins, the prisoners are allowed to get together in the courtyard to discuss a plan. What is the optimal plan they can agree on, so that eventually, someone will make a correct assertion?

P.S. Probabilistic analysis for this problem can be difficult, so try simulations to test out your solutions to see how long they take on average.
Internet advice can be obsolete, generally wrong, or wrong for your specific situation. A lawyer has more incentive to get things right.
I couldn't agree more. Based on the quality of the teams at the top, if you beat their algorithms you have proven you have something particularly special. I think you'll easily be able to sell it for more than $1 million.
Check out the groups website http://saturdayhouse.org , we are essentially a geek group that gets together twice a week to hang out, work on projects, do gameing and other fun activities twice a week. (Wednesday night and all day Saturday.)

We have a space in the Seattle area, and anyone reading this is more than welcome to come join us.

We have also done another six hour startup project called gamewrangle.com that was done two weeks ago.

Again anyone reading this is welcome to come join us.
Actually most of them have been dead for a long time so it wouldn't really matter, but I agree with you some things should not be patentable.

On the other hand imagine a world without patents and you'd probably get a world fill with trade secrets and that is even worse, at least a patent guarantees that the idea will pass to the public domain after a certain period. Would the world benefit if technology was segmented and kept secret like the coca-cola formula?

But seriously that is a great discussion for different thread.
I agree on the Mitchell book.

If you are looking for a light introduction to naive Bayesian text classification then there's always the piece I wrote for DDJ: http://www.ddj.com/development-tools/184406064

John.
KDD 2006 cup
http://www.cs.unm.edu/kdd_cup_2006

My algorithm scored 2.043 19 on tasks 1 & 2
Top 3 places 1: 1.35 1.28 1.27
Top 3 places 2: 13.58 13.56 13.44
Note these scores represent 5 different teams.
The API is the thing to own.
The prisoners elect a counter. His count is initially 0, but increases to 1 the first time he walks into the room. Whenever he visits the lightbulb he will do the following:

1) If the lightbulb is off, leave the room.

2) If the lightbulb is one, turn it off and increment his count.

Every other prisoner follows the following rules:

1) If the lightbulb is on, do not touch it.

2) If the lightbulb is off and you have not flipped it on before, flip it on.

3) If the lightbulb is off but you have previously flipped it on, then do not touch it.

When the counter reaches 100, he may tell the guard that everyone has visited.
Going out and winning the Netflix prize and/or KDD and refusing to release your code would bring you the best tests (and biggest paying customers) because of the publicity. I actually can't think of a better and faster way of building a business around machine learning. Beat the best teams in the world as an individual and you won't have to worry about how to make money any more.
Yes, at the chip level, the ARM has won.

My point is that the APIs across phones are very much up for grabs.

An additional "strong feature" for Android is its price: free.
I'm in Guildford too although my day job sees me around the SE hacking ahem I mean consulting.
How many days does this take on average?
It's probably because you majored in CS.

CS is a brand-new discipline, which means it's in the process of generating a lot of shallow observations right now [1]. In another generation or two, some brilliant synthesizer will come along and produce a real theory. For now though, most of the stuff you learn as a CS undergrad (other than a few senior-level theory courses) should be obvious if you know how to program.

If you do go back, pick another discipline and study it like a computer scientist on vacation. Pick ONE powerful software package (python might be good, or maybe (sic) Mathematica) and use it to do ALL your assignments. Focus on simulation and visualization. You get to learn something real, and you get to do cool software work at the same time.

[1] Graph theory is almost 100 years old now, and we're starting to see the discipline collapse into a hard core. You still need a lot of loose terminology to get started, but after that there's a clear progression through the different concepts.
The group selects one person to work as a counter. All other prisoners will only turn on the light if it is off and it is their first time in the room (if it's on they do nothing).

The counter will always turn the light off (and count the number of times he does so).

When the counter reaches 99, he knows that all 100 prisoners have visited the room.

It could take forever - especially since the jailer can not be truly random and could potentially pick a single prisoner (or even the counter) every single day.
Dating site matching?

There are a zillion ways to monetize it. The real question is can you successfully do so. What about selling an appliance similar to google search, but instead is your predictive technology. Make a public api for people to test it, and then sell the hardware option.
If you want a fairly easy read without too many equations, try:

Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques (Second Edition)
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/book.html

Which goes nicely with the Weka open source ML toolkit
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/

(although it is a good read without the toolkit)

If you want a bit more math, I really like the recent (Oct 2007) book:

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning
by Christopher M. Bishop
http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-Learning-Informati...

It is nicely self contained, going through all the stats you'll need.
Aren't the chances of it not taking forever infinitesimal?

All it takes is two prisoners to go to the room in between counter visits, and the counter will only ever reach 98.

See the subtle difference between slashcom's answer and yours?
Wall St. Journal to Make Web Site Free
Funny, I have the exact same dilemma with my image analysis algorithm...
I haven't done a simulation, but I would guess not much more than 10,000. Almost every visit of the counter would decrement the number of prisoners who haven't flipped yet by one.
Wonder why they are building a deep water navy and starting up this cold war kind of gamesmanship? I don't see them in a lot of peacekeeping or international aide missions. They certainly make a lot of threats towards Taiwan, though.
Reasons why this may not be such a big deal:

1. Diesel-electric submarines from various countries (including, I think, Germany and Australia) have been known to lurk near US aircraft carriers before. It's not that surprising that a Chinese one managed it too.

2. We don't know whether the submarine actually managed to sneak up on the carrier, or whether it just lurked at the bottom and waited for it to approach.

3. The Kittyhawk is an old carrier and doesn't have all the anti-submarine warfare capabilities of the newer ones.

4. For all we know, the carrier might have detected the submarine anyway and decided to pretend it didn't, so they can avoid giving away how good their sonar actually is.

Regardless of what the British tabloids might think, I don't necessarily think this represents a "serious geopolitical change".
Subject matter expertise can be hired, as employees, or as advisors to your company. For this type of start up, you not only need a team to build out the product end users will ultimately use (an expensive endeavor in and of itself), but you also need to gain credibility from experts and get published before doctors will look at your stuff.
A diesel-electric submarine based on 50+ year old technology (i.e., small and quiet) sneaks up on America's high tech fleet in the middle of a war game.

Serious geopolitical change? I'm sorry, no. (Please don't sensationalize such headlines ala reddit.)

Problems in the high tech detection systems of the American military? Yes, that's the ticket.
There's a solution that takes around 3500 days.
Google "Kerry Conran"

He spent a few years working on his computer making a short film to please himself. The short earned him a big budget ($40 million) to develop a feature film based on his story and ideas. The project, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, starred Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law and was directed by Conran.
How do you use it to trade commodities? What do you trade?
Are we going to need a politics.ycombinator.com too?

Please, tell me this isn't so!
I think they have sent troops to African countries as peace keepers.
Currently adopted as the OS of choice for 73% of smartphones.
Cryptographically and Constantly Changing Port Opening
A little layer of security I use for my servers.
Other Navies have apparently routinely snapped periscope-depth/range pictures of US warships. This isn't news. It's not even evidence that the Chinese were undetected.
I love this: "...from his or her own cell", "...if he or she wishes"!
"Welcome to dork talk"
Curse you, amichael! No! No, I am not going to try to solve this problem tonight. I'm going to do ourdoings.com coding on the train ride home. I am not going to think about prisoners, light bulbs and distributed systems. I'll check in tomorrow and see if someone else has posted the answer, but I won't try to come up with it myself. You tempt me, but I resist. :-)
I was hoping to avoid all the hassle by sticking to my core competency of artificial intelligence doing a co-venture with some established players in the fields and help them improve their results.
I know that the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" is not true but I was hoping that at least the world will meet me half way...
"I just can't be a college student without Facebook"
What type of spam do you get and how do you handle it?
akismet sucks and "photomatt" is a lousy coder. look at the source code to wordpress and try not to vomit. i dare you.
The machine learning blog at http://hunch.net/ is a good resource.
Good guess.
100 runs:
Average: 10163
Lowest: 7762 Highest 12391

If I knew how to paste code in here, I would show you my simple python script to test it.

Edit:
1000 runs:
Average: 10109
Lowest: 7389 Highest 13461
it's a little kludgy, but here's how it goes:

fns stores continuations.
gensym: make an array of 20 random characters (make an array of 20 #s, map each to a random character).
storefunc: continuation -> string, and store the continuation in fns, such that eval(string)==continuation
jsonk: make a query string from the url, the parameters supplied, and the continuation (change 'callback' to whatever the api calls it), and then add that script to the page, returning the url for debugging purposes.

you could also have a timeout after 30 seconds to say "something went wrong", and that might not be much more code, just set a timeout, and wrap k in jsonk to a function that first stops the delayed error message and then calls k, but that's an exercise for the reader.

but yeah, so

jsonk("http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/V1/webSearch",{output:'json',appid:'YahooDemo',query:'britney'},function(r){alert(r.ResultSet.totalResultsAvailable)})

will pop up an alertbox that shows how many hits 'britney' gets on yahoo.
I (author of the thing, didn't submit the link here) did do some polishing and commenting on the code recently -- the last time it was submitted here it was in a bit of a write-only state.
I find the elitism here too funny. Most people seem to think that using Ruby or LISP makes them superior to thosepoor Java programmers while in the end all they are creating is a web-app like twitter (and of course think they are changing the world with this!). There are many Java programmers that are better than you.

And yes, as mentioned before they are using JVM which means you aren't limited to a single language(Java).
No way....a 4.0 just tells you that a person did really well with their course load, not that they were Ted Kaczynski wannabes.

I still remember the smartest person I ever met (I would be willing to bet that he'd do pretty well on any math test - Putnam included - you gave him). This fellow had the highest GPA in electrical engineering and also had the second highest GPA in economics. Simultaneously.

And on the side, he was an active skydiver and practiced jui-jitsu 2x a week. And over the course of the 4 years we spent in undergrad, I don't think I ever saw him study (I'm not exaggerating).

So it is possible to be off the charts intelligent and not be anal retentive or unbalanced.
Actually, they aren't using the JVM, but the Dalvik VM.
G.ho.st - a free virtual computer that runs on any browser as a PC
And make sure that if you color over you do so in a format that doesn't keep separate layers and thus allow the attacker to see the data by simply shifting the layers.
I've written a simulator that seems to fit with intuition, but you guys might want to check out my code (http://scripts.mit.edu/~bcater/prisoners_code.php). It gives me just under 10,000 operations, on average.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32766

It would probably be helpful if that information was readily available via a link near the "add comment" and "reply" buttons
I see. How about creating a public API (like someone else suggested) so we can see what it does, and then have a couple guys shop it around for you as you get validation studies going?

Then you give people enough to get enticed, but don't give everything away. You can then pursue multiple applications with a parallel effort.
That must be some PC; the fastest 7200 RPM disk can transfer 100MB/s.

There is an engineering tradeoff here; doing I/O in multiple threads introduces seeks, but it simplifies the code dramatically. Using one thread for I/O will introduce data copies and locking for the work queue.
It's a brave new world for start-ups
Fair enough, I guess its a matter of taste. I just like a slightly more journalistic style when opinions are stated (and in this case its all opinions).

I guess I just think blogging for bloggings sake is a bit silly, but I do like it when it is from other sources.

Its just a bit to ADHD for my taste, but I guess if he is digesting things quickly for other people, there must be some value in that.
Assuming this is an incandescent lightbulb with mediocre or poor heat conductivity and that the lapse between "end of the day" and "start of the day" is sufficiently short, extra information can be communicated using the temperature of the bulb (unless it burns out). For example:

The prisoners select a counter, whose count begins at 0 and increases to 1 when he himself enters the room.

When the counter enters the room:

1)If the bulb is off, leave

2)If the bulb is on and relatively cool, turn it off, increment count by 1, and leave

3)If the bulb is on and relatively hot, turn it off, increment count by 2, and leave

When others enter the room:

1)If the bulb is off and the prisoner has yet to signify his presence, turn it on at the end of the day. This counts as signifying one's presence.

2)If the bulb is on and the prisoner has yet to signify his presence, leave it on all day. If the bulb was relatively cool, then this will count as signifying one's presence.

3)If the bulb is on and relatively cool and the prisoner has already signified his presence, turn it off at the start of the day and back on at the end of the day.

4)Else, do not touch the bulb.

When the count reaches 100, he asserts that all have visited.
There is also a lot of wealth concentrated here.
All makes sense except for grouping Ruby with OCaml and Erlang - its not in the same league of hackers at all anymore.
I suppose yet further information could be attempted to be communicated by toggling the bulb enough to attempt to cause it to burn out and then observing replacements by finding a serial number of some sort, but that's getting outlandish.
I appear to have sparked that with my snarky comment about l33t haxxors.

What I really meant is that Java is where the broad market of developers is. Much like VB was where the market was, and to some extent, still is.
I am toying around with flapjax at the moment.

www.flapjax-lang.org/

It uses the functional reactive pardigm where state can be implicitly updated without callbacks. Flapjax is compiled down to javascript, which makes a lot more sense than the functional javascript library which tries to make javascript into something it isn't.

osteele.com/sources/javascript/functional/
Good things come to those who wait. Great things come to those who don't.

Great things come to those who don't screw around with games.