skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a look around the artists pages; the recommendations are good, each set seems fairly solid with mostly nothing too irrelevant, the main associations I would expect are generally there, the results seem fairly consistent across genres, and pretty good for niche/non-mainstream bands too. If this is all hand-rolled from web crawling and that sort of thing, rather impressive!

A couple of thoughts/ideas:

It'd be good to have more recommendations for bands who have dates coming up. As someone wanting to see shows, I'd generally like to see at least a couple of recommendations for specific tours, as long as they're fairly relevant. Though I imagine the main issue with this is tour data, rather than recommending. Also, If I'm looking for touring bands, it doesn't seem quite right to get several recommendations for bands I know I'll never see, like Nirvana and Biggie Smalls, so maybe you could provide separate result sets for bands that are touring and bands that aren't.

Another suggestion is to have a little more randomness, or a little more tolerance for less-close matches, or different types of closeness. The results tend toward big names/popular bands, but it may be good to throw in more that are more closely related by genre/style, and less by prominence. You may even consider randomly removing some of the biggest bands from results, otherwise you end with e.g. Metallica recommended for every band when browsing around any vaguely rocky bands.

There are a couple of cases where it seems maybe you've sucked in some related but irrelevant data, and end up giving word-concept recommendations, e.g. for Underworld I got [Gods, Hades, Orpheus, Doom, Demon, Witch, Terror, Curse, Warrior, Dawn]

Of course all this depends on the user and context. A disclaimer then: I'm a huge music fan, but my comments are probably coloured by my (generally, somewhat) less mainstream tastes. Sorry to go on so much, but I'm very interested in both music and recommendations, so I'm finding it hard to stop myself. But good job, it looks to be a very useful site that I would use. I'd very much like to hear more about it, and what you plan on doing with it when this meetup happens.
What do you think is important?
This situation is hardly new; Dalvik is (unsurprisingly) similar to the Danger VM and a few other unlicensed embedded pseudo-Java VMs. (Blast from the past: http://www.networkworld.com/news/0323sun.html)

I disagree with the analysis about patents. Dalvik has Java semantics and probably infringes several Sun patents. But all software these days infringes patents; who cares.
I'd like to get expert advice on this (cperciva or rtm?)

I guess we can agree that it doesn't fix any security problem; it's just redundancy, right? In this case, it's not another link in a chain but an additional layer of security. But is it "defense in depth" or just plain paranoia? Defense in depth is believed to be a good security principle; paranoia is not, because you don't use the rational part of your mind anymore so you don't focus where it's important and you're blind to some attacks.

So, the question is, do you think this trick actually:

- makes the system more secure;

- makes the system less secure;

- is irrelevant to security.

edit: jgrahamc, I didn't notice you were both the author of the trick and the submitter; can you provide some rationale backround?
Sutton and Barto's book on reinforcement learning is available online at http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/the-book.html, and is probably the definitive work on the subject.
You are right, of course. My mistake.
I now have Tool stuck in my head. Yes, it's related to the puzzle. Would probably be a better puzzle if you said they were aiming to get out ASAP (although you could fairly assume it...)

My solution, before I look at others' replies: One person is designated to turn on the light. The designated person should be the person with the most well-ingrained sleeping pattern in the group. If anybody comes in and it's their first time in the room and the light is on, they turn it off. If the designated guy finds the light to be on for 3 visits in a row and he's sure it's been 200 days since the first time, I think he can fairly confidently declare that all have visited the room.
http://weblog.fortnow.com/2006/07/science-and-art-of-computa...

http://weblog.fortnow.com/2007/08/impact-of-facebook-platfor...
Let bindings? Huh?
MVC Framework for ASP.NET
I don't agree with the whole "should register as a charity". This isn't a charity since last time I checked my time is not tax deductible (but if you happen to know a really good tax lawyer that would let me deduct hours spent playing vocab games it would be awesome).

Nobody is essentially donating money to this business, the advertisers pay them for the traffic they generate. It's simply a business with a noble goal.
That's an amazing thought.

When I was a freshman, no one had heard of facebook. When I was a sophomore, it was literally everywhere. It is interesting to me to think about whether or not it made any difference in my life at college.

My guess is that it probably did, but maybe not for the reasons one might think. The only difference I can think of that it made is that it allowed me to stay in touch with friends when I transferred who ordinarily I would have lost contact with.

I don't think I ever used it for any of its intended purposes (whatever those might be) relating to the college I was currently attending when facebook exploded.
The Vista Death Watch
OpenID + OAuth is the Final Nail in the Coffin of the WS-* vs. REST Discussion
The "Programming Collective Intelligence" book is pretty good in terms of a practical introduction to a variety of techniques.
Yeah I may try to get into one, but I'm thinking that I should try and get a real job and do my own stuff for a bit (~6 months). Maybe some part-time university courses?
"There are many Java programmers that are better than you."

Most likely because they've studied Haskell, OCaml, Forth, Lisp, or actually know something about computer science. The majority of Java programmers aren't like that though.
I read Tony Robbin's book(s) and frankly I think he doesn't know too much about the science part of things he talks about. Nevertheless, even dubious reinforcement can be helpful. I kind of needed it, so thanks.
Sometimes I have a hard problem in front of me. I can't crack it. I go to sleep. I don't dream about it. I wake up. I know the answer. That isn't part of the concious mind and is pure reflex and creative.
Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: The Singularity from Ray Kurzweil
Hey, there are a surprising number of billionaires today.
Presumably thats the law of averages at work. Anything popular will have that effect.
It can take less than 20 days if they have Michael Scofield with them.

(I'm working on a solution; will post it here soon)
I disagree wrt Mitchell; too dry and out-of-date. In its place I'd recommend the Norvig book which covers everything Mitchell does (IIRC) except 'Probably Approximately Correct' (PAC) learning. And, it's more up-to-date (Support Vector Machines) and is much more readable. Also, I haven't read it except a flip-through at a bookstore, but Christopher Bishop's one I'd look at (perhaps the Amazon comments).
I wish they'd make a new edition; but, probably, the field is moving too fast.
Motivations of an Entrepreneur
What makes this entrepreneur get out of bed each morning... Thoughts from the co-founder of NewsCred.
Along with all other relevant info for working with text in comments.
You can also try to twist the bulb in the socket and observe the orientation of the text written on it relative to other markers in the room.
I was going to bite my tongue before commenting on this, but that is the answer.

When each prisoner goes into the room they will cut themselves and leave their mark in blood in the room. Or they could scratch the wall etc.

Before you say this won't work because the warden could mess with the marks I don't have 30 something years to wait around for randomness to finish.
Startup Trademarks: Thoughts from the Beauty Trenches
I do try to get my site added to Web 2.0 websites but only for the free advertising that comes along with it. I have a hard time calling what I do Web 2.0 since I started my project in 2002. I have added Rss feeds but almost no Ajax and I do not use a javascript library.
Are the prisoners prevented from turning the bulb or using other pieces of the room as counters?

In other words, is the intent to use only whether the bulb is on or off to solve this?
Why am I reminded of the poison scene from The Princess Bride?
The intent is to use the light bulb in the obvious way.
There are a lot of different fields in ML. I don't believe that you have an algorithm that beats all algorithms out there , even if those are specialized on a specific setting.
"... author of the thing, didn't submit the link here) did do some polishing and commenting on the code recently ..."

Hey Marijn I didn't know the code had been previously submitted. I added your article because I've been looking to hack up a simple Javascript console editor to work with.

editing Javascript in Firebug is okay for simple expressions
useless for anything above 3 lines

Coding in the browser allows the REPL [0] time to be reduced and you get instant feedback. So this lead me to your article. What I intend to do is try to re-create pythons idle shell [2] allowing you to type in syntax (highlighted) then press enter, eval the code on the next line. Reading your article helps me a lot in solving this.

I re-created the demo in about 5min last night. One problem I do have is entering text then hitting newline. Artifacts are left on-screen and the gutter spacing is odd. I'll see if YUI Dom object can solve the placement problem.

I do like the style of syntaxhighlighter. [3] Did you ever think of adding line numbers?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REPL

[1] Demo code ~ http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/codemirror/

[2] http://www.python.org/idle/doc/idle2.html#Shell

[3] http://code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter/
What to build: a Network/Ecosystem or a Platform?
I just realized I used "one" instead of "on". :-P

Some statistics from my little python simulation:

n: 1000 (I ran my simulation 1000 times)

Mean: 10425.721 days

Stddev: 1005.34467779 days

Min: 7506 days

Q1: 9711 days

Median: 10391 days

Q3: 11074 days

Max: 14090 days

Note: can someone tell me how to do single linebreaks in the comments?
Somebody should do an Ask PG for this. The line breaks in the comments drive me nuts. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Sometimes you can start with them working and then they're not working again.
First 99 days:

if bulb on: do not touch

if bulb off:

if you haven't been visited before, consider yourself counted, and do nothing.

if you have been in here before, turn it on. you are now the counter. look at the day number (1-based). if it's day 36, then 35 people (including yourself) have visited the room.

day 100:

if bulb off, and you haven't been there before, declare victory (super lucky!)

if off, but you have been there before, you're the counter and the count is 99.

if bulb on: turn it off.

after day 100:

use the original solution with a counter.

speedup:

you get about 12.2 people counted in the first 100 days. normally it's somewhere around one person counted per 100 days. so total time is around 100 + 87.8*100. a bit better. not near 3500 though.
"... wonderful intelectual (sic) excercises. Probably not products ..."

Wrong.

If you read the article carefully, you will see the code was used to produce a rather nice interactive digital book, *"Eloquent JavaScript: An opinionated guide to programming" ~ http://eloquentjavascript.net/chapter1.html
I think the chance of anyone being lucid enough to carry out the solution after 9.5 years of solitary confinement is small enough that the solution doesn't really matter. Someone will say they've all been in there after the first year just to put themselves out of their misery!
10 Thoughts On How Internet Startups Can Improve Their Marketing Strategy
All that buildup for some Tony Robbins flapdoodle? Here's a classic article touching on similar topics:

"Before he was two years old, it is said, Wayne Gretzky watched hockey games on television, enraptured, and slid his stockinged feet on the linoleum in imitation of the players, then cried when the game was over, because he could not understand how something so sublime should have to come to an end. This was long before Gretzky was any good at the game itself, or was skilled in any of its aspects[...] But what he had was what the physical genius must have before any of the other layers of expertise fall into place: he had stumbled onto the one thing that, on some profound aesthetic level, made him happy."

-- From The Physical Genius, by Malcolm Gladwell:
http://www.gladwell.com/1999/1999_08_02_a_genius.htm
I am in the U.K - Milton Keynes, which is less than an hour from London. I dabble but I am no hacker by any means. I do however design software for a living and I am looking for a hacker co-founder for a startup. So if anyone is interested, do get in touch - initially by reply here and we'll take it from there.
Well, it depends how you look at the problem. Brute force attacks against SSH are a real threat, but this can be mitigated in different ways.
"Both bits of software hash this secret with the current UTC time in minutes (using SHA256) to get 256 bits of random data."

Not random...
How do you make sure the times are synchronized?

Why don't you just have your server broadcast a bunch of bits that change every minute and use them instead of a timestamp to hash with your secret?

Your protocol seems vulnerable to eavesdropping, technically couldn't someone sniff any client's packets to find out which port to connect to?

Also, I suppose you have some kind of tolerance for when you send a packet to the server at minute x and 59 sec and it arrives at minute (x+1) and 01 sec?
Joyen: Free Facebook hostapplication hosting
I've seen the Norvig book recommended by others on this site for ML, but I don't understand why: the Norvig book is an AI book, not an ML book. It only has a few chapters on learning, and IIRC much of that is on reinforcement learning. Obviously the Norvig book is very well-written and is good background for learning about ML, but I don't think it is a sufficient ML book as such.

As far as ML goes, I found the "Programming Collective Intelligence" book to very readable and practical, but very light on the theoretical foundations (which is intentional, of course). I've got a copy of the Witten ML book ("Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques"), but to be honest I haven't gotten much from it yet, either: it doesn't seem to discuss SVMs in any detail, nor random forests or neural networks. But I haven't really dug into it yet.
Right, but aren't they doing it for Linux or Mac?
FAQ: How to Get a Job at a Silicon Valley Startup (LOL)
Nope, it wasn't the CS that was the problem. I got good grades in my CS courses, and did even learn some new stuff. But yes, most of an undergrad CS program is pretty straightforward once you learn to code. The things that really tripped me up were the general ed courses, math courses, and any course that required a lot of non-coding homework. Basically, the way school worked was just not the way I worked.

By leaving college I was able to get rid of a humongous stressor in my life, and this new mental freedom let me pursue my interests and study what I liked. Now I've figured out how to actually sit down and study, and I could actually take an interest in all the GenEd courses that pissed me off so much in the past. I bet now I could go back and actually finish an undergrad degree with good grades... but now I need it even less than before; I've learned how to study on my own. If for some perverse reason I do end up going back, I'll probably study math. That's one area that I'm still figuring out how to self-study.
Thanks.

import random
def run():
prisoners = {}
for x in range(100):
prisoners[x]=0
days=0; counter=0; bulb=0
while counter<100:
prisoner = random.randint(0, 99)
days += 1
if prisoner == 0:
if bulb == 1:
bulb = 0; counter += 1
else:
if prisoners[prisoner] == 0 and bulb == 0:
bulb=1
return days
How does one get into a university without a high school diploma? Is it possible to get into a good one?

I dropped out of high school, and thinking that college would be more of the same, I didn't even consider applying. This was a mistake, but I had immigrated to the US only a short time prior, and didn't know these things. I learned to study on my own (and ended up "living" in my local university's library for a time), but now my motivation is waning, and I think it's due to lack of external pressure.

Err, sorry for the life story; what I'm getting to is this. I always assumed that I've missed my opportunity, and that going to college now, while possible, would be more trouble than it's worth. It wouldn't be a good college, and I'd have to pay for all of it. Until today, I didn't even know you could earn scholarships while in college.

You said you never went to high school--was your situation similar? How did you get in, and where?
Yes, you are correct this approach would be vulnerable to a simple man-in-the-middle attack. Just sniff packet headers to find out what port the server is accepting indicated by packets sent back with an ACK flag set. Headers with that flag set will be the currently valid port at that instant, since all other packets will be sent back with RST set (blocked).

And yes you could have potentially very frustrating synchronization problems. With TCP you wont be able to control certain things such if a connection request is going through exponential back-off due to network congestion. For example, lets say you could make a connection request within your alloted tolerance, but if there is network congestion and your NIC is not getting either RST or ACK packets back, it will continue to send connection requests at continuously increasing intervals which you cannot easily control since its done at the transport layer. Then one of your connection request packets finally reaches the server late, and you are blocked from connecting again for 15 minutes.

If you could work around the second issue though it could work. I think its a great idea in general, nice creative work!!
Never work again (unless I absolutely wanted to, for pure fun and challenge). Invest half (maybe some in startups?). Buy a sizable, but comfortable, house on top of a remote mountain in Montana or Colorado, and use it as my headquarters as I trek across the world.

But, some amount of time into my aimless wandering, I would no doubt get the itch again, and have to start creating something.
If you can read and understand Mitchell's book, you will have a very good foundation for understanding modern ML techniques. The poster was looking for references to introduce him to the field.
Xobni Discusses The Perfect Startup Office and They Still Suck My Ram
I would make every prisoner into a counter!

Everytime someone visits the room has to take the following two steps:

(1)actions:

- if it's their first time make sure the light is off (i.e. if off don't touch, if it was on, turn it off)

- if you have been there before make sure the light is on (i.e. if it was off turn it on, and if it was already on don't touch it)

(2)counting:

- if the light was off when you walked in then add one more to your count

- if it was on then don't count anything

this way everyone counts, we now have 100 counters. And whoever reaches hundred first (counting themselves in) should report it.

Note: the guy that went in on day one, should not count for the day before, but everyone else will count their day before if appropriate (based on the rules above).
can you run mine through and see how many days you get!
i wrote code. 1000 trials.
naive mean: 10389.832
my strategy's mean: 9392.652

i think the improvement was a little less good than i guessed because i jumpstart getting the first dozen or so people counted, and they are a little easier to count than the last people.
Sorry, I didn't address the 80k hopefuls. I would say that given the economic trends (ee is easier to outsource than software and is being replaced by it) that the long-term growth prospects don't look good salary wise.

The 80 k entry salaries are dubious unless they plan on using their school name to get a non-ee high paying job (read consulting, hedge fund, finance, etc). 60 is probably more realistic in my area (mid-Atlantic east coast) at the high-end entry level. In the most inflated market (the valley), seems like 100k is reasonable after 3-5 years experience (non consulting). A lot of them want advanced degrees. Of course, most of the jobs are software: http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=302...
Sounds like you read: "On Intelligence" - if so, cool, if not do so. Then do this:

break CAPTCHA

There are plenty of people who will pay for that, and a successful implementation of Hawkins/George system will be able to do so.
so, the light gets turned off 100 times in total. there are 100 different people counting. none ever reach 100 in their count.
Django Book is done - shipping the second week of December
In stead of waiting a decade or more, I would make a shank.
No doubt the siemens medical solutions people would be interested in talking with you further. The KDD 2006 training and results data have now been released, so its not really a great demonstration.
I am in Devon hacking away at my ideas. Doing client work to pay the bills at the moment.
"What IBM did was to create a piece of hardware which everyone bought into. And built it out of generic enough parts that it could be cloned. I'm not sure who the equivalent player this time around."

-- I don't think there is an equivalent to IBM in the handset market.

IBM had a powerful steamroller when it came to branding, sales and cash - most people hopped on the PC Compatible standard (including DOS) because it was the "sure thing". Not because DOS was inherently more open than, say, CP/M.

Google has a similar steamroller (at least in the respect that to a lot of people, Google = Internet) but unless most people are demanding a "Google Phone" then handset makers aren't going to fall over themselves to hand over their lunch to google.

Google and the developer community will have to build something pretty incredible and build a lot of mind-share with the general public, I think.
If all your drives support tagged queueing then it's probably okay.
What is the advantage of your language?

The easiest way to present your language is to motivate it.
What is wrong with SQL that you are fixing?

If you say, "cleaner syntax", then good luck. Don't forget the history. Codd wanted Alpha, but politics at IBM is what gave us SQL. Once SQL started rolling, it's what stuck.
Here's a paper on the subject:

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/papers/100prisonersLightBul...

It includes my answer :)
Here in Peru it's from 0 to 20, I have 14.3 average.
I've heard anecdotes from multiple sources that there are groups of software engineers and algorithm designers buried deep inside all the major firms that are doing just this. I know those firms manage and create hundreds of billions of dollars and I've been told that the stiffest competition is in these tiny software components of the business.

But I don't mean to sound too snarky. Sorry about that. So go ahead and try to get a job at Machine Insight or another such firm to find out what they're all about.
http://www.machineinsight.com/
I care because I was under a lot of pressure the other day.

I do work a lot on my own. I too know only of a handful of guys who are more willing to learn than me.
They have regional interests, and they need to make sure they can counter any hegemonist's power-projection in the their region.
And what's the deal with tater tots? Are they potatoes, or are they children who haven't yet learned to walk? Doesn't everyone like curly fries better anyway?

Reading this column is like watching an elderly man try to imitate Jerry Seinfeld.