skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hahaha. Thanks for the honesty :)

I think you are an exceptional person if you are reading more than 1 thesis.

Didn't mean to offend with the title, but I was hoping to elicit that kind of reaction. I have had this talk with a bunch of people at the University of Toronto and we all sort of agree.. but I am an extremist I guess.

If you are interested in Context Awareness and HCI then I will send you a copy when I am done ;)
That's probably a better metric, but I still think it's making a statement about some causal relationship between size and quality, which I think is complete bunk.

I can solve a problem in 1 line of buggy code. You have to write 1000 lines, but it is mathematically certain that yours works. Whose is the better implementation? Mine might be O(n^n) in the worst case, while yours is O(1).

See, I'm talking about specific programs, but these sorts of comparisons extend fairly naturally to programming languages too.
This does not generalize to other languages, imo. Pythons ASTs tend to be pretty involved, but the language is very simple and clean.
How about the title.

"Why most people won't read your thesis"
The much paraded statically unresolvable ambiguity does not apply when the Perl 5 parser parses Perl 5 code for reasons explained in the article. The parse tree produced is unambiguous.

Grammar modifications in BEGIN blocks make the parsing process a little different from many other languages with which I believe readers are familiar.
That's a different application of the same metric. Here, we're using LoC to measure the relative power of different languages. In your example, managers are using LoC to measure a developer's productivity.
Most of the entries on that site seem to be about Windows/Macs.

Anyone know of a similar Linux/UNIX-themed site?
I don't see what's wrong with asking the police to help protect your house from vandalism, even if you are on vacation. The kind of behavior this old lady's kids were engaged in was illegal, and the police helped solve the problem in a cost-effective way. Where's the problem?
Are you sarcastically suggesting that the best thing about the article is the font -- and since the font is nothing special, there's nothing special about the article? If so, that's hilarious and you deserve upvotes.

Are you just using a computer that happens to have the right font installed so that you see the beautiful, but unfortunately not universal, font the article uses? If so, it might be useful to realize that fonts are only visible when you have the installed on your computer. It looks (from the stylesheet) like the site uses Helvetica Neue, degrading to Arial, Helvetica, and finally to sans-serif. Helvetica Neue is basically just a marginal improvement on Helvetica; good, but hardly what I'd call "beautiful" in a breathless tone. It's also far from a universally available font.

Are you just really that naive about commonly available fonts? If so, I'm afraid your comment is a waste of time.
the first one only started including other domains after being called out as a spammer, the second one is a clear case to me as well.

There are plenty more these two are only a small sample.
There's also linguists that love comparing spoken languages. But for most people, most spoken languages are good enough to communicate - just like most programming languages are good enough to express what you want.
It's not a black swan for everybody but it's a black swan for a lot of people.
there's a big difference between having competition for a niche and having the provider of the service remove your niche completely.
Yes, the proposition is always true, but that doesn't help him to make a decision.

At work, some people prefer R; others Matlab. The nice thing bout R is that it's free so you can have it on multiple machines.

But I'm wondering why he hasn't considered other alternatives like octave, etc.
Clearly, the 1000 lines of mathematically proved correct code that is also faster is better. But that's a contrived example. In general, less lines means less bugs.

That you can contrive counter-examples does not invalidate the metric for use in the normal cases.
I think the author is correct in the result, but not in the reasoning. The vast majority of M.Sci thesis are not read because they are neither ground-breaking nor well written.

As for ground-breaking, they are only one year projects on average. No one can expect much more from it.

The author's main critique is the style of the thesis, but here I think he is incorrect. Research papers need to be concise and precise, and to do that they must use an agreed upon language and style. The proper place for a casual style is in a survey or popular article (re: advertisement).

I think another reason that one shouldn't expect their thesis to be read is that a M.Sc thesis is usually the first full publication of the author, while even a PhD thesis is too often the collation of the author's first publications. One simply does't have the practice necessary to write a great paper.

Also, it is good to remember that the audience of a thesis the review committee. It is not written as a dialog in the research community as a journal article or conference paper is. Most advisors will not push for style changes or expanded references because at that would engage a larger review.
clear and honest ideas! I feel there is a natural force that will push things _sorta_ in that direction. Re-factoring happens more and more.. Take gravatar.com, for instance. I agree with some of the other posters, however, that people put up with inefficiencies all over the place all the time. It may not be necessary to have an efficient space on the web. Jungle vs. well-oiled machine...
Hackers set new high score for credit card theft at 130M
Thanks - we would very much like to hear your thoughts. Please drop a line using the contact form and we can sync up. I really like the energy in this forum and this culture is exactly what gets me up in the morning! :-)
Well, I've only used repoze.who and repoze.what.

I started implementing my own .auth library before I found those two. repoze.who is exactly what I had in mind for an authentication library, and much better architected than my own solution. I don't use any of the existing plugins (apart from openid), so the real win for me is the improved design compared to whatever I could come up with.
Safari 4.0.3 on XP
That is a fair point, but it's orthogonal to the discussion at hand.
Claude Shannon's thesis is special in that it is the most influential M.Sc. thesis ever written.

See the second paragraph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon
This is about as minor as it gets, but I thought you might like to know - your contact form confirmation has a typo in it:

"Our team will respond to your inquity within one business day."

I assume you want that to say "inquiry".
Why is iLike selling out to MySpace for $20 million?
They're not (and can't) relying on OpenID alone for matching accounts on different sites due to the fact that Google and some other OpenID providers generate a different ID for different hostnames, even for the same user.
Behavioural finance to the rescue?
I'm sorry, but I think religious thinking and scientific thinking are _almost_ incompatible. One is based on faith and dogma, other on testable evidence.

There are areas that they shock directly: religion says something about our reality, and scientific investigation finds out that that thing is just wrong.

IMHO, beliefs about our reality that _are testable_ should never be based on religion. Science does a better job at this. Now, beliefs about things that is out of science scopes can rely on religion (it can't really rely on much else.)
Already did, looking forward to checking it out soon.
Cell phone hardware is a commodity to a first approximation already and that will become more and more true as time goes on, Apple's attempts notwithstanding. I can't speak to Google's plans and motivations, but Android already has been ported to phones that it was not "indented" to run on, paralleling Linux development on PC hardware. Buy the platform, don't buy the platform, whatever. It will still exist and hobbyists will always be able to put it on their devices.

But that's not even the point, really. From the perspective of the cell phone manufacturers, eliminating or reducing the expense of developing an OS is good for their bottom line. As long as Android is "good enough" for most users, I foresee it continuing to be used.
now it's offending because people say "sigh"?
Screenr: Instant Screencasts for Twitter
I wouldn't say that it's designed for when police don't want to do their job. There are many communities where there aren't enough police to do a good job. Using techniques like this seems like it would allow them to use actual humans where they're more needed.

The cases cited in the article were of neighbors asking the police to somehow combat the unruly elements in their communities. It seems like you're under the impression that this is a matter of "nervous prejudices" running wild, like some Salem witch trials scenario. But what would you, personally, think would be the best course of action if one of your neighbors (not you yourself) was a drug dealer whose activities were a constant nuisance, if not a threat to your well being? What would have the police do if they had tried every other tactic at their disposal? I don't know if you have children, but if you did - would you just stoically endure, put them in danger, on the basis that a technique which works might one day be abused?

I know it's lame to say "think of the children!", but when you're talking about drug dealers and the kind of trouble they bring I think it's appropriate. In high school I worked with a lot of kids from bad neighborhoods and saw the effects of living in an unstable environment. If something like this helps out kids like them, I'm all for it.

/rambling
MonkeyGTD?
Those fast electronics cost extra time and money to design and build.
I can only confirm that R has a great community of savy-users ready to help. See the r-help mailing list.
A Jitterbug does well to simplify phone calls for old/technology incompetent people.

But an iphone is hardly comparable. It is an ipod, internet browser, game machine, and cell phone. And the usability considering the multi use is FANTASTIC.
Canadian Medical Association: "We all agree that the system is imploding"
Losing the best player on a team can improve it
Actual paper: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0908/0908.1801v1.pdf
Second sentence in the article is a direct quote:

"Friends don't let friends use IE6," said Amy Bazdukas, Microsoft's general manager for Internet Explorer (IE).

That's not at odds with their support commitment. Just because they will support IE6 for another half decade doesn't mean they want people to be using IE6.
Two of whom? Women or co-founders? :)
I don't get it, somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.

Hashtables derive their efficiency from the number of keys that you can encode for a given size hash. If the collision chance is low the number of 'chained' items in each hash bucket approaches one.

To take the length of the key and the number of bits in it as a factor in the complexity of the hash table shifts the problem to a sub-problem that has nothing to do with the original one. As far as the hash table algorithm is concerned that is a different algorithm, whose fixed cost per item is taken into account.

Sure, it is slower to compute a longer hash. But that is not where the majority of the savings are. The majority of the savings are in not having to traverse the N items in the keyspace to find a given key.

Constant factors - and this is one of them - are simply left out because in the greater scheme of things they are but a very small item. Any constant factor, be it 5, 10 or 50 as viewed from the far side of the code calling the hash store is simply that, a constant.

You might be able to optimize on it by using a clever algorithm, you might be able to work it down all the way to '1'.

But that will not change the complexity at all.
Imagining the Tenth Dimension (flash video)
You may wish to visit this website: http://maps.google.com.

Pick a location, then hit "street view".
If this ends up being half as good as Learn You A Haskell, it will be well worth it. Good to see that you get their permission first
Why does it have to be one or the other? :P
Aha; good point that I'd overlooked. Is there a way the user could prove the different synthesized IDs are the same Google principal, by conscious choice?
DIY-Spy: a homebrew 2.4GHz wi-fi spectrum analyzer
HP Rethinks Energy: Data centers are just the start
Both metrics seem to assume that source code is a fixed thing. My bottleneck when working with source code is not write or read, but modify. Therefore, the most important metric to me is whether an O(1) conceptual change requires only an O(1) change of source code.

A small line count / compressed size / AST node count is probably a good indicator of this, but I'm not convinced it's exactly the same.
oops, I guess I'll have to pay closer attention
I don't think that's been true for a long time. It might be true of a given language, but I would almost guarantee that the language being used would make a much larger difference to the number of bugs than something as trivial as code length.

For example, let's say I was writing in language X and the average error rate was 1 error per 10 lines. I write 100 lines of code (because I'm very thrifty with my code!) and so my program has 10 bugs.

Now, I write in language Y where the average error rate is 1 error per 20 lines. I write my program in 150 lines, because Y is a bit more verbose.

I'm sure you can do the math. Would you seriously try to tell me that using lines of code is a relevant metric for making comparisons between programming languages?

I just made up my estimates arbitrarily. I think the difference in error rates between a language like PHP versus a language like ML would be even more dramatic.
How exactly did that happen?
I'm confident that a cheaper 1T disk 16gig of RAM Linux machine can just run just as many virtualized instances as a 1T disk 16gig RAM Apple machine. So if you had 4-5 Linux machines, that's 4 or 5 additional copies of this mythical production environment. Using your own math, this would be an ever bigger win for productivity.
Advanced PHPUnit: Annotations
That would be (sigh) depressingly accurate :-(
With the government, there is a relatively unaccountable representative standing between the funding organization (the taxpayers) and the projects to be funded.
MongoDB 0.9.9 Released
Wow...I really didn't mean it this way at all, but now that you point it out, I can see what you mean.

What I meant was that I feel the same way about some of the issues he raised, and I think that there are lots of large-scale improvements that could be made on the web, but the scope of the problem makes it overwhelming to deal with.

The "where to start" piece in particular sounds bad, but I just meant that I wasn't sure how to articulate the problems I see with his solution. I get that it doesn't come off that way, especially now that I read it. Apologies to the author.

I didn't mean to belittle his effort in the least. It's a noble task to try and effect change in such a large domain because you believe in it.
From the comments:

'Wow! This "article" might just set a record for the most smarmy marketing, tech, green, and politically correct cliches in a single space. I'll bet a team of HP marketing flacks worked for weeks on this thing'.

... and I really hate that Forbes welcome ad that I have to skip. Note to self, must get karma to the point can -1 do!
No one will ever read my thesis because I wrote it to fulfill a bunch of requirements set up by my program and my advisors. I didn't actually write it for the average person to read - it probably isn't even all that readable by most standards. But it flew through the approval process, which was my intention.

After two years in grad school, I was looking to finish, and not to win an award. I could imagine that PhD students are even more desperate after 4-6 years in school.
This seems like a clumsy way to make a simpler and more generic point: any key/value data structure (at least one that relies on inspecting the key in its entirety) will scale as O(NlogN) at very large sizes. The reason is that the size of a key needed to identify a unique entry in a table of size M is at least log2(M) bits long. So the primitive operations on the keys is bounded by log2(M) and is not constant.

This is the same reason that "radix sort" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_sort) isn't a linear operation even though it doesn't seem to have a log(N) dependence on the input set. The number of radix buckets scales as log(N).

That said, of course, this doesn't mean much in practice, where primitive operations on keys live in L1 cache and the pointer indirections require DRAM cycles.
It's up to Mr. Allen to decide if he wants to give away his work for promotion and his wealth doesn't make stealing from him right.
So, what was the problem with Matlab that made you want to switch to R? I didn't see anything in the article about it...

Also, there are some good machine learning libraries for .NET, which you could call from C# or F#. If you don't need all the other features of Matlab or R (or you want some of the .NET features), maybe you consider that as an option.

EDIT: Also...there are plugins for Matlab (both commercial and free) that will use CUDA to accelerate the calculations. Depending on what you're doing, it could be a big boost to your research, so check that out as well.
Neither will saying "it just does." How do you think that seeing a detailed brain scan would tell you what it is like to see red? It's extraordinary that you think the burden of proof is on those who simply deny the near-inconceivable possibility that it would.

The problem is precisely one of predictions. Physicalism doesn't predict the existence of conscious experience. (And if you really think its necessary to give an argument for the existence of these experiences other than "we all have them and know that we have them," I am not sure what to say -- you are simply in denial.)
Is that the only reason? If so, would it be possible to offer a public place to view apps that was separate from the main page? Judging by the popularity of the "review my startup" posts, I bet tons of people would be interested in reading them.
Maybe the iPhone could be easier to use, but it's much easier than a lot of the phones out there. I have heard a bunch of people in their 50s and 60s complain about the Blackberry Storm, and how difficult it is to use when compared to the iPhone. It's fairly simple to figure out how to do the basic stuff on the iPhone, which is really all most people are looking for.
>what is _really_ true IS what makes the best predictions. Otherwise in what sense is it true?

That is the anti-realist position, but it could be true in the sense that it corresponds to the actual nature of reality, if you are a realist.

> You have only one data point: your own consciousness.

Yep, and that is the data point that physicalism doesn't seem to be able to account for.
Can you link please to students/parents deciding tracks? I'm very dubious on this actually working, as if it wasn't for direct teacher/administrator intervention in my early education, I wouldn't have been pushed nearly as hard.
>You cannot name a single effective technique that's been shunned because it smells bad to a philosopher.

I'm not sure why I should need to do that, since I'm discussing a hypothetical scenario where a crazy method turns out to be effective. Are you saying that it /would/ be scientific to ask a five year old kid if it turned out to be effective? Or what?
One certainly could write an adapter layer to the R libs. I think the interfaces are pretty coarse-grained from what I recall.
I'm in exactly the same situation. MATLAB and R are so different, yet there's no obvious way to distinguish which will be better for the job.

Thanks to those who are also proposing alternatives. However, if the author is in anything of the same situation that I am, then it must be one of the two. Anything that's not "tried and true" seems to make too many people (bosses, clients) squeamish.
You should not be using n for the number of bits and n for the size of the input.

It may take longer to multiply 128 bit data structures than 64 bit data structures, but it is constant with respect to the size of the hash table.
I can't seem to find the pricing on that school.

There are similar schools in the States (Carolina Friends school in Chapel Hill comes to mind), but most of them are very, ridiculously expensive (as much as a private college in the U.S.).
It seems to me he is using the same variable to represent two different quantities:

m- the size of the hash table
m- the size of each element in the hash table

The 2nd m should be a different variable, and it is constant with respect to the first m, which is the one we care about.
Also see Stackoverflow question on this topic: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1280594/can-perl-be-stati...
No need to apology, I did read that premise the way you explained it right now -- might have been naive now that I think about it. ;-)
The problem is that it went from extreme no-other-solution necessity to a more mundane use. In other words we get too comfortable with it and pretty soon they could be monitoring everyone. It's not a slippery slope. It's just natural progression.
Fail, fail. Nothing there explains what Disqus is, or is supposed to be, it very rudely suggets me that I should twitter about it (before I really saw anything and have any idea what Disqus is), and then it doesn't even bother to tell me that I need flash player to see that advert (of something, what? I don't know.)
Yes, I wouldn't want to live in a surveillance society either, however, that may be preferable to rampant crime -- especially if it's the crime where you fear for your safety. At that point, though, moving is probably the better alternative.

Perhaps public surveillance needs to be conducted like a search warrant and subject to public discussion. It should automatically expire after a certain amount of time.

Also, the evidence can only be used for intended purposes. Police should not be allowed to spy on people indiscriminately.
Taleb has no problem with innovation - as long as the risk of the innovation is borne by the innovators, or investors putting their own money at risk. The problem occurs when people bet other people's money, reaping nost of the rewards when the bet pays off, and incurring little loss when the bet goes wrong.
Nowhere in the article does it mention if iLike was you know... making any money. Seems like if it was losing tons of money it might make the sale and price more understandable.
Taken to its logical extreme, the cache becomes "your database," in which case you didn't need, for example, an RDBMS in the first place.
> but it is constant with respect to the size of the hash table.

Exactly. That is the whole key to complexity analysis.

Otherwise you end up drowning in details without getting more meaningful answers.

You're analyzing the hash table algorithm, not the hashing algorithm used to produce the keys.
That's a jackass line of thinking, Dan. I agree with what you're saying; it's why I release things online. But to make that decision for Woody is rude.

If Woody did want to release his older essays online, I'm sure he'd want them as nicely-formatted as they were in his original book, not vomited up on a shitty Tripod page. Formatting certainly chances our attitudes toward what we read. Furthermore, in a case like Without Feathers each separated story loses something of its context, which is a shame and makes it a less fulfilling read.